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

Feature Article
On the Sentiment of Rationality
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2024/03/06

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Writers go to great lengths to argue that machines can't be intelligent. Why? Here's what I think it is. Put simply, there's something that it feels like to understand something. It's that 'aha moment' that teachers chase, that dawning of comprehension students seek, that moment when we 'get it'. All these are instances of what I'll call 'the sentiment of rationality' for the purposes of this post. And it's this sentiment, precisely, that we think we have, and that robots cannot.

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Culturally Responsive Teaching Strategies: Enhancing Learning Across Diverse Courses 
George Ojie-Ahamiojie, Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning, 2024/03/06

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This article feels to me like it's speaking to people who are used to being in a position of privilege and is encouraging them to 'allow' people from diverse cultures to participate fully in the courses they teach. So while I appreciate the sentiment, I'm not really comfortable with the positioning. Nor am I comfortable with the idea of passing out a questionnaire to "show students that you want to know about them, their learning styles, and their culture." That strikes me as about as artificial as it gets. And anyway, it isn't about what you want. So how would I do this differently? I'd try to parse the privilege out of it - it's a fact that people are from different backgrounds, that they can be critical and independent thinkers, and that everyone's ideas and opinions in a class are relevant. Whether you 'allow' this is irrelevant; a proper and professional approach to teaching (or anything) takes these as givens. You treat people with respect, consideration and care, no matter who they are, no matter who you are.

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Old
John Quiggin, Crooked Timber, 2024/03/06

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I'm now just a month away from being 65, so the topic of being old is of more interest to me these days (I would add that I am not a 'Baby Boomer' - that's the generation before me, and they are all older than I am; I belong to what's called the 'Jones Generation'). So anyhow, the topic of a pedagogy for old people occurred to me, and while I thought I was being original there for a moment, I wasn't. I wanted to call it 'gerongogy' but it has already been named 'geragogy' and extensively covered in this book from 1992 (true to form, there's no ebook version available). Look at it, geragogy seems a lot like androgogy, but more so. It's a mixture of learners wanting to be independent, but needing more support, being slower, and more rooted in experience. Anyhow, to the topic of the Crooked Timber article: people blame the drift to the right on old people, and maybe that's true, but it's a drift that started in 1980 when those older than me bought into ideas like corporatism and trickle down theory, and is only now passing out of favour. Finally.

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What is tokenization?
Prashanth Reddy, Robert Byrne, McKinsey & Company, 2024/03/06

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This article looks at "what tokenization is, how it works, and why it's become a critical part of emerging blockchain technology" and therefore a core part of web3. In a nutshell, "tokenization is the process of creating a digital representation of a real thing." In other words, its's something we already do all the time - your driver's license, passport, credit card or other sorts of ID are tokenized versions of yourself. What makes tokenization interesting is (to my mind) persistence - how can you make it so that the bond between the token and the real thing is unbreakable. That's what distributed ledger technology (aka blockchain) is supposed to provide, but there are still issues. This article also looks at tokenization in large language models, which suggests all sorts of possibilities (imagine, for example, an AI that performs using 'large persistent object models' instead of language models).

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Does Claude Want a Body? Is It Trying Not to Worry Us? - Daily Nous
Justin Weinberg, Daily Nous - news for & about the philosophy profession, 2024/03/06

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The headline is that " Claude 3, the latest language model from Anthropic, was released earlier this week" and in general people are very impressed with it. This particular article considers whether Claude 3 could be thought of as anything like conscious, and more specifically, on "experiments which try to elicit whether there is something that it's like to be Claude 3 Opus." The point is that, as a sophisticated language model, Claude 3 could certainly respond as if it has a sense of self, of needs and wants, and even sensations, even though we don't think it does. "Even if LLMs are not conscious, their ability to act as if they are has all sorts of implications."

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Another Think Coming · AI Expertise Over Tech Jobs
Miguel Guhlin, MGBlog, 2024/03/06

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Quotes Harold Jarche, who says "In a few months, maybe a year, the first wave of AI-driven layoffs slash firings are going to hit the economy. And then? They'll just keep going. Executives are going to figure out that a whole lot of work — clerical, administrative, accounting, legal, writing, marketing, customer relations, even decision-making and risk analysis and data analysis — can be automated." I think that's true. But as someone who provides the tech to people sometimes, my experience suggests that there will be a need for educators to help people learn how to use these new automated systems. There's going to be a lot of push-back, because it's a lot easier to work with the clerical, admin and other staff that used to manage these processes.

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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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