OLDaily

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

2023-2026 Data Strategy for the Federal Public Service
2023/04/21

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This is as generic as you might expect from a government strategy document, but from where I sit the transition to a data-driven workflow from a document-driven workflow would be transformative across all departments. "In the future, people and organizations receive government services when and how they want them. Data makes this future possible because it is stewarded and used by the government for the public good, such that effective, equitable, ethical, and inclusive services, programs and policy are delivered."

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Ten of My Favorite Papers on the Science of Learning and Thinking
Scott H. Young, Scott H Young, 2023/04/21

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Taken collectively, these ten papers reflect the core can of the cognitivist / instructivist account of learning science. To me, they're little better than phrenology, based on a paradigm where made-up entities and effects are cobbled together to create metaphor-based accounts that serve political and ideological ends better than they do any serious study of learning, inference and discovery. But hey, some people swear by them.

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Can ActivityPub save the internet?
David Pierce, The Verge, 2023/04/21

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This is a good article and covers a lot about Mastodon and the fediverse we've seen here in the last few months, but it's important to understand that as a former Wall Street  Journal writer the author is coming from a 'money usually wins' background. "The bigger question looming is more existential," he writes. "Can ActivityPub grow without getting lost? There's a familiar pattern with protocols like this, known as "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish." Step one: start an app on an open protocol, grow quickly because it's easy to adopt. Step two: add new, platform-specific features, usually while complaining that the open protocol isn't powerful enough to keep up. Step three: bail on the open protocol altogether, saying it simply didn't serve your users' needs anymore. Microsoft did it with the early internet; Google Talk did it to the open XMPP messaging standard." At a certain point, I think, society needs to learn that a great concentration of wealth and power is the problem, not the solution, to whatever ails us.

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From Beyonce to the Pope, Twitter begins removing blue checks from users who don't pay
Barbara Ortutay, CP24, 2023/04/21

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This will be all over the news, so I need not comment more than to say I I have frozen my Twitter account and will no longer be posting there. Notices here and here. I was worried about losing readers, but have realized that they won't be seeing my posts anyways; any content I'm posting is going to be drowned out in the sea of spam and 'promoted posts' the algorithm delivers. Just like on Facebook, which I also left years ago for the same reason. See also: Twitter now requires all advertisers to have a verified checkmark. See also: My twitter bots and apps have been defecated, by Alan Levine.

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Choose Your Weapon: Survival Strategies for Depressed AI Academics
Julian Togelius, Georgios N. Yannakakis, arXiv, 2023/04/21

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This is a light-hearted look at a serious problem (see especially footnote [1]). What do academics working in artificial intellignce when corporate research throws millions of dollars into large scale infrastructure capable of training AIs with billions of data points? There's nothing a university can do to compete directly. The authors look at a list of alternatives, some serious, others less so, that academics can do to adapt. Personally, I think the only way smaller players can remain relevant is to do the one thing the authors don't suggest: decentralize. Work openly with others. It seems to be axiomatic that AI requires large centralized data centres running proprietary algorithms and data sets, but I don't see why that would be the case. And when the kind of supercomputing power that costs millions today is in the hands of the average person tomorrow, we're going to need to know how to interoperate.

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Going to court without a lawyer? DIY law is on the rise
Yvette Brend, CBC, 2023/04/21

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True, this is a story about the structural bias in favour of wealth in the legal system ("Divorce is not for the poor or even for the middle class") but it is also a story about education. Specifically: " In order to represent herself, Jinha ended up missing work in order to prepare chamber applications and evidence, and taught herself about the legal process by studying public legal education blogs and begging for help from experts like family law arbitrator and blogger John-Paul Boyd. After the trial, she even considered going to law school, and still may pursue paralegal training." What are we as educators doing to make it easier for average people to learn and master difficult things like law?

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Please Stop Drawing Neural Networks Wrong | by Aaron Master | Mar, 2023 | Towards Data Science
Aaron Master, Towards Data Science, 2023/04/21

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This article provides two valuable services to the reader: first, it offers a method to replace the many bad network diagrams that are out there with good ones, and second, it describes each of the components of those diagrams - and therefore or neural networks - clearly and in detail. Things like weights, bias and activation functions are key to describing different types of network, and these new diagrams make all of these clear (and even describe the matrices on which the mathematical operations actually occur).

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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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