Multilitteratus Incognitus

When I first started teaching graduate courses back in 2012 (wow...time flies), my hallmark course was titled The Design and Instruction of Online Courses .  Most of my students were folks who were learning to be instructional designers, or faculty who wanted to learn to teach online and had some years of teaching in person under their belt.  One of the most common things I heard in that class was that it was easier when teaching on campus to determine if students were engaged or paying attention.  Just by looking at them, you could determine this by their facial expressions and body language. Eh...OK🤷‍♂️.  While I don't disagree that some people may have this ability some of the time with some of the students in front of them, I still think that people tend to overestimate their ability to do this. Fast forward to today, browsing through the r/Professors subreddit, one tends to find posts asking fellow redditors how they can tell if their student's work is generate...

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 ...

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...

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...

ChatGPT Patch of the Wise Owl Recently, I've been playing around with image generation in ChatGPT, not so much to create output that I plan on using seriously for something (although some output do end up on this blog as post images), but more to see how easy (or hard) it is to get something from my mind's eye into some kind of machine output.  I am also curious to see how the LLM interprets what I input (that element of surprise). I only really have the free credits that OpenAI gives to its free users, to my experimentation is basically 10-15 minutes of futzing around while watching TV in the evening. As I was playing around the other day, this scene from Star Trek: The Next Generation came to mind. In Schisms ,   the crew had been abducted by an alien race but had no memory of it (think Alien Encounters of the Third Kind ). As they start to remember small elements of their experience, they all try to piece together their memories so that they can come up with a reconstr...

  A bit of a kerfulle happened a few weeks ago, and it's just indicative of how the rest of life is  going what I've had this post in draft form for almost a month while I've plugged away at it... Annnyyywhoooo🙄 The kerfuffle was kicked off by Wiley's  Open Educational Language Models initial post describes OELM as bring together a collection of openly licensed components that allow an openly licensed language model to be used easily and effectively in support of teaching and learning.  In his follow up post, Wiley is  open pondering/brainstorming about OELMs, Wiley discusses a separation of form from content, similar to how text on the web is separated from the formatting CSS layer . Wiley's original posts are intersting and do provide some points to ponder. I don't necessarily agree in whole with what  he proposes, but I can see a grain of something interesting there, and certainly worth pondering and discussing. Maybe I've gotten a bit more "get o...

All right!  With all that pondering and throat-clearing done (see my previous series of posts), I was wondering what piques my interest in this LLM-hyped world from a practical side . I've been somewhat active in critiquing this whole thing over the past two years, but beyond creating AI images for the blog (or to amuse myself), or using ChatGPT to make silly little genre-busting poems (again amusement and play), and or using ChatGPT to give me a boilerplate letter that I can then tweak (marginal utility, but I guess if organization ask for things that can be boilerplated, they get something that is boilerplate).  I don't mean to dismiss the value of experimentation or play, they are valuable and low-stress ways to get to know a tool and then you may get an AHA!!! moment of a sort. I've been thinking of something more structured.  I was listening to a relatively recent episode (it was recent when I started writing this darned post!_ of the Vergecast , titled  The Ch...

[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...

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...