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

Meta taps US, UK universities to test VR in education, creates digital twin 'metaversities' in Europe
Paul Sawers, TechCrunch, 2024/11/12

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According to this article, "Meta has launched a new partnership with a slew of universities in the U.S. and U.K., as it looks to ingrain VR across the education system." I guess it's a big deal (per Mixed, Upload, Social Media Today, Technopedia, ReadWrite, etc etc) but it's hard for me to stifle a yawn. It's not simply that I was here for the Second Life hype, it's that their product is a "digital twin" of the university - "environments that directly replicate their real-world campus counterparts" - the least imaginative use of any media ever. I think there's a lot of room for VR in education, but this announcement isn't it.

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Bluesky and AI4Communities
Mathew Lowry, Medium, 2024/11/12

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This post deserves a look if only for its cracking good diagram illustrating the difference between the ActivityPub protocol (used by Mastodon and others) and the ATmosphere protocol (used by Bluesky). View it here. Essentially the difference is that the AT protocol disaggregates posting and applications, which (in theory) means that a viral post won't cause your 'instance' to crash (presumably because the post is being cached by the applications?). However "Bluesky's openness means there will not be separate villages, nor private groups for collaboration." 

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How I ship projects at big tech companies
Sean Goedecke, 2024/11/12

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I remember a phrase from some technical conference a number of years ago: "quality ships." If you ever wondered what this means, this article is for you. It describes what it is to 'shop' a software product, and the sorts of concerns the person responsible has in order to ensure the project ships. After all, the default status for any project is 'not shipped'. There will always be something that could be added, something improved. The idea is to get it in front of as many ideas as possible, deal with the issues, earn the confidence of management, and deliver the result. Via Ben Werdmuller.

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Empowering Education Leaders: A Toolkit for Safe, Ethical, and Equitable AI Integration
Roberto J. Rodriguez, et al., Office of Educational Technology, 2024/11/12

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This is a longish (79 page PDF) resource from the U.S. government's Office of Educational Technology. "The Department heard educators say that AI is here to stay, AI will keep changing, and safely integrating AI in educational settings will require informed leadership at multiple levels across the education system." The toolkit is divided into three sections: migitating risks, strategy for AI integration, and guiding its use. The risks considered include privacy and data security, student civil rights, accessibility, and digital equity. The second section is weaker, focusing on the 'instructional core' (credited to Elmore, but basically Moore (1989)), with a corresponding focus on instruction. The third section begins with a discussion of AI literacy (limited to "includes the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to engage with AI safely") and promotion of "responsible use". 

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View of Preparing Educators to Teach and Create With Generative Artificial Intelligence
Paula MacDowell, Kristin Moskalyk, Katrina Korchinski, Dirk Morrison, Canadian Journal of Learning and Technology, 2024/11/12

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This paper reports on a process where thirty-five teachers enrolled in an elective three-credit multimedia design course "engaged in experiential activities focussed on developing artificial intelligence (AI) literacy, alongside a collaborative assignment to co-author an open-access textbook, Teaching and Creating With Generative Artificial Intelligence." In the process, "the Student Artificial Intelligence Literacy (SAIL) framework was developed (illustrated)." The paper concludes with the usual recommendations ('do no harm', 'develop communication skills', etc.). Each participant wrote a chapter, though a common template was used. I very much like the idea of producing a useful open resource as part of class activities. Oddly, the article doesn't provide a link to the textbook, but I found it here. It's a nice selection of 'how-to' articles that readers, I think, will find useful. One chapter (chapter 20 1/2?) is missing.

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Human-AI collaboration: Designing artificial agents to facilitate socially shared regulation among learners
Justin Edwards, British Journal of Educational Technology, 2024/11/12

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This article is dense but yields to a reasonable careful reading. In a nutshell: the authors consider what the use of AI could tell us about how to support "Socially shared regulation of learning (SSRL)", that is, "a complex process where learners collectively manage their learning activities, influencing each other's cognitive, motivational, and emotional states." They conceptialize an AI called a Metacognitive Artificial Intelligence (MAI) employing a design process called Echeloned Design Science Research (EDSR) (which readers will find is very similar to the Waterfall design methodology) and, lacking an actual functioning prototype, emulate its functionality using humans behind the scenes (aka the Wizard of Oz (WOz) approach), and apply it using a cohort of 52 pre-service teachers. It didn't work. "Although the theory-grounded design principles proposed in the domain appear somewhat effective, our results indicate that these are insufficient in real-world contexts, and insights from human-computer interaction are necessary for creating truly effective designs."

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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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