OLDaily

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

A Critical Time for Critical Thought
Jonathan Zimmerman, Education Next, 2023/12/07

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Here's what we read: "Michael Roth and I want the same thing: a university that nurtures skeptical and independent minds. Like James Baldwin, though, I'm a lot more pessimistic about our ability—and, especially, our desire—to achieve it." The context is a review of Roth's book The Student: A Short History. But here's why my critical mind says: if you want a society of independent minds, people (and not just 'students') have to be able to access the means to achieve that. Publishing and reviewing expensive and often unaffordable books does not achieve that. Paywalling news and information does not achieve that. No matter what they may say, the people supporting the pay-for-access system are working against the idea of a society made up of sceptical and independent minds. Democracy dies behind a paywall. Democracy dies behind a paywall.

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Where Did the Open Access Movement Go Wrong?: An Interview with Richard Poynder - The Scholarly Kitchen
Rick Anderson, The Scholarly Kitchen, 2023/12/07

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People interested in open access should read this article, but it should be read with a grain of salt. Authored by Rick Anderson, a longtime Scholarly Kitchen author critical of open access, it depicts Richard Poynder, a longtime commentator on open access, as having recanted and declaring that open access has failed. There's nuance in Poynder's words that can be lost in Anderson's framing. For example, it wasn't that open access was a bad idea, rather, we "saw responsibility for OA pass to organizations whose interests are not necessarily in sync with the objectives of the movement... This allowed publishers to co-opt OA for their own purposes, most notably by introducing embargoes and developing the pay-to-publish gold OA model." Similarly, "While many researchers were willing to sign petitions in support of open access, few proved willing to practice it voluntarily." More: "I have seen claims that OA was in fact never about costs, which is simply not true. Indeed, the affordability problem was one of the primary drivers of the OA movement."

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A recurrent network model of planning explains hippocampal replay and human behavior
Kristopher T. Jensen, Guillaume Hennequin, Marcelo G. Mattar, bioRxiv, 2023/12/07

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Why do we plan? A commonsense explanation based, say, in evolution might be that it is advantageous to plan. As a result, we would have developed that capacity over time. But what does that mean, exactly? What is it to plan, and what are the mechanisms explaining how it offers an explanation. This paper isn't the last word, but it does show how neural network simulations can take us past the hand-waving stage of explanation and offer something more concrete, perhaps pointing the way to a broader pedagogy of planning as well as to the development of AI that can plan. This is a pretty complex technical paper but it will reward the effort. Minimally, it encourages us to think about such things as how long we spend planning, a planning space and planning tasks, a recurrent network architecture of planning, the idea of 'human agent rollouts', and how these resemble what's actually happening in the hippocampus.

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Developing Institutional Level AI Policies and Practices: A Framework
Lindsey Downs, WICHE Cooperative for Educational Technologies, 2023/12/07

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Another day, another framework of the use of AI in higher ed, this time published by WCET. "The WCET framework adapts (Cecilia Ka Yuk) Chan's framework (22 page PDF) and categorizes institutional AI policy needs in three areas: governance, operations, and pedagogy." According to the WCET article, "Issues surrounding academic integrity, the quality of knowledge produced by AI tools, the replacement of instructors by AI, mitigating a new 'digital divide,' and how to prepare students for an AI-infused workforce, among others, are real."

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Research on Workforce Skills Communication
Michele (Shelly) Bartosek, et al., OLC, 2023/12/07

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The question being asked here (14 page PDF) is interesting. It has three parts: how much do institutions use workforce trends to identify workplace skills, how much are these trends being sued to design learning experiences, and how well are students taught to communicate their proficiency in these skills. It should be noted that each question builds on the previous, creating an assumption that educators should identify, value and propagate these workplace skills. The data collected, though, is minuscule, "interview data gathered from 18 academic leaders, program directors, and faculty." No idea how they were selected. The results indicate "the existence of a workforce skills communication gap" but they could indicate life on Mars and be just as reliable. There's also a Playbook (21 page PDF) which I suspect was the main deliverable of the project.

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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