OLDaily

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

A personal social knowledge network (PSKN) facilitates learners’ wayfinding and its differences in behavior patterns between high and low performers in connectivist learning
Jinju Duan, Kui Xie, Qiuhua Zhao, International Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 2024/04/02

---

"As a basis of connectivist learning, wayfinding has been the focus of access paths of diverse resources," write the authors. But "most learners are exposed to wayfinding difficulties, such as information overload and technical difficulties." So "wayfinding support is necessary." This article (30 page PDF) explores "a case study to develop a personal social knowledge network (PSKN) and facilitate wayfinding in connectivist learning." There's a lot of detail here covering both the mathematics and mechanics of node distribution and wayfinding path detection, including "differences in wayfinding behavioral patterns between high- and low-performing learners." Most interesting to me is the finding that "creating nodes was an essential wayfinding feature in the PSKN." The best way to make connections is to contribute. "As the connection proceeds, the learner becomes like a teacher, and creating nodes becomes a critical wayfinding behavior in connectivist learning."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

AI-Assisted Grading: A Leap Forward or a Step Back?
Pascal Vallet, 2024/04/02

---

I'll share Pascal Vallet's new newsletter because it exists, but I'm not a fan of the whole idea of email-only newsletters with subscription plans and no RSS feeds. Anyhow, in this post, he shares the wisdom that "not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted," which is why (I guess?) AI-assisted grading is a bad idea. "Perhaps," he writes, "there is a dimension of grading that is inherently bound to the educator's engagement with student work—an engagement that offers insights into the students' understanding, strengths, and potential areas for growth... grading should be seen as an integral process that enhances the educator's comprehension of student needs, rather than just a means to an end."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

The Stanford Prison Experiment was massively influential. We just learned it was a fraud.
Brian Resnick, Vox, 2024/04/02

---

I'll just restate the critically important point: "In science, too often, the first demonstration of an idea becomes the lasting one — in both pop culture and academia. But this isn't how science is supposed to work at all!Science is a frustrating, iterative process. When we communicate it, we need to get beyond the idea that a single, stunning study ought to last the test of time. Scientists know this as well, but their institutions have often discouraged them from replicating old work, instead of the pursuit of new and exciting, attention-grabbing studies."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

View of Gesturing and Image Making: Growing Mathematics Understanding
Marc Husband, Lisa Lunney Borden, Evan Throop Robinson, in education, 2024/04/02

---

"Are you noticing any patterns here?" What would a gesture-based 'language' of mathematics look like? I still don't know, but this paper is an interesting exploration of the relation between gestures and learning math. "Teachers can select tasks that will elicit gesturing, notice how the gesturing signals the thinking, and respond to the dynamic nature of a process conveyed by the gestures to stay with students' own ideas as they guide their mathematical understandings. To stay with student ideas, means we can use students' own ways of thinking to support their learning rather than trying to channel their thinking into some predefined process."

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

Tech lets people play games with their thoughts
Nat Levy-UT Austin, Futurity, 2024/04/02

---

No, this isn't the Elon Musk grift. It's real work on brain–computer interface (BCI) control published in PNAS (15 page PDF). Specifically, the research shows "that a decoder trained on the data of a single expert is readily transferrable to inexperienced users via domain adaptation techniques allowing calibration-free BCI training." Technology like this has the potential to assist a wide range of people facing difficult physical challenges.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

Backdoor found in widely used Linux utility targets encrypted SSH connections
Dan Goodin, Ars Technica, 2024/04/02

---

This is an object lesson in why organizations that use open source code should devote resources to supporting and maintaining it. Because if you don't, the actors who fill the gap may well be malicious. That's what happened here when a 'back door' was planed into XZ Utils, a widely-used set of tools used to compress software archives. The resulting code created a vulnerability in key infrastructure, used to secure critical systems such as cloud-based tools. It was caught by an engineer working at Microsoft, though in retrospect the tracks of an unknown bad actor seeding the code were there fir all to see.

Web: [Direct Link] [This Post][Share]

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.

There are many ways to read OLDaily; pick whatever works best for you:

• Read in your web browser on this web page, updated weekdays
• Receive a daily or weekly email newsletter by subscribing here
• Subscribe to the RSS feed using your favourite feed reader
• Follow @OLDaily@mastodon.social on Mastodon or elsewhere in the fediverse
• Follow @OLDaily on Twitter
• Integrate the open API using the JSON feed