OLDaily

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

Do I need a little help?
Doug Peterson, doug -- off the record, 2024/02/22

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Doug Peterson points to the Hemingway Online AI editor. Enter your text into the form on the page and it will report on your article's 'readability', looking at things like sentence complexity, passive voice, use of adverbs and simple phrasing. I entered my most recent blog post into the editor and it responded that I reached a 'Grade 8 reading level', which the page says I should strive to attain. It also had a lot of criticisms to make (mostly regarding how hard my sentences to read (pretty much guaranteed with a use of parentheses)).

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How to read (part twelve). Can I read philosophy like I read a novel?
Martin Lenz, Handling Ideas, 2024/02/22

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As most readers know, my background is in philosophy. According to what we read here, this means that the way I read is, in an important sense, different from the way most other people read. People who work with 'stories' (the word 'novel' is to limited) can be said to be reading "with a sense of identification," that is, aligning with the protagonist. Or reading might even be 'aspirational', that is, wanting to identify with the author, work, or intended audience. Reading philosophically, by contrast, is reading 'adversarial', that is, reading to question, criticize, or dispute what is being asserted. I don't read to 'see myself' in literature, I read (maybe) to position myself against a large, wide, confusing and often baffling world. What's interesting here (and not stated in the post) is that reading adversarially is a reflection of privilege, where who I am has not been questioned, and my right to exist well-established. Related: Critical Thinking in Reading Comprehension: Fine Tuning the Simple View of Reading.

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Understaffing, poor pay undermining student journalism
Emma Bainbridge, J-Source, 2024/02/22

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When I was an undergraduate student I was in exactly the same position as Queen's'Journal editor-in-chief Cassidy McMackon: working a part time job in retail, working almost full time on the newspaper, and carrying a full course load. My days, to say the least, were very full, while at the same time I was living on a Spartan diet of pasta and tuna. It wasn't great, but there wasn't anything else in the world I wanted to be doing more, except for the retail job. The answer, of course, isn't higher salaries for student newspaper editors, but better support for students in general.

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Using Generative AI to Teach Philosophy (w/ an interactive demo you can try)
Michael Rota, Daily Nous - news for & about the philosophy profession, 2024/02/22

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ChatGPT "sometimes just makes stuff up," writes Michael Rota, but "what if you could provide GPT-4 with good answers to questions you wanted your students to work through? It turns out you can, and thus it is possible to create an alarmingly capable course tutor by supplying GPT-4 with a series of question/answer pairs." I tried it out, and while I found it pretty slow and a bit presumptive (it expected answers more specific than the questions that were asked) it was also a perfectly capable course tutor (if you think a 'course tutor' is an AI that quizzes you about the course content). Rota also links to ChatPDF, where we can upload any PDF up to 120 pages and then query it for free. Here's a PDF of my paper on Connectivism you can try it on.

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Utah Bill Would Require Teachers to Be Politically 'Neutral' In Class
Katie McKellar, The 74, 2024/02/22

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Without commenting on the wider issue of increasing thoughtcrime legislation in the U.S., I would observe that the meaning of 'neutral' is very much in the eye of the beholder. To me, 'neutral' means I have no stance on which pronouns you wish to use to refer to yourself. Others depict 'neutral' as endorsing a more restrictive stance on pronouns. To me, 'neutral' means not endorsing political principles such as 'democracy' or 'capitalism', while to others 'neutral' means endorsing only certain political principles. To me, 'neutral' entails not prejudging academic enquiry such as 'critical race theory', while to others, 'neutral' means explicitly prohibiting such discussions. To me, 'neutral' means discussing any and all religions, while to others, 'neutral' means not discussing any religions, except perhaps one. That's why I reject the idea that teachers should be neutral, and lean in to the idea of their professionalism and fair judgement.

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The Edtech Icarus: BYJU's Crashes and Burns
Ben Kornell, Edtech Insiders, 2024/02/22

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I suppose I should cover this, since it's a significant event in edtech. The actual tech example, I guess, is that you can't develop tech by acquisition. Most of the cases of this I've seen over the years end up harming the company more than helping, in addition to being completely destructive of the company that has been acquired. If you have a huge pile of debt (owed either to banks or VCs) you can't focus on development and innovation, and in an industry like ours, that's death.

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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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