Stephen Downes

You might not like this, but this, I think, is the future of assessment: "Stealth assessment is a learning analytics method, which leverages the collection and analysis of learners' interaction data to make real-time inferences about their learning." According to the authors, the success of this approach depends on four sets of models: "Stealth assessment is a learning analytics method, which leverages the collection and analysis of learners' interaction data to make real-time inferences about their learning.' The central question is whether these models can be developed algorithmically, that is, by using AI. The full version is behind a paywall, but don't bother - you get the sense from the outline and most of the relevant work was already openly published here. Image: Rahimi.

Alex Usher paints a picture of generally declining government support for higher education since 1971. Through to 1996, this resulted in funding shortfalls altogether (this was ehen I was in higher ed). Since then, revenue generation has become the name of the game. But, he says - correctly, I think - this era is coming to an end. There's no support for continued tuition increases. And government has placed limits on international student recruitment. So institutions will have to focus on cutting costs. In the current model, this doesn't work - you can't cut your way to sustainability; each cut makes it more expensive to support the students that remain. The model - as I predicted in (checks) 1998 - has to change.

I think this is a good idea, independently of any preconceptions we may have about the outcome. "We need a comprehensive evaluation–a metaphorical "doll test"–that can reveal how AI shapes students' perceptions, attitudes, and learning outcomes, especially when used extensively and at early ages." Such studies should not look for specific things, should not cater to people's fears about AI, but should be widely designed so as to capture any effects, whatever sort they may be.

It is of course not a surprise to find three fake philosophy journals making it into the top 10 in Scopus rankings. This sort of fraud is rampant. But note how they accomplish this: "The trick is simple: The Addleton journals extensively cross-cite each other." It's a trick not limited to AI-generated journals, and results in some very unserious work being taken seriously.

Teachers won't win in a war against AIm writes Deanna Mascle. Nor is it an answer to encourage students to 'feed content into the capitalist techbro maw' (writers using expressions like that are hard to rake seriously). " The solution to AI's entry into the writing classroom is not hysteria but a return to the writing workshop. Know your students, know their writing, and create a community where your students know the writing of their peers (because you write together as a community) and slay the AI monster together."

This article describes how AIs are trained using 'the story plot game' whereby the systems are gradually trained to find missing words in a story pattern, leading to their ability to find a compelling story from nothing but pure static. "Just as the children in our game were asked to uncover the hidden plot, the model is instructed to remove the noisy pixels and return a coherent image." The effect of the prompt (or other context) pushes the generated story (or image) in certain directions, based on similarity with the input provided.