OLDaily

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

forall x: Calgary. A Free and Open Introduction to Formal Logic
Richard Zach, Tim Button, P. D. Magnus, Aaron Thomas-Bolduc, Open Logic Project, 2025/03/26

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It's a bit of a weird title but this open textbook (438 page PDF) is a good introduction to formal logic (so far as I can determine by reading through the first few chapters and looking randomly at other sections). I'm passing it along because if there is a secret manual to academic success, this is it (and so, if you're working with some really promising young students, you should pass this on to them and whisper "this isn't for everyone"). More seriously, though there are some well-known limitations to formal logic, there is no discipline that does not rely on it, and facility with formal logic will make less stringent tasks - writing, for example - a lot easier to do well. Via Open Education Global, and hence, Alan Levine.

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Gabriele Scheler reflects on the interplay between language, thought and AI
Paul Middlebrooks, The Transmitter, Brain Inspired, 2025/03/26

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This is a wide-ranging podcast interview (read the transcript) that really first well with today's topics of discussion. Gabriele Scheler talks about the relation between language and thought and the shortcomings of AI in this regard. The flow is informal and there are insights scattered throughout. Like this, for example: "The idea was the neuron has its connections to other neurons, and there's calculations going on in a network. You could call it a horizontal network for calculating information. Then on the other hand, the neuron has, as I said, 15,000 or up to 70,000 different proteins. They interact with each other in an internal signal network. There is a lot of-- There is the metabolic network, of course, which overlaps with it." When AI uses complex neurons like humans do - I wonder what will be the result.

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Connected Belonging: A relational and identity-based approach to schools' role in promoting child wellbeing
Ceri Brown, Alison Douthwaite, Michael Donnelly, Marnee Shay, British Educational Research Journal, 2025/03/26

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Interesting article that finds a thread woven through several different studies on student wellbeing and community that leads to this: "Allen et al. (2021) identify four components to the notion of belonging: competencies, opportunities, motivations and perceptions. In line with this framework, our Connected Belonging approach includes these four key aspects, including the applied (competencies), resources (opportunities), psychological (motivation) and experiential (perceptions) in emphasising that while belonging might be felt individualistically (i.e., through perceptions and motivations), it is nonetheless experienced relationally (i.e., through opportunities and the resources generated), which can provide tangible skills and benefits for the individual (e.g., competencies)." 

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Video catches microglia in the act of synaptic pruning
RJ Mackenzie, The Transmitter: Neuroscience News and Perspectives, 2025/03/26

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This is really cool, but some background helps. There has been a longstanding discussion about how neural networks form: do we start with a densely connected brain and then prune connections that are not being used, or do we start with a loosely connected brain and grow new connections as we gain experience? There's a (very loose) alignment between cognitivists (such as Fodor and Chomsky) with the former, and connectionists (such as Hebb and Rosenblatt) with the latter. This article describes actual video recording the former: an immune cell called a microglia actually pruning a synapse between two neural cells. "A microglia cell expressing a green fluorescent protein clearly reaches out a ghostly green tentacle to a budding presynapse on a neuron and lifts it away, leaving the neighboring blue axon untouched." 

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‘How can I know what I think till I see what I say?’: How AI is changing education and writing
Nick Hillman, HEPI, 2025/03/26

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This is a review of John Warner's More Than Words: How to Think about Writing in the Age of AI. I haven't read the book because, well, books cost money, and I'm still working on Mark Carney's Value(s) (which is really good, by the way). Anyhow, Werner's thesis is that "ChatGPT cannot write" because "writing is thinking". I get the concept (which probably required less than 300 pages to explain). "Writing, Warner says, is a process in which 'the idea may change based on our attempts to capture it.'" This happens with me less often with writing (except for these 100 word tidbits I write in OLDaily) and more often with speaking (which is why I consider my talks my primary academic output). What chatGPT doesn't do when writing, that I and other humans do, is to interpret experience. That, though, may change in the future when chatGPT has more than just human text as input.

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For this unsung philosopher, metaphors make life an adventure
Sue Curry Jansen, Jeff Pooley, Psyche, 2025/03/26

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This is an overview of Susanne K Langer's contribution to our understanding of language. It's one with which I am largely in agreement. "Language is built up bit by bit, word by word, through slow, metaphoric accretion... Thus, to perceive, for our ancestors, was to conceive: to see one thing (the sensory onrush) in another (the perceptual shape given by the mind and primordial cultures). That is, our predecessors were already abstracting... By abstraction she means the process of recognising something in common, something shared, in more than one thing." 

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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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