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

Alex Wang on LinkedIn
Alex Wang, LinkedIn, 2024/01/30

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This is a LinkedIn post, which means it will demand you sign in to read, but just close the signin box and you can read the article. It contains a list of links to some open courses on AI from Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Rice. Not to dismiss the courses, but of more interest to me were the radar charts describing different data professional profiles (illustrated). This is consistent with my own description of different data literacy profiles (presentation here, article on LinkedIn). In the discussion there is some disagreement about Wang's diagrams. This shows the need to create on the basis of actual evaluations of data professional work patterns, and not by definition or fiat.

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A brief guide to perl character encoding
David Cantrell, DEV Community, 2024/01/30

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I spent most of the day learning more about, and messing with (yet again), character sets. For those (few) of you who are interested, this article dives deep into the subject. Basically: character encodings are set anywhere you deal with a string of characters: as content in your code, as something you input or output, as something you display on a web page, as something you store in a database. Perl, as a very old language, defaults a lot of the time to ISO-Latin-1 (a strict superset of ASCII). Sometimes other applications (such as VS Code) do as well. It depends. But numerous languages require Unicode Transformation Format 8-bit (UTF-8) to encode special characters. Unless your software have been told to use UTF-8, there's always the danger it will represent the string as two (or sometimes three, or sometimes even four, if it's (say) an emoji) Latin characters, not one (examples: one character: $, two characters: £, three characters: 한, four characters: 😄). Anyhow, after 25 years of using the Perl database interface (DBI) I learned I need to enable the mysql_enable_utf8mb4 flag attribute to handle all the utf8 encodings.

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We Need Your Email Address
Jason Koebler, Samantha Cole, Emanuel Maiberg, Joseph Cox, 404 Media, 2024/01/30

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404 Media is requiring people submit their email address in order to read their articles. In this article they explain why. They want to make the site easy to view to encourage readers to sign up for subscription content, but for this to work people have to actually view the content. Their main concern is that their site is being scraped by AI engines that then rewrite the articles and publish them, using serach engine optimization (SEO) to divert viewers from the original to the clone. It doesn't help that advertisers, citing 'brand safety' concerns, don't want to support actual journalism. Nor does the fact that social media platform algorithms favour clickbait-style engagement, and have in any case become cesspools. My problem is that I don't link to articles that require email subscriptions to view. Open online learning is no doubt facing the same issues (albeit more quietly).

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Solving olympiad geometry without human demonstrations
Trieu H. Trinh, Yuhuai Wu, Quoc V. Le, He He, Thang Luong, Nature, 2024/01/30

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We read here (21 page PDF) that "On a test set of 30 latest olympiad-level problems, AlphaGeometry solves 25, outperforming the previous best method that only solves ten problems and approaching the performance of an average International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) gold medallist." So much for the argument that AI is bad at math. To train the model developers needed examples of other proofs in the same domain, a dataset that is hard to come by. So they used an expert system to generate a synthetic data set containing "100 million synthetic theorems and their proofs, many with more than 200 proof steps." A language model was pretrained on the synthetic data and performed almost as well as the top mathematicians in the world. Via Rose Luckin.

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Training to reduce cognitive bias may improve decision making after all
Anne-Laure Sellier, The Conversation, 2024/01/30

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It seems to me implausible that we cannot improve our intuition through learning. This despite Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate and a founder of the field and, saying "You can't improve intuition." And this despite studies over the last few decades seeming to confirm Kahneman's statement. In my own work in critical thinking I found and helped students correct incorrect intuitions on a regular bases (for example: a tendency to deny the antecedent, or to assign higher probability to less probably events). Anyhow, according to this research, "a recent experiment suggests that it may be possible for training to improve decision making in the field." The test has participants recreate a situation to the Challenger shuttle disaster, an accident that resulted from poor decisions often attributed to cognitive bias. Via Frederik Graver.

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Higher Education in Emergencies Secure the Transition from Learning to Earning for Refugees in Africa
eLearning Africa, 2024/01/30

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According to this article, "the African Higher Education in Emergencies Network (AHEEN) was launched during the pandemic as an African solution to the African problem of forced displacement of youth and their lack of access to Higher Education." The program is supported by "university members in five African refugee-hosting implementation countries – Kenya, Somalia, South Sudan, Burundi and South Africa." The first cohort has recently graduated with a Diploma in Community Interpreting from the University of Nairobi. This programs teaches skills supporting interpretation in remote contexts using digital technology.

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Supporting climate action through digital education
Open Learning, 2024/01/30

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There's no doubt in my mind that "education has a vital role in tackling the catastrophic impact of the climate emergency." And arguably "there's abundant evidence that educators, worldwide, lack the knowledge and skills to effectively address the climate crisis in their teaching." So this free course from the Open University is appreciated. However. The presentation could be a lot better - the real point of the course seems to be to get people to sign up for and enroll in other OU courses. The clutter is so bad that on any given course page (and I went through the whole thing) you don't see any course content without scrolling (as illustrated in the image). And despite the recommendations about collaborative learning (with an unfortunate reference to Kirschner, Sweller and Clark, 2006) there's no mechanism enabling course participants to communicate with each other. Meanwhile, the course has eschewed image alt descriptions in favour of a hidden element below each photo (maybe that's OK? but it seems wrong). Via Sheila MacNeill.

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Will AI turn the web into an information landfill site?
Alastair Creelman, The corridor of uncertainty, 2024/01/30

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Alastair Creelman quotes a post by Ian Betteridge, The information grey goo, that "states that anywhere content can be created will ultimately be flooded with AI-generated words and pictures. New AI applications will feed off the old AI content and the mix becomes increasingly inaccurate, resulting in what he describes as AI Grey Goo, a swamp of rubbish." Such a future would be bad, but is it realistic? First, there will be havens of AI-free content. This newsletter is one such example. It's only the platforms that will fill up with AI-generated content. Things like personal blogs, photo albums will be mostly AI-free. But what of AI-generated content: will it really be rubbish? Maybe not. There's no reason to suppose developers would train AI on AI-generated content, for exactly the reason cited here. AI developers will seek out original content wherever they can find it, the higher the quality the better.

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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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