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

OEGlobal 2024 Schedule
2024/11/14

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OEGlobal 2024 aka #OEGlobal24 is taking place right now in Brisbane, Australia (and hence, from late afternoon to the middle of the night for me). I've enjoyed it in bits and pieces. Some things worth highlighting: Siobhan Leachman's keynote, From Passive Absorption to Empowered Co-Creation (starts after the 19:00 minute mark). Also, Tim Klapdor's Learning Types guide (not to be confused with learning styles). Also, notes from the Experience Open Education Without Internet: BCcampus Open Content via Kolibri, an "an ecosystem of open digital products and tools centered around an offline-first learning platform." Also: Bionomia, and a related resource, the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Also, Alan Levine's Conference of the Air. Also, a series of Australasian OER case studies. including useful chapters like Sarah Steen's From Blank Pages to Completion and Alison Lockley's Repurposing MOOCs to Microlearning.

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How a stubborn computer scientist accidentally launched the deep learning boom
Timothy B. Lee, Ars Technica, 2024/11/14

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This is a great article documenting several strands of research that came together to result in the AI deep learning boom we are seeing today. It may introduce you to people you haven't heard of before -Fei-Fei Li, who created ImageNet; Alex Krizhevsky, who inspired by Geoffrey Hinton developed AlexNet; Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia who launched CUDA; Yann LeCun, who developed a cheque-reading application. It just goes to show, I think, that groundbreaking inventions are produced by a society, not by the 'individual geniuses' who later monetize them. Via Tel Amiel.

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The time has come to reimagine college textbooks for the modern digital era
Vinay K. Chaudhri, The Hechinger Report, 2024/11/14

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This is an idea straight from the 50s but expect to see more of the same as companies wrestle with how to make their publications relevant in the age of AI. Vinay K. Chaudhri beghins with a reaffirmation of the importance of textbooks (as "a carefully curated body of knowledge... nearly 100 percent accurate... (and) the view of an expert educator"). Needed now, though, is "authoring textbooks so that their concepts can be read as computer code." How? Back to the 50s - a controlled vocabulary. "Textbooks, using the discipline of knowledge engineering, can support the curation, preservation and learning of all forms of human knowledge." Next up? I guess it would have to be the unification of the sciences.

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Your brain isn't the only part of the body that makes memories
James Devitt-NYU, Futurity, 2024/11/14

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This article challenges us to think more deeply on the distinction between knowledge and memory. The claim made here is that parts of the body - the kidney, say - can replicate the massed-spaced effect, retaining information over time, which is the same thing we see when connections are formed between neurons in the brain. But is that the same as forming a memory? I have Haglund's Deformity, a 'memory' of my many years of walking in bad shows. That seems more like "what our pancreas remembers about the pattern of our past meals to maintain healthy levels of blood glucose" and rather less like "knowing Paris is the capital of France". We can interpret these 'memories' as retained information, but it's not clear this is in any way any sort of knowledge.

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Feels Like Empathy: How “Emotional” AI Challenges Human Essence
Angelina Chen, Sarah Koegel, Oliver Hannon, Raffaele Ciriello, Australasian Conference on Information Systems, 2024/11/14

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One of the major differences between AI and humans, we are told, is the capacity to empathize. But is empathy intrinsic to being human? We could certainly imagine an 'Artificial Emotional Intelligence (AEI)' that mirrors human empathy and is used as a much-needed salve for social ills such as loneliness. But offer a convincing enough emulation of empathy and we humans are inclined to conclude that it is empathy. And the authors of this paper (14 page PDF) consider the possibility of an unintended outcome of AEI: that we humans would change what we mean by empathy. "The assimilation of AEI into society gives rise to emergent empathy. This concept reframes empathy, not as an intrinsic feature but as an outcome of the dynamic interaction between humans, technology, tasks, and structures."

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From Artificial Intelligence to Artificial Consciousness
Isaac Mao, Isaac+Mao, 2024/11/14

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What's the difference between artificial intelligence and artificial consciousness? The difference is small enough for Daniel Dennett to warn against the deployment of "counterfeit people". Where the difference lies, at least as I read this article from Isaac Mao, is somewhere on the inside, echoing Thomas Nagel's idea that consciousness means that it is something that it 'feels like' to be something. A bat, say. This, presumably, would result in capacities an artificial intelligence doesn't have; Mao suggests that an AI can't be creative the way a human can. But my views align with Hume's, that consciousness is nothing more than experience, and that there's nothing in principle that would prevent an AI from having experiences.

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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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