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

Fallacies
Hans Hansen, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2024/09/03

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As longtime readers know, my first real online work was a guide to the logical fallacies. So I have an ongoing interest in the subject. This article is a newly revised SEP entry on the subject, and while it is nicely comprehensive, it will need some updating fairly soon. For one thing, the domain of fallacies is not limited to argumentation, which is why my own guide lists fallacies of definition and explanation. And while there is a section at the end on biases, it really doesn't grapple with the tension between the ideas of logical fallacies and cognitive biases.

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Is online learning a lifeline for financially struggling universities?
Neil Mosley, Neil Mosley Consulting, 2024/09/03

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I think this is a fair-minded article addressing an ever-more pressing issue now that colleges and universities can't just bring students into the country on temporary visas (this is happening globally, not just where we live). The spectacular failure of 2U, reported here a few weeks ago, suggests that the finances don't work; fees must remain high, it seems, because the cost of acquiring new online students is so high. But maybe it's good for other reasons, says Neil Mosley. "It is a good investment because it expands the ways in which HEIs offer access to higher education, broadening the audiences they can reach and enhancing their capability to serve existing audiences."

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Would a tech tax be a fair way to make Google and Meta pay for the news they distribute and profit from?
Anya Schiffrin, Nieman Lab, 2024/09/03

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I think it's important to understand that news media doesn't create the news either. People create the news, something by creating something, sometimes by having accidents, and sometimes by starting wars. The news media just collects it - harvests it, if you will. Think of how much paywalled news (and journal) content is just a rephrasing of stuff that was already out there in the world. Moreover, I think it says a lot about society that we'll throw people into jail for copyright violations but really not be so concerned about the seriously problematic online content out there today (this reproduces a line of argumentation I heard on TWIG yesterday).

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GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar: Key features, spread, and implications for preempting evidence manipulation
Jutta Haider, et al., Misinformation Review, 2024/09/03

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This paper surveyed Google Scholar for questionable papers, which it then analyzed to determine how many were authored by an AI application such as ChatGPT. It found a fair number of papers. Notably, limiting the selection to indexed journals slowed, but did not stop, the flow. It should be noted, as Grant Potter highlights on Mastodon, that "It is important not to present this as a technical problem that exists only because of AI text generators but to relate it to the wider concerns in which it is embedded."

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OLDaily (@oldaily.bsky.social)
Stephen Downes, Bluesky Social, 2024/09/03

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OLDaily now publishes on BlueSky. I wrote a little Perl script adapter for gRSShopper to publish whenever I also publish to Mastodon and the web. It was fairly straightforward, though I did get lost in the facet[] syntax for as while, to include links as links. Also, I'm getting better and better writing these APIs. Who needs IFTTT when you can roll your own? P.S. Kudos to Michael Hughes, who followed me on Bluesky even before my first 'Hello World' post came out.

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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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