OLDaily

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

Using Large Language Models for Automated Grading of Student Writing about Science
David Wiley, Reviewing Research on AI in Education, 2025/01/07

---

Personally I think grading is more of a categorization problem than a language problem, and so I would think of a large language model (LLM) as a blunt instrument for this sort of task. The proof, I think is that it's necessary for the instructor to write a clear rubric to even make it possible for an LLM to grade papers with any degree of reliability. And dependence on a rubric, of course, rules out the possibility that a response might be unexpectedly good, going beyond what was required in some way not predicted by the instructor, but in a way that would be recognized by a categorization system but not a language model. Anyhow, the paper David Wiley introduces is here (33 page PDF).

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

What Has Happened to Our Grand Experiment, the Internet?
Tom Valovic, Common Dreams, 2025/01/07

---

I'm sympathetic with the point Tom Valovic makes, but the argument feels weak overall. The point, of course, is that we've lost what made the internet great, "the tremendous potential that this new communications breakthrough had for academia, science, culture, and many other fields of endeavor." But people were seeing it as a vehicle for freedom, not social control. And this is just wrongheaded: "The beginning of the 'free service' model augured a long slow downward slide in personal privacy... the temptation to use free services became the flypaper that would trap unsuspecting end users into a kind of lifelong dependency. But as the old adage goes: 'There is no free lunch.'" Hogwash. Services you pay for spy on you too, maybe even more so. And lots of stuff - including this newsletter - is free with no strings attached. It isn't 'free' that is killing the internet. It's something else entirely. Via Grant Potter.

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

A guide to AI prototyping for product managers
Colin Matthews, Lenny's Newsletter, 2025/01/07

---

There's nothing in this article that's wrong, so far as I can tell, but there's an important caveat. First, let's look at what AI prototyping does: "We just created a working prototype of a CRM in less than five minutes—something that would have previously taken weeks of an engineer's time. Unbelievable." OK, sure. But what's left unsaid is what it doesn't do: complex applications, applications that haven't been developed many times before, applications that run in non-standard environments. If you know exactly what you want and it's something that has been done many times before - a CRM, for example - the AI will do it in five minutes. If not, the AI will help a lot, but you're going to have to work with it, step by unexpected step, toward your vision.

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

Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power since 1500
Kate Crawford, Vladan Joler, 2025/01/07

---

Don't miss this incredible visualization of the evolution of technologies since 1500. It stopped me in my tracks for about 15 minutes first thing this morning, even before coffee. "The aim is to view the contemporary period in a longer trajectory of ideas, devices, infrastructures, and systems of power. It traces technological patterns of colonialism, militarization, automation, and enclosure since 1500 to show how these forces still subjugate and how they might be unwound." The image makes the case in a way that text never could. Via Luiza Jarovsky.

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