Multilitteratus Incognitus

High School Hallway by Matt Dempsey CC BY-SA "You don't know what you're consuming!*"  It's a loose translation of what my grandmother used to say to me when I refused to eat something 'exotic' (in my view) that she had cooked, like rabbit stew or cuttlefish. My sophomoric response was "I know exactly what I'm eating" since I didn't want to even try what she'd cooked. I suspect that Grandma meant to say "You don't know what you're missing," but somehow Grandma's malaphor was always one of those things that we shared a tacit understanding of. Anyway, the other day I was reading a post on IHE on Online Classes and Conflicting Desires . The crux of the argument is a conflicting relationship with what people say and their actions (um, surprise?)... I’m seeing it in the push-pull of students wanting a more robust on-campus college experience while simultaneously crowding into online classes. The desire for a robust o...

I didn't realize it, but here is my 1,000th post on this blog 🙃.  I've been going back to my drafts folder to see what I saved over the years to comment. Most things I just deleted because I didn't have an interest in commenting on those topics any longer. Most were pre-pandemic, and things that seemed interesting while I was working on my dissertation proposal. Others were going to be reflections on working on things like journal editing, peer reviewing, and publishing.  I may return to those one day as my thoughts evolve, but for now, most things got trashed.  Here's one topic from before COVID (July 2018 to be precise). Way back when, in the magical pre-COVID times, I came across this post on one of the instructional design-related groups that I was a member of:  Been working on a PhD in Instructional Design from [University Name]. Have absolutely LOVED my coursework. However, most of my classes have been on pedagogy, methodology, transformational leaders...

When it comes to reading trade magazines, I tend to have an on-again, off-again relationship. I think that I am now in the "on-again" part of that relationship with TD Magazine. In a recent(ish) issue of TD, I came across an article titled " Prompting is the problem ," which piqued my interest (edit: archive link didn't work - saving placeholder in case I find a solution). I think there are pros and cons here, so I don't want to dwell on just the negative. For example, the author writes that... "Here's an inconvenient truth: Because AI systems are probabilistic and in motion, the same request won't always give the same answer—and the same model won't behave the same way month to month. Research demonstrates measurable behavioral drift across major large-language-model providers." Yes, it's true that LLMs are probabilistic, and they won't have consistent known outputs for known inputs. As learning design professionals, we should ...

Old Timey School House ( Lego version ) I came across a post on LinkedIn the other daaaay (read this in a Letterkenny cadence, if you know what that is  😆 ).  Here's a direct link to that post if you'd like to engage with it and its author . Over the past couple of years, I've been trying to get my mojo back when it comes to discussing issues like this. For a brief time, we had MOOCs (well, cMOOCs) with a daily recap of what was happening on Twitter using a specific hashtag, blogs, and other places on the web (Downes' gRSShopper, if anyone remembers this). Now things are difused though LinkedIn posts, people's blogs or substacks  branded blogs, or on Discord; and there isn't a place that collects this discussion.  Anyway, don't mind my "old man yelling at clouds" moment. So, one of the things that I've been observing over the last decade (or more) is that a tried and true narrative exists any time there is a new technology out there. Namely, ...

Last fall, I got to design and teach a course that I've been wanting to teach for a very long time : Language Learning and Technology (or, in other words, Computer-Assisted Language Learning - if you are in the language education field). It was a lot of fun to design, and a good experience to teach. I really enjoy design work (even though I don't get to do it often), and it's been ages since I taught a class that was a regular graduate class; all of my grad courses since 2021 have been Capstone courses, which I've treated mostly like a studio space with peer review.  There isn't a lot of "discussion" that happened in that kind of course. Anyway, the last time I taught a course with regular weekly discussions, we used Blackboard "Classic."  I've been using discussion forums on Canvas for a few years now through my OLC facilitation, and before that, I've had experience with a variety of LMS and their associated forum functionality.  They ar...

It's the winter break, and now that I have some actual downtime, I decided to do some Microsoft training. I think the last time I had the mental space to do any of this on the Microsoft Education was sometime in 2021 (if the last badge earned is any indication). Anyway, I went through the course offerings to see what's on tap at Microsoft, and I came upon a whole load of AI-related things. Cool. While I've been paying attention to this whole AI thing, I haven't really paid that  much attention to what corporate training is saying about their products (and how they might be used).  I've seen some colleagues post their badges on LinkedIn, so I thought I'd also follow the AI for Educators  learning path on Microsoft Education to get conversant with what others on my campus are experiencing through these trainings. Now, AI has been touted as a time saver on a variety of fronts, a claim that I think has yet to pan out.  As I was going through the AI for Educators ...

Academic AI-Slop (ChatGPT Produced) Happy end of the semester, and almost the end of the calendar year! Alright, I'll own up to it. The title of this post probably doesn't hit the mark ;-) One more calendar year is in the can, and for me, it was a year of (potential) endings, a year of (potentially) new beginnings, and a year where things changed much more so than I expected in my teaching practice. I won't dwell too much on the endings and beginnings in this post because those things are best viewed in retrospect, so they might take a few years to distill down to a post.  I did want to reflect a bit on my teaching practice. As I look back at the year of teaching, I think this year marked an inflection point: the year I started seeing AI-slop as student submissions.  Interestingly enough, it wasn't my graduate students, but my faculty learners  in some of the various workshops I facilitate that submitted such work as part of their coursework.  Can I prove it?  N...

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, ...