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

AI Agents Are Coming to a Classroom Near You
David Ross, Getting Smart, 2025/05/01

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I've discussed AI agents and related protocols (MCP, A2A) in previous posts, but unlike David Ross, I don't actually see them being applied to classroom learning. And I consider the recommendations to be misguided (the number one priority in the table illustrated is "invest in adaptive learning pilots", which has been the same recommendation coming from this crowd for decades, and has never been useful). If AI does anything, it will free students from teaching, adaptive or otherwise, and allow them to learn by creating and doing.

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More than "Just a Next-Token Predictor"
Carlo Iacono, Hybrid Horizons, 2025/05/01

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How often have you heard this about AI? "It's just a next-token predictor." Strictly speaking, that's true. But that understantes what it is. As Carlo Iacono explains, "The critique of AI as 'just prediction' makes the mistake of focusing only on the mechanism rather than what emerges from that mechanism at scale. It's like saying humans are 'just neurons firing' - technically true but missing everything meaningful about human experience and capability."

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Where We Are Headed
Dean W. Ball, Hyperdimensional, 2025/05/01

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A "rough sketch of the near future" that seems to me a lot more plausible than a lot of what I've read in tech media. "Even if it goes as well as possible, make no mistake: AI agents will involve human beings taking their hands off the wheel of the economy to at least some extent. Most of the thinking and doing... will soon be done by machines, not people." Ball adds, "Epoch's Ege Erdil and Matthew Barnett published a piece with a somewhat similar thesis." Also worth reading.

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Beyond the process: A novel analytical model to examine knowledge construction in MOOC forums
Dennis A. Rivera, Mariane Frenay, Magali Paquot, Pauline de Montpellier, Valérie Swaen, Computers & Education, 2025/05/01

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This article introduces the Learners' Online Discussions Analysis Model (LODAM) to analyse learners' discussions in MOOCs. "When discussing in MOOC forums," we are told, "learners explain and clarify concepts, answer questions, and negotiate meaning." The authors are trying to resolve what appears to be a contradiction: "Participation in MOOC forums is often correlated with course completion and higher learning gains; yet, studies also report limited knowledge construction." This changes if you recognize that "studies analysing MOOC forum textual data have focused on discussion topics rather than the concepts themselves." That's what the model corrects. "LODAM does not classify learners' discussions into fixed, discrete categories. Instead, our novel model aims to highlight the spectrum of potential dialogues that may emerge from learners' socio-cognitive engagement in discussions." 

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Is it okay?
Robin Sloan, 2025/05/01

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This article considers the arguments for and against AI by first discarding the most popular artuments for each position - "depriving each side of its best weapon" - on the grounds that it is unconvincing to the other side. So, no 'analogy with humans' for the pro side, no 'it violates copyright' for the con side. The result is an argument between 'it may result in great scientific advances' for the pro side, and 'it may put the entire creative industry out of work' on the con side. For me, the scenario not considered is far more interesting: what if it were a good thing to replace our entire creative industry with AI? People complain about how much energy AI consumes; consider how much more energy all the people in the creative industries consume! Consider how much we have to pay for all manner of creative content! Why must artistic genius be rare, when we could produce it for pennies every day? What would all these people do instead? I don't know - something useful? I jest, of course, but only a little.

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Backing Up Wikipedia
Another Think Coming, 2025/05/01

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Miguel Guhlin thinks about making a backup of Wikipedia and other similar sites and reports on Kiwix: "you can run it from any storage drive, making it great for placement on a USB drive after you've downloaded (faster) the libraries you want to safeguard for democracy." It's not just for Wikipedia: for example, you can also download RationalWiki (RW), "a wiki-based community working together to explore and provide information about a range of topics centered around science, skepticism, and critical thinking."

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Presentation Skills Considered Harmful
Serious Pony, Wayback Machine, 2025/05/01

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Alan Levine links to this old Kathy Sierra article (we miss her) talking about what matters in a presentation (he says he plans to update it for podcasts). "The problem is thinking that what matters in your presentation is you. Because unless you're a paid performer - musician, comedian, motivational speaker - you are not the reason they came to the conference. They are sitting in your session because of someone that matters far more to them than you: themselves. They are there for their own experiences, and 'watching you present' is not one of those experiences." Still, there's an argument for some presentation skills, even if you're not an expert, as evidenced by what might be the worst keynote slide I have ever seen (I know, I know, it's not a slide - but that fact somehow makes it worse!).

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A Case For Ethical and Transparent Research Experiments in the Public Interest
CITR Team, Coalition for Independent Technology Research, 2025/05/01

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Researchers from the University of Zürich conducted a large-scale, unauthorized AI experiment on a Reddit community "without the Reddit community's knowledge or consent, and the bots were not labeled as AI." Specifically, "Reddit users were unknowingly exposed to sometimes deceptive AI-generated content designed to shape their opinions - raising significant ethical and transparency concerns." I don't believe such research would pass scrutiny on the Research Ethics Board I am a part of, although it apparently passed the researchers' own ethics board. "When told the project met institutional ethics standards, moderators disclosed the study to their shocked and outraged community. Reddit banned the associated accounts and issued a statement condemning the activity." This article contains more commentary and numerous links. Via Ben Werdmuller.

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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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