OLDaily

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

Nifty Simple Web Archive Tool
Alan Levine, CogDogBlog, 2025/02/03

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"Right now, as I type, the world is witnessing the wholesale strip mine clearcutting of the web for the ego-flexing kicks of the lunatic in charge," writes Alan Levine. So a reliable archive is all the more important. Here we have  which collects anything people have clicked an 'archive this' bitton on. "By trying one of their searches," writes Levine, "I can find find every single Wired URL someone has clicked the button to archive, that anyone can navigate to the way Sir TBL intended, just click a link and read. No greedy gate agent. Just putting the domain in the searchbox, I have free access to over 1500 Wired articles." I wonder whether I can devise a way to subscribe to that, to get new articles as they appear. I checked my own site (naturally) and found only two items listed. Either I'm very unpopular or people haven't seen the need to archive my fully open website. Maybe someone should, though, just in case. Life is short.

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Reinforcement Learning Explained
Nir Diamant, DiamantAI, 2025/02/03

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This is something we tried to argue in the 2000s with connectivism, though the response was often, "there's no similarity between computer and human learning," or even, "computers can't learn, period." Here's where we are in 2025: "Reinforcement learning is at its core the art of learning through experience, trial and error, feedback, and gradual refinement. Whether it's an AI mastering a complex task or a child learning to ride a bike, the principles remain the same." This article explains the concept. And I want to underline here, this is a learning theory, and it's the sort of learning theory that makes the old stand-bys of behaviourism, cognitivism and constructivism seem quaint and uninformed. What's not in the article are the mathematical foundations, physical implementations, applications and deployment. But they're all there too.

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The End of Search, The Beginning of Research
Ethan Mollick, One Useful Thing, 2025/02/03

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Ethan Mollick explores ChatGPT's o3 model (those who are saying development in large language models has stalled simply aren't paying attention). It's a 'reasoning' engine, which (to make a long story short) means that it produces text and then reconsiders that text before simply putting it on a screen - it thinks before it speaks. "The quality of citations also marks a genuine advance here. These aren't the usual AI hallucinations or misquoted papers - they're legitimate, high-quality academic sources... It wove together difficult and contradictory concepts, found some novel connections I wouldn't expect, cited only high-quality sources, and was full of accurate quotations." But what happens when the quality of the response begins to outpace the reader's ability to comprehend it? Then we move from 'the end of research, the beginning of teaching'. Hang on tight!

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The Console Wars Are Over And Nobody Really Won
Zack Zwiezen, Kotaku, 2025/02/03

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As the article says, "Nintendo moved on, Xbox gave up, and Sony is left fighting nobody." What's funny is that Sony is still fighting as though there's a console war on, "holding on to exclusive games tightly and trying to win people over with bigger, more expensive consoles." Meanwhile, Xbox became a third-party game publisher and Nintendo has been outselling everyone by not engaging in the war. Me, I think the deciding factor was game streaming services, like Steam, which made consoles, to a large degree, moot.

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Is the First Generation of Open and Distance Education Out of Date?
Junhong Xiao, Inspired, Open University Malaysia, 2025/02/03

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"Technologies which are more cutting-edge and more expensive are not necessarily better suited for (open and distance) education," writes Junhong Xiao.  "As the study by David Lim (2024) and colleagues shows, 'students' lack of privileged access to frontier technologies is no barrier to learning success' because 'learning outcomes have causality beyond technological determinism.'" Some access, in whatever form, is better than no access. The people focused on 'omproving quality' often miss that.

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Find Academics on Mastodon
Mark Igra, Sciences Social, 2025/02/03

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This is a great and easy-to-use service to help people find, browse, and follow academics on Mastodon. "This app does not maintain a copy of the data and does not 'crawl' or 'scrape' Mastodon, it just loads the lists into your browser and requests information from Mastodon instances as you browse." That's also how CList works, and I'd love to integrate this into it. Via Alan Levine. Related: another list of academics on Mastodon.

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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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