OLDaily

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

Recapping OpenAI's Education Forum
Marc Watkins, Rhetorica, 2024/10/15

---

This is a summary of OpenAI's recent Education Forum. Marc Watkins highlights "Leah Belsky acknowledging what many of us in education had known for nearly two years—the majority of the active weekly users of ChatGPT are students." The article leans into the question, "what is OpenAI doing to support education," where education is what colleges and universites like Harvard (which purchased access for its students) provide. This approach to me feels artificial, though George Veletsianos says ed tech innovations "haven't had the systemwide transformational impacts that their proponents promised... that's how the edtech industry operates regardless of evidence and history." Of course, ed tech has transformed education; you'd have to be blind to miss that. AI will as well. Maybe just don't listen to some of the high profile proponents (or critics) without deep backgrounds in the field. What are the people who are building (not selling) the stuff saying? What are you reading (if you're reading) in the discussion lists and informal discussions saying (as opposed to the people in the glossy tech media and education magazines)?

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

Google Go Nuclear
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2024/10/15

---

According to this post, "Google made the headlines today, signing a groundbreaking deal to power its data centres with six or seven mini-nuclear reactors, known as Small Modular Reactors (SMRs)." According to the SMR website, "mall modular reactors (SMRs) are advanced nuclear reactors that have a power capacity of up to 300 MW(e) per unit, which is about one-third of the generating capacity of traditional nuclear power reactors." Google plans to have the first of these running by 2030 (which seems like a long time to me, but I'm not a nuclear expert). I personally think this is a good idea, for a variety of reasons (I could easily imagine major universities building their own SMRs to mee their power needs).

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

Critical AI Literacy is Not Enough: Introducing Care Literacy, Equity Literacy & Teaching Philosophies. A Slide Deck
Maha Bali, Reflecting Allowed, 2024/10/15

---

The core of this post is the slide presentation in the middle (easily viewed in your browser) though it ends rather abruptly leaving me hanging. Maha Bali's focus is on literacy, but there's a good deal of philosophy and ethics in her presentation. Indeed, at this point I'd say we're beyond talking abut literacy (and hence the motivationfor my own approach to critical literacies) but I do agree with her that an ethical approach to AI is going to involve learning about more than just AI (which is in general the weakness of a lot of 'AI ethics' approaches) and ultimately we need to be looking at an ethics of care as well. 

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

RAG Techniques
Nir Diamant, GitHub, 2024/10/15

---

This item is from this week's AI Tidbits newsletter. Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) is the latest trend in generative AI (I had someone drop it as an acronym on a panel recently and took the time to spell it out for people). Basically it's the idea of seeding your AI engine with documents to produce context-specific results. There are various ways to do this, and that's what this website is about. I haven't tried any of the code, but the presentation is in iteself a nicely structured and clear presentation of the different approaches. If you worked through all the code it could be quite an effective crash course in RAG. Here's the Diamant AI newsletter.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

MindSearch: Mimicking Human Minds Elicits Deep AI Searcher
Zehui Chen, et al., arXiv.org, 2024/10/15

---

This came though the AI Tidbits newsletter this week. Mindsearch is intended as an alternative to Perplexity. "It decomposes the user query into atomic sub-questions as nodes in the graph and progressively extends the graph based on the search result from WebSearcher. Tasked with each sub-question, WebSearcher performs hierarchical information retrieval with search engines." I haven't tried it; when I'm doing research, search is the least challenging problem to solve, in my experience. Here's the code on GitHub.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

Get started with Readeck
Readeck, 2024/10/15

---

This looks like a pretty cool tool. "Readeck is an open source web application that lets you save content from the web so you can access it later and keep it forever." As the image suggests, it takes nice been screenshots. It also produces video transcripts. It's only available as an open source self hosted app right now, though (presumably paid) cloud hosting will be available soon. Via Dave Lane.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

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.

There are many ways to read OLDaily; pick whatever works best for you:

• Read in your web browser on this web page, updated weekdays
• Receive a daily or weekly email newsletter by subscribing here
• Subscribe to the RSS feed using your favourite feed reader
• Follow @OLDaily@mastodon.social on Mastodon or elsewhere in the fediverse
• Follow @OLDaily on Twitter
• Integrate the open API using the JSON feed