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

Redefining “Normal” in Academia
Roohi Ghosh, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2023/11/07

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I think this article makes some good points and has its heart in the right place. "The traditional "normal" in academia often lacks the richness and dynamism required for robust intellectual discourse and innovation. For generations, academic institutions have been defined by homogeneity, with a limited range of voices, demographics, and perspectives driving the discourse," writes Roohi Ghosh. Now we would like to redress that, to experience again the richness and diversity ideal in scientific enquiry, though there are some loud voices opposed to that. What we need, says Ghosh, are 'mindfulness' and 'personalization'. I think we can be more precise (and more human) here: what we need are 'care' and 'agency'. 

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Trying to Predict the Future of AI
Sonya McChristie, ALTC Blog, 2023/11/07

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Let me say right off that I am disappointed that "you are not going to be able to upload your consciousness into a computer," as reported here. I have maybe 20 years left for them to make this work, so I don't want to hear this kind of news. More seriously, while Sonya McChristie is deflating expectations, she also argues that AI is a bubble. "I don't believe improvements from here on are going to be much more than incremental," she writes. Also, jobs will change, not be eliminated, and meanwhile, AI is deepening inequalities and making the climate crisis worse. What fascinates me about articles like this (and this one is basically a 'greatest hits' version of them) is that these claims are made without any real evidence. Pointing to single instances of this or that isn't indicative of a trend. I'm seeing AI begin to build a sustainable business model, I'm seeing it help non-experts do things, and smart energy management has already saved more energy than AI will likely ever consume. And it's not just some "set of rules which could be programmed into a computer." Educators do themselves no favours when they scatter before AI squawking like frightened chickens.

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There is no such thing as “the science of learning”
Nick Covington, Michael Weingarth, Human Restoration Project, 2023/11/07

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I saw the piece in the Hechinger Report a few days ago but didn't feel like taking the time to argue that it was nonsense. This article does the job for me. "The Science of Learning, shockingly, is really concerned with the field of 'Learning': a narrow scientific field of psychological and educational research that is obsessed with testable and measurable output, memorization, and school outcomes," write the authors. "The Science of Learning is misleading when it refers exclusively to cognitive science, memory management, and the brain, because it ignores all the unknowable and ineffable components of what happens inside a student's brain. It positions The Science to be thoroughly researched, but it also doesn't acknowledge a huge body of work that proves cognitive science is significantly more complex than they have portrayed it."

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Training vs Cited Sources or is Bing 60,000 Times Better Than...
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2023/11/07

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This is a fun look at how AI deals with Alan Levine's longstanding question about "the history, source and scientific rationale behind the claim the 3M scientists proved that humans perceive information in images 60000 times faster than text." The catch is, there is no source for this result; it appears to have been made up. ChatGPT fails utterly, but Bing AI does much better, employing actual search results. "This is good," says Levine, "but again, these are sources for the result it spat out… this is by no means the sources of what Bing was trained on to be able to do this magic trick." I think the issue is that actual research with a search engine is a two-step process: first, run the search, then second, follow up through the references and/or links found in those search results. Bing apparently does the first, but clearly, not the second.

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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