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

Navigar
PIPSC, 2024/01/18

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So this is interesting. I just received a notification from the Professional Institute of the Public Service of Canada (PIPSC), which is the union I belong to at my day job, announcing the launch of Navigar as "a web application to help our members future-proof their careers.... a smart online skills development platform that will be free to members when it launches later this year. Think of Navigar as a 'google maps' for your career, helping members get from where they are to where they want to go professionally." It's too soon to assess whether this was money well spent, but it does point to the relation between employee unions and online professional development, a relationship that becomes more and more important as employees become more mobile and want top prepare for their next job, not their current one.

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What is Web3 and Why It Matters
Dion Hinchcliffe, On Digital Strategy, 2024/01/18

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I like the diagram that accompanies this article. Dion Hinchcliffe writes, "Web3 represents a major rethinking for a new iteration of the World Wide Web. This vision is both far-reaching and as we will see, truly transformative in nature. It requires us to fundamentally shift our ideas about many important concepts in the realms of digital data and the online world in general." It will still take some time, and will no doubt change in that time, and won'rt be as grandiosely described as it is here, but I do think something like Web3 has a future.

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upGrad in talks to acquire US platform Udacity
The PIE News, Kim Martin, 2024/01/18

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I don't care whether Udacity is acquired by upGrad (described in Wikipedia as "which is one of the largest Online Education companies in India - focused on the higher Education and Specialization sector"). It was a bit interesting that "it was reported that upGrad is likely to acquire Udacity for around US$80 million." This is a far cry from the juggernaut Udacity was supposed to become when it was first founded by some Stanford professors." Meanwhile, even though it doesn't have a Wikipedia article of its own (natch) I'm going to follow what upGrad is up to a little more closely from now on (though it doesn't encourage me that upGrad has a blog but no RSS feed).

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Is There A Sound Philosophical Method? (guest post) - Daily Nous
John Bengson, Terence Cuneo, Russ Shafer-Landau, Daily Nous, 2024/01/18

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"Is there a sound method for constructing and assessing philosophical theories?" It's a good question. It's one that is encountered not only in philosophy but also in theories of education and technology. I frequently run into the supposition that the answer to this question is "yes" (and then see defended some outmoded version of the hypothetico-deductive method). But readers will know that I've often expressed a form of methodological scepticism in these posts. As Paul Feyerabend says in Against Method: "anything goes". I'm especially sceptical of putative 'empirical' methods in education (placed in scare quotes because I don't think they're actually empirical). The debates in education are rarely about how we know whether something 'succeeds' but in whether we should even be trying to do this thing at all. 'Method' doesn't solve these debates; it assume the debate has already been resolved.

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The Coming AI Revolution
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, 2024/01/18

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Irving Wladawsky-Berger summarizes a (paywalled) article from Foreign Affairs by James Manyika and Michael Spence summarizing the potential impact of AI on global productivity. Key to me (and I think to educators generally) is this item buried in the fifth of six points: "Despite its enormous promise, AI is unlikely to trigger an economy-wide jump in productivity, or to support sustainable and inclusive growth, if its use is left to market forces." There are several reasons why this would be the case: we need to prevent misuse and harmful effects, we need to prevent the concentration of ownership in a few corporate hands, and we need to steer AI toward wider public benefits and not just profit-making enterprise.

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Search engine results are getting worse, research confirms
Brandon Vigliarolo, The Register, 2024/01/18

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The Register reports what we're all sensing. "No, it's not just you - search engine results really are getting worse as the internet is flooded with low-effort garbage from SEO farms and affiliate link sites, a group of German researchers has concluded (16 page PDF)." Via Ben Werdmuller. See also Product Spam on YouTube: A Case Study from the same researchers.

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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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