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OLDaily

by Stephen Downes
Apr 25, 2024

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

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Does AI Know What an Apple Is? She Aims to Find Out.
John Pavlus, Quanta Magazine, 2024/04/25

Ellie Pavlick tells us "we decided that meaning involves concepts in some way... If you use the word 'apple' to mean apple, you need the concept of an apple. That has to be a thing, whether or not you use the word to refer to it." And my opinion is, this is a category error. So it was interesting to see them actually find evidence of such a concept - "we found a small place in the model where it basically boils that connection down into one little vector... It's like this systematic 'retrieve-capital-city' vector." Is that what it means to, say, 'know' what an apple is? If so, though, then the knowledge and the thing knowing are one and the same thing - there's no 'concept' over and above the 'conceiver'.

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Using X.509 Certs for DID Provenance
Phil Windley
, Technometria, 2024/04/25

The first thing I did as I started to read this item is to look up X.509 Certificates on Wikipedia, which made me gulp a little. It's a bit daunting to grasp from scratch. The assertion in this post is that "the abundance of X.509 certificate authorities who already perform identity proofing for businesses provides a rich resource that can be leveraged to boot the verifiable data ecosystem." There are still questions to ask, for example, can we trust these authorities, are they accountable, are the costs reasonable, are they available, and of course, are they technically feasible for the wider population? That said, the idea is new to me, and represents another step in the thinking toward distributed identity (DID).

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Harvard Library is Launching Harvard Open Journals Program
Harvard Library, 2024/04/25

According to this statement from Harvard, "Harvard Library will offer new sustainable and equitable open access publishing models to advance open access scholarly communication." That's a good thing, and I support it, though I will remind people that that the Public Knowledge Project (PKP) has been doing this for years. Decades, even. My worry, of course, is that years from now people will talk about this as the 'start' of the open journals movement, as is wont to happen when a top tier institution adopts a practice like this (which is why we read, even in this article, things like, "I hope that many research-heavy institutions adopt our approach. The first Harvard Open Access policy launched in 2008 has been adopted nationally and internationally, and it would be great to see similar reach."

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Wanted outcome
Matthias Melcher, x28's New Blog, 2024/04/25

Matthias Melcher considers the question I asked yesterday: "what do we want the outcome of an education to be, comparing a student, an intellectual, a billionaire, (or) small-town inhabitants." Of course, none of these is ideal - but each of these represents in some way the ideals our education system seems to aspire to. But more, these four points are so different it's hard to imagine basing a single system on them at all. P.S. I created the image for this using chatGPT 4 - it struck me how similar it was to working with a human designer (eg., I asked for four people, the first version had five people, etc).

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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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