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Summary execution
Martin Weller, The Ed Techie, 2024/12/12

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"Beyond the whole 'summary fetishisation' there is a more worrying trend," writes Martin Weller. "That is when you can only get access to the AI summary. Tom Scocca reports on how The Washington Post has (or is experimenting with) removing its archives, and instead giving access to AI trained on its archive. So much more efficient, right?" I don't think I can access the Washington Post archive anyways - I just don't have enough money for that - so this particular example doesn't worry me. Nor does losing access to carefully rewritten press releases published in much of the commercial press. But I do want access to original research, not for things like Weller's stellar wit, but for access to the actual facts and data (assuming they exist) being used to draw inferences.

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View of Virtual Reality in Elementary Education: A Scientometric Review | Journal of Learning for Development
Ika Maryani, Amir Karimi, Kourosh Fathi, Journal of Learning for Development, 2024/12/12

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I don't have a lot to say about this article, which reviews publications on the use of virtual reality in education since 2012. There's one interesting trend: "developed countries contribute a large number of publications and citations, mainly research and development themes... Developing countries contribute publications in the context of technology applications." I suppose that makes sense. I guess the main thing, though, is that even though everyone is talking about something else, interest in VR remains high.

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Roll Your Own Mastodon Starter Kits
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2024/12/12

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I've tested this myself and can confirm that the 'starter pack' method for Mastodon described here does indeed work. If you're on Mastodon and saw me follow you a few days ago, that was as a result of Alan Levine's EDTech list. I've seen a post from Mastodon saying lists will get a lot easier to manage shortly, so this is a way to get a bit of a head start on that.

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In Praise of Print: Why Reading Remains Essential in an Era of Epistemological Collapse
Ed Simon, Literary Hub, 2024/12/12

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Some people may appreciate this defense of traditional reading in print books, including especially science fiction. As someone who read thousands of science fiction books before the digital age arrived in force, I can attest to their value - but can I say that without reading print novels I wouldn't have arrived at 'interiority'? "I read novels to indulge in a concentrated and directed inner activity that parallels - and thereby tunes up, accentuates - my own inner life," writes Ed Simon. Novels do work - but, I think, so do the rich content experiences I have in a digital world. And I am very wary of denying that others have the sort of inner life I do, as it seems to me to be a way of dehumanizing them.

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Uniplay Unveils the World’s First Game-Based, AI-Powered LMS
CHECK.point eLearning, 2024/12/12

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According to this article, "Uniplay's AI engine analyzes existing training content and matches it with game templates like quizzes, challenges, or timed scenarios. In the backend, AI then customizes each game for users based on data, learning goals, and past interactions." It doesn't really sound like any of the games I play; I think there should be a requirement that game-based LMSs be designed by actual game designers, or at least, gamers. Here's the original PR.

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I just saw the future of the web - Google's new Deep Research tool unleashes swarms of AI agents to do in-depth research for you
Ryan Morrison, Tom's Guide, 2024/12/12

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Here's the gist: "Google Gemini is getting an incredible new feature that will allow it to create mini clones of itself and send them off around the web to find information for you based on a prompt. It can then come back and create a complex, detailed report with links to the information it found." We're just a hop, skip and a jump from having it draft the literature review, then design an experiment for 45 midwest students, recruit them, run the survey, and send the results for publication. Se also: the Verge.

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Inside Netflix’s Distributed Counter: Scalable, Accurate, and Real-Time Counting at Global Scale
Eran Stiller, InfoQ, 2024/12/12

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This is a really interesting engineering challenge: how do you count when the people doing the counting are scattered around the world? For Netflix, it's a practical problem: each time someone views a Netflix video, Netflix wants to increment the 'views' counter by one. But how do you do that without the many flaws that might make the actual count inaccurate? This article describes their recently published "deep dive into their Distributed Counter Abstraction." Idempotency - the idea that the same REST request should return the same result - plays a key role. It allows remote sites to retry failed requests, for example, without double counting. This may seem to some like a pretty trivial problem, but as we enter the era of distributed computing, answering questions like this will be crucial.

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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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