OLDaily

Welcome to Online Learning Daily, your best source for news and commentary about learning technology, new media, and related topics. 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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An AI toolkit for libraries
Michael Upshall, UKSG Insights, 2022/11/02

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"There is a need for a set of skills for evaluating new tools and measuring existing ones," writes Michael Upshall. These "should enable anyone commissioning or managing AI utilities to understand what questions to ask, what parameters to measure and possible pitfalls to avoid when introducing a new utility." Maybe. But it's not clear to me that "the skills required are not technical." Consider an AI that recommends learning strategies to instructors. How is this to be evaluated by the non-technically inclined? Some examples are presented, such as a spell-checker and a metadata generation tool. These may feel like they could be used by non-technical people, but that's only because we've already internalized the skills of spelling and categorization. And could a non-technical person detect bias in a training set? Or that the optimal algorithm is in use? Related: Marta Samokishyn, the role of algorithmic literacy.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

6 Causes of Unfinished Learning
edCircuit, 2022/11/02

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According to this article, "Unfinished Learning refers to any specific or general loss of knowledge and skills or to reversals in academic progress, most commonly due to extended gaps or discontinuities in a student's education." The unnamed author presents a listicle with six causes, but surprisingly doesn't mention failure, which seems to me to be a glaring omission. When I see something like this I always ask myself what the author's agenda is, because it doesn't seem reasonable to suppose this and other causes were left out by accident.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

"Get Ready to Relearn How to Use the Internet" + several other items re: AI - Learning Ecosystems
Daniel S. Christian, Learning Ecosystems, 2022/11/02

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"Everyone knows that an AI revolution is coming,"writes Tyler Cowen in a paywalled Bloomberg link, "but no one seems to realize how profoundly it will change their day-to-day life.... This view is likely to be proven wrong - and soon, as AI is about to revolutionize our entire information architecture. You will have to learn how to use the internet all over again." There are a few more items in this post, all on the theme of how AI is rapidly becoming more capable. "Large language models are not yet as good at responding to my prompts as the readers of my blog. But their capacity is improving fast and the prices are dropping."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Lessons from Treadmills and Owls: The Most Important Feature in Educational Technology Products
David Wiley, improving learning, 2022/11/02

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Davis Wiley takes four paragraph to get to the point of his article: "The most important feature in educational technology products is the nudge – the feature that persuades you to actually use the features that will improve learning." So after talking about some features in edtech aren't used, like features on a treadmill, he offers the example of how Duolingo uses the nudge to lead people through language learning.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]