OLDaily

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

AI & Universities
Mary Meeker, Bond, 2024/07/09

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This (17 page PDF) is Mary Meeker's first public report in four years, and it is a pale shadow of the comprehensive coverage she has offered in the past. The focus is mostly on the opportunity AI brings to education. " bringing AI to learning and teaching requires what Sal Khan calls 'educated bravery'," she writes. "AI creates once-in-a-lifetime opportunities for evolution, creativity and leadership... Our universities and regulators have a responsibility to rapidly and deeply understand the global stakes that AI presents for freedom, democratic values, good and evil…and take strong stands." All this is true, but I really miss the depth and subtlety of the old Mary Meeker.

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“A lot of catastrophising:” Standardised tests don’t show decline
Erin Morley, Education Review, 2024/07/09

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There's a good lesson here. "Ask almost anyone how Australian students are going in tests of basic skills, and the perception is that results are getting progressively worse," Dr Larsen said. "In reality, student achievement is only declining in the PISA assessments." As is well known, Pisa creates its own standards for assessment, and doesn't assess what national curricula are actually teaching. This makes Pisa more than just a testing program - like most evaluations of this sort, it's actually a form of advocacy for a certain set of learning outcomes. But you wouldn't know this unless you compared Pisa results with other forms of testing, which is what this article does.

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Programming, Fluency, and AI
Mike Loukides, O'Reilly Media, 2024/07/09

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Here's the question: "But there's one misgiving that I share with a surprisingly large number of other software developers. Does the use of generative AI increase the gap between entry-level junior developers and senior developers?" Based on my own experiences with AI, I would say "no". Instead, what it does is this: it raises the floor of what we would expect a junior programmer can do. It's similar to giving a junior programmer a higher level language like C or Lisp instead of having them write in Assembly or Machine Language. They're both equally hard, but you can get a lot more done with the higher level language. Wrangling AI to get it to produce decent code is similarly difficult, but it will use all those obscure functions or libraries you won't have learned as a junior.

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On breaking philosophy out of the seminar and back into the world
Pranay Sanklecha, Aeon, 2024/07/09

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I have been a non-academic philosopher for the last 30 years - indeed, I don't think academics would even recognize me as a philosopher ay more. I didn't get the terminal degree and I mostly eschewed academic publications. This article tells a different story about a different philosopher, but a lot of Pranay Sanklecha's reflections echo my own. And much of those reflections apply to all branches of academia, not just philosophy. "Let us go back to the world, to the modern equivalents of the Greek agora, let us do philosophy in places and with people where we are not protected – and mummified – by the sophisticated conventions and intricate rules of the institution of academic philosophy."

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20 Years as an Instructional Designer
Christy Tucker, Experiencing eLearning, 2024/07/09

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This is a great article where, after 20 years working in instructional design, Christy Tucker reflects on her first ID job, career journey, and what's changed. The job search part is a great story - after accumulating 200 rows in her job attribute spreadsheet, she attributes getting an interview to "luck". What's changed? The tool, she says, are a lot easier to master today than at the start of her career.

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Journalism must update its mission to survive
Mattia Peretti, Journalism.co.uk, 2024/07/09

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"Media should be a force for social connection, a convener of people across differences and a facilitator for what to do after the facts are laid bare." As usual, we can easily substitute 'education' for media. The current state is the same for both: "Trust in journalism is at an all-time low, engagement is declining, and the business outlook for the industry is uncertain at best." This article looks at why we have journalism at all and how we should redefine its mission. "As journalists, we should care about the people we report for, right? Otherwise why bother?" Via Michelle Manafy.

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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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