OLDaily

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

Zhuangzi
Chad Hansen, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2024/03/29

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Known as Chuang-tzu back when I was first studying philosophy, Zhuangzi ( 莊子) was a broadly naturalist philosopher in the Taoist tradition known for a careful study of language, ethics and society (social dàos). As summarized by Hansen: "When we walk the paths in real time, we realize some of the possibilities the path affords... Human social dàos become map-like aids in finding and choosing behaviors. Our knowledge of dàos is indexical. We learned how, acquired our virtuosity, through practice and know-to realize this behavior here now. We have constructed human ways of following nature's paths of opportunity." To me: freedom is finding your own way; finding your own way is the basis of social organization; social organization is what keeps us free.

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The negotiation cycle.
Ethan Marcotte, 2024/03/29

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Some reading from Doug Belshaw this morning led me through a nice day of reflecting on technology, work and freedom. This item, from Ethan Marcotte, led me to the next item (from Alan Jacobs). Marcotte channels Jabobs into a reflection on the life of the technologist. "Our tools keep getting updated, processes become more complex, and the simple act of just doing work seems to get redefined overnight." He says, "Maybe it's time we step out of that negotiation cycle, and start deciding what we want our work to look like." Fair enough. Belshaw in turn follow this thought and finds a Mozilla guide for navigating ethical issues in the tech industry, an all-too-brief synopsis that runs from the (correct) observation that "all companies care about is maximizing profits" to a history of tech worker organizing. Which leads me back to the Cronin and Czerniewicz paper from yesterday. Image: CBC.

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From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis
Alan Jacobs, The New Atlantis, 2024/03/29

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The Standard Critique of Technology (SCT) is something like this: "powerful technologies come to dominate the people they are supposed to serve, and reshape us in their image.... (and so) these technologies constitute the device paradigm, which in turn produces a culture of compliance." The response is "to find and use technologies that, instead of manipulating us, serve sound human ends and the focal practices that embody those ends." A sound argument and response, suggests Alan Jacobs. So why does it carry so little weight? Because we have never learned to be free.

In short (and this is my interpretation of what he says): we're too busy trying to live our own lives (and the more we try to use machines to make our lives better, the more we become servants of those machines). His response, which takes us through a useful discourse on Taoism (and through Ursula Le Guin's essential Always Coming Home), amounts to something like 'live more simply'. But more than that (and I say this because my life has been steeped in exactly this discourse): instead of living to make a living, we should make a living in order to live. How we do that - how we find what it means, for us, to live (and live fully, and live contentedly) is the key to understanding how to live with technology). Image: Alphatu.

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Augmented Behavioral Annotation Tools, with Application to Multimodal Datasets and Models: A Systematic Review
Eleanor Watson, Thiago Viana, Shujun Zhang, MDPI, AI, 2024/03/29

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This paper (44 page PDF) reviews more than two hundred samples "to explore the state-of-the-art in the annotation of behavior." It is a lot of work to read, and honestly, I couldn't devote the time to it that it deserves. That said, it is an excellent account of the sort of thinking needed in the development of educational technology in the future. What is it to perform a task? How do we describe it? What language do we even use? How do we even get people to expend the care and consideration needed to create a quality dataset that can be used productively by foundational models interpreting and supporting learning tasks? "There is a clear pattern towards the use of sophisticated semi-automatic and automatic methods annotation methods (however) he limiting factor in AI is shifting from a lack of capability to a lack of trustworthiness. (So) offering social annotation in the forms of peer dataset auditing and curation may... provide possibilities for the wider public to alleviate concerns through sublimating them into a productive and meaningful activity." 

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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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