OLDaily

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

Personal AI beyond the distractions
Matthias Melcher, x28's New Blog, 2024/07/12

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What might AI do for us personally (as opposed to generating generic content)? Not a lot so far but there are hints. Matthias Melcher explores the topic. "For me, the most important 'mind-numbing' (@jarango) activity that AI might do for me, is re-reading stuff. Stuff that I have already read or written myself, but which has grown too much about a given topic. So I would want AI to sort it into subtopics." That sounds useful. Also: "find texts or code on my hard drive that I remember only too vaguely." So useful!

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This blind trial paper raises some serious questions on assessment
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2024/07/12

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This is from a few days ago but I left it on my computer before I went on my short vacation because I wanted to make sure it was noted. Donald Clark writes, "In a rather astonishing blind trial study (markers were unaware) by Scarfe (2024) (33 page PDF), they inserted GenAI written submissions into an existing examination system... (the results): 94% AI submissions undetected; AI submission grades on average half grade higher than students." Unlike Clark, I don't actually consider that shocking, not simply because AI is good, but also (mainly) because assessments today are basically language tests. We give them a bunch of language (direct instruction, readings, other content) and then ask them to perform a generative language task (multiple choice, short answer, essay). What do we think the result is going to be?

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The Science of Visual Data Communication: What Works
Steven L. Franconeri, Lace M. Padilla, Jessica Hullman, Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 2024/07/12

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Readers my age will remember Darrell Huff's How to Lie With Statistics (73 page PDF), the examples in which were out of date even when I was in university. This article (54 page PDF) reminds me a lot of that slim book, detailing as it does many of the ways the presentation of data can be manipulative or misleading. Some of the examples are even the same as Huff's: the distorted axis, for example, or combining data. Even so, this would be a valuable addition to any course or program about data literacy or working with data. P.S. Sage Journals brands this as 'Available access'. I don't know what that means. It isn't 'open access'. So maybe download a copy while you can. Via Data Science Weekly, another of the newsletters I troll regularly fo content related to online learning.

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Researchers discover a new form of scientific fraud: Uncovering 'sneaked references'
Lonni Besançon, Guillaume Cabanac, Phys.org, The Conversation, 2024/07/12

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What is a 'sneaked reference'? "Some unscrupulous actors have added extra references, invisible in the text but present in the articles' metadata, when they submitted the articles to scientific databases." Why is this a problem? "Citation counts heavily influence research funding, academic promotions and institutional rankings." The article calls this a new form of academic fraud, which I think is a bit much, but it's certainly unethical. Personally, I don't think much of citation counts; I have often seen an idea referenced in one paper that gets a few cites and then restated in another paper, usually by a more prominent researcher, that gets a much higher citation count. But it might take AI to track 'idea origin' and attribute real, not merely counted, influence. Via Scott Leslie.

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LivePortrait
KwaiVGI, 2024/07/12

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Just for fun, this is an AI app that will take an image (in this case, me) and a sample video and create a video of the image mimicking the sample video. Watch mine here. I can't imagine it will be available for very long. It was created using an service called Gradio, which will help you create fun apps like this. Here's the GitHub. I found it on the AI Tidbits Weekly Roundup. You should visit this at least one; this is a list of the new models, services and applications released this week, which shows the remarkable activity in the space. I follow it every week to keep an eye out for anything relevant to online learning.

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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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