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

Salience and associations
Matthias Melcher, x28's New Blog, 2025/12/30

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I've been enjoying Matthias Melcher's reflections (here and here) on what I've had to say about similarity, salience and association over the years. I don't really have anything to add here at the moment, but I wanted to acknowledge the work.

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None of your beeswax!
Hollis Robbins, Anecdotal Value, 2025/12/30

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This blog post is based on an article by the author in the Chronicle (archived here) criticizing the design of public debate platforms in use at some colleges. The platforms solicit students' opinions on various controversial subjects and then pair those with opposing views to stimulate debate, evaluating students on how well they articulated and defended their beliefs. "Both Sway and Dialogues have sold universities on the idea that on top of all the other metrics and data being collected, they need now to elicit students' political beliefs as raw material for institutional assessment," writes Hollis Robbins. It seems odd to me to begin on a point of disagreement. Discussion - any discussion - begins with a point in common, even if that point is agreement on a problem that needs to be solved, or even "what should we do next?" Points of disagreement may emerge, but these are not the focus and objective of the exercise. And yeah - people should not be required to express their views on whatever the topic of the day happens to be, whether in the service of 'viewpoint diversity' or 'your pronouns'. Sometimes, it is genuinely 'none of your beeswax'.

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What Agency Means in the Era of Automation
Marc Watkins, Rhetorica, 2025/12/30

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It's a good point. We believe that education is (at least in part) about agency, but "we associate it with free will, but what does free will mean when algorithms and complex systems increasingly dictate our lives?" These days, teaching and learning is so transactional education is "focused on releasing automations that easily allow both students and teachers to make learning as efficient and as frictionless as a mobile payment." Agency, then, needs to be something else, and Marc Watkins argues it should create a culture of awareness, focus on growth, and normalize struggle. "College isn't where you go to receive knowledge or a degree, but to actively engage in creating an experience unique and worthwhile to you." Actually - in my view - that's not just college, that's life, and what educators need to learn is how everyone can have that good life.

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ChatGPT and the Educational AI Chatter: Full of Bullshit or Trying to Tell Us Something?
Eamon Costello, Postdigital Science and Education, 2025/12/30

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This article (6 page PDF) would be better, I think, had it been written more clearly, but I get that what Eamon Costello is trying to do with the text is to illustrate the phenomenon being discussed. If I had to summarize (and I do; it's the job) I'd say that it illustrates how language leads us along and the meaning (or truth, or whatever) that we find in reading is created as much by the reader as by anything that has been written (which in the best fashion says as little as possible). "The problem is that we are theory machines. We fabulate, take shortcuts, and spin stories upon the slightest whim or germ of evidence. Most stories we tell ourselves and each other are unprovable. The social world is too complex to make anything but the most banal predictions about but, because we crave certainty, we always fall for the future and its purveyors, AI or otherwise... This is Papañca: 'We will discover that everything we are carrying around in our minds is nothing but extraneous matter. It has been put there by our desires, rejections, reactions, thoughts, plans, hopes, ideas, and viewpoints.'"

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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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