OLDaily

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

Professional Development Opportunities in Educational Technology and Education For November 13, 2023 to June 2024, Edition #50
Clayton R. Wright, Stephen's Web, 2023/11/10

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We have a milestone edition this time! The 50th edition contains selected professional development opportunities that primarily focus on the use of technology in educational settings and on teaching, learning, and educational administration. Only listings until June 2024 are most complete as dates, locations, or Internet addresses (URLs) were not available for a number of events held after that date. MS-Word Document.

 

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7 principles for AI in education
Laura Ascione, eSchool News, 2023/11/10

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This article reprints a press release referencing the recently released Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) seven principles for AI in education. The principles cover the usual: involve stakeholders, serve student needs, protect privacy, don't blow up the world. What's missing here (and in so many similar initiatives) is any sense of how AI should (or even could) be used to support learning. If there's a real harm caused by AI in education, it may be by retrenching current instructivist practices based on spoonfeeding content to passive students. AI can help with so much more, if only we would use our imaginations.

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Bot-Building for Educators
Philippa Hardman, Dr Phil's Newsletter, Powered by DOMS™ AI, 2023/11/10

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This article looks at OpenAI's new assistants. The instructions could be clearer, so here's my version (created through testing): You activate them by opening the OpenAI platform and then, from the left-side menu (it's hard to find, move your mouse all the way over), select 'Assistants'. Click on the 'Create' button. You'll provide a name, 'instructions', seelect a GPT model (3.5 is available; you need a paid subscription for GPT-4) and select the tools you want to include. Click 'Save'. To try it, click 'Test' (the link is in the upper right hand corner and hard to spot). You'll open up your new tool 'Playground'. Philippa Hardman suggests some educational uses for your model (including 'curriculim generator' and 'feedback assistant'). Your experience will make it clear, I think, that an AI-assistant makes sense only in the context of doing something else (in my case, writing software), and not as some sort of stand-alone engine feeding you content. Related: Vicki Davis, How to Make Your Own GPT.

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Augmented Reality Transforms Student Engagement in Step Into Biology App | edCircuit
edCircuit | Augmented Reality Transforms Student Engagement in Step Into Biology App, 2023/11/10

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This is essentially advertising content ruin as news in edCircuit. The story is that Zoic Labs has launched a collaborative multiplayer AR app called Step Into Biology, that demonstrates biological functions through interactivity and user-activated animations. The suggestion is that teachers would use this to teach students concepts like the golgi apparatus. All very nice, but it's a lot better if you actually need to visualize the golgi apparatus for some reason. If it's just another biology lesson feeding content to students the AR gets old on a hurry.

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Cree kids become recording artists talking about mental health, friendship and culture
Samantha Schwientek, CBC, 2023/11/10

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As this story reports, "A group of 16 Cree kids aged 10 to 14 wrote and recorded their own songs thanks to an initiative to use music to promote mental health." This to me is a great example of a use of learning technology; the computers and equipment are used to support participatory and immersive activities. These activities are important to the participants and involve them with the wider community. Eventually, AI will be used to support these sorts of activities (for example, the way it currently helps me despeckle and sometimes sharpen my photographs). It's the opposite of using AI to spoonfeed learning 'content' to kids sitting in rows in a classroom, and it's the right way.

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'We don't have teachers' | This Austin private school lets AI teach core subjects
Daranesha Herron, KVUE, 2023/11/10

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I actually feel sorry for the kids being taught at this school. Not because of the 'AI' teaching core subjects for the first two hours of every day, though that really looks and sounds awful. But because it's probably the only real learning the students will do. "The other six hours of the day are set aside for learning life skills like public speaking, overcoming rejection, grit and robotics." Of course it's a private school; it's hard to imagine a public school being so reckless with their students' futures. Via Tim Stahmer.

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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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