Multilitteratus Incognitus

A great number of years ago, I was part of an edtech team tasked with evaluating learning management systems to move to after WebCT was essentially EoL'd by Blackboard.  Long story short, despite our recommendations, management went with Blackboard, which I guess now is classed "Classic," and it too has been EoL'd.  I wasn't a big fan of Classic, but it worked fine for what we needed it to.  When the time came for the next LMS, my institution went to Canvas (finally...).  I've seen Ultra, the next incarnation of Blackboard, and all I could say was "me'h." I was just happy I didn't have to use it ;-) Fast forward a year, and I am teaching for an institution that uses Bb Ultra. On the plus side, the course was already designed for me, so I didn't really have to figure out a ton of the nuts and bolts of Ultra ahead of the semester, and it seems  pretty easy to pick up.  There are some big "ughs" when it comes to using this system, ...

This semester, I am helping co-facilitate a course somewhere new. More details of that in the future (maybe), but for the time being, I wanted to reflect a bit on technology use.  Since this is a new institution for me, I have to click on the technology acceptance pop-ups, see policy dialog boxes that I no longer see at my institution, and so on.  One of the assignments I am grading this term requires the use of TurnItIn, and while perusing through the course to familiarize myself with the course, I clicked on TII. Since I am new to this instance of TII, I got greeted with a disclaimer about AI detection (bolding my own): Our AI writing assessment is designed to help educators identify text that might be prepared by a generative AI tool. Our AI writing assessment may not always be accurate (i.e., our AI models may produce either false positive results or false negative results), so it should not be used as the sole basis for adverse actions against a student. It takes further...

  A few weeks ago, I saw this posted on a friend's social media feed, and the response was also repeating the "oh wow! I would have never thought of doing this! This is so nifty! Well... my first thought, knowing how ChatGPT works, is that this is a complete bunch of bullshit, and I immediately jettisoned this idiocy from my brain.  Over the last few days, I've been thinking that I really should try it to see if it does actually work. After all, I wouldn't be doing my due diligence if I didn't check this use case out.  If it does, it could be useful for accessibility purposes. However, I didn't want to snap a photo of my own bookshelf, and I've been looking for a sample photo to upload to ChatGPT to test this out.  Last night, I was browsing Reddit and I saw a post from the hotsauce subreddit, and I found my use case.  So, I downloaded the picture , submitted it to ChatGPT (yeah...sorry about that), and asked it some questions.   I've added the photo (...

Well, it's been a hot minute since I last jotted down some thoughts. Don't worry. blog, it's not you, it's me 😂. I also have a daily meditation/reflection journal that I used to jot things down in, even though sometimes it was "Doogie Houser style," that only gets an entry twice or thirce a week.  Gotta take a step back and do some more reflecting.  On the plus side, the weather is finally nice enough to get out and do a daily walk, something I used to do most summers until work (in all its multiple facets) got to be a bit too much. In any case, you didn't come here to read about my (lack of?) exercise and my busy schedule, did you? I thought I'd jot down some thoughts since it is July and summer is one-third gone (sigh). One of the things that I am not making as much progress on as I would have liked is course design. In all honesty, I thought that by now I would have chosen all my readings for the fall, started to put them into Canvas, and have Augu...

ChatGPT Patch of the Wise Owl Recently, I've been playing around with image generation in ChatGPT, not so much to create output that I plan on using seriously for something (although some output do end up on this blog as post images), but more to see how easy (or hard) it is to get something from my mind's eye into some kind of machine output.  I am also curious to see how the LLM interprets what I input (that element of surprise). I only really have the free credits that OpenAI gives to its free users, to my experimentation is basically 10-15 minutes of futzing around while watching TV in the evening. As I was playing around the other day, this scene from Star Trek: The Next Generation came to mind. In Schisms ,   the crew had been abducted by an alien race but had no memory of it (think Alien Encounters of the Third Kind ). As they start to remember small elements of their experience, they all try to piece together their memories so that they can come up with a reconstr...

Happy Friday, to all! This past week  - well, even a few weeks before that, if we're really counting - I've been contemplating my academic work.  Part of it is because I am working on one collaboration with some really awesome folks, and reading proofs for another collab from last summer (that should be published later this year).  However, it's worth noting that all of these academic pursuits are hobbies for me, so it takes time off other hobbies.  They are not things that I can do as part of my regular work (I am not a faculty member). Part of this introspection is because I was updating my Academic CV for a teaching gig I might apply to (another part of the hobby, but this one pays at least), and  I realized that I've done quite a few things in the past couple of years that fit into this particular hobby category, and also fit pretty much in the "life of an academic" category. So, what's changed? To cut to the chase, Trump, and Musk,... and their demen...

  A bit of a kerfulle happened a few weeks ago, and it's just indicative of how the rest of life is  going what I've had this post in draft form for almost a month while I've plugged away at it... Annnyyywhoooo🙄 The kerfuffle was kicked off by Wiley's  Open Educational Language Models initial post describes OELM as bring together a collection of openly licensed components that allow an openly licensed language model to be used easily and effectively in support of teaching and learning.  In his follow up post, Wiley is  open pondering/brainstorming about OELMs, Wiley discusses a separation of form from content, similar to how text on the web is separated from the formatting CSS layer . Wiley's original posts are intersting and do provide some points to ponder. I don't necessarily agree in whole with what  he proposes, but I can see a grain of something interesting there, and certainly worth pondering and discussing. Maybe I've gotten a bit more "get o...

I came across Sarah's post on blogging questions (which I think was something started on the Reclaim Discord, so I thought I'd jump in. I was a bonus opportunity to post this Super Simple Badge , which I also created a while back, but didn't have a place to put it that made sense ;-) I guess this is a "tag you're it" sort of thing that I am just butting into. Why did you start blogging in the first place? Back in high school I had penpals. It was fun to keep in touch with my old town, get to hear about what my old friends were up to, and in turn share my own new adventures in my new city. When we all graduated from high school, many left home to go to University, and people's mailing addresses changed.  Keeping up with where people were those days was too much, and everyone's new adventures meant that there was little time to do the penpal thing.  Some old friends made the transition to email for asynchronous communication and IM for synchronous chat...

 Alright...alright... bad pun 😅 But to be fair, CALL (computer-assisted language learning) does lend itself to some bad puns... And that's before I even get into other acronyms like TELL and MALL😹. I promise to spare students the dad jokes in the fall😅 Anyway, last week I decided to answer my pondering  as to what my course redesign should cover, and I settled on designing an Introduction to CALL course. I decided that the course number (685) doesn't matter all that much considering that our course numbers over the past 30 years have drifted to an extent that they make some sense, but they aren't (as a whole) totally coherent, and that's not my problem to solve. The next part of my mission is to determine learning objectives (which I more or less have) and determine what kinds of assessments and activities I want to include. The universe of possibilities feels rather endless, so I need to find the right size for semester activities and assessments. One of the thin...