OLDaily

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

Introducing SIMA, a Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent
Maria Abi Raad, et al., Google DeepMind, 2024/03/13

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Generative AI might be about to touch my life more personally than ever - inside my video game world. I am a passionate and long-time player of No Man's Sky (NMS), an immersive procedurally generated space exploration simulation (which means there are billions of planets in the game). One nice thing about NMS is that there are no in-game purchases. I have hundreds, nay, thousands, of hours in the game. According rto this article (31 page PDF), SIMA, a "Scalable Instructable Multiworld Agent", will be tested in some of theseworlds, including NMS. I'm not sure what to think about that. On the one hand, it will be cool to bring in more interactive elements. On the other hand, the content may be polluted by AI agents trying to sell stuff. 

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Adobe Education Exchange
Adobe, 2024/03/13

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Doug Belshaw has some comments about Adobe's announcement of new (LinkedIn-ready)digital credentials. "While it's great that they've suddenly discovered digital credentials... we'd be naive to think that this is a benevolent act," he writes. "Digital credentials could and should be used to recognise lifelong and lifewide learning. They can be used to showcase the breadth of our experience in a holistic way." However, "That's not what brands are interested in... Brands are interested in capturing and enclosing you as data points to be packaged up and sold alongside their proprietary products."  But as Weblearning says, "if public higher education wants to use innovative credentials (open badges, digital certificates etc). They also have to commit to integrating the open recognition infrastructure (the backpacks) with their controlled recognition infrastructure." That, however, has been a step too far for educational institutions, who are forever protective of their turf.

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EU Parliament passes AI Act in world’s first attempt at regulating the technology
Alexander Martin, The Record, 2024/03/13

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Summary of the AI Act approved by the European Parliament today. As mentioned previously, it is a risk-based approach, categorizing AI by the potential for harm, and limiting use accordingly. For educators, there are some implications: "banning biometric categorisation systems based on sensitive characteristics and untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases... also prohibited will be the use of emotion recognition technologies in the workplace and schools, as well as social scoring and certain kinds of predictive policing based on profiling individuals." Via Ben Werdmuller.

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Complexity bad: An interview with HTMX creator Carson Gross
Matthew Tyson, Infoworld, 2024/03/13

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This one gets into the details of front-end web interfaces, so it's too technical for most but represents a fun read for those of us who design them. Two really big takeaways: first, a reference to and discussion of Hyperscript, "a newer language for handling common scripting needs on the JavaScript front end." And second, HTMX, "the HTML extension syntax that replaces JavaScript with simple markup." There's also an interesting discussion of REST, which originally meant 'REpresentational State Transfer' but now means something like "JSON APIs over HTTP". All of these address functionality I work with on a regular basis, so it's super-interesting to me - but daunting, because I'm just getting caught up on modern Javascript.

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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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