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

Fast Crimes at Lambda School
Benjamin Sandofsky, Sandofsky, 2024/06/20

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This is a long detailed post documenting the rise and (mostly) fall Lambda School, aka Bloom Institute of Technology. To be clear, "Lambda School targeted single mothers, the disabled, reformed convicts, and people struggling with serious medical problems. They lost tens of thousands of dollars, some lost years of their lives, on a broken, predatory program." This is billed as a tech story - the founder, Austen Allred, is compared to Elon Musk and the company to Uber. But it isn't, it's just another case of someone hyping a service using 'tech' and venture capitalists falling for the hype. There's a lot of this in EdTech, just as there is a lot of this in industry generally. Via Marco Rogers.

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Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power since 1500
Kate Crawford, Vladan Joler, 2024/06/20

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George Station calls it clickbait, and maybe it is (though unlike real clickbait it took a lot of time to create and delivers real value). This wide diagram allows readers to "explore how technical and social structures co-evolved over five centuries in this large-scale research visualization." I would have my quibbles (I think they leave out a lot in the period 1500-1800) but it's certainly something to pause and ruminate over. And yes, there's a column for education. Read more about it here.

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Former Snap engineer launches Butterflies, a social network where AIs and humans coexist
Aisha Malik, TechCrunch, 2024/06/20

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Thisis kind of a neat design exercise: "a new app called Butterflies is aiming to create a social network where humans and AIs interact with each other through posts and DMs." Now not surprisingly the reaction is that it "sounds downright sociopathic and great for narcissists". I personally don't see why narcissists shouldn't have their own app, and to be honest I'm beginning to question the barrage of moralistic criticism of this and related technologies (this comes right after I finished reading a downright offensive criticism (via Ben Werdmuller) of AI by someone who pretends to be the world's only authoritative voice on the subject. I get that people don't trust the corporations behind AI nor the ideals of the people doing the developing. Me neither. But the language is getting judgemental and the responses reactionary, and I'm not a fan.

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View of Trustworthy Verification of Academic Credentials through Blockchain Technology
Faton Kabashi, Halil Snopçe, Artan Luma, Vehbi Nezir, International Journal of Online and Biomedical Engineering, 2024/06/20

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This paper (14 page PDF) offers an outline of how academic credentials could be secured using blockchain. Eventually something like this will be put into place - the main challenge here isn't the technology but whether institutions will cooperate enough with each other to support such a system. I would also add that most people will never see the workings of such a system - instead, they'll just have 'verified credentials' on their digital wallet or some such thing.

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Decentralized Social Networks and the Future of Free Speech Online
Tao Huang, arXiv.org, 2024/06/20

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This paper (25 page PDF) "critically and systematically assesses the decentralization project's prospect for communications online." In the course of the discussion we get a good overview of types of decentralization long with potential promises and pitfalls. The major challenge for decentralized networks, though, is "the phantom of centralization", manifest through users' and moderators' desires to control what they can't indirectly control. We see these issues emerge in things like shared blocklists and network-wide serach functions. The paper seeks to: "balance the decentralization ideal with constant needs of centralization on the network, and how to empower users to make them truly capable of exercising their control." Good discussion, well structured and clear.

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Painting over problems with AI in the third sector
Doug Belshaw, Open Thinkering, 2024/06/20

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"I'm convinced that, as with other forms of literacy, definitions are a power move, with individuals and organisations seeking to dictate what does or does not constitute 'literate practice'," writes Doug Belshaw. I agree (cf. OSI's Open AI Definition). There are, he writes, many elements of digital literacy (105 page PDF), all of which come into play in AI literacy. See also AI Literacy.fyi

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What 40 Million Messages Tell Us About Parent-Teacher Communication
Nadia Tamez-Robledo, EdSurge, 2024/06/20

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TalkingPoints is a proprietary messaging platform that, it says, "connects and empowers families and teachers by using human and AI-powered, two-way translated communication and personalized content." This story reports on a report from a year ago (there's no explanation for the gap) where they "partnered with Google for a massive, AI-powered analysis of 40 million messages in its app to find how parents and teachers are exchanging information." There are some interesting results - "44 percent of the messages were around logistics" and only 8 percent were about academics. But critics are wondering about the privacy implications. Did the users know their messages were being tracked and analyzed by AI? Why, indeed, would schools use a messaging platform without a full security audit that would answer questions like this and others. Nothing about this in the EdSurge article, of course, which is 100% rah rah.

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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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