Multilitteratus Incognitus

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 ...