#oldaily — Public Fediverse posts

I Made a Real Fly Brain Play Pong. It Didn’t Learn - And That’s the Interesting Part #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79760 This sort of article is really interesting to me, both for the subject matter, and for the fact that someone can deeply embed themselves into advanced scientific topics like this.

Two years ago, Meta killed CrowdTangle. Can a new AI tool fill the void? #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79759 You read something on social media. You might want to know not only whether it's true, but where it came from, why it's there, and what might likely result. Meta had a tool called CrowdTangle to sort out the threads, but it was ultimately uninterested in it and killed it off in 2024.

AI Framework for Educator Preparation #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79758 This report is brief (7 page PDF) but tightly written; I've seen 30 page reports on the same subject with less content.

Online Enrollments Have Found a New Equilibrium #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79757 This is interesting data, at least for U.S. based institutions (though I would be surprised were the trend not the same elsewhere as well). Online learning, writes Phil Hill, has reached a new equilibrium point, lower than peak levels during the pandemic, but noticeably higher than what we saw before.

The Knowledge Concentration #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79756 I don't for a moment believe that 'learning' is the same as 'stealing knowledge', but I get the concern expressed here that the result of AI learning from books and online text is a concentration of capability (I won't call it 'knowledge' because it's arguable that current AIs do not 'know' in the sense of, say, justified true belief).

Creativity Doesn’t Have to Look Flashy #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79755 John Spencer returns from a big problem-based learning conference full of flashy and high-level demonstrations and feels he isn't really up to the standard being set. But then he argues that what's at stake isn't the project or the publicity but rather the cultivation of the creative process, which is a lot more basic and simple than these conferences would suggest.

Performative Theatre: Why Learning Analytics Fails at the Coalface #oldaily https://www.downes.ca/post/79754 I'm not a fan of the 'coalface' terminology but this is otherwise a good article with good insights scattered throughout. The main argument is that the implementation of an analytics system is only the beginning of what should be a serious academic enquiry, rather than the implementation of a platform that masks, rather than reveals, ways the institution could improve.