OLDaily

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

It's February, And Now You Understand Why Individualized Learning Hasn't Worked
Dan Meyer, Mathworlds, 2025/02/07

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"Some of the most popular individualized learning software has failed to demonstrate significant results with the majority of students in their efficacy studies," writes Dan Meyer. Why? "If any of those commentators have ever canceled their gym membership or abandoned their fitness plans, they should know better: it is people who help us do the difficult things we need to do." This isn't an argument based on the capacity of AI (though there are elements of it), it's more of an argument along the lines of, "why would we bother trying to impress an AI?" As Meyer writes, "Maybe one day students will be as interested in disclosing their thinking to artificial intelligence as they are to even the most curmudgeonly teacher. But today is not that day."

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AI Literacy Whitepaper
Centre for Finance, Technology and Entrepreneurship, 2025/02/07

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Literacy is more than just knowing a bunch of stuff, and according to this (version 0.1) white paper, "AI literacy is more than just knowing how to use AI-powered tools. It encompasses understanding how AI systems work, recognising their limitations, and ensuring they are used ethically and responsibly." What follows is a first draft of the concept reasonably well put together. It's a bit hard to get - this link points to LinkedIn, and there's also a version available at the CFTE website behind a spamwall. You can download it directly from my site here.

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The End of Programming as We Know It
Tim O'Reilly, O'Reilly Media, 2025/02/07

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"It is not the end of programming," writes Tim O'Reilly. "It is the end of programming as we know it today." It's not the first time. When I worked with Texas Instruments in 1980 we had desk-sized computers, called TIMAP, that were programmed by setting switches on the front console. Machine language. O'Reilly traces the increasing abstraction of programming languages, from machine-level instructions to BASIC to cloud computing and internet operating systems. Will it be different with AI? he asks. No. "AI will not replace programmers, but it will transform their jobs. Eventually much of what programmers do today may be as obsolete." As Chip Huyan says, "I don't think AI introduces a new kind of thinking. It reveals what actually requires thinking." Image: Computing History.

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CUS System Makes AI History For Distributing ChatGPT Access to Nearly 500,000 Students
Jose Enrico, Tech Times, 2025/02/07

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California State University is really leaning on the "making history" angle as the press release churnalism outlets this week have almost all incorporated that into their headline. In fact, it's not so historical, as this survey of similar initiatives from Reuters shows. Where I work, ChatGPT access has been in place for more than a year. But whatever, it's better than banning ChatGPT for students, which is the reflexive reaction I've seen across the edusphere.

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Abolish privacy
Elisha Lim, Mareike Lisker, Lukas Hess, Malte Engeler, Leah M. Friedman, Jessa Lingel, Muna-Udbi Ali, First Monday, 2025/02/07

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How often have you heard, "this must be confidential, so people can speak freely?" When I served on boards, my response would be, "this is just so you can lie in public." The case for privacy and confidentiality isn't so clear as it's made out to be (and for those of you who think we all share 'common ethical values', read this). "Privacy is an inherently exclusionary liberal entitlement inextricably linked to property, racial oppression, sexual control and class segregation," the authors write. "Privacy is anathema to social justice because it reinforces marginalization and skews protection towards property-holding insiders." Moreover, "there is no actual possibility of privacy, nor any real corporate incentive to privacy, except as an optic tactic to avoid accountability." 22 page PDF. Image: Reddit.

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Why AI Is A Philosophical Rupture
Tobias Rees, Nathan Gardels, NOEMA, 2025/02/07

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I've seen this point made a few times, and made it myself a couple of times, but it bears repeating: the rise of AI results in what might be called a new Copernican revolution, in which humanity's place at the centre of the world is lost. "The human-machine distinction provided modern humans with a scaffold for how to understand themselves and the world around them. The philosophical significance of AIs — of built, technical systems that are intelligent — is that they break this scaffold." Arguably, to my mind, the mechanism underlying intelligence is simple pattern recognition. If so, we're no different in principle than other pattern recognizers. "Does this mean that human brains and AI are the same thing? Of course not. Are birds, planes and drones all the same thing? No, but they all make use of the general laws of aerodynamics. And the same may be true for brains."

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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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