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

HyperEssays. : languagehat.com
Geoffrey Pullman, Languagehat, 2024/12/27

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I read the Essays of Michel de Montaigne in 1989 and was moved and influenced by both the form and the content. So I celebrate the current project,  Sebastian Biot's HyperEssays, "a project to create a modern and accessible online edition of the Essays of Michel de Montaigne." It's worth noting that the term 'essay' originates from the French 'essai', which means an attempt or a trial. Putting one's beliefs on trial was the whole point of the Essays, an idea that later became the archetypical Cartesian scepticism.

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Kevin O’Leary Is Playing Alberta for a $70 Billion Fool
Nick Heer, Pixel Envy, 2024/12/27

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The news is this: "Celebrity investor Kevin O'Leary says he is planning to bankroll and build what he says will be the world's largest artificial intelligence data centre. The proposal — named Wonder Valley — is slated to be built in the District of Greenview, near Grande Prairie, Alta." The idea of building a data centre in a cold climate is a good one. But Grande Prairie isn't as cold as you might think - I used to live there. You'd want to build it about 2,000 kilometers north to take advantage of the climate. And $70 billion seems like a lot. And I would not be inclined to trust Kevin O'Leary to build it.

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Internet’s Effects on Children and Adults: Re-Wired Brain?
Larry Cuban, Larry Cuban on School Reform and Classroom Practice, 2024/12/27

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So we've seen this criticism made over and over: the idea that computer use destroys concentration. "Carr noticed changes in himself. "I'm not thinking the way I used to think [especially when] reading... I'd spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose... Now my concentration starts to drift after a page or two." The problem is always assumed to be in the person, but maybe it's in the material. After all, the same person who "can't concentrate" will also spend twelve hours glued to a computer game. Once you've seen the alternative, you begin to realize how bad long stretches of unbroken text are as an interface. Students aren't more distracted; they're more discerning.

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OpenAI's ChatGPT Edu targets universities
Laura Ascione, eCampus News, 2024/12/27

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This is more branding than anything else, but here it is: " OpenAI recently announced ChatGPT Edu, a new version of ChatGPT designed for universities and intended to help them 'responsibly deploy AI to students, faculty, researchers, and campus operations.'"

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Boids
Cornell University, 2024/12/27

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This is a pretty cool exercise, though it's designed for the PIC32 microcontroller, which most of us don't have access to. It does demonstrate emergent flock behaviour pretty well though. "Just like in nature, each boid does not have global knowledge of every other boid in the flock. Instead, each can only see boids that are within its visual range and that are within its smaller protected range. These are tunable parameters. A boid will move away from other boids that are within its protected range (birds don't want to fly into each other), it will attempt to match the average velocity of boids within its visible range, and it will tend toward the center of mass of boids in its visible range." 

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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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