OLDaily

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

Generative Agent Simulations of 1,000 People
Joon Sung Park, et al, arXiv, 2024/12/04

---

What will become of the social sciences after this? The authors describe a system that generates simulations of survey responses by a group of about 1,000 people. It can "replicate participants' responses on the General Social Survey 85% as accurately as participants replicate their own answers two weeks later" and also, "reduces accuracy biases across racial and ideological groups compared to agents given demographic descriptions" (which, presumably, the humans don't do). The paper is a 65 page PDF, though only the first ten pages are actual paper. The key lies in emulating specific individuals in order to "evaluate our architecture by comparing how accurately each agent replicates the attitudes and behaviors of its source individual." Via Mark Oehlert.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

Overview and key findings of the 2024 Digital News Report
Nic Newman, Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, 2024/12/04

---

This is a report (168 pages) from mid-June, prior to the recent Bluesky surge. News media was facing "layoffs, closures, and other cuts due to a combination of rising costs, falling advertising revenues, and sharp declines in traffic from social media." But in the last few months, as Ed Zitron reports, "Bluesky sends real traffic. Will update this tomorrow with firm numbers but journalism is going to move here for sure. Twitter is a drop in the bucket. It's over, but we are so back, and so on and so forth." There's no guarantee that Bluesky will continue to connect people to people, but it's a far sight better than the current social media ecosystem that connects people to propaganda. Via Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

University lecturers' lived experiences of teaching critical thinking in Australian university: a hermeneutic phenomenological research
Musa Nicholas John Manning, Higher Education, 2024/12/04

---

I don't think you can use "Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology and Gadamer's hermeneutic circle" as critical thinking, which may be why "the first problem to consider is what about critical thinking makes it an unsolved mystery in Australian higher education." Though Musa Nicholas John Manning writes (17 page PDF), "there are no unified approaches or models of teaching critical thinking," there is a consensus, as Manning notes, that critical thinking is "self-regulatory judgment that gives reasoned consideration of evidence, contexts, conceptualizations, methods, and criteria, resulting in interpretation, analysis, evaluation, and inference." But in this article Manning uses "the hermeneutic approach to infer... from what the lecturers did not say, by searching for hidden clues (e.g. nonverbal cues and behaviours including gestures and tone of voice)."  I would respond that these are so culturally bound as to be useless as the basis for inference. But you can see how we drift, for example, by "specifically targeting the student's interests rather 'than solely being about Argumentation'." You can't just treat critical thinking as though it were some branch of the social sciences or psychology. Anyhow, I've written on this several times, including here and here.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

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.

There are many ways to read OLDaily; pick whatever works best for you:

• Read in your web browser on this web page, updated weekdays
• Receive a daily or weekly email newsletter by subscribing here
• Subscribe to the RSS feed using your favourite feed reader
• Follow @OLDaily@mastodon.social on Mastodon or elsewhere in the fediverse
• Follow @OLDaily on Twitter
• Integrate the open API using the JSON feed