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

6 major academic publishers face antitrust lawsuit
Laura Spitalniak, Higher Ed Dive, 2024/09/17

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It's a lawsuit that will probably not amount to anything, but that's more a statement about the legal stsrem than an assessment of the merits of the case. Lucina Uddin (the "Scholar Plaintiff") "brings this
antitrust class action to challenge collusion among the world's six largest for-profit publishers of peer-reviewed scholarly journals," alleging that the six have formed a "cartel" through the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers (STM). "Members agree to follow STM's policies, which state that peer review is "volunteer work" and that researchers cannot submit their manuscripts to more than one journal at a time or freely share their work under review."

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Gen AI Demands We Teach Critical Thinking
David Ross, Getting Smart, 2024/09/17

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"Is this real?" This should be our first reaction these days to any new content, whether it shows up on TikTok, Twitter, cable news, or a major newspaper. And "the question 'Is this real?' is a call to action for critical thinking." Quite so. But what, and how? Ross offers a rough and ready account of critical thinking, one that could use some polish, and suggests 'infusion' - "explicitly teaching principles of critical thinking embedded in specific subject-matter content within a discipline" - is the best way to teach it. My own preference is the reverse - teach the subject-specific content matter as material embedded in a single cross-disciplinary critical thinking focus. But imagine asking students to ask of textbooks, "is this real?" And yet, how necessary.

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Digital Natural Law
David White, 2024/09/17

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"We imagine there is a Natural Law of Digital," writes David White. "It's a kind of digital Garden of Eden state where everything 'works intuitively' in a manner which releases us to only have to work on things we believe to be authentic and meaningful." The problem with this 'law' is that it doesn't exist. It's "state which none of us would agree on even if we could describe it." The problem, maybe, is that we take digital for granted. A sense of wonder would, well, do wonders: "Of course it's down, do you have any idea of how complex it is? It's a wonder it ever works at all!." We really are living in an age or miracles. But still, people complain.

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The large, small, and dynamic viewport units
Bramus, web.dev, 2024/09/17

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I learned about different viewport heights yesterday, which means you get to read about it today (and apologies if this is old news to anyone). A lot of web design is based on the height of the screen - the viewport. But on mobile phones, the height of the screen changes as the browsers expands or shrinks things like the address bar or menu buttons. This means, for example, if your website is defined as 100vh (that is, 100% of the viewport height) the top of it will be hidden behind the address bar. So if you're designing for a mobile browser, you need choose between the large (lvh), small (svh) or dynamic (dvh) viewport size. Each of these has its own tradeoffs.

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Building the Public Infastructure for AI in Education
Nafez Dakkak, Nafez's Notes, 2024/09/17

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Yusuf Ahmed has had an interesting history, including working directly with the President of the American University in Cairo (AUC) during the Egyptian revolution. Today he is a cofounder of the non-profit PlayLab AI. This interview covers a range of topics related to education and technology. Including this: "We could have easily created Playlab as a closed platform—similar to something like Teachers Pay Teachers, Facebook, or Amazon. But we chose a different path. Consider a world where libraries weren't public institutions. In such a scenario, access to books would depend on purchasing them or subscribing to a service."

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OECD Education at a Glance, 2024
Alex Usher, HESA, 2024/09/17

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Alex Usher offers a brief summary of the OECD's 'Education at a Glance' report. It's probably this report, though he does not bother to offer a link. There's not much that's groundbreaking in the report. I read far too much of it trying to figure out the 'public institution' data, which Usher (nor without justification) reports as "nonsense" - it reports 100% of Canada's and 0% of the U.K.'s institutions as being 'public institutions'. Now of course the OECD does not actually believe this - there are other tables in the report (eg. B.3.4) that show different percentages. I assume Usher is referencing this table (though he doesn't bother to reference his reconstruction, so I don't know for sure (just sloppy work here, he can do better)). Now I can't explain this table either (it actually shows Canada, Greece, Luxembourg and Denmark all at 100%, and doesn't include the U.K. at all).

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An AI tutor helped Harvard students learn more physics in less time
Jill Barshay, The Hechinger Report, 2024/09/17

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This article has the magic word in it that always gets the attention of the media - "Harvard". The gist has been reported in other studies as well over the last few months: "Students were randomly assigned to learn a topic as usual in class, or stay 'home' in their dorm and learn it through an AI tutor powered by ChatGPT... Each student learned both ways, and for both lessons – one on surface tension and one on fluid flow –  the AI-tutored students learned a lot more." The study? "Kestin provocatively titled his paper about the experiment, AI Tutoring Outperforms Active Learning, but in an interview he told me that he doesn't mean to suggest that AI should replace professors or traditional in-person classes."

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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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