OLDaily

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

It is like a friend to me: Critical usage of automated feedback systems by self-regulating English learners in higher education
Long Li, Mira Kim, Australasian Journal of Educational Technology, 2024/04/10

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I have a subscription to Duolingo and it gives me feedback and tries to get me to continue my long-languishing Spanish lessons (I have no planned visits to any Spanish speaking areas and this might explain my lack of motivation). It has a cutesy little character unimaginatively called 'Duo' to try to make it like a friend. I can see that it could be like a friend, if it were better designed. Anyhow, this article interviews all of seven people (so few it actually names them all) and interviews 32. Compare this to "data from over 500 million Duolingo learners around the globe." I don't want to criticize these researchers in particular, as they are just doing what is expected of them in academia. But I ask of all academia, especially in the field of education: what are you doing? How is this helping? Why not just write some speculative fiction: wouldn't that at least be more interesting? Journal editors: are you being responsible when you request and select this sort of study for publication? I wish I could force the entire discipline to stop and reflect on its methods for a bit.

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Is it time for mandatory mental health training for university students in Canada?
Eloïse Fairbank, University Affairs, 2024/04/10

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Nobody needs to convince me of the importance of mental health, and therefore, of the importance of mental health education in general. But this post really missed the point. Here's the main point: "Now, more than ever, a large-scale, preventive mental health approach is needed to promote student mental health and well-being." So "A mandatory mental health training would teach students easy-to-implement strategies to manage stress and solidify "mental health literacy" to improve knowledge of mental health." So many problems with this. First, throwing mandatory training to solve a problem almost never solves the problem. Second, mental health is something that all of society needs, not just students. And third, universities aren't exactly the institutions I would trust to offer mental health education. Let's put this properly where it belongs: as a health issue, to be addressed by public health care, for everyone (not just those privileged enough to pay tuition), managed by doctors, with support where needed and requested from other institutions.

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Exporting blog posts to JSON for easier use with LLMs such as ChatGPT
Doug Belshaw, Open Thinkering, 2024/04/10

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If you look at the source of, say, Ben Werdmuller's blog, you'll see a script of the form 'type="application/ld+json"'. This is a Javascript Object Notation (JSON) representation of the entire blog post. The idea is to make it possible to link the post into a wider linked data network (LDN). You won't find a plugin for this just by searching WordPress (I tried; what you see is mostly SEO). But Doug Belshaw links into a video and download of just such a plugin so you can try it on your own WordPress blog. On the surface, it will look like nothing happened. But if you view your blog source, you'll see the linked data. You don't need to do anything fancy like upload it into GPT-4, but if you did, GPT-4 would find it useful. (P.S. There are various other schemes for doing the same thing - schema, open graph (og), twitter, etc).

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How Does a Large Language Model Really Work?
Tobias Zwingmann, The Augmented Advantage, 2024/04/10

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This is a pretty good post and will help readers hone their intuitions about what a large language model (LLM) like chatGPT actually does. But I want to focus on one tiny little statement: "ChatGPT doesn't really 'know' anything. It has no self-awareness or consciousness." Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute now. Since when does 'knowledge' consist of 'self-awareness' or even 'consciousness'? When we look at current and historical accounts of knowledge (such as the widely discussed definition of knowledge as 'justified true belief') the critical elements seem to be (a) an assertion that some proposition is true or false (ie., a belief), that is is true (eg. according to Tarski's theorem), and that there are grounds for our assertion (based on evidence, confirmation, or any number of other proposals). If you want to say consciousness or self-awareness are necessary, that's fine, but you also need to tell us what consciousness or self-awareness bring to the table. Via Alan Levine.

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Why Student Debt Might be About to Rise
Alex Usher, Higher Education Strategy Associates, 2024/04/10

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Alex Usher has a couple of interesting posts about student aid in Canada. Never one to shy away from a straw man, Usher devotes the first post to attacking unnamed critics arguing "student debt is skyrocketing". It's pretty hard to find anyone saying this, and where we see the assertion being made, as here by the CFS, it's about total debt, which continues to rise unabated. Usher avoids this discussion entirely. But more interesting is the present post, in which he projects significant student debt increases. The reasoning - and in this case, it's sound - is that allowable limits on student debt are being raised 42% this year. "The weekly limit just jumped from $350/week to $500/week." I think we both agree that increases in debt like this are unsustainable. But our solutions are, I think, quite different. (P.S. the story of fees in the U.S., illustrated, is completely different, and where most of the 'skyrocketing' talk is actually coming from. It is also unsustainable, only even more so). Image: Annie Surla / Nvidia Blog.

 

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'Human intelligence'
Helen Beetham, imperfect offerings, 2024/04/10

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Helen Beetham is someone with whom I routinely disagree, which makes her a valuable foil for my thinking on education and artificial intelligence. In the current case, I think we have a common starting point: the idea of a simple concept of 'intelligence', as measured by (say) 'intelligence tests', is unhelpful, and very likely to lead to problematic and discrinminatory assessments of people and their potential. This was true before artificial intelligence became so prominent, and continues to be so. What follows in Beetham's post is a long list of ways the biases and prejudices of the people currently building AI are bad, but it is a discussion (to my mind) that needs more recommendations and less in the way of "we don't like these people". Image: Wikipedia.

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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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