OLDaily

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

June 19, 2025: Service
Chris Corrigan, 2025/06/19

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Chris Corrigan links to Peter Levine's call to restore a call to public service. "The paradigm of service should be a full-time, professional career in the government. I am not against social entrepreneurship or temporary community service, but the civil service is much larger and more important. We do not need alternatives to government careers nearly as much as we need more and better positions within the civil service (federal, state, and local)." I have of course dedicated my career to the public service, and while in theory I could have made boatloads of cash in the private sector, none of that would work would have resonated as well with my own sense of worth and value.

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Hijacked Minds and Broken Trust
Wesley A. Fryer, Moving at the Speed of Creativity, 2025/06/19

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Wes Fryer discusses some of the obvious issues around rebbuilding trust in society and culture south of our border as citizens struggle to understand whether anything they read is true, whether the rule of law will bcome effective again, and whether governance is still a thing. "Most users of social media today would agree that the shape of the 'TechBro'-dominated social media landscape (think Twitter/X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc.) has and continues to have a massive influence on how we as people see and consume ideas," he comments. "We are struggling as a society in part because we have discounted the importance and value of expert voices and expertise. So many people have opinions… and in some circles / on some platforms, those voices can have an 'outsized volume' and an unwarranted level of amplification."

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OER25 – Stepping back and speaking truth to power
Lorna M Campbell, Open World, 2025/06/19

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Commentary on the upcoming Open Education Conference taking place in London next week with the theme "Speaking truth to power: open education and AI in the age of populism." We of course wish the author well as she recovers over the summer. I always consider it a relevant question to ask, "who is in power?" and "what counts as truth?" when it comes to "speaking truth to power". Sure, the Broligarchy is a suitable target deserving of some long-overdue criticism, but so also is the demographic that graces the TED stage and somehow has the ear of that elite audience.

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Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task
Nataliya Kosmyna, et al., arXiv.org, 2025/06/19

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So I had a look at that paper getting all the press recently for showing a "cognitive debt" accumulated by students who use chatGPT only to write an essay. If you do a Google search for 'ai use results cognitive capacities' you'll find a number of studies making the same claim. The issue with this study and others like it is that they measure only for a specific set of capacities that were important for people who do not normally use the tool. They do not anticipate nor measure the development of new skills made possible through the use of the tool. I have other criticisms too, but the study has been stamped with the approval of MIT and Time Magazine.

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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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