OLDaily

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

Is language the same as intelligence? The AI industry desperately needs it to be
Benjamin Riley, The Verge, 2025/11/27

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"According to current neuroscience, human thinking is largely independent of human language." I believe that this is true but I don't see it as an argument against AI (though it does show that large language models will not in the long run give us the AI we want). "Three scientists published a commentary in the journal Nature titled, with admirable clarity, "Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought."

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Who's Grading You on Coursera? The Shift from Human Peers to AI
Pat Bowden, Class Central, 2025/11/27

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Coursera has two problems. The first is that its peer assessment system is broken. The second is that it needs to continue to scale and attract investment. Both of these are leading it to turn to AI. "People are eager to invest in the parts of a business that scale. Not everyone wants to invest in the humans to maintain that scale. Peer review is slow and can be messy and expensive to do well." The core question is this: does this end the slow decline of Coursera's credibility, or does it accelerate it?

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Alchemy
Josh Collinsworth, 2025/11/27

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I think these two statements say very different things: first, that "Art is valuable precisely because it is not easy to create," and second, that "We care about art because it';s a form of connection to other humans." Now, true, sometimes it's hard to connect with other humans, but sometimes it's all too easy (at which point, we begin to value insulation from other humans). I really don't care how hard it was to produce something, at least, not intrinsically. I do value what doing something hard tells me about the person. And none of this tells me how much I should pay for a thing, because all of this is cheapened if it just becomes a form of transaction.

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How citizen archivists in South Asia confront the online marginalization of oral cultures and languages
Amrit Sufi, Diff, 2025/11/27

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One day I will wrestle with the idea of how there can be multiple knowledge communities, but for now, I wish only to emphasize the need to preserve them. "Documentation of these narratives by citizen archivists who are native speakers of the languages ensures that these are not excluded from the mainstream knowledge forms online, thus supporting epistemic and social justice." Related: Pluriversality of Knowledge in the Age of AI. "What will happen to the knowledge of those who cannot speak or cannot live, those who are unable to own or govern the record of their memories and experiences?"

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From detection to development: how universities are ethically embedding AI-for-learning
Mike Larsen, HEPI, 2025/11/27

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"I believe the 'Police and Punish' model must now be replaced," writes Mike Larsen. "A reliance upon detection was perhaps once a necessary evil but it has never aligned with the fundamental values of higher education. The assumption that policing student behaviour is the only way to safeguard standards no longer applies." So what to do instead? "An emerging policy framework for consideration and research is 'support and validate' which pairs timely, evidence-based academic support with student self-validation of authorship and learning."

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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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