OLDaily

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

Something About The SWF Makes Me Feel Icky
Sean Tilley, deadsuperhero, 2024/10/23

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I wrote about the Social Web Foundation (SWF) last week and suggested there's some controversy about whether the term 'social web' refers to the entire fediverse or to ActivityPub implementations alone. This post is an instance of that controversy boiling over. I'm always wary of attempting to place the governance of a decentralized network under a single entity, despite the calls for governance, coordination and organization around a collective purpose. 

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UAE and Utopia
Bryan Caplan, Bet On It, 2024/10/23

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This has nothing to do with online learning (except tangentially with the recent debates about student visas in my country) but I need to create a post to test a bug fix and I do have an opinion on this. Not on the UAE, or even on the United States, but on the debate described here on the subject "Does open borders benefit humanity by reducing poverty and boosting the economy?" I believe it does (and so does Bryan Caplan in this article). And it seems to me that we cannot have freedom - real freedom, which applies equally to all people - until humans can move about the planet at least as freely as goods and capital.

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Saving Time For What? – Ideas and Thoughts
Dean Shareski, Ideas and Thoughts, 2024/10/23

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"Descript helps remove filler words and creates clips and descriptions that now reduce the three hours to one. I just saved two hours," writes Dean Shareski. But then the kicker: "what will I do with those 2 hours saved?" The answer? More work. "Those of us who work in education and many other professions have never-ending jobs. All of us could and some of us do work 80 hours a week and we never finish. Our to-do lists never get completely crossed off." There's truth to this, and yet at the same time I can't help but think it's a poor profession that is managed thus.

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Pedagogical Alignment of Large Language Models
Shashank Sonkar, Kangqi Ni, Sapana Chaudhary, Richard G. Baraniuk, arXiv, 2024/10/23

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This article raises the issue of 'pedagogical alignment' of large language models. What does 'pedagogical alignment' even mean in this context? It "involves breaking complex problems into manageable steps and providing hints and scaffolded guidance rather than direct answers." That strikes me as very narrow, but let's persist. The authors "propose a novel approach to achieve pedagogical alignment by modeling it as learning from human preferences (LHP)... to represent desired teaching behaviors as preferences, enabling more nuanced optimization." And this (of course) requires data "to quantitatively measure an LLM's tendency to provide step-by-step guidance versus direct answers, offering a robust metric for pedagogical alignment." And so plays out the paper. I would find such an AI very frustrating. I think we need a model of learning that is something that isn't spoonfeeding.

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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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