AI
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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…
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The Emily Carr, Mattiusi Iyaituk & Tom Thomson approaches to AI
(with apologies to real experts in Canadian art, and probably all Canadians. And artists.) Here comes an extended, and possibly inaccurate attempt at developing an analogy for how we approach new technology such as the internet and now, AI. How the perspective of Western Art came to interpret the landscape of Canada is, I’m suggesting, analogous to how higher education can come to understand the new landscape of an AI rich internet. Before we delve in, it’s important to note that Western Art, like higher education, is only one perspective, and a problematic one. But the point here is how any established area tries to understand something that is new…
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Generative AI & the taste of sweet surrender
I’ve attended a lot of AI talks recently (I mean, even if I tried to avoid them I would still have racked up a few). And here’s my hot take for education – just go for it. I don’t say this as an AI enthusiast, I find it quite boring and kind of soul sucking, but shouting loudly and hoping it will go away isn’t a viable strategy. As I argued in my last post, it has a strong inevitability factor, and lack of engagement risks doing ourselves and our students a disservice. That’s not to say we shouldn’t fight to make it open, to avoid bias in datasets, and…
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The inevitability, or otherwise, of ed tech
In Metaphors, I have a chapter about VAR (Video Assisted Refereeing) and Learning Analytics. In it I make the case that VAR got to the point where its implementation in football seemed inevitable. Everyone (fans, pundits, players, not sure about referees) wanted it – mistakes were made by refs, and then analysed in detail in the studio by pundits with access to multiple high definition camera angles. It seemed ludicrous that the ref, who was actually making the decisions, shouldn’t have the same access. I go into some of the problems with the actual implementation in the chapter, but I want to revisit that idea of ‘inevitability’ in this post.…
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The Cursed Earth post – the AI version
In my last post I messed around with the idea of Judge Dredd’s Cursed Earth story as a metaphor for aspects of educational technology. I thought I’d try this idea as a ChatGPT prompt. It strikes me as a good example of the type of thing generative text isn’t very good at, because it’s quirky and relies on some depth of understanding. At OER23 Dave Cormier called this kind of AI “the autotune of knowledge“, and this seemed like a good example to test that notion. What it generated is below. Thanks, I hate it. I mean, it’s very impressive from such an idiosyncratic prompt, but it’s so bland it…
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25+ Years of Ed Tech: 2022 – AI Generated Content
via GIPHY Despite the book 25 Years of Ed tech finishing with 2018, I’ve kept it going with one entry for each year since. The criteria for selection was the year I think they became significant, in that people talked about them a lot. And your annual reminder that inclusion does not denote approval (some people struggle with this). So, AI generated content eh? The year started with fun AI generated images and ended with ChatGPT promising the end for humanity as we know it. This can produce genuinely decent outputs, and so the phase of just dismissing it as inferior is not a valid approach. The obvious potential victim of decent AI…
