Multilitteratus Incognitus

Part VI of my ponderings on all the things and wayfinding in academia. This is the last part of this series - at least for now. I don't know. I think it's time to move from retrospection to some kind of next phase 🤓 Anyway, I saved the most controversial topic for last hahaha 😂 OK, so before I get the rotten tomatoes🍅🪰, hear me out!😅 I am a big proponent of lifelong learning. In fact, I joke, on this very blog, that I am "Pondering what my next degree should be 😂" Go ahead, look to the top of this page, I'll wait. In case you're from the distant future and my blog's subtitle has changed, it basically said what's in the quotes, and I added this subtitle after I completed my doctorate in 2021.  Anywhoooo.... where was I?  Ah yes, Lifelong learning ! Since completing my dissertation and graduating in 2021, I've tried my hand at professional development through various means. I've done a month-long synchronous online workshop on coaching (one...

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...

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...

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 ...

It's the end of the year, and the end of the term, so I look back at my own learning this past fall semester. This fall, I decided to revisit FutureLearn.  Over the past few years (since 2018ish?) I've been signing up for FutureLearn courses so that I can have them in my queue (in case they disappear). I guess I was optimistic in 2019...and 2020...and 2021 that I would get to these, so the queue of courses kept getting larger and larger 🤣. So, with the queue so long I decided to do something about it: The total number of courses I went through this fall (August through December was 36.  Some courses were outside of my wheelhouse but seemed interesting, while others are peripheral to what I am doing, so things were not always new.   Unsurprisingly, the courses that were on subject matters that I already knew something about went by rather fast since past information kept coming up, both my own previous knowledge and things that came up in previous FutureLearn courses...

I came across an article on Campus Technology last week titled  7 Tips for Listing MOOCs on Your Résumé , and it was citing a CEO of an employer/employee matchmaking firm.  One piece of advice says to create a new section for MOOCs taken to list them there. This is not all that controversial since I do the same.  Not on my resume, but rather on my extended CV (which I don't share anyone), and it serves more a purpose of self-documentation than anything else. The first part that got me thinking was the piece of advice listed that says "only list MOOCs that you have completed".  Their rationale is as follows: "Listing a MOOC is only an advantage if you've actually completed the course," Mustafa noted. "Only about 10 percent of students complete MOOCs, so your completed courses show your potential employer that you follow through with your commitments. You should also be prepared to talk about what you learned from the MOOC — in an interview — an...

OK, I am almost 'caught up' with the stuff I missed while I was on vacation (at least as far as 806 goes).  I remember receiving an email from Pearl indicating that Sir John Daniel would be presenting. Too bad the internet wasn't that reliable :-/  Oh well, thank goodness for recordings ;-) Sir John Daniel seemed like a pretty interesting  person, and very knowledgeable (with over 300 publications to his name) and he must be a respectable human being because he wouldn't hold 32 honorary degrees from 17 different countries if people only liked him for his scholarship.  I guess the bar has been set for me (haha! :-) ). The only area where I surpass him is in the amount of MOOCs I've taken vs how many he's taken.  Even as a recording it was great to get to 'meet' such a distance education heavyweight (maybe I can email him and we can go for some coffee and discuss the future of DE next time I am around his neck of the woods in Canada ;-)  ). In any ...

A number of threads converged last week for me, and all of the threads exist in a continuum.  The first thread was one that began in the class that I am teaching this summer, INSDSG 601: Foundations of Instructional Design & Learning Technology . One of the things that we circle back to as a class (every couple of weeks) are the notions of instructor and designer.  Where does one end and the other begin in this process?  It's a good question, and like many questions, the answer is "it depends".  The metaphor that I use is the one that calls back to two sides of the same coin.  In order for instruction to ultimately be successful you need both sides to work together.  An excellent design will fail in the hands of a bad instructor, and a bad design will severely hold back a good instructor (assuming that there is an instructor and it's not self-paced learning). There is the other side too: as instructional design students we were told that we would be w...

Here is the recording of the live session I was in where Matt Crosslin talked about the dual layer MOOC design.  I still question the notion of assessments in MOOCs :-)

The other day I came across this PhD Comics strip on grading rubrics. As a trained instructional designer (and having worked with instructional designers on and off since I started university as an undergraduate student) the concept of rubrics has really stuck with me.  That said,  I generally struggle with rubrics. In theory they are brilliant - a way to objectively measure how well someone has done on whatever assessable assignment. On the other hand, they are not that great and they could be a means for discontent and discord in the classroom (the "why did you indicate that my mark is in category B when it's clearly, in my student mind, in category A?" argument). For this reason I try to create rubrics that are as detailed as I can make them.  That said, it seems that detailed rubrics (like detailed syllabi) are rarely read by students ;-) Another issue arises with inherited courses. When I've inherited courses from other people that's also a source of...

The other day I was reading a blog posted by Rebecca on marking and getting a sense of that impostor syndrome creeping in . I love reading posts like these because I still consider myself new  to the teaching, even though I've been doing it for a couple of years now.  Some of the things that she describes are things that I have thought or experienced, and some are not. In terms of an impostor syndrome, it hasn't come out for me with grading assignments.  In the past, when I have momentary panics or thoughts that impostor syndrome is setting in, it's usually around content-area knowledge!  Early on, when I started teaching, I wasn't even a doctoral student.  I was a practitioner and life-long learner, with a little research under my belt.  I knew enough, but I didn't consider myself the font of all knowledge - and that was scary.  What would learners think of me?  What if I was in a 'pop quiz' type of situation and the learners asked me some...

In my quest to catch up on Pocket - before the news becomes stale, I came across this post by cogdog on seeking the evidence behind digital badges . The anatomy of the Open Badge include the possibility of including links to evidence for the skill that you are being badged for.    Of course, just because there is an associated metadata field available for people to use,  it doesn't mean that people actually use it! I know that the evidence part of badges is something that is often touted as an improvement over grades in courses, or diplomas, because grades don't indicate what specific skills you've picked up, and this problem is a bit worse with diplomas and graduation certificates because you can't evenly compared one candidate to another (let's say in my case it would be comparing me to some other computer science major from another university - or heck even my own university). Anatomy of badge, by ClassHack So, in theory, badges are superior to th...