OLDaily

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

On trickledown epistemics
Pat Lockley, The Daily Dive, 2023/11/02

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Pat Lockley (whose name appears nowhere on this website) asks what seems to me to be a newbie question about newsletters: "The problem is, there is no correction, little chance to reply, and given you're a guest on a comments page...  newsletters don't feel like a conversation... How do you make sure it's good. How do we find a way of making newsletters into a conversation?" The answer - simply - is to do what I do. Use your newsletter to respond to posts in other newsletters. If enough people do this (as used to be the case in the blogosphere before almost everyone sold out to Twitter and Facebook) then collectively you create what amounts to a mesh network, and this allows people to reply and criticize each other so that eventually what filters to a top represents some sort of consensus. Is it perfect? No, but it does replicate the epistemic value of a (more or less egalitarian) conversation. And this, on the whole, is rather more reliable than an algorithm biased to encourage outrage and controversy.

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How To Use Microsoft Teams For Virtual Training | Taughtup
Umair Nazaqat, TaughtUp, 2023/11/02

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So I use Microsoft Teams (along with most of the other online conferencing applications) and I cannot agree with the author that "Microsoft Teams is the future of virtual training." Indeed, when I see sentiments like this my overall feeling is that the proponent doesn't really understand online learning. It's not that we could simply exchange Teams for some sort of better app (Zoom, maybe? Slack?). The primary purpose of a tool like Teams is to get the person working with something that is not Teams (and often not even online) to develop a real skill, and then to use the conferencing only to report back and maybe get some questions answered. You can't learn something just by talking about it; that's how chatGPT learns, and we've seen how well that has worked out.

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The history of Kubernetes - IBM Blog
Stephanie Susnjara, IBM Blog, 2023/11/02

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I confess that I have not yet mastered Kubernetes. I haven't even tried, actually - working with Docker has been challenging enough for now. So the best I can do to report on it is to talk about what I've read about it, and not from actual experience. And from that perspective, this seems like a good article to pass along, reporting on the origins of the Google cloud orchestration tool in a project aptly named 'Borg' to its adoption to support cloud-native enterprise applications. I've done enough work in the cloud to appreciate the importance of a tool like Kubernetes, though happily my projects have been small-enough scale to not need it.

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Using Technological Tools to Develop Students - Attitudes Rather Than Skills
Andy van Drom, Eductive, 2023/11/02

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This article explores aspects of the use of technology to teach attitudes. For example, the author considers 'wonder' to be a desirable attribute in a learner. He suggests, using a VR video montage of scenes from Morocco, that it "engaged them in a way that just reading or talking about the country and seeing photos wouldn't have achieved." He also looks at the effect of having students make coasters similar to what they would find in the souk of Fez and reportyed that the group "was quick to remember the effort they had invested in the project and reflect on how much more work would be involved in doing all of the engraving by hand."

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Boston Dynamics turned its robot dog into a talking tour guide with ChatGPT
Emma Roth, The Verge, 2023/11/02

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This is another item for those people saying "robots will never replace teachers". Here, "Boston Dynamics leveraged ChatGPT to turn its four-legged robot, Spot, into a talking tour guide. The company trained Spot to generate responses and answer questions about its facilities." I've looked into how much it costs for the ubiquitous Boston Dynamics 'dogs' and I'm thinking right now that the main reason we're not seeing more experiments with robot teachers is that politicians are not willing to invest that much money in teachers.

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The Bletchley Declaration by Countries Attending the AI Safety Summit, 1-2 November 2023
Gov.UK, 2023/11/02

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This document signifies agreement by the countries to identify potential harms caused by AI and to "building respective risk-based policies across our countries to ensure safety in light of such risks," relying on " increased transparency by private actors developing frontier AI capabilities, appropriate evaluation metrics, tools for safety testing, and developing relevant public sector capability and scientific research." As Ben Werdmuller says, "The onus will be on AI developers to police themselves. We will see how that works out in practice." No. We know how that will work out in practice. See also: Reuters, the Guardian, BBC.

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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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