Multilitteratus Incognitus

#wilty A few weeks ago I decided to ask ChatGPT to tell me a little bit about myself. Part of it was curiosity, while part of it was because I needed to write a short bio and I just felt uninspired.  The first time the query ran, ChatGPT told me that it didn't know who I was.  That's fine, I thought to myself, because it would be weird to be known like that. After all, I don't really consider myself to be anything big in academia. This past week I decided to try again just to see if anything had changed in the world of ChatGPT. And lo and behold it had! Now ChatGPT seems to know who I am...sort of... Prompt: Who is Dr. Apostolos Koutropoulos? Response: Dr. Apostolos Koutropoulos is an educator, researcher, and entrepreneur who has worked in various fields related to technology and education. He is currently an Associate Professor of Instructional Technology at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the founder of several EdTech companies . Koutropoulos has published

I thought I'd post a little comic relief before the week begins.  I decided to play a little bit with ChatGPT this week as well as DALL-E. I've been thinking about AI in Education, connected with an upcoming project, and I was thinking about the history of the pondering and discourse around AIEd. My goal here was to see what ChatGPT does when it is presented with prompts to produce something in a language other than English and to assess the quality of the non-English output.  It's not great, but it is rather humorous... Prompt: please give me a poem in greek about how yummy gyro souvlaki are Output: Γυροσουβλάκι, πικάντικο και νόστιμο με τη ζωή να σε δουν, δε θα σε στοιχειώσω πλάτη στο σκεύος, και μπριάτσα στο παράθυρο παραδειγματικός για την ελληνική κουζίνα ο κύρος. (Translation: Gyro souvlaki, succulent and delicious With life to see you, I will not enumerate Loin in the dish, and tomatoes in the window An example of Greek cuisine, the lord.) Prompt: write a poem in g

This is Part V of V of a look back to 2022. The  first part discussed peer review requests in 2022 , and the  second part discussed professional development more broadly .  The third part branched off a bit from the second part,  discussing professional development a bit more from an academic development frame .  The fourth part reflected a bit on research and publishing . Concluding this look back at 2022, part V will explore some of my ponderings about... Determining where teaching fits in for me... This was an interesting point to ponder. My entry into teaching was about as predictable as my educational path: in other words, it really came out of nowhere! I was an average high school student and an average college student. It was during my first Master's when the change from average  to academician  began.  When thinking about my foray into teaching, looking back on it, I honestly think it was done on a dare ! I was advocating for a couple of courses to be offered in the MEd pro

This is Part IV of V of a look back to 2022. I know, my blogging is lacking a bit of urgency LOL 😂. The  first part discussed peer review requests in 2022 , and the  second part discussed professional development more broadly .  The third part branched off a bit from the second part, discussing professional development a bit more from an academic development frame .  Continuing with that academic framing, part IV will explore some of my ponderings about... Determining where research fits in for me... At the end of last year I was reflecting on where research fits into my professional and hobby life; keeping in mind that my job does not require, nor does it make provisions for, me to do research - thus it's mostly a hobby.  My relationship with doing research, and where it fits in for me, has really evolved over the last decade. When I was attending my last Master's degree (before completing the degree), I had a hard time even imagining writing 7000 words, let alone publishin

This is part III of V of a look back at 2022. The first part discussed peer review requests in 2022 , and the second part discussed professional development more broadly .  As I was pondering professional development, a branch from that thread started vining out and sort of developing in my mind as related to, but distinct from, professional development.  Thus, part III will be dealing with... Charting out the next phase of academic development As I was pondering professional development in my previous post, I started to veer into the area of academic development.  I continued to write my previous post, but I decided to stop myself and separate this section out because I realized that I think of PD and AD as two different (but sometimes overlapping) entities.  In my view, PD tends to relate much more closely to one's work. What you learn is usually applicable to your work environment sooner rather than later.  Professional Development is also something that you might be able to do

This is part II of V of a look back to 2022. The first part of this series did a bit of reflecting on professional expectations in the form of peer review requests that I received in 2022 . This next section is all about retooling, pondering, and... Figuring out what PD means for me I think that 2022 was really about recovering  from my doctoral work. I completed my defense in July 2021, and all edits were accepted and published, and the degree was granted by October 2021. This, in essence, left me the entirety of 2022 to just let my brain air out a bit and recalibrate. Looking back, 2011-2016 were my MOOC years (free-range learning), and 2014-2021 were my Doc years (structured learning), and lots of time and brain bandwidth were allotted to that endeavor.  While there were bumps in the road, I am really happy with the committee I had in the end, and they supported me in reaching that finish line. The completion of a doctorate means that I "won" at academia-ing right?😂  I

  Happy New Year fellow learners and ponderererers (that's spelled right, right? 😜) Looking back, 2022 seems like an academic blur. I know that lots of things happened, and I've jotted all of them down on a notepad so I can add them to my CV as some point in the future, but as I look back five distinct threads (points of pondering) come up as trends that emerged, or became more clear, in 2022. As I started writing this, it seemed like the length was getting out of hand, so I decided to break it up into many different blog posts. My first point of pondering is... A deluge of peer review requests... Alright, maybe "deluge" might be a bit overdramatic, but it does feel like requests for peer review increased in 2022.  I've been peer reviewing since 2012 and I am not sure what exactly changed.  Did someone see my publons/WoS/ORCID profiles and decided to add me to their regular reviewer's circle? Did the addition of a doctorate to my credentials make me more visi

It's the end of the year, and the end of the term, so I look back at my own learning this past fall semester. This fall, I decided to revisit FutureLearn.  Over the past few years (since 2018ish?) I've been signing up for FutureLearn courses so that I can have them in my queue (in case they disappear). I guess I was optimistic in 2019...and 2020...and 2021 that I would get to these, so the queue of courses kept getting larger and larger 🤣. So, with the queue so long I decided to do something about it: The total number of courses I went through this fall (August through December was 36.  Some courses were outside of my wheelhouse but seemed interesting, while others are peripheral to what I am doing, so things were not always new.   Unsurprisingly, the courses that were on subject matters that I already knew something about went by rather fast since past information kept coming up, both my own previous knowledge and things that came up in previous FutureLearn courses. Being abl

  A lot of digital ink has been used up in the past few days with Elon's purchase of the big blue bird , both in blogs and Twitter itself, and news outlets (not that I think of it) To be fair, it is a little concerning when your social network changes hands, but then again other things are concerning in the land of social media (where "you're the product"), like most social media ownership, privacy, uptime, and what companies are doing with user data.  However, is this most recent panic enough of a cause to move over to another platform (or protocol) like Mastodon?🤔 Perhaps...or perhaps not.  Earlier this year I created an account on Scholar.social  (based on where colleagues seemed to be moving)- which took forever to verify - because their servers were kneeling under the weight of the many people who were "leaving" Twitter after the last Elon scare. I see today that Scholar.social no longer accepts new members.  Just for giggles I also created a mastodon