OLDaily

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

Exploring what matters: getting the most out of educational technology research
Alexandra Mihai, The Educationalist, 2024/11/11

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Interesting commentary on the state of research in educational technology today and what's missing. What's missing? Research that links theory through technology to needs and practices (so I summarize). Thus, Alexandra Mihai looks for "insights into how educational technology can enhance the learning process" and "how technology can contribute to addressing the increasing diversity of our learner population." Mihai also considers the impact of AI on the research process, suggesting "it's so important to maintain our agency in the research and writing process." I don't think education as a discipline has come to terms enough with how people actually learn, which (to me) explain the persistence of the sort of teacher- and institution-focused approaches Mihai asks for here.

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View of Into the Open: Shared Stories of Open Educational Practices in Teacher Education
Helen J. DeWaard, Canadian Journal of Learning Technology, 2024/11/11

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I enjoyed the lavish illustrations in this article, a rarity in academic publications. After anm introductory section, the paper offers what is essentially a dialogue around the topic of sharing and openness in education. This bit from  the abstract resonated most with me: "It is becoming ever more important to share expertise as practitioners, researchers, and theorists in the field of education by making explicit what is often tacit and unspoken, and when sharing knowledge, reflections, and actions. By actively thinking-out-loud through blogs, social media, and open scholarly publications, educators can openly share details of what, how, and why they do what they do." This is the space where OLDaily operates - a somewhat middle ground between full academia on the one hand and the popular press on the other.

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AI and writing, AI in education, AI regulation
Anna Mills, Bluesky Social, 2024/11/11

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The most interesting migration in social media these days is from twitter to Bluesky. Here are two approaches to making it easier: the first is a 'starter pack' on people in AI and education. It makes use of the Bluesky Lists feature or the Bluesky Starter Pack. In the same genre, here's a Tech Media Starter Pack. The second, via Miguel Guhlin, is based on a hashtag with members listed on a Google Docs spreadsheet. It's cleverly done. You have to apply to be listed on the spreadsheet, and to be accepted you have to use the #Edusky hashtag in your account on Bluesky. Viral. Here's the Edusky feed.

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Gender, Race, and Intersectional Bias in Resume Screening via Language Model Retrieval
Kyra Wilson, Aylin Caliskan, Proceedings of the AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society, 2024/11/11

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The topic of AI-based recruitment and hiring has been discussed here before and research continues apace. This item (13 page PDF), despite the characterization in GeekWire, is a fairly narrow study. It looks at three text-embedding models based on Mistral-7B-v0.1, and tests for gender and racial bias on applications containing name and position only, and name and position and some content (the paper discusses removing the name but does do it). The interesting bit is that intersectional bias (ie., combining gender and race) is not merely a combination of the separate biases; while separate biases exaggerated the discrimination, "intersectional results, on the other hand, do correspond more strongly to real-world discrimination in resume screening." Via Lisa Marie Blaschke, who in turn credits Audrey Watters.

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Trashing universities is now a populist position
David Kernohan, WonkHe, 2024/11/11

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I suppose I would agree with a lot of what David Kernohan offers in this long and winding discussion of the populist critique of the university, but I'm also finding myself disagreeing with a lot of it. With Kernohan, I reject the core of the critique, which is to assert that today's universities focus on "indoctrination" or "the priming of the younger generation around identity politics" and the consequent "rise of the bureaucratic class." It's a red herring. What the populist critique does tap into (and we see it even in Kernohan's retelling of the Kemi Badenoch origin story) is the idea that university is funded by an elite, for an elite, and otherwise blocks opportunities at the door for the rest of us.

When universities decided that raising tuition fees was a viable strategy, they laid the foundation for populist attacks against them. It's not so much the idea that "I could have gone to Oxford" as it is the idea of "a growing consensus that we can't just keep expanding university provision." If the doors to opportunity are being locked, and it's a different type of people being granted admission, why not tear down the institution? After all (goes the argument) it's not like they "disseminate truth and knowledge" or "train the next generation of young minds to actually anticipate the world as it is (and) to apply first principles to critical and difficult problems." Or, bluntly, if universities aren't empowering us (the people), what's the point of them?

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The submissive university
Ingrid Robeyns, Crooked Timber, 2024/11/11

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I have many thoughts about this article on education funding cuts in the Netherlands, but I want to focus on two items in this post. The first is the author's assertion that universities "are not supposed to serve any master other than truth, in all its dimensions." The second is that "politicians with authoritarian aspirations try to undermine public institutions because they are crucial for truth-telling." These is an element of truth to each of these assertions, but in a more important sense, they are not true: universities serve societies , and authoritarians would rather universities served the state. Now there is a lot of nuance here I'm eliding, but my takeaway is this: universities were strongest when their mission was based on providing knowledge and learning for all, and the further they move away from this ideal, the more reasonable the authoritarian case seems to be against them.

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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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