OLDaily

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

Who Owns AI-Generated Content?
Rory McGreal, unitwin-unoe, 2026/03/16

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"The legal trajectory of AI-generated content presents a pivotal opportunity for open education, directly addressing the twin problems of legal uncertainty and eroded trust outlined at the outset," wqrites Rory McGreal. First, AI-generated content is automatically open content. "The clear consensus that purely AI-generated works are not copyrightable and belong to the public domain provides a stable legal foundation. Educators can use such content without fear of copyright infringement, licensing fees, or complex attribution chains. This demystifies a major part of the 'minefield,' transforming the 'what if' from a source of dread into a clear guideline: autonomous GenAI can be used to create OER lessons." That doesn't mean 'anything goes'. "The academic community must uphold principles of authorship, accountability, and transparency. Using public domain AI content does not absolve educators of the need for due diligence, citation of specific sources, or ethical disclosure of AI assistance in human-AI collaborations."

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AI should be the Guide, not the Ghostwriter
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B, 2026/03/16

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The point of Donald Clark's article is to offer what I guess we can call 'the standard argument': "Generating words, knowledge and solutions is better than simply reading, highlighting text or getting AI to do it for you. Acts of personal generation provide the context for greater understanding and subsequent recall.... This is a short-term pain, long-term gain idea, where desirable difficulties are learning challenges that make the learner study harder in the short term to improve long-term retention and understanding." He then offers an eight-step approach to writing essays along these lines. It's funny, but I would do the eight steps in reverse order - write a version, test my conclusion, identify what's missing, etc. The idea that you use your writing to reason things out and to reach a conclusion is, in my mind, just wrong.

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Openness, transparency and reach: three reasons why public institutions should embrace the Fediverse
Elena Rossini, 2026/03/16

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This article is focused mostly on European institutions, though its conclusions could be more widely applied. Ultimately, I think, the recommendation is for institutions to at least include federated social media (such as Mastodon) among their accounts lists. The three reasons are openness, user agency, and reach. People need "a public, open communications platform that is accessible to all citizens, without the need for an account; an independent network not subject to censorship due to opaque algorithms or political bias." 

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Random Audits as a Scalable Deterrent to Cheating: Using Game Theory to Design Fair and Effective Academic Integrity Systems for the AI Era
David Wiley, SSRN, 2026/03/16

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On the one hand, I think the proposal is sound: using random audits to deter cheating rather than mass surveillance. On the other hand, however, I think that David Wiley's argument misses the point: if using an AI counts as 'cheating', then probably whatever you are assessing for is the wrong thing to assess. 16 page PDF.

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Aether OS is a computer in a browser built for the AT Protocol
Terrence O'Brien, The Verge, 2026/03/16

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"Impractical, sure," says the website, "but fun." I assume that Aether is using the Personal Data Servers (PDS) as a file store. That would explain that anybody with the address would be able to read them (AT isn't really intended to be a privacy-first protocol). It's an interesting test of the protocol's capabilities.

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Zuck's Ed Tech Baby Goes With A Whimper
Peter Greene, Curmudgucation, 2026/03/16

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This could have been a really useful critique of Summit School and the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative's forays into learning technology, but it undermines its own message with unnecessary sarcasm, typos, missing spaces between words (was it copied from some output of something?) and just plain bad reasoning typified by personal attacks, innuendo and loaded questions. What's the point of this? Readers will find some of the links useful (though many of them are self-links, so look before you click). I get that the name of the blog is Curmudgucation, but this reads more like the opposite of that. Via Thomas Ultican.

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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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