OLDaily

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

In defense of a minimum referee ratio
Ingrid Robeyns, Crooked Timber, 2024/12/05

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The reviewer shortage isn't, as Ingrid Robeyns claims, "a collective action problem." I have stopped refereeing papers entirely (though the requests keep pouring in). It's not just that it's unpaid labour for (often) commercial entities. It's that I think the pre-publication peer review system is broken and needs to be replaced with a system for open and post-publication peer review. No more 'mystery reviewer #2'. No more secret requirements that 'the literature' (ie., other papers in the same journal) be cited. No more inner cicles of people positively reviewing each others' stuff. And also, by making reviewing open and post-publication, we have a strong case for open access publishing, of for no other reason we have eliminated much of the expense of publishing a journal. Image: UAB Libraries.

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Dow Jones negotiates AI usage agreements with nearly 4,000 news publishers
Andrew Deck, Nieman Lab, 2024/12/05

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When Dow Jones sued Perplexity for failing to properly license its content, Perplexity replied, "[Dow Jones] prefers to live in a world where publicly reported facts are owned by corporations, and no one can do anything with those publicly reported facts without paying a toll." Now let's suppose that what Perplexity said is true, that is, that the content under question really consists of "publicly reported facts". What does that say now that Dow Jones has its own AI engine, Factiva, and has negotiated licenses with news publishers? To me, it says precisely that Dow Jones thinks that it now owns exclusive rights (or, at least, rights) to publicly reported facts. But that's now how it's supposed to work, right? Nobody owns (say) the fact that there was an earthquake off California today, no matter how someone (or some thing) learned of that fact. Can you imagine a university having to license the facts it teaches in its classes?

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A Blueprint for the Brain's Circadian Clock
Meet Zandawala, IDW, 2024/12/05

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This article summarizes a much longer paper in Nature (20 page PDF) on the circadian clock of the fruit fly. It comprises a connectome of some 240 neurons in the fruit fly brain (compared to some 20,000 neurons in vertebrates), accepting input from photoreceptors and sending output signals from a variety of locations to other fruit fly systems. The authors draw an explicit parallel between the fruit fly system and that found in vertebrates, though they note there are some significant differences as well. The connectome isn't located in one particular place in the brain, but is distributed across a wide range of regions. Utterly fascinating.

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Threads takes an important baby step toward true fediverse integration
Wes Davis, The Verge, 2024/12/05

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"You can now follow fediverse accounts on Threads, but the accounts aren't searchable and their posts won't show in feeds." This might not have happened at all were it not for the recent Bluesky surge. 

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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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