OLDaily

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

Labour in the middle layer
Helen Beetham, imperfect offerings, 2023/07/21

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"It's becoming clear," writes Helen Beetham, "just how much human work maintains the illusion of intelligence," and she provides a number of examples where this is the case. The article is worth reading just for these examples from Bloomberg and Fortune on human labeling, TechCrunch on Mechanical Turk workers outsourcing tasks, and Josh Dzeiza's investigation. "Automation is not an inevitable outcome," she writes. "It is a way of restructuring and disciplining future labour." Well - true and false. Both statements are literally true. But the restructuring of labour in this way does lead to (almost inevitable) automation. The labour involved is more like construction work that service work - the labour creates an artifact that endures after the labour is complete. And gradually, more and more of this construction work will be automated as well.

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The skewed geography of AI
Derek Robertson, Mohar Chatterjee, Politico, 2023/07/21

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This article cites a new Brooking Institution report that argues "Federal leadership will be essential to push against excessive AI sector concentration." Fair enough, but the recommendations offered are as old as the hills, unfortunately: "Brookings argues for more federal cash to be appropriated for those universities and nonprofit, NGO-style consortiums. They point approvingly to efforts like the Alabama Artificial Intelligence Center of Excellence." Sorry, no. I've watched such initiatives flounder for decades. To distribute the benefits of technology (or any industry, really) the only effective strategy is twofold: first, enable workers to be a part of the industry from anywhere (or in other words, support remote working); and second, make these places into places people want to live (which means supporting an open, diverse, engaging and supportive community). If you can't do these two things, it won't matter how much money you pour into a region.

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Openness in Education as a Praxis: From Individual Testimonials to Collective Voices
Aras Bozkurt, Open Praxis, 2023/07/21

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This article has 54 authors (I counted) each of whom offers a unique perspective on opennes in education in contribiutions ranging from a few words to a few paragraphs. I would be hard-pressed to disagree with any of these perspectives, and there does appear to be an understanding among them that openness should be understood in all its flavours and complexities. Still, with all due respect to Jane Austin, it is not true that "human beings naturally inhabit an open ecosystem, engaging in complex, multifaceted interactions with their environment." If there is any feature persistent in our ecosystems, both social and natural, it is the existence of barriers of all kinds, which openess, both as an idea and a movement, helps us overcome, to the benefit of all. And that it seems to me is the true message of this article. Image: Arnold and Mundy.

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How to Use AI to Do Stuff: An Opinionated Guide
Ethan Mollick, One Useful Thing, 2023/07/21

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Ethan Mollick's opinions shower a lot of love on Bing, more than I would, but this guide is nonetheless useful because it identifies specific tasks you can do with AI - create an image, write some text, analyze a document - and describes the tools that can be used to do them. The image of the desktop dashboard is a winner, though it's not possible to make out the text, even if you enlarge it (I tried). Via Mike Taylor.

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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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