OLDaily

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

First Official EU Ethical Guidelines for Blockchain Systems
Signe Agerskov, Dataetisk Tænkehandletank, 2024/11/29

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We haven't heard a lot on the blockchain front lately but it's still out there (and if you dig deeply enough you see it showing up everywhere). Hence the utility of this new set of ethical guidelines for blockchain systems (53 page PDF). There are five major dimensions: fairness, privacy, security, accountability and social responsibility. There are some good bits here, for example, "blockchain systems' governance power should be distributed to minimize the risk of unintentional concentration of decision power." Also, "designers should consider how tokens incentivise behaviour before any assets get tokenised." A lot of thought has gone into this document and it seems to me to be one of the better bits of writing on ethics and technology.

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Epoch AI Unveils FrontierMath: A New Frontier in Testing AI's Mathematical Reasoning Capabilities
Vinod Goje, InfoQ, 2024/11/29

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According to this article, "60 mathematicians from leading institutions worldwide (have) introduced FrontierMath, a new benchmark designed to evaluate AI systems' capabilities in advanced mathematical reasoning." Basically it's a set of mathematical problems drawing from such bodies of knowledge as number theory, probability and geometry to be posed to AI systems to test their mathematical skills. It's a tough test; current large language models score in the 2% range (not a typo: that's two percent). What I wonder is how well humans would perform on the same test. Now obviously, mathematicians who have had a lot of experience and practice would do well. Me? Well I would have to brush up. A lot.

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The Manifesto for Teaching and Learning in a Time of Generative AI: A Critical Collective Stance to Better Navigate the Future
Aras Bozkurt, et al., Open Praxis, 2024/11/29

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This paper has 47 authors, give or take, and is a bit of a round manifesto stuffed into the format of a square research paper, but despite that awkward fit it offers a fairly cogent summary of the potential benefits and risks of AI in education. Where it is substantially weaker, to my mind, is in the actual 'manifesto' part of the paper (titled "Conclusions and Implications: A Call to Action and Inquiry"). It contains the usual platitudes ("GenAI is not a silver bullet" and "GenAI reuses knowledge rather than creating new knowledge") and a restatement of some of the risks. It hints of "a shift not only in our attitude toward GenAI but also in the way we discuss it" but doesn't really get at what that shift should be.

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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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