Multilitteratus Incognitus

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, ...

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...