OLDaily

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

How to recognize a psyop in three easy steps
Annalee Newitz, The Hypothesis, 2024/05/06

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This is a bit of an update on the topic of fake news and misinformation. The use of the term 'psyop' is a clever way to externalize (and militarize) the use of language as a weapon. Reading through the three steps, however, I was first struck by it being centered on U.S. politics (the first step is "pay attention to media messages that paint groups of American people as foreign, or somehow not quite "real" Americans"). This is known more generally as 'othering' and can be used anywhere. But I was also struck by how dated and clumsy the mechanisms are. Misinformation today is far more sophisticated, personalized and targeted, generated by AI, used to create not just othering and criminalization but also loyalty, affinity, identification and many more attitudes, and used widely for commercial, political and military purposes. Via Ben Werdmuller.

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A Debate about Words » David Strohmaier
David Strohmaier, 2024/05/06

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The first educational technology was language, and despite having used it for so long we still have much to learn about it. This survey article looks at three papers addressing the question of what words are and what they do, beginning with David Kaplan's Words and considering some objections. Kaplan is mostly interested in the role of words as names for things, but there's a lot more to words than that, even in the case of words that name - just ask Max Power. David Strohmaier argues that our study of words should be more empirical and less theoretical - "empirical complexities cannot just be ignored away by focusing on those areas least accessible to empirical investigation" - and while I don't disagree we would need to discuss at some length just what would count as empirically relevant in such a discussion.

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We Must Be Founders
Michael McAfee, Stanmford Social Innovation Review, 2024/05/06

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I don't make political posts here on OLDaily, for some very good reasons, but I am interested and informed about the ongoing trials of western democracies and the challenges they face. This post from SSIR talks about adopting a 'founders mentality' in order to rebuild the structures of society. But that points to the problem as well as the solution - no doubt we need to renew democracy, but this will not be accomplished by a small group of well-connected individuals drafting a manifesto. Today's democracy does depend on such groups, and that's a big part of the problem. We need to learn to govern ourselves inclusively, creating a society that works for all, and that's a different set of skills from the ones we learned about working and negotiating in small groups and teams.

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Twitch app moves into news coverage, redefining journalism
Around the O, 2024/05/06

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More coverage of the emergence of live news coverage on platforms like Twitch, YouTube and TikTok, this item from the University of Oregon, where the research was conducted. I'm a regular viewer and financial supporter of Reporting from Ukraine, a good example of this. "Twitch users relish communicating live with each other and the streamer through a text-based chat room. That 'liveness' redefines the concept of 'live news' in that the content producer and audiences parse news together in real time, each contributing content or sources and together analyzing information. This relationship forced the three channels to make operational decisions toward balancing engagement with editorial independence." Via Michelle Manafy.

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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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