Multilitteratus Incognitus

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...

#wilty A few weeks ago I decided to ask ChatGPT to tell me a little bit about myself. Part of it was curiosity, while part of it was because I needed to write a short bio and I just felt uninspired.  The first time the query ran, ChatGPT told me that it didn't know who I was.  That's fine, I thought to myself, because it would be weird to be known like that. After all, I don't really consider myself to be anything big in academia. This past week I decided to try again just to see if anything had changed in the world of ChatGPT. And lo and behold it had! Now ChatGPT seems to know who I am...sort of... Prompt: Who is Dr. Apostolos Koutropoulos? Response: Dr. Apostolos Koutropoulos is an educator, researcher, and entrepreneur who has worked in various fields related to technology and education. He is currently an Associate Professor of Instructional Technology at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the founder of several EdTech companies . Koutropoulos has published ...

I thought I'd post a little comic relief before the week begins.  I decided to play a little bit with ChatGPT this week as well as DALL-E. I've been thinking about AI in Education, connected with an upcoming project, and I was thinking about the history of the pondering and discourse around AIEd. My goal here was to see what ChatGPT does when it is presented with prompts to produce something in a language other than English and to assess the quality of the non-English output.  It's not great, but it is rather humorous... Prompt: please give me a poem in greek about how yummy gyro souvlaki are Output: Γυροσουβλάκι, πικάντικο και νόστιμο με τη ζωή να σε δουν, δε θα σε στοιχειώσω πλάτη στο σκεύος, και μπριάτσα στο παράθυρο παραδειγματικός για την ελληνική κουζίνα ο κύρος. (Translation: Gyro souvlaki, succulent and delicious With life to see you, I will not enumerate Loin in the dish, and tomatoes in the window An example of Greek cuisine, the lord.) Prompt: write a poem in g...

This is Part V of V of a look back to 2022. The  first part discussed peer review requests in 2022 , and the  second part discussed professional development more broadly .  The third part branched off a bit from the second part,  discussing professional development a bit more from an academic development frame .  The fourth part reflected a bit on research and publishing . Concluding this look back at 2022, part V will explore some of my ponderings about... Determining where teaching fits in for me... This was an interesting point to ponder. My entry into teaching was about as predictable as my educational path: in other words, it really came out of nowhere! I was an average high school student and an average college student. It was during my first Master's when the change from average  to academician  began.  When thinking about my foray into teaching, looking back on it, I honestly think it was done on a dare ! I was advocating for a couple...

This is Part IV of V of a look back to 2022. I know, my blogging is lacking a bit of urgency LOL 😂. The  first part discussed peer review requests in 2022 , and the  second part discussed professional development more broadly .  The third part branched off a bit from the second part, discussing professional development a bit more from an academic development frame .  Continuing with that academic framing, part IV will explore some of my ponderings about... Determining where research fits in for me... At the end of last year I was reflecting on where research fits into my professional and hobby life; keeping in mind that my job does not require, nor does it make provisions for, me to do research - thus it's mostly a hobby.  My relationship with doing research, and where it fits in for me, has really evolved over the last decade. When I was attending my last Master's degree (before completing the degree), I had a hard time even imagining writing 7000 words...