OLDaily

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

Feature Article
Emergent Leaders in the Classroom
Stephen Downes, Half an Hour, 2024/01/03

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a colleague from Iran asked me for "insights on how teachers can effectively manage group pressure and address in-group/out-group dynamics in the context of group learning. Understanding that individuals who establish authority within a group can significantly influence the final goals, I am particularly interested in exploring effective strategies to navigate and mitigate this dynamic."

[Link] [Local copy]

Deconstructing the Normalization of Data Colonialism in Educational Technology
Lucas Kohnke, Dennis Foung, Education Sciences, 2024/01/03

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While I'm not sure I would classify this as 'colonialism' per se this article (14 page PDF) does identify the use in academia of a model first defined by John Locke in 1689: "Whatsoever then he removes out of the State that Nature hath provided, and left it in, he hath mixed his Labour with, and joyned to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his Property" (to be clear, the article does not reference Locke directly). The authors write, "Under colonialism, natural resources were considered 'free' to take and appropriate, which was supposed to bring about a new social order and a better world. Similarly, 'data colonialism' treats user data as a natural resource, justifying the process by introducing new social relations and ideologies." Does academia do this? Based on the results of this study, it seems clear that they do. The authors recommend a series of measures to reverse this practice. Image: Badawy et al.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Fedstellar: A Platform for Decentralized Federated Learning
Enrique Tomás Martínez Beltrán, 2024/01/03

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This is pretty interesting, a "platform that facilitates the training of federated learning models in a decentralized fashion across many physical and virtualized devices." Imagine an artificial intelligence engine distributed across dozens or even hundreds of different computer systems, and you have an idea of Fedstellar. Here's a paper (15 page PDF) describing the system. Here's the code on GitHub. Here's a system diagram.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

A New Kind of AI Copy Can Fully Replicate Famous People. The Law Is Powerless.
Mohar Chatterjee, Politico, 2024/01/03

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"Over two months, by feeding every word Seligman had ever written into cutting-edge AI software, he and his team had built an eerily accurate version of Seligman himself — a talking chatbot whose answers drew deeply from Seligman's ideas, whose prose sounded like a folksier version of Seligman's own speech, and whose wisdom anyone could access." I have to admit, this is my backup plan for immortality in the event of my demise (it would be nice to also carry my consciousness through to the system as well, but alas, that is as yet a bridge too far). Also, I guess it's not unreasonable to predict the rise of a 'no artificial people' lobbying effort. Already, we have this: "Even Wu — a seasoned scholar of America's complicated tech economy — held a straightforward view on the unsanctioned use of AI to impersonate humans. 'My instinct is strong and immediate on it,' Wu said. 'I think it's unethical and I think it is something close to body snatching.'" Would the sanctioned use of AI be OK? I'm sure no small number of people will answer, "no".

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Whose ethics? Whose AI?
Helen Beetham, imperfect offerings, 2024/01/03

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Helen Beetham answers four questions following her recent talk on learning, ethics and AI. It's all pretty reasonable. Some notable bits: a quote: "openness alone will not democratize AI. However, it is clear to us that any alternative to current Big Tech-driven AI must be, among other things, open." And, "We are lying to students if we tell them we can reliably detect the use of AI, and we are asking them to lie to us if we tell them not to use it." Also: "We use what students produce as signs and proxies for learning, and if they stop being reliable signs, we probably need to find different ones. That's on us." The most noteworthy bit, though, is the chart showing the almost complete withdrawal of the academic sector from the building of AI systems.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Cloudron
Boris Mann, Boris Mann's Homepage, 2024/01/03

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If you host your own website somewhere, you can either manage your applications individually, or you can use a tool like Cloudron to manage them for you. For many reasons it's a lot easier to use Cloudron. Like Boris Mann, I have been working with this technology recently, and appreciate his summary, and especially his recommendations about costs and services.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

The Stratification of Universities Revisited: Status, Followers, and the Shape of National Hierarchies
Roger Pizarro Milian, David Zarifa, Canadian Journal of Higher Education, 2024/01/03

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By the end of this paper (17 page PDF) it seems that the authors lament the impossibility of a 'Harvard of the North' though I am of a mind that we don't want one and don't need one. In any case, the authors examine the stratification of universities through the light of social media following (specifically: Twitter) instead of the traditional metrics of money and power, identifying Gini coefficients for Canadian university social media and their U.S. counterparts. A bit to their surprise, it seems, the social media assessment confirms, rather than refutes, the oft-noted relative equality of Canadian universities. Again, this is a good thing, not a bad thing.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

Social Media Use and Digital Competence as Predictors of Students' Familiarity with MOOCs
Ana Stojanov, Ben Kei Daniel, Nikolina Kenig, Nadine Hoskins, International Journal of E-Learning & Distance Education, 2024/01/03

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"MOOCs represent a digital learning environment that requires a degree of digital competence to navigate and can be promoted or discovered via social media," write the authors. So it makes sense to ask whether activities that would develop that competence - participation in social media, for example - would have an impact on a student's participation in a MOOC. This study (49 page PDF) is (unfortunately) limited to two cases, measuring "the level of MOOC awareness among students as a function of digital competence and social media use in a research-intensive public university in the Southern Hemisphere and a university in North Macedonia." But it's not straightforward, considering "the counter-intuitive finding that technical literacy negatively predicts social media use." But overall, "lower digital competence and limited engagement with social media lead to reduced awareness of MOOCs... But awareness does not necessarily convert to engagement." But most of all, we shouldn't be thinking of MOOC use the way we would a typical university class. "MOOCs seem to be treated more casually, akin to watching a documentary rather than committing to a formal educational track... the high number of participants who merely lurk in these courses reported elsewhere suggests that MOOCs are approached in a more laid-back manner, rather than as an externally imposed requirement which is seen as a means to an end."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post]

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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