OLDaily

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

Bah! Amazon Shmamazon
Helen Blunden, Activate Learning, 2024/09/05

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Helen Blunden writes about her failure to be a successful Amazon shill after her affiliate links don't produce the sort of sales traffic the company requires. It's the same, in my view, for any for of advertising-supported media. The media must, at least in part, support the advertising. This doesn't need to be a hard sell; it can be as subtle as writing about different topics (covering books more than you might, for example) or altering expressions (using phrases like 'advertising supported ' instead of 'advertising encumbered'). I'm not sure there's any way to get around this - when we use fundraising services we become shills for (say) gofundme. When we use open licensing we promote (with a link) Creative Commons on every page. All of these alter what we say and how we say it.

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Is better learning ‘more efficient’ or is it about students actually wanting to be in class?
Dave Cormier, Dave's Educational Blog, 2024/09/05

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This article meanders a bit and I don't necessarily agree with where it ends up, but it makes some important points on the way. The first is, before we talk about improving learning (through AI or otherwise) we need to have some understanding of what we mean by 'better' and 'learning'. The second is that there is no consensus on this (and, I would add, won't be so long as people keep referring back to educational theory as though it were fact). Engagement, writes Cormier, is much more important than remembering. With this I agree. But I wouldn't say that only human practitioners can stimulate engagement.

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Is the AI Revolution Already Losing Steam?
Irving Wladawsky-Berger, 2024/09/05

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We are supposed to believe that AI is a bubble and that it's over. "The last tech bubble gave us some deeply unserious 'innovations' like Web3 and the metaverse. But it also gave us a fourth industrial revolution, powered by the mobile internet, automation and artificial intelligence, the impacts of which will be playing out for decades to come." I don't think those were bubbles in any serious sense, and the 'fourth industrial revolution' was precisely about AI. I think that the companies and specific products related to AI are unimportant. I don't see the technology going away at any point in the future. It's already too useful to ignore.

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How Consistent Are Humans When Grading Programming Assignments?
Marcus Messer, Neil Brown, Michael Kolling, Miaojing Shi, EdArXiv, 2024/09/05

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We've seen this sort of result (16 page PDF) before in other studies, but it does no harm to reiterate it. "Our results show that human graders in our study can not agree on the grade to give a piece of student work and are often individually inconsistent, suggesting that the idea of a "gold standard" of human grading might be flawed, and highlights that a shared rubric alone is not enough to ensure consistency." At a certain point, students will demand AI assessment in order to ensure consistency and fairness.

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Statuzer
2024/09/05

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This is an app that (in theory) allows you to view your Mastodon accounts and Bluesky account side by side in a deck layout (I tried it and it had issues on the Bluesky side - first, you had to enter your full Bluesky name (ie., @downes.bsky.social ) and then it didn't display the timeline). Each column will access a distinct instance through its API. There's a consolidated posting feature allowing you to write once and post to multiple sites. Here's the author's account. Here's the Statuzer feed. Via Kuba Suder.

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Is Retrieval-Augmented Generation All You Need? Investigating Structured External Memory to Enhance Large Language Models’ Generation for Math Learning
Wanli Xing, et al., EdArXiv, 2024/09/05

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I'm using this link to a preprint paper (16 page PDF) to introduce and define the concept of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG). "Conceptually, RAG in educational contexts supports the accuracy of LLM-based QA by utilizing external knowledge sources such as syllabi, workbooks, and handouts. RAG injects information from a retrieval knowledge base into the LLM during inference (e.g., via prompts) to enhance the generated content through knowledge integration." The proposal in this specific paper is that structured information, such as a knowledge graph (KG), might serve the same purpose, only better. "KG-based RAG approach can enhance the groundedness and faithfulness of both the retrieved documents and the generated context."

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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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