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

Strengthening Democracy Through Education for Democracy: Policy Recommendations from the Democrat Project
Democrat | Education for Democracy, 2024/11/25

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This is a "summary of policy recommendations based on the Democrat project's research and findings, which can help guide education systems and policymakers in implementing effective democratic education." This a European project that has been conducting living labs in six countries across the EU. The work is based on the following conceptual framework and study. Note that I've been providing technical support for this project, including constructing their Agora. You can also view a video where I describe the Agora and its affordances.

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against the dark forest
Erin Kissane, wreckage/salvage, 2024/11/25

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Long and full of vivid imagery, this article is full, like a dense forces, around a core of a message I'll unveil here: "The public social internet is worth designing and governing in a way that demonstrates less than total amnesia about the history of human civilizations and the ways we've learned to be together without killing each other. For people with the ability and willingness to work on network problems, the real choice isn't between staying on the wasteland surfaces of the internet and going underground, but between making safer and better places for human sociability and not doing that." This presupposes, of course, that we've learned to be together without killing each other, though the evidence is equivocal on that. Still a fun read, though.

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Social media users probably won’t read beyond this headline, researchers say
Ashley WennersHerron, Penn State, 2024/11/25

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To be clear, I did read beyond the headline. But really, the headline says most of what you need to know. The study is focused on Facebook, which may be an outlier, but who knows? "The researchers at Penn State found that around 75% of the shares were made without the posters clicking the link first. Of these, political content from both ends of the spectrum was shared without clicking more often than politically neutral content." We're shicked! Shocked! "It was a big surprise to find out that more than 75% of the time, the links shared on Facebook were shared without the user clicking through first," said corresponding author S. Shyam Sundar. Here's the study.

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The Globe Puffs Up Another Dubious “Science of Reading” Program
Maurice Cunningham, MassPoliticsProfs, 2024/11/25

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I normally stay away from education policy discussions, but I want to highlight once again citicisms of the 'science of reading' (SOR) program. This article focuses on Last week in a Boston Globe article introducing it as a new  'superpower' a 'research backed practice' endorsed by 'experts'. "Relax," writes Maurice Cunningham. "It's just the Globe promoting a for-profit corporation named Ignite Reading which is based in the K-12 privatization industry." As Cunningham writes, "peer reviewed research finds SOR dubious, but it is a money maker." There's a lot of dark money supporting school privatization, writes Cunningham, and SOR is part of it.

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Taking Exams in Blue Books? They're Back to Help Curb AI Use and Rampant Cheating
Marlena Jackson-Retondo, Mind/Shift, 2024/11/25

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Readers will probably to reject the idea of hand-written exams, and I do. But I want to focus more on what counts as 'the right answer' in these sorts of exams. Marlena Jackson-Retondo writes, "Students who weren't prepared for the exam also struggled to apply reason to their answers - an important skill to master for future policy makers," and suggested these struggles were masked by the use of computers. Masked? Or ameliorated? It made me wonder, though: does academic writing really depend on reason? Some. But my breakthrough moment while studying for a set of third year exams was the discovery that almost everything I was taught consisted of lists - nested lists, to be more precise. Academics - and especially educators - love lists. Students "focused solely on the content of the questions and applying their own knowledge and reason" are really just more likely to land on lists as a tactic: they're easier to remember, and they're easier to write out (even if disguised as prose, which is what I did).

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How decentralized is Bluesky really?
Christine Lemmer-Webber, Dustycloud Brainstorms, 2024/11/25

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Long detailed description of whether Bluesky is decentralized (it isn't) and the challenge it poses in the future. One significant area of concern revolves around identifiers. "Bluesky controls users' keys, and therefore even if users 'move away' they must trust Bluesky to perform this move on their behalf. And even if Bluesky delegates authority to that user to control their identity information in the future, there is still a problem in that Bluesky will always have control over that user's key, and thus their identity future." This problem with Bluesky is an opportunity for the fediverse, which should try to get ahead of the problem and embrace fully decentralized IDs. There's a good section near the end of this post with more specific advice for the fediverse.

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Chatbot Arena
UC Berkeley, 2024/11/25

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This is pretty cool. "Chatbot Arena (lmarena.ai) is an open-source platform for evaluating AI through human preference, developed by researchers at UC Berkeley SkyLab and LMSYS. With over 1,000,000 user votes, the platform ranks best LLM and AI chatbots using the Bradley-Terry model to generate live leaderboards. For technical details, check out our paper." Note that this is just a research trial and the service could disappear at any time. Via AI Tidbits. 

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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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