OLDaily

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

Turkey's translators are training the AI tools that will replace them
Kaya Genç, Rest of World, 2025/02/25

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I get the gist of this article, which is that the outcome for translators "may include being replaced by LLMs, diminished skills, and fewer career options for all but the elite scholars." But in contrast, I ask why translation should be reserved only for those individuals and corporations that can afford it? The promise of AI is that everybody will be able to understand other languages. That's good, isn't it? We will continue to need people who specialize in translation - maybe even more, now that everybody is using the service - but they will be well-educated high-paid professionals.

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Every UK national newspaper prints identical front page
cahal milmo, The i Paper, 2025/02/25

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All national newspapers in the U.K. ran the same 'Make It Fair' front page this week to protest proposed copyright legislation that could make it legal for AI to read news websites. I spend some time searching for the statement but the QR code was obscured and most of their content is behind paywalls. "This feels a lot like, creative gatekeeping?" says one commenter on Reddit. "I'm not a writer, but with AI I can be." In related news, UK musical artists ran a similar protest, releasing "a joint silent album, featuring recordings of empty studios and recording spaces." They had better be careful; when I ran a silent video on TikTok I was flagged for violating the copyright on John Cage's 4'33". 

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MORF: A Post-Mortem
Ryan S. Baker, Stephen Hutt, 2025/02/25

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This (10 page PDF) showed up in the Learning Engineering forum today and has the unusual distinction of beinga  post-mortem of a project that is being retired. There's a lot to like about the article and the project. It was called the MOoc Replication Framework (MORF) and was basically a way of providing MOOC data for analysis in a way that respected student privacy through the use of data enclaves: "secure, controlled environments where sensitive or confidential data can be accessed and analyzed by researchers." It wasn't really a success; the only studies to make use of it were those at the universities where the project was housed. It was technically difficult to operate and involved large amounts of data, so researchers found it easier to use more accessible MOOC data. This may have had an impact on the sort of studies they ran; "the cost of learning to work with MORF may simply have been hard to justify for external researchers who could simply investigate different research questions." I appreciate the honesty of this paper and wish we saw more like it.

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New Tools. Old Complaints. Why AI Won't Kill Education or Fix it
Vicki Davis, Cool Cat Teacher Blog, 2025/02/25

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I like this long post from Vicki Davis. "so much of what we teach in schools isn't the answers on a test. It answers questions like 'What is my purpose in life?' 'How do I make friends?' and 'How can I help my team be stronger.' Questions that aren't asked on a test but are essential to living a good life. These questions aren't answered between the ears but within the heart." The knowledge is pretty much irrelevant. Not because we don't need it, but there will always be knowledge, the knowledge always changes, and if we need to, we can always look it up. "These days, we need to build another kind of fire. A fire that sparks the joy of learning. The joy of the opportunities that await us sparked by some of the most powerful tools ever invented."

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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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