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

Presentation
On AI in Leadership and Project Management in Distance Education
Stephen Downes, Jan 28, 2025,

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What leadership approach provides maximum support for the exploration and appropriate implementation of AI in education? This is a talk I gave for the EDDE program at Athabasca University last night. Slides only at the moment; I hope to have audio and video soon.

[Slides] [Video]

Automattic and others back Openvibe, an app that's unifying the open social web | TechCrunch
Sarah Perez, TechCrunch, 2025/01/28

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Two things. "Openvibe doesn't just let people stay connected with friends across all these services in a combined timeline, it also allows cross-posting to multiple networks at once." And also, "Openvibe's fundraising signals that there is some appetite among investors for backing apps and services that are taking advantage of the new open social protocols." That's (partially) why it's important to have a free and open source app that runs on all platforms, not just (locked down) mobile phones.

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Stunning breakthroughs from China's DeepSeek AI alarm U.S. rivals
Scott Rosenberg, Axios, 2025/01/28

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The whole 'China versus America' angle doesn't really interest me, coming from what is (so far) a completely different country, but the news of Deepseek's arrival adds a twist to the already complex world of large lanmguage models. And here's the twist: "The kicker is that DeepSeek created and released its entirely open source project for about $6 million in training costs ('a joke of a budget,' in one expert's words). OpenAI is spending hundreds of millions of dollars." It ould be cool is we could have open source AI that costs so much less to develop, but it's very much early days here, and there might be another shor to drop. Some more links via Mark Oehlert: Anil Dash on DeepSeek, Don't use DeepSeek-v3!, Conor Grennan on DeekSeek, DeepSeek R1's bold bet.

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15 LLM Jailbreaks That Shook AI Safety
Nir Diamant, DiamantAI, 2025/01/28

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This is an interesting look at attacks on the integrity of large language models, no so much because it raises serious security concerns (it doesn't) but because it shows how creative attackers can be and how ineffictive simply layering rule-based barriers (which is what things like 'banned words' are) can be.

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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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