OLDaily

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

Dispatches from the media apocalypse
Ben Werdmuller, Werd I/O, 2024/07/22

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A long, detailed, and fascinating post from Ben Werdmuller on the future of online news. "There are two pivotal facts for every newsroom," he writes. "Their work must reach an audience, and someone must pay for it. The first is a prerequisite of the second: if nobody discovers the journalism, nobody will pay for it. So, reaching and growing an audience is crucial." The same is true for educational institutions, which lag news media by about 10-20 years. And what's crucial in the current environment is that the lock-down of social media and the sceptre of the 'dead internet' have made reaching an audience almost impossible.

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Things I was wrong about pt2: The Death of the VLE
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2024/07/22

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Another of Msttin Weller's "I was wrong" series that I like so so much. Here again he was not alone. "I think during the late 00s we were all still caught up in web 2.0 fever, and let's face it, naive about the robustness of third party tools." Instead, those tools all died (or became their own sort of silo) snd the LMS - which by now is fully entrenched into administative systems - survived.

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Academic authors 'shocked' after Taylor & Francis sells access to their research to Microsoft AI
Matilda Battersby, The Bookseller, 2024/07/22

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All I can say is, what did you expect? "Authors claim they have not been told about the AI deal, were not given the opportunity to opt out and are receiving no extra payment." I think it's good that academic papers are being used to train AI - it's far better than using Twitter posts. But deals like this are characteristic of what we will get if we continue to support a closed-access publication system. If we want open access to AI, we have to offer open access to our publications. If you don't like the idea of corporate AI running everything, then you have to be willing to contribute to training the alternative. Simply saying "there should be no AI" is not an alternative. Via Robin DeRosa.

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After Tesla and OpenAI, Andrej Karpathy’s startup aims to apply AI assistants to education
Rebecca Bellan, TechCrunch, 2024/07/22

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According to this story, "Andrej Karpathy, former head of AI at Tesla and researcher at OpenAI, is launching Eureka Labs, an 'AI native' education platform." While most pundits will criticize the AI component (including the three-handed student in the 'school of the future' image) my own concern is that while the vision of AI may be futuristic, the vision of education doesn't step at all beyond the traditional collegiate model. Why oh why if we had AI in our pockets would we build a cathedral-sized learning institution out of glass?

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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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