OLDaily

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

My Top 10 Tools List for 2024
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2024/08/23

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This is my submission for this year to Jane Hart's annual list.

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New journal on open, distance and digital education: a review
Tony Bates, Online learning and distance education resources, 2024/08/23

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The first issue of the new Journal of Open, Distance and Digital Education has been released and featrures articles from luminaries such as Ross Paul and Diana Laurillard, among others. In this review, Tony Bates remarks that while "most articles in existing ODDE journals focus heavily on the micro level, namely at the individual or class instructional level of learning.... equally important for ODDE are the institutional and government policies and actions that lead to or inhibit ODDE." The articles are open access, and we'll see where the discussion goes in subsequent issues (I really to hope they avoid the trap of 'sampling 23 psychology students in a midwestern university').

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Why are int'l graduate returnees to China considering themselves "wastes"?
Xing Xu, Ly Tran, The PIE News, 2024/08/23

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I don't know how much of this is accurate and how much of it simply supports the narrative of limiting the number of international students prevailing in a number of countries in the west. The story here is that "While Chinese students learn and transform through overseas study, they face significant barriers when returning home" as reflected in a discourse called 'Haifei', or 'overseas returning wastes' (海归废物). Obviously both cultures benefit from international student exchange, and because of internet restrictions it's not clear the same benefits can be found in online learning. But obviously the present situation as described here is not desirable.

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A Gentle Introduction to Bayesian Statistics
Iván Palomares Carrascosa, Machine Learning Mastery, 2024/08/23

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This is pretty old school, but my introduction to Bayes's theorem in graduate school was not gentle (as I recall there was a lot of abstruse mathematics involved) so I'm inclined to ease the road for anyone following in the footsteps of probability theory. At its core, the concept is simple: the probability of one thing changes as the probability of a prior thing changes. For example the probability that George will return home with groceries is higher if you know that George probably went to the grocery store, and lower if you know he probably went to the bar. But does it mean to say that? And what are the implications for machine learning? This article looks at this concept, as the title says, gently.

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Meet the Maker: High School Student Develops Robot Guide Dogs With NVIDIA Jetson
Andy Bui, NVIDIA Blog, 2024/08/23

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A high school student from Istanbul, Turkiye, has created robot guide dogs for the visually impaired. The story itself is a marketing piece from Nvidia, so it's very much a special case (she's in AI4ALL, a nonprofit program with the mission to make AI more diverse and inclusive, and the New York Academy of Science), but I'm a great supporter of the idea of young students being able to use new technology to create whatever they think may be useful or entertaining. Let's make opportunities like this available for all students.

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The darkish side of open licences
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2024/08/23

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In a nutshell: if you licensed your content as CC-by it has probably been used to train AI. The story, of course, is that not all open content advocates are comfortable with this. "I think I'm coming down on the side of accepting that openness means content being used by AI or whatever sites deem to harvest it," writes Martin Weller. The point may be moot in any case - it may turn out that using content to train AI is fair use. But I think advocates of open content are on much firmer ground when they advocate for open-access AI.

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McGraw Hill Introduces 2 Gen AI Learning Tools
Matt Jones, Campus Technology, 2024/08/23

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The flood of AI-based learning tools continues. "AI Reader is available within a variety of titles on McGraw Hill's eBook platform and offers students a deeper understanding of course materials with real-time engagement and support." Also, in Iowa: Department of Education launches AI-powered reading tutor program. There's also coverage today of Qu's Heeyo, a children's "interactive tutor and friend".

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I'm Unable to Attend, But I'll send my AI Bot
Pernille Tranberg, Dataetisk Tænkehandletank, 2024/08/23

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This article talks about online meetings but a student could just as easily send an AI Bot to an online class. Should they be allowed to? What if the choice is between skipping the class entirely and sending a bot? Can other students veto the use of bots?

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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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