OLDaily

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

Types of central processing units (CPUs)
Phill Powell, IBM Blog, 2024/06/07

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This is a good reference post for people who aren't familiar with how computers work. The CPU is the core of a computer and manages all its activities, managing and orchestrating operations involving data and devices. This article surveys terms related to CPUs, describes types of CPUs and some CPU companies, and looks at the 'next wave' of CPUs, including specialized processors such as specialized chips and quantum CPUs. Good accessible read.

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Can I Use A.I. to Grade My Students’ Papers? (Kwame Anthony Appiah)
Larry Cuban, Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice, 2024/06/07

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This is from a column by Kwame Anthony Appiah called 'The Ethicist' that appears in the New York Times. The assertion is that "It's not hypocritical to use A.I. yourself in a way that serves your students well, even as you insist that they don't use it in a way that serves them badly." The reason is that the purposes of the two uses are different: the student is attempting to learn, while the teacher is attempting to support learning.

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WTF is the authenticated web?
Seb Joseph, Digiday, 2024/06/07

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This article presents a version of what must be an advertiser's dream: an 'authenticated web' where the user must be logged in (and typically a paying subscriber) in order to access online content. This (frankly) is exactly what we don't want a distributed identification system to amount to, but as this article makes clear, publishers and advertisers would very much like to use identity to lock down the web. (Original post is here but may be paywalled; my link is to the Internet Archive version).

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Decentralized Identity Comes of Age
Phil Windley
, Technometria, 2024/06/07

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The summary in this short post is the key message: "In session after session, attendees at EIC are hearing the message that decentralized identity is the answer to their identity problems." I'm also convinced of this. But making it happen is not trivial.

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How to Foster Digital Wellbeing through Youth Leadership and Voice: Announcing the Release of the Connected Wellbeing Impact Studio Case Study Series - Connected Learning Alliance
Jenna Abrams, Connected Learning Alliance, 2024/06/07

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The case studies discussed break down into three major approaches: connecting to people who get you; harnessing tech for equity and belonging; and diversifying and amplifying youth voice. The full set of 11 case studies is available here.

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GenAI Handbook
William Brown, 2024/06/07

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This is already a useful resource and has the potential to be that much more. As William Brown comments, "here really isn't a good textbook-style source for getting up-to-speed on the latest-and-greatest innovations in LLMs or other generative models, yet there is an abundance of great explainer resources (blog posts, videos, etc.) for these topics scattered across the internet. My goal is to organize the "best" of these resources into a textbook-style presentation." The hard work here is in the curation - the organization and presentation of so many diverse resources in a useful fashion.

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A neural algorithm for a fundamental computing problem
Sanjoy Dasgupta, Charles F. Stevens, Saket Navlakha, Science, 2024/06/07

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This article (4 page PDF) demonstrates a relationship between the way flies smell things and the way similarity-based search works in neural networks. This is important because similarity is arguably a cognitive foundation for artificial intelligence, and correspondingly, human intelligence. The flies accomplish this through something like tagging - but the tags demote not only the specific scent, but also some information about the scent's relation to other scents in a vector space.

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Can an emerging field called ‘neural systems understanding’ explain the brain?
George Musser, The Transmitter, 2024/06/07

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The gist of this article is that the study of artificial neural networks - such as those used in large language models - can help in our understanding of the brain in a way that neuroscience itself has been unable to thus far. What makes it work is that, provided the networks have a sufficient base configuration, they can emulate many areas of human (and animal) cognition, including, for example, vision and image recognition. Good stuff here, and this article supports in a way the assumptions underlying the theory of connectivism George Siemens and I were on about some 15 years ago.

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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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