OLDaily

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

Newspocalypse now
Mike Orren, Nieman Lab, 2023/12/19

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"Nothing sobered me more than a recent University of Pennsylvania study in which 2,529 people were offered free, no-strings-attached digital subscriptions to major local newspapers," writes Mike Orren. "Forty-four people redeemed those free subscriptions. Not 44%…1.7%. We can't give it away." As he says, 2024 probably represents the end of the local newspaper industry, and the beginning of the end for most of the rest. This is significant because trends in education have pretty reliably followed trends in media by about ten years. Closed access classes and tuition revenue may feel pretty secure right now, but in a decade the bottom will be falling out of the market and higher education will be in the same shambles the news industry is today. "We will learn that the less something looks like what we have now, the better chance it has of being the thing on the other side of death."

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Trustworthy decentralized last-mile delivery framework using blockchain
Ala' Alqaisi, Sherif Saad, Mohammad Mamun, NRC Publications Archive, 2023/12/19

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I'm not sure how much educational institutions depend on Last-Mile Delivery (LMD) services but I would imagine many institutions send at least some things to online students (lab kits, maybe - I once signed up for an Athabasca course specifically to get a plastic model of a human brain (which, sadly, I never got)). Current LMD depends on everything from Canada Post to FedX to Uber. But as the authors write in this article (13 page PDF), "the current generation of LMD platforms that leverage crowd-shipping are centralized platforms and behave as intermediaries that charge commission fees." This is bad because "they lack transparency, and most of them, if not all, are platform monopolies in the making." So in this paper the authors propose an alternative, distributed, blockchain-based model "by introducing a decentralized reputation model that executes over a cryptocurrency-less blockchain network... to decentralize the crowd economy."

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A fediverse account with your phone service?
Evan Prodromou, Mastodon hosted on cosocial.ca, 2023/12/19

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OK, Evan Prodromou deleted the poll question that prompted this post, but I thought it was pretty interesting. It was something like like: do you think you should get a free fediverse account with your phone? Or something like that. The discussion that followed was interesting, and it still exists. And Les Orchard comments, "Suddenly weirdly nostalgic for when my ISP gave me web space, e-mail, and usenet access." Anyhow, I do think each person should have their own (free) fediverse server (not just an account on someone else's server). Or something like that. I have no idea how it would work, and maybe it's impossible. But the idea of making each person their own publisher has merit, for a variety of reasons.

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Fedipact - The instances blocking Zuckerberg's Threads.net
Reddit, 2023/12/19

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It's not easy to write this in a way that won't sound like jibberish to people who haven't kept up with the latest in social networks. Meta wants Threads to join the fediverse. This is a good thing, because it means we can all talk to Threads users from our own Mastodon servers. But not all Mastodon server owners are happy. Pretty much nobody trusts Meta. There's the risk that Meta will use Threads to embrace, extend and extinguish the fediverse. At the very least, the lack of proper content moderation on threads will allow spam, spoofs and scams to proliferate. So a bunch of Mastodon servers formed a fedipact whereby they agreed to defederate Threads en masse should it become necessary. Via Dan Gillmor, who discusses this (where else) on Mastodon.

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The AI trust crisis
Simon Willison, Simon Willison's Weblog, 2023/12/19

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"It's increasing clear to me like people simply don't believe OpenAI when they're told that data won't be used for training," writes Simon Willison. It doesn't really matter what the evidence is any more. It's like when people believed (or still believe!) Facebook is listening to them on their microphone. The belief persisted even when there was evidence against it because people simply don't trust Facebook. And why would they? So, similarly, when Dropbox says it's enabling AI functions that can use Dropbox contents, people immediately suspect that the data is going straight to OpenAI. because why wouldn't they? "The fundamental question here is about training data: what are OpenAI using to train their models? And the answer is: we have no idea! The entire process could not be more opaque. Given that, is it any wonder that when OpenAI say 'we don't train on data submitted via our API' people have trouble believing them?"

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Opportunities, guidelines and guardrails for effective and equitable use of AI in education
OECD, 2023/12/19

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Another day, another AI policy and ethics guideline and policy document. This one (17 page PDF) was "jointly developed by the OECD Secretariat and Education International (EI)." It describes the arrival of AI as an "irruption", the first time I think I've seen that term used in any context (it is a real word; I checked). The principles are:

• Equitable access to affordable, high quality connectivity
• Equitable access to and equitable use of digital learning resources
• Teacher agency and professional learning
• Student and teacher wellbeing
• Co-creation of AI-enabled digital learning tools
• Research and co-creation of evidence through disciplined innovation
• Ethics, safety and data protection
• Transparency, explainability and negotiation
• Human support and human alternatives

These are on the one hand in line with many other proposals and on the other super-generic (not a word; I checked) - you could substitute LMS or OER or eBook for AI in this document and it would mostly read just fine.

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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