OLDaily

Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics.

How do we solve a problem like credit transfer?
David Kernohan, WonkHe, 2023/10/11

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The whole point of a university credential is that it is exclusive to the university. That's their value proposition, the 'barrier to entry' preventing other institutions from competing with them. So there's a lit of foot-dragging. "Though it has long been the dream of ministers to see learners switching providers and courses mid-stream as a benefit of the market, the evidence for demand is very limited and the current uptake of existing schemes is low." The evidence for demand is very limited because the current mechanism is awkward and nobody is making it any easier. Ottawa's transit system is a bit like that too. And just like transit, "we need to build capacity in order to build demand."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

The Ten Commandments for Ed Funders
Sam Chaltain, Letters from the Future (of Learning), 2023/10/11

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I don't see why these would be 'commandments' as opposed to just good advice, but they are good advice. Some of the good bits: "people learn best when they're supportively stretched to take risks"; "people only support what they create"; "ways that are in service of our diversity -- instead of at the expense of it"; "the future itself must become more trans: transcultural, transdisciplinary"; "shifting away from content fluencies, and towards omnidisciplinary content literacies"; and "if a kid has to ask why they're learning something, it's probably because the learning itself is fake."

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The human nature of generative AIs and the technological nature of humanity: implications for education
Jon Dron, 2023/10/11

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I love "warts-and-all raw first submissions". They're the most honest; they haven't been edited down to an unreasonably short length, and the individuality hasn't been ironed out of them. In this paper (16 page PDF) Jon Dron "applies the co-participation model that underpins How Education Works (and a number of my papers over the last few years) to generative AIs (GAIs)." If you don't have a lot time, at the very least, read section 2, which is as concise a statement as any of Dron's overall approach to the subject, and also some of the best writing of his that I have seen. Also, I'm mostly in agreement with it. Less so with section 3, but there are still good bits, like this: "The meanings we give to 'intelligence' or 'creativity' are social constructions representing dynamic and contextually shifting values, not fixed natural phenomenon like the boiling point of water or gravity." Section 4 deftly sets out the challenge: "The tacit, implicit and hidden curricula are not just side-effects of education but part of its central purpose." Quite so (and this is where content-focused pedagogies like direct instruction fail so critically). Section 5 feels boilerplate to me (I want to compare it to the last section of my Ethics paper, but perhaps that's unfair).

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What was Gary Marcus thinking, in that interview with Geoff Hinton?
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2023/10/11

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Background: 60 Minutes did an interview with 'the Godfather of AI', Geoffrey Hinton. In response, Gary Marcus wrote a column in which he inserted his own set of responses into the transcript, as though he were a panel participant. Neat idea. So, of course, I'm stealing it, and in what follows, I insert my own comments as I join the 60 Minutes panel with Geoffrey Hinton and Gary Marcus.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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