OLDaily

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

Exploring the future of learning and the relationship between human intelligence and AI. An interview with Professor Rose Luckin
Rose Luckin, Jürgen Rudolph, Martin Grünert, Shannon Tan, 2024/04/03

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It's easy to sometimes forget that there is a person behind the text I'm reading on education and technology. But so much of what we do is just our day-to-day efforts trying to have a life and a career. What I really value about this article (18 page PDF) is that it takes the time and care to present Rose Luckin as a whole person. In this interview I like how detailed she is, I like how open she is, I like how thoughtful she is. Her approach is more institutional than my own, I think (perhaps reflecting a background in banking and computer science) and these days probably more policy-oriented. No matter. The interview as a whole was a pleasure to read, and I wish we had more like this about the very interesting personalities in our field.

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Running OCR against PDFs and images directly in your browser
Simon Willison, 2024/04/03

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I tested this and it does work, though with the caveats expressed by Simon Willison in this post. What he has developed, in a nutshell, is a script that will convert a PDF or image to text (using an optical character recognition (OCR) algorithm called Tesseract) right in your browser - no uploading required! Here it is. This post describes how he created the tool, a process that involved working with Claude 3. This, I think, is becoming a new normal. Even if they do nothing more than save typing time, having an AI coding assistant is becoming a powerful developer tool.

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Beyond the Ivory Tower interview with Martin O’Neill
Sanat Sogani, Justice Everywhere, 2024/04/03

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The idea here is that universities and other public institutions should see themselves as more than just another private player in a marketplace. "The argument is that having more democratic intervention within the organization of the local economy is valuable not just in itself but also because it allows collective agency and decision-making that would not be available if you are just relying on the market to do things." The challenge lies in getting institutions to see it that way. "These ideas clearly seem to work in practice, and there was an interesting question about whether they could be made to work in theory as well."

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Turchin's terrifying predictions
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2024/04/03

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I'm not really going to disagree with any of this, not even the git about the gap between the credentialed class, that focuses on identity issues, and the working class, that focuses on economic issues (though as always a class-based analysis is far too coarse to be useful). "As the 'wealth pump' pushes money to the top of the pyramid, the elite, wealth is pushed from the poor to the rich, accompanied by the disappointment of even middle class aspirants (graduates), who have also become part of the precariat." It's all too easy in this environment to find scapegoats. We need to resist this trend. See also: the Guardian.

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Love and the Distance: The Role of Presence in Online Learning
Keith Brown, Zian Zhang, Canadian Journal of Education, 2024/04/03

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Despite the small number of participants interviewed this paper (27 page PDF) offers an interesting if idiosyncratic look at presence in online learning. It's clear that the interviewees, as the authors say, "wrestle with pre-existing ideas of presence inherited from holistic education theories" and demand "two cornerstones of a holistic notion of presence—undivided attention and embodiment." These, obviously, are a challenge in online learning, and we see the teachers laying down rules and conditions to enforce this in a way that, I think, undermines individual autonomy. The interviews are analyzed according to Aimee Whiteside's social presence model (20 page PDF) and hence discusses affective association, community cohesion, instructor involvement, interaction intensity, and knowledge and experience.

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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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