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

Feature Article
Different From Blogging
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2023/11/06

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Thinking about what returns our experience of social media to something that is more like a conversation - a focused interaction between individuals, including somethings the audience of one - rather than a stage on which we strut and perform in hopes of mass appeal.

[Link] [Local copy]

Announcing Grok
Xai, 2023/11/06

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Supposedly, Grok is "a research assistant that helps you ask the right questions, find information online and make sense of the world." The logo is slightly better than that of its parent company X. Almost nobody can use it yet, and you can only sign up for the waiting list with an X/Twitter account. There's also a 'prompt IDE'. If it's worth following up I'm sure someone will tell me.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

An Ontological Modelling of Prototype Theories
Daniele Porello, Guendalina Righetti, Nicolas Troquard, Roberto Confalonieri:, 9th Workshop on Formal and Cognitive Reasoning, 2023/11/06

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This is a really technical paper that I won't pretend to comprehend, but it serves as a way to talk about a really important concept: prototype theories, "an important family of cognitive theories of concepts that model the classification under a concept in terms of the proximity of an object to the prototype of the concept." So you don't define 'elephant' by means of some rule describing necessary and sufficient conditions, but by means of how similar an object is to a prototypical 'elephant'. Prototype theories "are very useful whenever we need to model commonsense concepts or data dependent classifications." Anyhow, what this paper does is define prototypes in Web Ontology Language (OWL) and defines a mechanism to determine how similar objects are to these defined prototypes (note: I say 'similar' instead of 'proximity', which isn't exactly the same thing, but works for our purposes). Read more about prototype theory in Wikipedia. See also this explanation from ICE blog.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

AI and the privatisation of everything
Helen Beetham, imperfect offerings, 2023/11/06

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"'Artificial intelligence' as a term has long been associated with privatising public goods," writes Helen Beetham in this widely shared post. The idea is that the companies mine public data and convert it into an information service. "Legal frameworks that might protect the public realm are actively undermined or evaded, whether these are anti-trust laws in North America or data protection laws and AI regulation in the EU, tax regimes or copyright laws everywhere." We see this especially in the case of health care, where nominally private patient data held by public health care services is incorporated into commercial tools that graduate replace the provision of public services. This works well at first, and for many, but over time "vulnerable people in an under-resourced healthcare system are likely to find apps being used to manage and even to frustrate their attempts to access care."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Guidance for generative AI in education and research
Fengchun Miao, Wayne Holmes, UNESCO, 2023/11/06

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The first section of the report (48 page PDF) outlines how generative AI works and has a really nice listing of the products and capabilities currently available. The second section, discussing issues, focuses mostly on social harms, such as "AI-generated content polluting the Internet" and "reducing the diversity of opinions and further marginalizing already marginalized voices." The third section offers a step-by-step recommendation for regulation of AI and outlines responsibilities of stakeholders. Section 4 discusses steps needed to develop a policy framwork on AI, including monitoring and capacity-building. It then, in the 5th section, looks at the "creative" uses of AI in research and education, insisting on a human-centered approach. Finally, in the last section, it takes a brief look at generativce AI and the future of education and research. All in all, this as good a document on the subject as any I've seen, and is recommended.

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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