Multilitteratus Incognitus

[warning - a bit of long post] Well, here we are! The end of 2023! It seems like only yesterday that we were starting to hear some whispers about this thing called "ChatGPT," but it was in fact about a year ago, and as you know we moved pretty quickly through that hype cycle.  Don't worry, this entire YIR (year in review) won't be about ChatGPT 😂.   As I was pondering other academic-y things over the start of my winter break, I was looking back at the year to see how things moved along.  I think I've written (or at least said) this before, but before I started my doctorate I felt like I had a rhythm so far as academic communities, activities, and outputs go, and things got disrupted while I was pursuing my EdD.  Coming out of that doctoral process, I felt like I took one exit off the freeway, while many of my other colleagues and friends took another. It feels like the end of a doctoral program is about rediscovering who you are and where things fit.  It s...

Gazing at Learning The other day I was doing some reflecting on my own "return" to being a learner after my doctoral journey ended. Last semester I took a course on negotiation, which I saw relevant to both work and also for my role as a member of our union's contract bargaining team this round.  This course was a graduate-level course, and is typically taken either in the first or second term of a graduate student's journey in the Conflict Resolution program at my university.  While the semester was busy, I rarely broke an (academic) sweat.  The course was challenging, don't get me wrong, but I found the number of readings manageable (since I have my TTS routine), and the number of words that I had to write for papers was 5,000-6,000 cumulatively in the semester (and maybe another 8,000 across the forum posts throughout the term). In the grand scheme of things, this feels normal for a graduate course (from a design point of view), but it feels  easy having gone ...

Yesterday evening I came across a post by Tony Bates where he shared some findings from some recent reports on faculty (and student) preferences for learning in a post-pandemic world . I haven't read the reports yet, but I had some initial thoughts based on Tony's high-level overview of those three reports.   Two big things jumped out at me. The first is that students and faculty aren't on the same page (for the most part), and faculty still overwhelmingly prefer on-campus.  Tony notes that, at least in the EDUCASE case, compared to pre-covid numbers, more faculty have expressed an interest in something other than purely face-to-face (about 79% pre-covid, with 50% now). Tyton Partner's Analysis of Modality Preferences The first thing I noticed above is where students and faculty fall in their respective preferences.  If taken together, something other than purely face-to-face is a clear winner for student preferences.  Now, what that something else actually is....

Bing Image Creator: A Syllabus Wow...it's been almost two months since I started this post! It's hard to believe that it took this long to return to this thought experiment.  Just to remind the diligent reader of this blog, this came out of not one, not two, but multiple places on the web (including professional development conferences!) whereby instructional designers (and other professionals) were demonstrating the use of GPT to put together quick and dirty course outlines for the busy adjunct. While I've got issues with this framing, I'll put those aside for now.  I thought that it might be interesting to actually go through the process to create a course outline and syllabus for a course that I used to teach often before I started my doctoral journey. The course is INSDSG 684: The Design and Instruction of Online Courses , a graduate course in the MEd program of Instructional Design at UMass Boston. I think it's important to start with a course that you know so...

NightCafe: Professor dealing with Digital Burnout  It seems like I am operating in Greek Time for #etmooc2 😅. This is a post for the second session of #etmooc which dealt with ethical issues around AI in education (and maybe AI broadly).  Since the third session record has not been posted yet, I'll make the argument that I am still "on time" for some commentary on this 😂. This post has been in my drafts for 2 weeks now.  With the end of the term upon us, I guess I have a little more time to process some thoughts. In any case, when I started to put together this blog post a couple of weeks ago, I was signed up for a symposium (or mini-conference?) hosted by a notable LMS provider, and of course, AI was the hot topic du jour.  One of the sessions that I attended was hosted by instructional designers, using ChatGPT, to assist in getting started with course development. Especially if that course development came at the 11th hour when an adjunct finds out that they are ...

Me again, anime-style AI (or at least what nightCafe thinks I look like in this setting) Alright, so here's my final post on session one of #etmooc2.  You can find post 1 and post 2 on this blog. For this post, I thought I'd post some prompts and responses from my playing with ChatGPT.  Fair warning, I tried to write a profanity-laden email (it sounds badly written IMO, but still has lots of profanities). I tried to channel the r/antiwork subreddit. I guess a content warning is appropriate. Here are some more ChatGPT prompting...about me. I have underlined  all of the information I think is wrong This can be wrong either to a small extent - i.e., it's exaggerated; or to a large extent - i.e., it's factually wrong. Prompt: Please give me an author biography for Dr. Apostolos Koutropoulos that is 200-300 words Attempt 1: Dr. Apostolos Koutropoulos is an educator, researcher, and advocate for open education and open technologies. He was born in New York City and raised ...

Another me in a Star Trek setting, by NightCafe This is a continuation of my previous post from the other day . I didn't want to leave things in all negative terms, so here's part II with some thoughts on how AI might be used (or at least areas of AI that I am warming up on).  This isn't a posting about the current state of AI, but rather a 5 (or 10) year look out.  This is mostly inspired by a recent tweet by Tim Fawns , who asked folks to think not about the just present, but the near future. So...with that in mind, here are some use-cases that I can think of (some of which have been borrowed and adapted from the first #etmooc session). Use Case 1: Getting your biography starter pack from ChatGPT.  I like writing.  I don't like writing about myself .  It feels very toot your own horn -like, and I've always never liked those people .  I acknowledge that to get ahead in life, and in academia, you have to do some of that self-promotion. Still, I don't like w...

Me in a Star Trek-themed anime AI image Just as session 2 of #etmooc2 is scheduled for this evening, I just caught up with the first session over the last few days. The recording can be found here , and it's funny that it took me 3 days to complete.  Part of it was because I could only really do 20-minute increments (with notes and reactions), and part of it was because I paused to experiment with things mentioned. Part of the session was really dedicated to identifying ways in which this kind of technology can help with what we do.  Essentially flipping the script and going from "ZOMG! ChatGPT is used for cheating" getting to "how to use ChatGPT to help us with learning?"  There were a number of examples used in this brainstorming session which present for red flags for me.  I did think of a few examples of my own that may (or may not) be good examples of what you could use tech like this for.  I'll start with my concerns though. Example 1: Using ChatGPT to...

Hey!  Blogging two days in a row! Who would have thunk it?  Well, I did tell Dave I'd read his post , and it did move some gears in the ol' noggin' so I guess something is still working upstairs ;-) I think you should go and read Dave's post, since I'm just going to reflect and react on a few select points. Dave introduced me to an article by Schinske and Tanner (2014) where they describe four purposes for assessments, those purposes being feedback, motivation, student ranking, and the objective evaluation of knowledge.  There were two things that jumped out at me: (1) the objective evaluation of a learner's knowledge and (2) ranking learners.   From a philosophical perspective, I don't think that it's the instructor's job to rank learners. As an instructor, I am not there to indicate whether Tom is marginally better at X than Dick. My job is to help learners go get through a particular corpus of knowledge that they should be able to use to do somet...

 Another AI-based image tool shared in ETMOOC that I thought I would try out.  This one is called NightCafe and it creates images based on a prompt and a particular style from its styles list.    My prompt for this one was: Show me a small group of Greek students huddled around a cafe table, drinking caffeinated beverages, while vigorously discussing philosophy. It's interesting that in my mind I had "college students" but these images remind me a lot of Rennaissance Italy (Assassin's Creed II time period) rather than a more modern Athenian Cafe with Freddo Cappucino and Frappe coffees...

I don't often read IHE, but when I do it usually bubbles up from my Twitter feed 😂. The gem that popped up this morning is one professor's lament about how ChatGPT bested him and his Critical Pedagogy practices. While I am happy that someone's attitudes have been adjusted by this experience, I was surprised to read, near the end of the opinion piece that he was familiar with at least some of the principles of critical pedagogy...🙄.  Getting sucked into the paranoia of "Cheaters! Cheaters everywhere!" doesn't sound like someone who's been practicing critical pedagogy for very long. Anyway - I thought I'd share some of my reactions to the article which I jotted down as I was reading it...(sometimes  I feel like these would be better as TikTok Takes 😂) "I shared with colleagues that “All we have to do is ask ‘Did you write this?’” and then copy and paste the student work into the prompt box." My first question is: did you actually research h...

I've been a bit "behind" in my participation in ETMOOC 2.0 . I've been enjoying keeping an eye on Discord, but I haven't really been participating as much as I would like to.  In a couple of weeks, the semester ends, so mental bandwidth should be freed up a bit ;-). This past week one of the streams that crossed my little part of Twitter was about teachers using ChatGPT to give feedback to learners on the homework/essays that they've submitted for grading.  I managed to avoid most of this discussion - probably a symptom of having rolled my eyes so hard I almost knocked myself senseless 😂.   When I stopped for a moment to consider the possibility of this thing being useful for teaching (assuming we put aside any ethical or legal issues that come with uploading a student's paper into this kind of platform), I was reminded of a comic meme that I saw on the ChatGPT subreddit last week (or was it two weeks ago).  While it is more focused on the workplace envir...

  If only it weren't for those darned kids! Admittedly I haven't been blogging a lot these days. I keep meaning to come back and actually get into the habit of writing more frequently, but as one of my Twitter acquaintances once observed, you make a note of it to come back to, but then lose motivation (loosely paraphrasing Matt Crosslin - I think).  In any case, à propos of TurnItIn's announcement this past week that they will now have an AI writing detector and AI writing resource center for educators  as part of their offerings (wooooo! /s), I thought I'd spend a few minutes jotting down some thoughts. Warning: I am a  bit of a Dr. Crankypants on this one... If you haven't been paying attention, the early research is out on these kinds of detector schemes. People have been playing around with ChatGPT and AI author detectors and the results are in. These detectors just aren't good. Even GPTZero "The World's #1 AI Detector" (🙄) isn't all that ...

This week a new collaborative article was published in the Asian Journal of Distance Education  titled " Speculative Futures on ChatGPT and Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI): A Collective Reflection from the Educational Landscape ." Our friend and colleague Aras Bozkurt invited us to participate in a piece using speculative methodology, something new to me, to explore positive, and not so positive, narratives around the use of AI in education. I love collaborating on this type of output because I learn so much both from engaging in the experience as well as from other participants (and there were 36 of us in this endeavor).  It was great to be in the same academic and social mindspace with old friends and acquaintances from past collaborations, as well as work with new folks. The published document is 78 pages long, so a short book if we consider page breaks between stories and perhaps some illustrations, which the original article doesn't have, but someone in our c...