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

AI Tools - Artificial intelligence
Michael Webb, Artificial intelligence, 2024/08/29

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Useful list of AI resources from Jisc. "We think the value is understanding how people are using them.  So we are going to focus on sharing details of AI tools and features that we hear people are using and link to any story or information about how.  Defining 'AI tools' is getting increasingly hard, as AI is built into more and more tools, hence the mention of both 'tools' and 'features' - the latter which might be in any application."

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The Geek Way: A Better Way to Run a 21st Century Company
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, 2024/08/29

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I don't think I would have characterized this as 'the Geek Way' or any similarly branded methodology created by an MIT business professor, but these four features do characterize a new way of doing business (quoted):

• ownership: giving employees higher levels of personal autonomy, empowerment and responsibility
• openness: a willingness to hear what other people have to say, and being receptive to arguments, reevaluations, and changes in direction
• science: conducting experiments, generating data, and arguing about how to interpret the evidence
• speed: a preference for achieving results by iterating rapidly instead of planning extensively

These new processes are necessary because of the changing nature of the workplace. Central planning and control are not sufficiently responsive. But doing it like this requires new skills.

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The gen AI skills revolution: Rethinking your talent strategy
Alharith Hussin, et al., McKinsey & Company, 2024/08/29

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As this report from McKinsey outlines, the use of AI is greatly increasing productivity in engineering. "Gen AI has improved product manager (PM) productivity by 40 percent, while halving the time it takes to document and code. At IBM Software, for example, developers using gen AI saw 30 to 40 percent jumps in productivity." As a result, new types of skills will become more important: better code review skills, integrating different systems, and "higher-value 'upstream skills' such as writing user stories, developing code frameworks (for instance, code libraries, support programs), understanding business outcomes, and anticipating user intent." There are additional new skills listed for product managers and leadership.

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AI pioneers want bots to replace human teachers – here’s why that’s unlikely
Annette Vee, The Conversation, 2024/08/29

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You have to scroll to the bottom of this article to find the five paragraphs that explain why Anette Vee thinks it's unlikely. First, "Students are unlikely to be inspired and excited the way they can be by a live instructor." Second, "A lack of data privacy and security can also be a deterrent." And third, "If a bot teaches millions of students at once, we may lose diversity of thought." This third point is laughable. "Where does originality come from when everyone receives the same teachings?" she asks. What do you think happens now, with standardized curricula?

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Artifacts are now generally available
Anthropic, 2024/08/29

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Anthropic (an AI company) is making something called 'Artifacts' publicly available. "Artifacts turn conversations with Claude into a more creative and collaborative experience. With Artifacts, you have a dedicated window to instantly see, iterate, and build on the work you create with Claude. Since launching as a feature preview in June, users have created tens of millions of Artifacts... From code snippets and flowcharts to SVG graphics, websites, and interactive dashboards, Artifacts help bring your ideas and projects to life."

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IAB Workshop on AI-CONTROL (aicontrolws)
IETF, 2024/08/29

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Robots.txt (a.k.a. the Robots Exclision Protocol) is a small file web servers provide to tell web crawlers like the Google search engine where they can search and where they can't. The Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF), which creates the protocols for the internet, is considering the use of robots.txt to manage what crawlers used by AI companies can do. This page is a set of submissions to that task force, including contributions from OpenAI, Creative Commons, the BBC, Elsevier, and more. Most of the submissions are pretty short and all of them are interesting reading. Via Ed Summers.

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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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