OLDaily

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

(No) Hope for the future? A design agenda for rewidening and rewilding higher education with utopian imagination
Rikke Toft Nørgård, Kim Holflod, nternational Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 2024/05/02

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I made a comment during a talk earlier this week (slides, audio coming soon) that we cannot become ethical people merely by avoiding risk. That's why I challenge risk-based definitions of ethics in AI research and practice. We have to hope for and work toward something better. That's at the core of a lot of punk-based rebellion, and I will confess, if it has 'punk' in the name, I'm probably on board, because it implies building and doing and making for yourself. With that preamble (emphasis on the 'amble') I introduce this paper, which tries to do better: "cultivating hopepunk and solarpunk attitudes within the field of higher education and educational technology, as well as rewidening and rewilding higher education using utopian imagination, the article (20 page PDF) points towards more hopeful, preferable futures for the people and the planet."

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Flood of AI-Generated Submissions ‘Final Straw’ for Small 22-Year-Old Publisher
Samantha Cole, 404 Media, 2024/05/02

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There are two stories here, the main story, and the story I think is written between the lines. The main story is that the small publisher is shutting down because the deluge of AI-generated content submitted is too much to wade through. Also, the content is poorly written: "It is soulless. There is no personality to it. There is no voice. Read a bunch of dialogue in an AI generated story and all the dialogue reads the same." Between the lines, though, is the likelihood that it's taking more and more time to distinguish between the AI-written and human-written content. And then what? How does a publisher decide what's worth publishing? Via Paul R. Pival.

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MetaMate: Large Language Model to the Rescue of Automated Data Extraction for Educational Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses
Xue Wang, Gaoxiang Luo, EdArXiv, 2024/05/02

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This paper describes "MetaMate, an open-access web-based tool leveraging large language models (LLMs) for automated data extraction in educational systematic reviews and meta-analyses." While some may reasonable express scepticism about the use of AI to summarize papers for metastudies, I think it will be a positive to spend more time reading the papers and less time searching for them. Anyhow, the paper evaluated the software's precision and finds it compares well with human coders in most areas, though it's weaker in subjects such as Delivery Mode (81.25%), Intervention Duration (87.5%), and Academic Subject (87.88%).

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How Twitch is redefining journalism
Matt Cooper-Oregon, Futurity, 2024/05/02

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As usual, we could replace the term 'journalism' with 'education' and arrive at pretty much the same conclusion. "Twitch is a major player among live video platforms with 1.6 billion hours of content produced monthly, much of it by users age 25-34. That content is mostly livestreamed gameplay, but the app is an increasingly common distributor of news and information." Here's a livestream we did just last week (I livestream using YouTube instead of Twitch). Here's a playlist of 65 videos where I livestream my own experiences learning new software. More and more, I think, we'll just livestream learning experiences directly, and more and more, they won't be in the classroom. (p.s. I often livestream my gaming sessions as well).

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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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