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

Study Buddy or Influencer
Lisa Chesters, et al., Parliament of Australia, 2024/09/10

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This report (150 page PDF) from an Australian Parliamentary committee argues essentially for an embrace of AI technologies in schools, coupled with measures to limit risks and avoid harms. "The best way to implement GenAI education tools into the school system, like study buddies, is by integrating them into the national curriculum, creating and implementing guidelines and polices... foundation models, especially large language models (LLM), should be trained on data that is based on the national curriculum." Via Rhiannon Bowman.

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Rethink: On the fraying of our shared reality and how to protect it
Rachel Botsman, Rethink with Rachel, 2024/09/10

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"Our lives have moved towards an image-driven existence where genuine human experience, what actually happened, is obscured by a saturation of false representations and spectacles," notes Rachel Botsman. "We must be able to align around the concrete facts of what happened on the day. There also needs to be a distinction between what has already happened, what will happen, and what might happen." I wish it were as simple as that, as though there were this third strand of 'objective reality' that could ground our agreement in fact. But 'objective reality' crucially depends on social agreement about what counts as evidence, what words we use to describe evidence, and what importance evidence has (or perhaps I sould say, more accurately, society is the result of thise sort of social agreement). From where I sit, we have always lived in different societies, but we haven't even been able to see these other societies; the supposed 'fraying' is these other societies coming into view for the first time, and challenging our view of reality. That's a good thing.

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Eating the Future
Alex Usher, HESA, 2024/09/10

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I agree with Alex Usher here but I wonder about the framing. He writes, " we never spend time talking about expenditure now vs. investing in the future... all our policy discussions are about how to avoid investing in the future, and spend money now, in the name of 'affordability.'" Now at the risk of being called "crackers" I would depict quite a bit of the discussion as being about the future. It's pretty much the main focus of this here newsletter. When we talk about making education accessible to all, that is a discussion about the future. But my main question here is about agency. Who is framing all these debates in terms of whether the government can afford it? And why are we letting them get away it with it?

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Towards a Competence Framework for Open Scholars: Acknowledging the Dearth of Epistemic Competences | Open Praxis
Barbara Class, Dalila Bebbouchi, Alexandra Fedorova, Lilia Cheniti, Ghada El Khayat, Souhad Shlaka, Open Praxis, 2024/09/10

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There's a lot of depth in this article, which makes me happy, though the point of the article can be described very simply: descriptions of open scientific research in the literature focus more on practices than knowledge, and it should begin to make the shift. The authors carefully work through concepts of scholarship, responsibility and competence and draw out a theoretical framework based on sustainability education and activity theory framed for competences, linked together as "systemic levels of knowing". This framework informs the literature review and analysis of competence frameworks, with the result that "scholarship focuses on practice (and) does not suggest that reflexive and epistemic capabilities are present or in the process of being developed." The article draws a lot from Elizabeth St. Pierre and if I had to summarize the theme in a nutshell, I'd cite from here: " it cannot be a social science research methodology with preexisting research methods and research practices a researcher can apply...  post qualitative inquiry encourages concrete, practical experimentation and the creation of the not yet instead of the repetition of what is."

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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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