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

Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures
Catherine Cronin, Laura Czerniewicz, Open Book Publishers, 2023/10/26

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I don't want to be too critical because I think their hearts are in the right place, but I have to admit disappointment on reading the majority of these articles. These articles as a whole are very light reading, and lacking the sort of clarity and depth I would have hoped this subjct merits. I mean, I just did a study on data literacy, so I looked forward this article on data literacy, but I came away with the question of whether the authors had read anything about the subject before opining. Similarly, the chapter on digital pragmatism is a mish-mash of sometimes unsourced observations on satisficing, fractals, murmurations, collaboration, conferences, and butterflies, most of which has nothing to do with pragmatism. The article on higher education as commons rails against the 'education factory' model (styled for no particular reason as an 'imginary) and recommends "resolving the collective action problem by cooperating, not competing."

The paper on 'openness' as a strategy against platformisation describes a process where their students write a manifesto, discover that open is hard, and ultimately "discarded strategies that turned out to be radical and simplistic, such as promoting FLOSS as an alternative" (this, tbh, was one of the better papers). I'm still not sure how the dialogue of assessment and social good connects with ethics in any way; there's no examination at all of what ethics would be in such a context, just the blanket assertion that "what matters the most in assessment — not technical matters, but ethics and good education " and that's the extent of it). Goodness knows, I'm not a stickler for whether authors have 'read so-and-so', but I wasn't seeing any indication here that the subjects being discussed have been the focus of a wide and rich literature over the last few years.

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Introducing Mozilla's AI Guide, the developers onboarding ramp to AI
The Mozilla Blog, 2023/10/26

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From Mozilla: "Today, Mozilla announces the availability of its AI Guide, a community-driven resource, where developers can come together, ready to pioneer and drive generative AI innovations. In the spirit of a truly open web, Mozilla launches a tool that will evolve, just like the world of AI, which is messy, and poses complex questions that have yet to be answered."

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What I Learned at EDUCAUSE about the Higher Ed AI Conversation(s)
Lance Eaton, AI + Education = Simplified, 2023/10/26

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Lance Eaton has launched a brand new Substack and this three part series (part 1, part 2, part 3) launches us into its main theme as he discusses what he learned about AI and education at Educause. He considers things like "the different roles that higher ed has to think about regarding AI, and navigating the development of policies or usage guidance" and "issues that are coming up". Not that that's slowing anyone down; "it feels like every company is touting its AI much like companies tout their gluten-free properties as if that was their original intention (I'm looking at you, 'gluten-free' eggs!)." I don't think there's anything new here (besides the Substack) but it's worth knowing what's happening behind the doors at Educause.

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Web Scraping with Perl & ChatGPT
Mohan Ganesan, ProxiesAPI, 2023/10/26

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So as I've mentioned before, I use that ancient language called Perl for most of my web scripting. As it turns out, one of the advantages of using an old language is that chatGPT performs very well when using it. Following the examples in this article, and then branching out on my own, I tried a number of scripts, all of which were executed flawlessly. Want 'feed to JSON'? Ask chatGPT to "write a Perl script to harvest an RSS feed from an SSL-secured site and convert the results into JSON format." Then if you want to output the results using Javascript, ask it to "take the results of this and write Javascript to display the feed on a web page as html." Voila! Feed2JS in about three minutes.

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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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