Multilitteratus Incognitus

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...

Alright, #MassiveTeaching (or under its official name: "Teaching Goes Massive: New Skills Need") on Coursera is over, that's all he wrote (and then deleted, and someone else recovered). All joking aside, I decided to participate in the final assignment/test of the course which ultimately turned out to be a Level 1 evaluation. I've included the three questions in my previous blog post about this. What I neglected to include in my previous blog post was a fourth question which went something like this: Would you recommend this course to someone else? The requirement to "pass" the assessment was to grade 4 submissions. I ended up "Grading" 14 submission because I was really surprised at the results. Of these 14 graded assignments, 8 of them were positive (57%) and these respondents claimed that they would, or have already recommended the course to their colleagues. One person commented that this course would be good for professional development an...

Well, I am not quite sure what to make of this just yet, but I am keeping an eye on the situation to see how it gets resolved.  What situation am I talking about?  The seemingly under-reported (or not reported at all) situation happening in the course Teaching Goes Massive: New Skills Required , which is offered by Paul-Olivier Dehaye of the University of Zurich.  I have to say that initially the course description did not draw me in because anyone who claims that they will teach you about MOOC teaching is either naive, or selling snake-oil since the developments are so new.  I would prefer an approach, like a collaborative exploration (pioneered by a colleague), or something like #rhizo14 on the topic.  In any case, I re-read the description (below) and decided that I had 3 weeks to devote to the course.  My approach would have been a cMOOC style approach since the instructor didn't have a set syllabus. This way I could, potentially, continue to explore...

Well, Week 4 has begun in the graduate course I am teaching, and it was time to tally up some numbers to see if any secret badges needed to be released and awarded to students in the course.  Of the 8 secret badges I designed for this course, four of them have been discovered by students one-quarter of the way through the course! This is actually pretty nifty!  So what are the secret badges that were revealed this weekend? Helping Hand Description: A helping hand can be like a compass showing you the way to the solution. Criteria: To earn this badge a learner needs to respond to at least two fellow learner's troubleshooting question with an answer that gets the initial learner "unstuck" from where they currently are stuck in their project, or in the course. More info: The idea behind this badge was to reward students who help out others students with some of the technical issues in class. For example a student may not know how to "collect" discussion ...

Alone in the Dark (DOS, Mac System 7.5) So I'm back to another cMOOC arena, yay!!! Just by chance I came across a Rhizomatic Learning  course offered by Dave Cormier (of MOOC fame), and the course is called Rhizomatic Learning - The Community is the curriculum. The course spans six weeks and this first week was simply an introduction, but as far as intros go, this has been quite a busy week!  It's nice to see fellow cMOOC participants from previous MOOCs like Dave, Jaap, Rebecca and Penny, but also fellow locals, from UMass Boston, Peter Taylor. This first week we are tackling the topic of cheating as a weapon for learning. We were encouraged to think about how we can use the idea of cheating as a tool to take apart the structures that we work in; and to think about what this says about learning,  power and how we (the participants) see teaching.  There have been quite a few blogs up to this point, that I have not had an opportunity to read yet, but I thought ...

"Design Gold" badge Happy and Prosperous 2014 to anyone who is reading this :-) Since it's a new year, and the semester is starting in about a month's time, I've decided to spend the month-and-a-half between semesters thinking about the course that I teach: The Design and Instruction of Online Courses,  a course for graduate level instructional design students.  I was first assigned the course last year, and having been familiar with it (even though I had never been the instructor of record before), I wanted to start experimenting with badges then-and-there.  Of course, things weren't ripe just yet, so I decided to focus more on the day-to-day stuff for my first semester and have a look at the reading material each week.  I decided to put my creative energies into testing out a weekly recap podcast as a way of reaching out to learners in the course. With the course materials kinda set (still tinkering with a few learning modules), and the podcast id...

This semester I was planning on returning to the classroom, the language classroom, to get back into French.  The last time I took a formal french class was my senior year in high school and it was fourth year french (mostly literature from what I remember). In any case, my freshman year in college I frequented Yahoo! Chatrooms to practice my french and I did have a pen-pal for a while. Around 1999 our paths diverged and that was the last time I wrote in french (also the last time I regularly "spoke" it as well). In any case, I was planning on taking a 300 level french course on composition and stylistics. I attended a few class sessions and the course was challenging, but just at the right level for someone as rusty as I am. Due to work, and the fact that I just can't sit for 90 minutes two times per week I decided to stop auditing the course and attempt a different method.  I figured that there are enough french speakers on the internet to help me out.  I thought I wo...