Stephen Downes

If you have been wondering where the newsletter is, well, I am on hiatuis until August 25 for a long-planned bikepacking adventure in Iceland. As I type, I am in Selfoss, five days into the trip, and everything has been as difficult as you could imgine. This link is to my video playlist, which you can check from time to time; I've recorded a fair amount of video and uploaded almost none. But I will, I promise. In the meantime, I don't promise that there will be no OLDaily posts, but definitely don't count on hering from me for a month.,

As Philipp Schmidt comments, "The article poses the right question 'Given that AI exists in the world, and that students are likely to use it (whether accidentally or on purpose), what evidence of learning would I now find persuasive?'" (This article might be behind a paywall though it seems to be open and a 'sharing token' was included in the link - try it here.) Image: John Spencer

This resource page from Alex Russell on browsers, standards, and the process of progress is a bit peripheral to my own interests, so I won't follow everything in here, but there's enough overlap to at include at least this post here. "This page collects links to folks and firms sharing outstanding work on the web. If you're already caught up and just want to follow their ongoing adventures, import this OPML file via your feed reader." I mean, if I had another eight hours a day, I would follow all these authors. I just can't. Image: Rick Viscomi (I mean, I did browse through the links).

We get only the most tantilizing glipse of this research from Liming Liu; I couldn't find a more detailed presentation of these ideas anywhere online. Essentially, the argument, based on a study of 500 billion words from 5.2 million books since 1500, while the five basic moral foundations are "care, fairness, liberty, purity, and authority," a deeper analysis shows "different patterns emerged from this, and varied strongly across four target languages." As Axel Bruns comments, "existing research on this is overreliant on observations from English-language studies, which may not translate well to other languages and cultures with their own cultural norms." No kidding. I find it ironic how writers who complain of bias in AI fail to examine the cultural  bias in their own understanding of ethics.

Ben Williamson interprets the recent article titled Your brain on ChatGPT (covered here) from the perspective of a recent work of his own, Learning brains: educational neuroscience, neurotechnology and neuropedagogy. Both are worthy of a read (maybe start with this blog post then read the more formal article). The Learning Brain "is being conceived in terms of 'brain facts' that are assembled out of neural information through highly-data-intensive and computational methods... the scientific setup of investigation - the instruments used, the institutional priorities underpinning the study, the types of information collected - all play a part in constituting the findings, and in how the learning brain is rendered as authoritative scientific knowledge in published results, findings and presentations." Williamson and colleagues Jessica Pykett and Dimitra Kotouza identify four types of Learning Brains - a plastic learning brain, a synchronized learning brain, an attentive learning brain, and a computational learning brain, with the suggestion that there may be other characterizations. 

Noteable is "a platform that promotes interactive learning by enabling the use of computational notebooks across various disciplines." These, such as Jupyter Notebook, enable users to view, edit and run code in the context of a text document. Notable is enabled as a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) by the University of Edinburgh in collaboration with Jisc, and is available as an integration with virtual learning environments like Canvas, Moodle, Blackboard, and Brightspace. This article describes the provision of Notable from a business and support perspective. See more case studies in Pooling Resources, Building Value.