OLDaily

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

Developing verb conjugators for Indigenous languages - National Research Council Canada
Anna Kazantseva, et al., National Research Council Canada, 2024/06/27

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From the 'what my colleagues are up to' department we have this impressive project developing  learning support for complex Indigenous languages in the form of a verbn conjugator. "Verb conjugations are one of the most difficult aspects of these languages to learn, yet very important as many sentences consist of a single long verb." The specific tool is called Gramble, developed by Patrick Littell and Darlene Stewart - here is the Github open source repository (in plain Javascript with no dependencies - kudos!) and here is a paper describing the software and its development. Here's more on the project.

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How I Produce OLDaily
Stephen Downes, YouTube, 2024/06/27

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For those who are curious: 1 hour 37 minute video showing how I produce OLDaily. I show some of the tools I use to produce the daily newsletter and also explain my thinking as I select some articles and write about them.

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Language Log » Stochastic parrots extended
Mark Liberman, Language Log, 2024/06/27

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Mark Liberman links to and discusses briefly a paper from Philip Resnick called Large Language Models are Biased Because They Are Large Language Models which suggests that large language models (LLM) are unable to distinguish between statements about what a word a word means and statements about the thing a word refers to (that is, between facts about meanings and facts about the world). Because of this, Resnick argues, LLMs are inherently biased in a way that can't be fixed. My question is, is it true that "LLMs... have no way to distinguish among distributional patterns that arise from definitions or meaning" versus statistical generalizations. That's not so clear to me. Image: Florian Pestoni.

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What did NRENs ever do for us? The answer might surprise you - Jisc
Heidi Fraser-Krauss, JISC, 2024/06/27

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This article briefly outline what the UK's Janet Network does and provides an overview of national research and education networks (NREN), focusing in particular on Britain's. "An NREN is a key piece of national infrastructure: a secure, resilient, high-speed network infrastructure that connects universities, colleges and research institutions. Across the world, 140 countries have their own NREN dedicated to supporting their research and education communities." I like this idea of NREN; a networked research infrastructure is essential today. But I'd to see them more open, so that everyone - not just universities and research organizations - can have access to them. Via GÉANT.

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We asked people about using AI to make the news. They’re anxious and annoyed
Jennifer Orsi, Poynter, 2024/06/27

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I commented today on how creating this newsletter is getting harder because of the proliferation of AI-generated content (you're just fooling yourself if you don't think it's already widely used). This article reports on some focus groups' responses to AI-generated news. "News consumers are clear they want disclosure from journalists about how they are using AI — but there is less consensus on what that disclosure should be." If it's AI-written, sure, I'd like to know (a label would be useful). But if AI was used in the research? When I was using Feedly's AI to filter RSS feeds (I have since stopped, because the selection was getting bland) should I have labeled every post? I don't mind the AI if it's producing content worth reading. But most of the content seems intended only for other AIs to read.

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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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