OLDaily

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

Speech with ChatGPT.... honestly, it is amazing
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2024/01/15

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"A massively underrated feature of ChatGPT is its speech functionality on smartphones," writes Donald Clark. My experience was a bit less than amazing, but still instructive. First - don't use the Play Store (or Apple store either, probably). There's a top of apps out there pretending they're chatGPT. Watch out for the icons that imitate, but aren't exactly, the OpenAI icon (pictured in this post). Go to the OpenAI app page on the web. Second, I found you had to tap three times to use audio - one to start it, once to stop it, and once to upload the text. So, not exactly hands-free. Third, chatGPT only responds in text, even if you're in audio mode. It's still easier to use voice on the phone than to type it out. But amazing? I wouldn't go that far.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

A Small + Mighty Grading Change: Student Self Assessment
Stephanie Farley, Middleweb, 2024/01/15

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Obviously this is an approach that would need to be validated (hopefully by some measure more robust than 'learning outcomes' as measured by test scores). But it's interesting and intuitively appealing: "If I were to boil down the most essential change I made – the one that made a significant difference in outcomes – it was this: I asked students to explain their thinking." This is in line with a lot of what I've read about having students reflect on their thinking, and specifically, not about what they were doing or trying to do, but why they were doing it this way.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

OPERAS welcomes Thoth
Judith Schulte, OPERAS, 2024/01/15

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I skipped over a couple of items today touting new books in learning technology. Books - the traditional kind, written on paper that you have to pay real money for - seems to me the least useful way to talk about how we learn and work online (though I'm sure their authors value the publicity publishers are willing to provide for them). Open online books, though, are another story. And to me, almost anything that gets these books into wider distribution is a good thing. That's what Thoth does. "Thoth is a metadata management and dissemination platform and service specifically tailored to tackle the problems of getting Open Access books into the wider supply chain. Thoth enables publishers to ingest, create, manage and export fully open, CC0-licensed metadata for their books in a variety of formats and platform-specific flavours of e.g. MARC, KBART, JSON, and ONIX via open APIs." Think of it as a fediverse for books - and a way to break into what until very recently has been a commercial monopoly.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

UK migration policy "will destroy" science superpower goal
Nick Cuthbert, The PIE News, 2024/01/15

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Like many nations, we in Canada have been debating immigration more and more over the last year or so as the cost of housing (especially) and other services rise. I personally doubt immigration is the cause (it's probably speculation by people who have too much money and want more) but no matter. Instead of addressing the issue by building more housing (especially lower-cost higher density housing) or reigning in the speculators, people want to limit immigration. But when a country cuts off the movement of people - either in or out - that's when it begins its decline. In an ideal world, there is a healthy movement to and from countries everywhere; this is even more important than the free flow of goods, ideas and capital. We need to figure out how to make this happen effectively, equitably, and sustainably, not cut it off.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

The fediverse for media organizations
Ben Werdmuller, Werd I/O, 2024/01/15

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This is an introductory-level posty introducing media organizations (to which I would include schools and colleges) to what we call the 'fediverse' - that network of interconnected content services that runs on open standards and allows people to connect to each other directly. The call to action is the same for education as it is for media: whould you experiment with it? Yes.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Critical ChangeLab
Critical ChangeLab, 2024/01/15

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According to the website, "Critical ChangeLab aims to build a resilient European democracy by reinvigorating the relationship between youth and democracy through civic interventions in which young people envision alternative futures for (shared) European democracy, and act on that." The project aims "to strengthen democracy in Europe by creating and implementing a flexible model of democratic pedagogy using a bottom-up approach that empowers young people to 'own' everyday democracy and engage in direct action towards justice-oriented transformations."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

OS Together
Road STEAMer, 2024/01/15

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OS (Open Schooling) Together "is a unique bottom-up movement consisting of 16 EU-funded projects in Open Schooling, with 191 organisations involved." The network is "a collective initiative that has embarked on a journey to form lasting synergies, have knowledge, results, tools, etc., produced in the context of open schooling projects meaningfully implemented in new settings (beyond those working on them) and offer insights on a transformative educational approach that transcends traditional boundaries." Participants include schools, local communities, policymakers, museums, science centres, and various local stakeholders.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

13 Best Open Source ChatGPT Alternatives
Ankush Das, It's FOSS, 2024/01/15

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This article is a useful reminder that there are open source alternatives to chatGPT. After all, the AI we know today began as an academic exercise, created at universities, and intended to be shared. This is a list of 13 alternatives, with the following important caveat: "Not all ChatGPT alternatives function the same way. Some solutions are purely meant for developers to create their own chatbot on top of it. And, a few others offer a chatbot or demo for you to test." This means they aren't all nice and easy to use the way chatGPT is - but may offer a better experience in the long run. Via Alan Levine.

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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