OLDaily

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

A futurist decarbonizes his professional travel in 2024: problems and options
Bryan Alexander, 2024/05/28

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"How can we travel without contributing to global warming?" asks Bryan Alexander. As an academic and futurist, he find himself traveling a lot. Trying to be responsible about it proves difficult, though. I read this as an object lesson in how climate change is much more a social problem than an individual problem. Even with the best of intentions, we can't do our jobs in a climate friendly manner. We need social supports and infrastructures our society - for whatever reason - won't put into place. Long term, the society will suffer for this.

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Digital Native Déjà Vu: Avoiding unhelpful generational generalisations around AI in education
Linda Corrin, ASCILITE TELall Blog, 2024/05/28

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The concern is over things like this: "In a LinkedIn post entitled Our coming AI Natives Prensky suggests that 'young people will grow up understanding how to control Generative AI just as they learn to direct their own bodies and minds, with much of the guidance they need in their pockets or chipped into their bodies'." Dave Cormier wrote on Twitter (now inaccessible unless you log in) "I've now seen the expression 'AI-Native' to describe the children who were 'born in the age of AI' because, I dunnno, they're going to grow gills or something." Sure, the whole 'digital native' thing was overblown. But we also make jokes today about young people not knowing what a DVD is or not understanding that phones had wires. It has more to do with exposure than age, obviously, but people do adapt, and it's worth adking how they'll adapt. Probably not with gills, though.

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Microsoft teams with Khan Academy to make its AI tutor free for K-12 educators and will develop a Phi-3 math model
Ken Yeung, Venture Beat, 2024/05/28

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This post describes the partnership between Khan Academy and Microsoft. "Launched in 2023, Khanmigo is an experimental AI tutor that offers students personalized guidance in subjects such as math, science, coding and writing. More than 65,000 students are said to be using the chatbot for their studies." Khan's core business is still courses - for now. But the real future is in personal tutoring.

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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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