Stephen Downes

For AI to support students, education institutions need to ensure employees have the skills and training to leverage new technologies. Today: 85 Total: 85 eSchool Media Contributors, eCampus News, 2024/05/03 [Direct Link]

I haven't tried either of these tools - I have a GPT4 account and use that. But I've been hearing that both of these are a step up. Here's the review: "Both tools have a lot to offer. If you need citations as part of your responses, Perplexity Pro wins hands-down. But be careful to not rule Gemini Advanced out, though. Its integration into Google Workspace means you will be using it in the future, one way or another." Each of the is about $20 a month, as is chatGPT-4. Your AI costs could add up faster than a cable bill if you're not careful.

Today: 181 Total: 181 Miguel Guhlin, TechNotes Blog, 2024/05/03 [Direct Link]

I made a comment during a talk earlier this week (slides, audio coming soon) that we cannot become ethical people merely by avoiding risk. That's why I challenge risk-based definitions of ethics in AI research and practice. We have to hope for and work toward something better. That's at the core of a lot of punk-based rebellion, and I will confess, if it has 'punk' in the name, I'm probably on board, because it implies building and doing and making for yourself. With that preamble (emphasis on the 'amble') I introduce this paper, which tries to do better: "cultivating hopepunk and solarpunk attitudes within the field of higher education and educational technology, as well as rewidening and rewilding higher education using utopian imagination, the article (20 page PDF) points towards more hopeful, preferable futures for the people and the planet."

Today: 59 Total: 313 Rikke Toft Nørgård, Kim Holflod, nternational Journal of Educational Technology in Higher Education, 2024/05/02 [Direct Link]

There are two stories here, the main story, and the story I think is written between the lines. The main story is that the small publisher is shutting down because the deluge of AI-generated content submitted is too much to wade through. Also, the content is poorly written: "It is soulless. There is no personality to it. There is no voice. Read a bunch of dialogue in an AI generated story and all the dialogue reads the same." Between the lines, though, is the likelihood that it's taking more and more time to distinguish between the AI-written and human-written content. And then what? How does a publisher decide what's worth publishing? Via Paul R. Pival.

Today: 50 Total: 318 Samantha Cole, 404 Media, 2024/05/02 [Direct Link]

This paper describes "MetaMate, an open-access web-based tool leveraging large language models (LLMs) for automated data extraction in educational systematic reviews and meta-analyses." While some may reasonable express scepticism about the use of AI to summarize papers for metastudies, I think it will be a positive to spend more time reading the papers and less time searching for them. Anyhow, the paper evaluated the software's precision and finds it compares well with human coders in most areas, though it's weaker in subjects such as Delivery Mode (81.25%), Intervention Duration (87.5%), and Academic Subject (87.88%).

Today: 57 Total: 334 Xue Wang, Gaoxiang Luo, EdArXiv, 2024/05/02 [Direct Link]

As usual, we could replace the term 'journalism' with 'education' and arrive at pretty much the same conclusion. "Twitch is a major player among live video platforms with 1.6 billion hours of content produced monthly, much of it by users age 25-34. That content is mostly livestreamed gameplay, but the app is an increasingly common distributor of news and information." Here's a livestream we did just last week (I livestream using YouTube instead of Twitch). Here's a playlist of 65 videos where I livestream my own experiences learning new software. More and more, I think, we'll just livestream learning experiences directly, and more and more, they won't be in the classroom. (p.s. I often livestream my gaming sessions as well).

Today: 42 Total: 280 Matt Cooper-Oregon, Futurity, 2024/05/02 [Direct Link]