OLDaily

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

Open Web UI Installer for Reclaim Cloud
Meredith Hoffman, Taylor Jadin, Reclaim the Blog, 2024/11/07

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I had a ton of fun this afternoon following along with the top video and setting up a Web UI website in Reclaim Cloud. The point of this video was to highlight the new installer, which makes it pretty easy to set up the interface. What the interface does is to give you a window where you can access an AI interface (such as ChatGPT) or run an AI model locally as well as additional tools, functions, prompts and models. You can even build your own knowledge base. This isn't strictly a how-to video; it's more the two participants exploring the installer and the functions, and there are tangents and side-quests. At the same time, there are some really useful bits, like knowing you have to set the image dimensions properly (eg. 1024x1024) for the image generation to work.

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The duty to explain: a positive defence of academic freedom in the social sciences
Bruce Macfarlane, Xiao Han, Teaching in Higher Education, 2024/11/07

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This paper (13 page PDF) argues that it is "unhelpful" to think of "academic freedom as a stark division between those who believe in 'balance' or 'neutrality', and others who insist on the right of the university teacher to express their personal beliefs without regard to their impact on the independent intellectual development of others." Why should professors get special rights to express beliefs that others do not have? Instead, it argues that the basis for academic freedom lies in the same principle as 'informed consent' found in other professions; providing the client with all the information they need to make an informed decision constitutes a part of the 'duty of care' that forms an ethical basis for these professions

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Universities need to leave X
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2024/11/07

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I have long ago left Twitter for reasons articulated elsewhere, so I understand the basis for Martin Weller's argument here. "It is explicitly an ideological platform now," he writes. "And unless your ideology aligns with that, then maintaining an account there is actively supporting it." Ah - but here's the rub: "I would hope that most university's ideology does not align with that of Musk." Why would we believe that? I won't offer the analysis here, but it's not hard for me to describe the educational system as one designed to advance the interests of the rich and powerful while maintaining class-based society and resisting the trappings of democratic control. People who are - or who want to be - the beneficiaries of such a system have no real issue with content and media that supports it.

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Human Made's S3 Uploads Plugin
Jim Groom, bavatuesday, 2024/11/07

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One of the ongoing maintenance tasks I have been working on in the background is the gradual transfer of my media content to cloud hosting instead of my (more expensive) web storage. This is why you're not seeing some of my presentation content when you navigate my presentation pages. Working with cloud storage is not straightforward, and least, not if you're running a website that needs to access it. In this post Jim Groom discusses the use of a WordPress plugin to manage uploading and retrieval. I've been figuring out how code this this by hand for my own non-WordPress software. It's fun work, but definitely not for everybody.

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The uniqueness of learning: Rethinking the meaning of student-centred education
Adan Chew, Magdalena Cerbin-Koczorowska, Jess Gurney, Teaching Matters, University of Edinburgh, 2024/11/07

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It's not clear to me that educators and educational institutions have embraced the findings discussed in this article. The authors assert, "an exploration of the predominant learning theories demonstrates that not only should each learner be treated as an individual with their unique learning readiness and abilities, but the dynamic and multifactorial nature of the educational environment cannot be ignored." They cite with approval Bates et al. ​(2019)​, "the inevitable diversity of contexts for learning and practice renders any absolute standardisation of programs, experiences, or outcomes an impossibility." But if it's true that "there is simply no 'one size fits all' approach to student-centred education" then how is any approach based on instructors, classes, and programmes to be successful?

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Falsehoods Programmers believe about DOIs
Joe Wass, Pardalotus, 2024/11/07

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This is an informative post about digital object identifiers (DOI) and, indirectly, the Handle system. It's set up as a series of myths about DOI, which it then addresses. DOI was originally intended as a sort of permanent URL system (permaurl) for academic publications, so that even if the source URL changed, the URLs defined for the paper as a DOI would still allow users to read the paper. This guide is intended to be helpful (and it is!) but I also read it as a documentation of the degradation of DOI over time, as it depends on the goodwill and compliance of publishers, which has always been in short supply. I believe that at some point in the future DOI will be replaced with content addressing (CA), which will allow the retrieval of a document from any place it is stored, and not just the publisher's vault. Via Paul Walk.

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Oldest depictions of fishing discovered in Ice Age art: Camp site reveals 15,800-year-old engravings of fish trapping
IDW, 2024/11/07

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I'm going to designate this as one of the earliest examples of an open educational resource (OER). It's an engraving of a fish and fish netting found in an ice-age camp site located at Gönnersdorf on the banks of the Rhine. The importance of fishing in an ice-age culture underlines the need to pass on the knowledge from one generation to the next. Here's the original publication.

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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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