OLDaily

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

The Different (and Modern) Ways To Toggle Content
Daniel Schwarz, CSS-Tricks, 2024/11/08

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I spend a lot of time thinking about how to display and hide things on a web page. This article looks at some of the modern ways to do that, with an emphasis disclosures using "the Dialog API, the Popover API, and more." This is a bit of an insight into the whole world of html and javacript  APIs which I have been learning about recently.

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Stature and status: Height, ability, and labor market outcomes - PMC
Anne Case, Christina Paxson, PubMed Central, 2024/11/08

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According to this article, "height is positively associated with cognitive ability, which is rewarded in the labor market." I would speculate that any such correlation would have to do with nutrition and health prebirth and in childhood. You want better learning outcomes? Ensure children are well-nourished. But there's a darker side to this argument, as in this report we read about height being used to screen applicants to higher education programs in Vietnam, where the restriction has generated outrage. "The school announced that female students must be at least 1.58 meters tall and male students at least 1.65 meters to be considered for admission this year." Both items via HESA.

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ChatGPT is transforming peer review — how can we use it responsibly?
James Zou, Nature, 2024/11/08

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According to this article, "at major computer-science publication venues, up to 17% of the peer reviews are now written by artificial intelligence." Of course, the detection of AI writing isn't totally reliable, but as James Zou writes, "reviews penned by AI tools stand out because of their formal tone and verbosity — traits commonly associated with the writing style of large language models (LLMs)." The article has the usual caveats that AI should not replace human reviewers and that "guardrails" should be in place. But "the tidal wave of LLM use in academic writing and peer review cannot be stopped." Via Daily Nous.

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OpenAI defeats news outlets' copyright lawsuit over AI training, for now
Blake Brittain, Reuters, 2024/11/08

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This will be all over the tech news today, but it's important to note that this is just the first step in what will certainly be a long legal process as the case works through appeals. But the finding is still significant. As Donald Clark summarizes, "Generative AI 'synthesises', it does not copy. This is central. It's a bit like our brains, we see, hear and read stuff but memory isn't copying, it's a process of synthesis and recall is reconstructive." More: VentureBeat, Engadget. Here is the full opinion.

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Canadian Government to Ban TikTok (the Company not the App)
Michael Geist, 2024/11/08

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I'm on the verge of closing my account and removing TikTok from my phone. This partially because of the new Canadian action, but mostly because of its content moderation stance that silence counts as copyright content. It's two sides of the same coin, I think: on the one hand, exercising arbitrary control over the content, and on the other hand "unacceptably invasive-by-design, treat(ing) users as raw material for personal data surveillance, and fall(ing) short on transparency about their data sharing practices." And thus TikTok falls into the junk pile where Facebook and Twitter already reside.

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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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