OLDaily

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

Code Droid Technical Report
Factory, 2024/07/01

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Back when I was a program manager I called for a project to explore using AI to study how experts approach tasks in order to understand what skills they require. We called it automated competency development and recognition (ACDR). Here's a couple of papers from my colleagues based on the concept. Automated competency development has advanced in the years since. This product announcement takes the idea a step further, progressing from recognizing the competency and developing in humans to developing it in artificial intelligence, who then go on to replicate the expert behaviour. Sure, at this stage, maybe it's all smoke and mirrors. But there's nothing inherent in the concept that suggests to me that it would be impossible, especially in narrow domains like software engineering.

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Practical ways to deal with AI in your courses
Elizabeth Wells, University Affairs, 2024/07/01

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I don't think this is a great article, but the first section took me back to the days when search engines first became popular. One suggestion was for teachers to have 'Google jockeys' in their classes to look up and report on things that were discussed. Elizabeth Wells suggests in this article the idea of 'AI jockeys'. "Since these people are on their devices anyway, we might as well make them work!." The remaining five suggestions are variations on the themes of 'go live and go offline', taking us back to the days of writing tests on paper. "We used to do this all the time, so its not as onerous as you think." For people who otherwise don't write anything, requiring paper-based tests is indeed onerous.

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This Is Your Brain. This Is Your Brain on Screens
Jill Barshay, Mind/Shift, 2024/07/01

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This paper explores studies that "show that students of all ages, from elementary school to college, tend to absorb more when they're reading on paper rather than screens." I think 'absorbing' is an odd way to describe reading. Researchers have been looking at things like blood flow, brain waves and electrical activity, which they then (fancifully) interpret. Here's a link to the meta-analysis. But ultimately, "None of this work settles the debate over reading on screens versus paper. All of them ignore the promise of interactive features, such as glossaries and games, which can swing the advantage to electronic texts."

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Stepping Down as Co-Chair of the National Information Standards Controlled Digital Lending Working Group
Jennie Rose Halperin, Library Futures, 2024/07/01

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Publishers are seeing this as their moment to destroy public libraries. The evidence of this is all around, including most recently their efforts to derail the the National Information Standards Organization (NISO)'s Interoperable Standards for Controlled Digital Lending (CDL) Working Group. "These (publisher) groups waited until the end of the process to declare that the entire concept of digital lending is unacceptable to them," writes Jennie Rose Halperin. Anyhow, "Whether or not big publishers approve, the standards are drafted and ready for use." This is the point at which legislators, not the courts, should be intervening, to protect public libraries, and in passing, the democracies they protect. Via Dan Gillmor.

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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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