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

US EdTech deeply embedded in NZ school system with 'discounted prices, additional benefits'
Paul Pennington, RNZ, 2023/12/13

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Taking a New Zealand perspective, this article explores "the gathering of students' personal information and what is done with it, the habituation of children to certain types of technology, and the big foreign firms' hold on the education market." I think that, when a country has enough money, adoption of Microsoft and Google software becomes automatic for national education systems. There's no need for procurement processes and review; who else is the system going to use? As in New Zealand, "When Google offered more discounted tech recently, 'the ministry did not consider alternative technology as most schools were already using Google', it said in an earlier OIA response in October." It's the same for me in my office (though I do my work in side projects mostly with open source technology, precisely because I think we should know where our data is, how it's being used, and that we can continue to access it in the future.

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Big Companies Find a Way to Identify A.I. Data They Can Trust
Steve Lohr, New York Times, Wayback Machine, 2023/12/13

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People may not realize this yet, but blockchain and metaverse have a role to play in the future of AI, by securing data and linking it to persistent objects. Because companies "are using their own data in pilot projects that use the generative capabilities of the A.I. systems to help write business reports, presentations and computer code. And that corporate data can come from many sources, including customers, suppliers, weather and location data. 'The secret sauce is not the model,' said Rob Thomas, IBM's senior vice president of software. 'It's the data.'" Quite so. And those with the most authoritative data will have the advantage in AI applications that people will use and trust.

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AI in L&D: The State of Play
Donald H Taylor, Egle Vinauskaite, 2023/12/13

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This brief report (15 page PDF) provides an overview of current applications of AI in learning and development. The illustration (download here to share) doesn't appear in the report, though the content is taken directly from it; the image source is a LinkedIn post by Serena Gonsalves-Fersch. Applications range from discovery to development, learning design, administration and more. "It's still too early to learn from best practices from organisations that have figured it out," write the authors, "because to our knowledge, none have yet. Instead, the best option is to take stock of where you are so you can decide where to go from there."

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EduMap: Navigating a Learning Adventure
Daniel Palamarchuk, Xiaohang Tang, Sonal Sathe, Rexime Abulikemu, Tong Wu, EdArXiv, 2023/12/13

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I have a long history of working with concept maps so a project like this is doubly appealing to me. The idea is to use chatGPT to create a concept map of all the key terms in a course, showing how they're related, thus creating multiple pathways through the material. As the authors note, however, it's not ready for prime time. My own experiments showed you can't just ask chatGPT to do it; this was the result when I asked it to build a concept map for my ethics course. So they developed a 'Key Term Scraper' to extract concepts "so that it can supply the Map with terms that an article is about." The study (11 page PDF) so far has given them some concrete results, for example the ability to evaluate the relevance of concepts discussed and consider ways to better organize the material. I look forward to seeing more in the future.

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Reclaim Hosting: the Site on the Edgeport of Forever Uptime
Jim Groom, bavatuesdays, 2023/12/13

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I'm engaged in an off-and-on project to move my website to the cloud (while at the same time, keeping costs manageable, which is a bit of a trick). Part of of this involves moving my DNS zone editor to Cloudflare. Among the services Cloudflare provides is a way of distributing static resources worldwide, so you access the content from the source nearest you. This also allows it to block spambots and DOS attacks. In this post, Jim Groom describes an alternative to this service, provided by Edgeport - "a new enterprise-grade DNS, CDN, and Load Balancing service much in the vein of Cloudflare." I haven't tried it but of course now I'll take a look.

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I Swim the Net Upstream
CogDogBlog, 2023/12/13

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The neat thing about Alan Levine's posts these days is that you're actually rewarded by reading from them. No skimming the headlines here! If you're willing to follow the post beginning to end you'll read about:

• how much web content is obscured by ads and popups
• reference to Mike Caulfield's Check, please information literacy course
• a Paris Review article on encryption by lava lamps, an the need to search (ie., swim upstream) for the source
• A hit on one of my fave sites, Atlas Obscura
• The source on Cloudflare itself
• Many useful resources on Cloudflare's Learning Center
• The original development of 'lavarand' by Silicon Graphics, per Wikipedia
• Internet routing, and how-did-I-get-here.net as shared by Terry Elliot
• Border gateway protocol, per Wikipedia
• More cool internet protocol projects by Lexi
• Putting the "You" in CPU: a rabbit hole into how your computer runs programs

"There are tons of obscure, non-trending, fascinating projects, art pieces, writing out there, so why just peddle share the same stuff everyone else is? There is much to experience that is not AI Hype or Get On the AI Train or Get Off the Tracks or Pitiful Tales of Billionaire CEOs. Plus, the more you swim, the more you find."

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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