OLDaily

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

Guiding Your AI Journey: Essential Resources - Artificial intelligence
Sue Attewell, JISC, 2024/03/07

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This is a collection of resources to help educators through their 'AI Journey' (celebrating, I guess, the recent unnaming of the National Centre for AI). "We thought it would be useful to pull our resources together in a more structured way to support different stages of AI maturity," they write. "Our aim is to develop a dynamic web based easy-to-use toolkit that grows with your needs. Initially we are sharing in blog format mapped to both support areas and maturity stage."

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Department of Defense Adopts a Philosopher’s Applied Ontology
Justin Weinberg, Daily Nous, 2024/03/07

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Today is the day for odd items, I guess. This article alerted me to the existence of the Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), which Wikipedia tells me is used by "over 450 ontology projects, principally in the areas of biomedical ontology, security and defense (intelligence) ontology, and industry ontologies." I'd feel more comfortable with this is all the links on the BFO home page actually worked. You can find the BFO in GitHub (for now, at least). It has become an ISO Standard (21838-2:2021) which the web page makes very clear is fully copyrighted and requires permission to use. Because nothing says 'basic human knowledge' like "fully copyrighted and requires permission to use". Anyhow, the ontology itself is no surprise, being founded on space ("continuant") and time ("occurant") based entities.

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Is journalism disappearing? These top educators have a lot to say about that
Fernando Alfonso III, NPR, 2024/03/07

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Online media, which had a brief resurgence during the pandemic, is now going through what is describe here as a "bloodbath" with numerous shutdowns and layoffs roiling the field. This article asks the question whether schools should even be offering journalism degrees at all. The experts surveyed, all from journalism schools (and therefore providers of the education being discussed) are unanimous in their agreement that the world still needs journalism programs. Students, unsurprisingly, are less sure. From my perspective, the $126,691 it costs to take a 9.5 month M.S. in journalism at Columbia makes no sense (though to be sure, it's a good way to make sure the authors of articles like this include you in their circle of experts). If the world needs what journalism offers, then maybe the world should find a way to make it more accessible, beginning with opening up Jschool to anyone who is interested and engaged. But there's also a deeper lesson here - and that lesson is the liklihood that the same thing happening to journalism today will happen to education in a decade.

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Teachers are embracing ChatGPT-powered grading
Axios, 2024/03/07

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Here's the story: "A new tool called Writable, which uses ChatGPT to help grade student writing assignments, is being offered widely to teachers in grades 3-12.... Teachers have quietly used ChatGPT to grade papers since it first came out — but now schools are sanctioning and encouraging its use." The story reads a bit like an ad for Writable, which bills itself as a tutoring tool (the story is also mostly point-form, which makes it look like an AI-authored story, though I have no other evidence that it is). Anyhow, as Barry Dahl says, "I'll bet you two beers that this is NOT widespread, as the article implies."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Why Arizona State University Should Win The Nobel Peace Prize
Brandon Busteed, Forbes, 2024/03/07

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Fortunately the Nobel committee does not make selections based on publicity found in Forbes. If a university qualifies for the award based on the difference it makes opening access to education, then surely it belongs to the Open University, a true pioneer in the field, or the Indira Gandhi National Open University, an institution that dwarfs ASU in scale. It's hard to believe that author Brandon Busteed is so unaware of other more deserving institutions in the field. But this is just Forbes being Forbes. What makes ASU stand out among the many other institutions in this domain is its commercial focus. But thankfully, the Peace Prize is not based on whether the recipient advances corporate interests.

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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