OLDaily

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

The evolution of personalised learning platforms
Hassan Baickdeli, Education Matters Magazine, 2024/08/19

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This is an exploration of the promise of AI-based Personalised Learning Platforms (PLPs) but the vision feels to me unimaginative and regressive. A four-step process is envisioned: identify patterns in learning behaviours and predict future learning needs; creation of adaptive leaning paths; personalized content recommendations; and real-time feedback. This to my mind treats learning as a discovery problem - the idea is that finding the right resources is key. But that's not what AI will do in the future; it will create whatever it is we need as we're doing other things.

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How to Use AI to Promote Equity Now
Vicki Davis, Cool Cat Teacher Blog, 2024/08/19

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Although there has been a lot of talk about how AI reinforces inequalities (and this talk is not without merit) it's nonetheless potentially a powerful tool to reduce inequalities. Humans can be as biased as AI - often even more so - and so there is potential to redress this prejudice. While we're still a long way away from this, Vicki Davis takes a step in the right direction by consider how we can use AI now to reduce AI. There's a pseudo-transcript on the web page with some suggestions; unfortunately the actual transcript is locked inside Apple's 'podcast' tool, though you can listen to the audio.

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CC strategic workshop reveals big opportunities for open access to cultural heritage
Connor Benedict, Creative Commons, 2024/08/19

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I read through this report and I'm sort of 'meh'. The idea is to follow in the footsteps of the UNESCO declarations on Open Educational Resources (OER) (2019) and Open Science (2021) to do something similar with Open Culture. But culture is rather more complex. In the end, the group limited its focus to Open Cultural Heritage, and to exercise more flexibility in the choice of 'instrument' supporting the objective. And as always there's a call to galvanize the open community and form a coalition. This sort of document - and the movement is flush with them - reflect to my mind the privilege and exuberance of the live in-person workshop or conference. We need to balance that with insight into what people without access or ownership over cultural resources might want or need. 

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Unbundling Profile: MIT Libraries
SPARC, 2024/08/19

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People who work with and edit academic journals today are experiencing enormous distress as the product of their life's work is packaged and sold to AI companies. But they've had decades to try something else. We're beginning to finally see some evidence of academia severing its ties to commercial publishers. In the current case, "MIT leaders describe the experience of not renewing its largest journal contract as overwhelmingly positive... Since the cancellation, MIT Libraries estimates annual savings at more than 80% of its original spend. This move saves MIT approximately $2 million each year, and the Libraries provide alternative means of access that fulfills most article requests in minutes." It's also money MIT can use to publish its own articles as open access publications.

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Who Knows What Consciousness Is? | NOEMA
Nathan Gardels, NOEMA, 2024/08/19

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Surface-level discussion of consciousness. "I do not believe consciousness arises from spooky forces. The brain is embodied, and the body is embedded in its environment," says Gerald Edelman. "The brain can speak to itself and the conscious brain can use its discriminations to plan the future, narrate the past and develop a social self." But "When the body goes, we go." My own view of consciousness is that consciousness is experience, that is, experience of both the senses and of the inner workings of the brain.

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Project Luminous: The next level of Augmented Reality
IDW Online, 2024/08/19

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The idea here is to blend augmented reality with large language models to produce a system that can make context-aware recommendations. The AR system "collects relevant data from their immediate surroundings, such as the presence of a fire extinguisher or an emergency exit and passes this on to the generative and multimodal language model... or so-called 'Multi-Modal Large Language Models'." The hope is that "future users of these new XR-systems will be able to interact seamlessly with their environment by using language models while having access to constantly updated global and domain-specific knowledge sources."

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Rejecting Dogmas Around AI, User Privacy, and Tech Policy – The Markup
Ross Teixeira, The Markup, 2024/08/19

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What are the ethics of companies using customer data to train models and of integrating AI models into our personal devices and lives? These questions are explored in an interview with AI scientist Jonathan Frankle. A significant moment: "you have what people will say in a survey, and then you can go and measure how they actually use their device... privacy is the first thing people are willing to give up." But also: "countries in the EU have quite recent experiences of what it's like to not live under democracy, and I can see how that informs a lot of questions around privacy, surveillance, and misinformation in the EU."

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Seven basic rules for causal inference
Peder M. Isager, Peder's blog, 2024/08/19

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How do we determine when one thing causes another? It's a core question in any science, including social sciences such as education. In our field we see a lot of correlation confused for causation, which results in ineffective technology and pedagogy. This post takes an analysis of causation beyond 'if and only if' and considers different types of causation and different ways are data can lead or mislead us. Clearly written with pictures. This blog is rarely updated so download the article while it still exists.

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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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