OLDaily

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

We Tried to Replace 404 Media With AI
Emanuel Maiberg, 404 Media, 2024/06/25

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The title of this article is a bit misleading, as the story describes an experiment where the 404 authors tried to replicate their site using web scraping technology. Basically, the sites either harvest feeds and link back to the source (I made my own sites like that back in the day), copy and reproduce full text, or use AI to rewrite copied text and present it as a new article. That's not the same as having an AI write your news site for you. In my opinion, a confluence of three factors make these possible: first, Google's ad model, which makes such sites profitable; second, the technology, which makes it easier to fool Google's search engine; and third, news sites themselves, which these days rely less and less on original research and reporting.

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Top 10 Emerging Technologies of 2024
Mariette DiChristina, Bernard Meyerson, World Economic Forum, 2024/06/25

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Today's new word (for me at least) is "elastocalorics", which refers to types of materials "emit heat when subjected to mechanical stress and cool down when the stress is relaxed." This is one of the ten new technologies predicted in this report (46 page PDF) from the World Economic Forum. The rest of the ten are various flavours of sensors and AI, proteins and genomics, and carbon capture. I don't meanto sound glib - I mean, there's a fair bit of research behind these ideas - but there just feels to me like there's a disconnect between what we see here and what we need. Via Alan Levine.

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Writing as 'passing'
Helen Beetham, imperfect offerings, 2024/06/25

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This article should be read from the bottom up as well as the top down, as the inference can work in either direction. The article begins as a critique of the Turing test (which says essentially that a computer has achieved artificial intelligence if it can fool a human) and Turing-like tests. Beetham offers the observation that Turing tests do as much to make humans appear as computers as they make computers as humans, since the only a text-based interface is used. But she then takes this a step further to suggest that higher learning itself changes the student as part of an identity-building process. Writing for assessment forces a person to interact differently than they would otherwise. As Beetham writes, "I think most students experience academic English as a profoundly 'other' discourse." The idea here, in both parts of the article, is to depict writing as an activity, not a product. As derived from Wittgenstein: "language is not representational form, however complex and inter-related, but action, interaction and expression."

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Developing Policy Guidelines for Artificial Intelligence in Post-secondary Institutions
Mohamed Ally, Sanjaya Mishra, Commonwealth of Learning, 2024/06/25

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Via Sanjaya Mishra, here's a new report (52 page PDF) from the Commonweath of Learning on AI policy. It's so new I can't find it in the CoL repository. Based on a literature review and survey of AI policies, "this report identifies 14 areas that stakeholders in higher education institutions should consider while developing policies for AI." You can find the list on pp. 15-16. The report also has general considerations on setting up the policy and a process for development and implementation.

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What We Do in a Nutshell: GÉANT at the Research Infrastructures Conference
GÉANT CONNECT Online, 2024/06/25

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This is an introduction to a video presentation on "Research Infrastructures in a Changing Global, Environmental and Socio-economical Context". Though the purpose is to describe the underlying infrastructure, it also in passing explains why it's a bad idea to force researchers from across the country to work in a single building in Ottawa: "None of us knows where the next super scientist sits, none of us knows where the next dataset is... By making sure all researchers are connected to our network, we ensure that scientists around the globe have the same chance to collaborate." Next-generation research and education agency should be focused on connecting researchers and educators wherever they happen to be, not forcing them to work in a downtown office.

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Pivoting From React to Native DOM APIs: A Real World Example
Richard MacManus, The New Stack, 2024/06/25

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When React came on to the scene it was heralded as a way to create instantly responsible web pages. It did this with a virtual document object model (VDOM) which mirrored the content of the web page, ran API operations in the background, and synchronized it with the actual page display. I found it interesting but hesitated to jump in because it was developed by Facebook. It is currently by far and away the most popular framework for interactive site. This article suggests that the age of React may be ending, not because of any association with Facebook, but to make speed and interaction improvements. Via John Allsopp, who notes "finding developers who know vanilla JavaScript and not just the frameworks was an 'unexpected difficulty.''

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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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