OLDaily

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

My AI Skeptic Friends Are All Nuts
Thomas Ptacek, Fly, 2025/06/06

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Strongly worded and sometimes rude statement in support of AI for software development. "If you're making requests on a ChatGPT page and then pasting the resulting (broken) code into your editor, you're not doing what the AI boosters are doing." So, that's where I'm at. Where are the pros at? "If you were trying and failing to use an LLM for code 6 months ago, you're not doing what most serious LLM-assisted coders are doing.People coding with LLMs today use agents. Agents get to poke around your codebase on their own. They author files directly. They run tools. They compile code, run tests, and iterate on the results." The main point here is that AI is not using tools, and obtaining the quality that the use of tools enables.

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Your Learners are Using AI to Redesign Your Courses
Philippa Hardman, Dr Phil's Newsletter, 2025/06/06

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Not only is it true that "AI is now a go-to tool in the learning process for many learners," it's also the case that "Learners are using AI to fix the shortcomings of instructional design practices." And there are numerous ways in which traditional course design could be fixed, from writing in language the reader understands to creating practice exercises to covering the material the course content "glosses over" (as a frustrated student of math and logic, the writers' habit of 'skipping steps' was a constant pet peeve of mine). Obviously, information about how students aredesigning courses would be of enormous use to designers.

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State of the Nation: K-12 e-Learning in Canada 2024 Edition
Michael K. Barbour, Randy LaBonte, Canadian eLearning Network, 2025/06/06

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Though the response rate from the actual e-learning projects is almost zero, the researchers are still able to compile a reasonably descriptive account (40 page PDF) of e-learning in the Canadian K-12 sector using other resources. What we learn is that while online learning forms nowhere near a majority, it nonetheless represents a reasonable subpopulation of students in every province. The report is also illustrative of Canada's decentralized higher education system.

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The Quiet Revolution
Carlo Iacono, 2025/06/06

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This post is centred on to main examples: one, a Morgan Stanley AI that "processed nine million lines of code and saved 280,000 hours of human work," and the other, an Imperial College London research AI that performed 10 years work in 48 hours on "how certain bacteria become resistant to antibiotics." Writes Calo Iacono, "This isn't about AI being smarter than humans. It's about AI being different in useful ways." But also, "these developments challenge us to think differently about our own roles."

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AI Signals The Death Of The Author | NOEMA
David J. Gunkel, NOEMA, 2025/06/06

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David Gunkel writes, "LLMs may well signal the end of the author, but this isn't a loss to be lamented. In fact, these machines can be liberating: They free both writers and readers from the authoritarian control and influence of this thing we call the 'author.'" This may be said a bit tongue-in-cheek but I am in basic agreement with this. We pay far too much attention to who said something than to what was said. The 'death of the author' forces us to be more critical when we read, as we should have been all along. "The LLM form of artificial intelligence is disturbing and disruptive, but not because it is a deviation or exception to that condition; instead, it exposes how it was always a fiction."

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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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