AI
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Things I was wrong about pt 4 – AI
After admitting I was wrong about QR codes, the death of the VLE and the democratising power of social media, we’ve arrived at the inevitable one I suppose. I want you to insert the biggest sigh you can imagine here – <sigh>. This is an example of when some knowledge can be a bit disadvantageous. I have a PhD in Artificial Intelligence, from back in 1994 and I joined the OU as a lecturer in AI. So, yeah, I should know a bit about it. I was however, largely dismissive of it, partly because I was grounded in symbolic AI (expert systems and the like), and had not really monitored…
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Privileging AI over people
Many of you will have seen that the Internet Archive lost an appeal against publishers recently. This related specifically to their National Emergency Library project when, during the pandemic, they removed the loaning cap on digital copies of books they had scanned. Remember, this was during the pandemic, when people couldn’t access physical copies, and many commercial publishers were effectively engaged in price gouging of digital copies. Access to some 500,000 books has been removed. I suppose I have some sympathy with authors who may be losing income as a result, and some of the digital-print analogies break down around copying a physical book and making it available to everyone,…
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The darkish side of open licences
A few weeks ago Eamon Costello highlighted that Taylor and Francis/Routledge had sold the rights to harvest their content for Ai to Microsoft. I, like many others, felt a sense of outrage (although I haven’t published with them for quite a few years). I think it is the sense of powerlessness that is frustrating, they can do this, and make even more money from your content, without any consultation. However, I also reflected that as someone who ran an open access journal and publishes under open access licences, then Microsoft (and any other AI harvesters) could have been doing this happily already, without any need to consult me. I remember…
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July 24 Round up
One month into leaving the OU, and I have been trying to establish some new pattern for the days. It’s been disrupted by parental care (or maybe that is the new pattern), and getting stuff sorted, but it’s beginning to settle down now. The most significant personal event this month has been my daughter’s graduation. She was part of that Covid cohort, who had it rough so it’s been a privilege to witness her growth as a scholar. I just need to persuade her to take up blogging now. As I mentioned last month, I’ve joined the Board of Trustees for the National Extension College, and it was great to…
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The price of process
(Photo by Natalie Cardona on Unsplash) Like Maren, I read David Sax’s The Revenge of Analog last month, and some points in it chimed with some other thoughts I’d been having around AI. The book makes the case around how analogue industries and formats have revived despite their apparent inevitable demise in face of digital alternatives. It is sometimes too keen to reinforce its won hypothesis and ignores counter points (the education chapter had me wincing in places for over-simplification), but overall it marks an interesting reaction to technology. It can be viewed in some respects as an argument against technological determinism, that despite all of these predictions of doom,…
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Don’t you want me? Questions to ask of new AI-VLEs
In my last post I was doing a backwards glance prompted by the Accenture-Udacity deal. In this one, I’ll look forwards. Apart from the MOOC angle, the other key aspect of the announcement was the investment in AI-enhanced learning environments. In terms of learning environments, the VLE/LMS has been the main player since around 2002. Prior to this there was a mixed economy, combining different commercial solutions, home spun set ups, open web tools. It was both a delightful cottage industry and something of a wild west. From the turn of the century the shift to an institutional wide, enterprise solution became inexorable until by the mid-2000s pretty much all…
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Don’t look back in anger (or anything else)
Because I was too busy indulging in self-pity in my last post I forgot to blog about Udacity being acquired by Accenture to build a platform to take advantage of AI, blah, blah. Audrey Watters taking a rare foray back into ed tech to say “I told you so” reminded me to blog something. Audrey says it better, but that’s never stopped me before… There are lots of takeaways from this tale. Here are some that occur to me: Self-Reflection is the real unicorn. Investors like to talk about unicorn companies, but it seems the real unicorn (as in, it doesn’t exist) is any sense of self-reflection or humility in…
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Welcome to the Wonkalarity
If you live in the UK you will probably have seen the story last week about the Willy Wonka Chocolate Experience in Glasgow. It promised a rich immersive experience, but turned out to be a disappointing, depressing warehouse with some bad props. We get one of these stories every year usually about a Santa’s grotto which is, well, less than might be expected. These stories often go viral, the mismatch between promise and reality is ripe for memes. This one I think offers an interesting prompt for considering issues around AI. For a start the advertising of the experience used AI generated images, so there is a good example about…
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True voyage is return
In revisiting the 25 Years of Ed Tech book for the 30 years podcast, I’ve been struck by how often I find myself saying things along the lines of “we’re seeing this again now with AI” or “this came to the fore again during the pandemic”. The snobbery about elearning that was espoused during the late 90s? It was there again in the attitude towards online learning after the pandemic. The myth of cheap elearning? See the excitement over AI generated content. The desire to share and reuse learning content easily? Revisited during the online pivot. Second Life islands and virtual campuses? Hello metaverse. And so on. I guess it’s…
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A grifter’s paradise
So, what about that AI eh? I get it, there’s a lot of fun to be had and it will undoubtedly be really useful in education. I’m not anti-AI (I have a PhD in it, but back when we though symbolic AI was the way to go), and I’m going to do a few more posts on it – I get why it’s everywhere at the moment, it really will have a big impact. But at the same time, I’m also just really uninterested by it all. Part of the reason I’m getting out of the game (after one last job, obviously) is that in order to stay relevant as…
