OLDaily

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

U.S. Copyright Office has registered 1,000+ works enhanced by AI
Timothy Beck Werth, Mashable, 2025/05/07

---

It's one thing to create a law saying that AI-generated content can't be copyrighted. It's quite another to prevent the copyright office from doing it anyway. Via Paul Pival.

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

Against college for all: the AFT president
Bryan Alexander, 2025/05/07

---

Bryan Alexander writes about the "shattering" of the "bipartisan consensus" that everybody should go to "college". I use the quotes because this debate has a uniquely American framing that not only posits giving up on the idea of universality, but is also where a "movement among business, state, and city leaders asks us to tear up the paper ceiling, opening up jobs to people without postsecondary degrees." The factors limiting access to education in the U.S. - lack of social mobility, socio-economic status, excessive tuition fees - have in part led to a deep social divide. Ending access for all entails creating other avenues for social mobility in a society that can't imagine any. After all, if the prohibitively expensive private higher education system can't offer exclusivity and elitism, what can it offer?

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

Productive Struggle: What We Lose When AI Does the Thinking
Dean Shareski, Ideas and Thoughts, 2025/05/07

---

Dean Shareski discusses a recent post from Clay Shirkey on the idea that students are not learning when they depend on AI do do the work. Now Shirkey's observations are based on "talking with professors and students" and are going to be biased in a certain direction. Still. Shareski responds "I've been pushing the idea of productive struggle as a primary goal of school." But it's a struggle between the desire to make things easier and the need to do the hard thinking required in order to learn. But the real problem, I think (and the reason why Shirkey's bias is problematic) is that the previous generation (ie., us, the teachers) aren't really able to imagine what's hard for students who are able to use AI. We're going to have to depend on the students to find this for themselves, and to help them value doing that.

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

Curl takes action against time-wasting AI bug reports
Connor Jones, The Register, 2025/05/07

---

Curl is a command line utility people use to make requests to web servers. It seems like a simple service, but can be complex behind the scenes. And like all software, it needs to be maintained for security and bugs and such. These are reported when found by developers. But recently, they are also being reported by AI, even in cases where there's no bug. So that's a problem, and that's what this article talks about.

But I was thinking yesterday, if we're in a world where AI does most if not all of our programming, why do we require software libraries any more? Just have the AI create exactly and only what we need. Libraries are useful for human coders, but they are much less useful for AI. The AI uses the package only because it has seen so many humans do it, but if told not to use a package, it could just create the code from scratch. Couldn't it?

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

Could OpenAI ‘Operator’ overwhelm uni admissions systems?
Nicholas Cuthbert, The PIE News, 2025/05/07

---

This is pretty funny. OpenAI's Operator fills and submits online forms automatically. So people are "urging universities to be ready for a rise in applications if prospective students are able to complete and submit a high volume of university applications at speed." I mean - the whole system of application for admission is cumbersome and archaic. There doesn't have to be such scarcity of placement, except that universities have no real desire to make their service more efficient and effective. It's like they think they're selling Birkin bags and not an essential service people need to prosper in life.

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

How to Measure Narrative Change
Yewande O. Addie, David Hanson, Emily Melnick, Melody Mohebi, Annie Neimand, SSIR, 2025/05/07

---

According to this article, "narrative change uses the power of stories to shape how people understand issues and the world." I've never really been happy with the ideas of stories to explain anything - the narrative linear text-based format imposes a lot of structure and cannot capture a lot of what happens. For example: "A theory of change follows an if-then-ultimately logic. In this model, 'x' is the activity, 'y' is the immediate outcome, and 'z' is the desired, longer-term change." So simplistic! My own view on patterns of change is here. And I imagine I would have a whole other story to tell about causality.

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