OLDaily

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

How We Will Decide that Large Language Models Have Beliefs
Eric Schwitzgebel, The Splintered Mind, 2023/11/30

---

As always, I apply the questions asked about large language models (LLM) to human subjects, such as students. For example: how do we know students (or people in general) have beliefs? This is a quick look at the question. Most telling is how we know artificial intelligences don't have beliefs: "They hallucinate too frequently, they change their answers, they don't consistently enough 'remember' what they earlier committed to, their logical reasoning can be laughably bad... It doesn't have a stable 'opinion'." A 'belief' is, if nothing else, a response from someone we can predict, something recognizable, and something (maybe) grounded.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

News from Canadian Economy
2023/11/30

---

This post isn't about the Canadian economy, but about the source of the news. Here I'm linking to a site called ground.news not because I want to recommend it to everyone but because it's illustrative of what we need to have to manage our understanding in a complex (and often misleading) news environment. Ground.news aggregates news reports by the story being covered, and displays these in topic areas (for example, 'Canadian Economy'). The idea is to give you the same story from a wide range of perspectives, and to assess the 'factuality' of each report. It's a paid service, unfortunately (though it's cheap) and you still face news media paywalls. And it has a strange understanding of left and right wing bias - it puts the National Post and CTV in the centre of the spectrum, which is surely incorrect. It also repeats identical coverage from multiple small sources in a chain. But I like the way it identifies 'blind spots' (for example, only 8% right wing coverage of 'Changing climate could add more than $4B to cost of Ontario's infrastructure, report finds'). Taken as a whole, the site is an object lesson in media literacy, and as such, an effective learning tool.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Learning Design for an age where old norms are fading away
Neil Mosley, Neil Mosley Consulting, 2023/11/30

---

This is overall a good article describing changes to the concept of learning design in a new environment. But one sentence stopped me in my tracks: "Whilst (lifelong learning) often defined as educational opportunities throughout one's life, I view it as broader, encompassing reaching a wider audience with more varied formats." I don't know how other people imagine things when they read, but to me, this sentence took the entire article and swiveled it on a single point from a learner perspective to a content provider perspective, this shift in perspective disguised by the phrasing as "broader". Now there's nothing wrong with looking at lifelong learning from a provider's perspective. But there's no sense in which this perspective is 'broader'. This manoeuver at the start of the article tainted the whole thing for me, and made it feel less genuine.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Do instructional animations help or hinder learning?
Connie Malamed, The eLearning Coach, 2023/11/30

---

To me, watching an instructional animation simply makes a complex process clearer. For a cognitivist, it's more complex. Instructional animations involve a high cognitive load, and so in theory should hinder, not aid, learning. But if you match them precisely to some sort of dynamic mental model entailed by the learning objectives, then it's an aid. This we read here: "when the learning goal is to acquire a kinematic mental model, the animation format can be more effective than static graphics... The studies reviewed here suggest that the limited effectiveness of many animations in learning occurs because their goal is unrelated to teaching perceptual and dynamic information." I'm sure the animations are still useful, but they teach you stuff that's not on the test.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

9000 Free Courses from Tech Giants: Learn from Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and More
Manoel Cortes Mendez, The Report by Class Central, 2023/11/30

---

This list is pretty limited, because it's just courses, and it's just tech. That said, if you took all of these courses, you'd have a ton of certificates (they would be a bit hard to display) and you'd be qualified for some very well-paying jobs.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

A Blueprint for an AI Bill of Rights for Education
Kathryn Conrad, Critical AI, 2023/11/30

---

I think there's a difference to be drawn between 'good practice' and 'bill of rights' and that this article should be in the former, not the latter, category. These, for example, don't feel like 'rights' to me: "input into institutional decisions about purchasing and implementation of any automated and/or generative system," or " input into institutional policies concerning AI". In the 'rights for students' section, one of the 'rights' is "protection of legal rights", which is getting a bit meta.

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.

There are many ways to read OLDaily; pick whatever works best for you:

• Read in your web browser on this web page, updated weekdays
• Receive a daily or weekly email newsletter by subscribing here
• Subscribe to the RSS feed using your favourite feed reader
• Follow @OLDaily@mastodon.social on Mastodon or elsewhere in the fediverse
• Follow @OLDaily on Twitter
• Integrate the open API using the JSON feed