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Introducing the GPT Store
OpenAI, 2024/01/10

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OpenAI has launched a 'GPT Store' "to help you find useful and popular custom versions of ChatGPT." One such app is Consensus, which looks at some 200 million academic papers to craft its responses. Naturally I asked it about myself. I think it's telling that the initial apps listed have a lot to do with online learning (here's the full list of 'featured GPTs', quoted):

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Time to rethink Canada's international education strategy
Moira MacDonald, University Affairs, 2024/01/10

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The main point of this story, to my mind, is let people know that the Canadian Bureau of International Education (CBIE) is "working on a code of ethics that it would like to become mandatory for every Canadian educational institution approved by a provincial or territorial government to host international students" (see page 10 (part 2) here). There are to be sure issues surrounding international education today, not just in Canada, but in every nation looking for international tuition revenue (and in Canada's case, potential future immigrants). I like the idea of being open to international students, but the way it's set up feels exploitative to me. Is that something the ethical code could address?

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Fragments: #WorkingOutLoud as Belief System
Julian Stodd, Julian Stodd's Learning Blog, 2024/01/10

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There's a tendency I often (probably unfairly) associate with Americans, which is the tendency to represent everything as a belief system, analogous to a political idea or article of religion. This reduces everything to something that needs to be campaigned for, advocated for, or proselytized. And of course that would be an inappropriate way to view the world; we don't 'believe in' the weather, we don't 'believe in' a pain in our finger. Much - if not most - of our experience of the world is not cognitively penetrable - that is, is not influenced by whether or not we believe it. So for that reason I push back against this tendency, and that includes its use here, in what converts a pedagogical process of 'working out loud' into a belief system. It's not. You don't need to believe in it. It doesn't matter whether you advocate for it.

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How to Unpack an Ideological Suitcase
Michael J. Petrilli, Education Next, 2024/01/10

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Overall I would say I am in agreement with Michael Petrilli here, though possibly not for the same reasons, and there are some caveats. No matter. He argues that "when aiming for equity, we should level-up instead of leveling-down." That makes intuitive sense. Nobody wants to "make all kids equal by making them equally unable to learn." But some forms of advantage cannot by definition be applied to all. A degree gives you an advantage in the job market because most people don't have one; give everybody a degree and your advantage disappears. The same with things like enrollment at a prestige institution, access to an exclusive circle of contacts, membership in the right golf course, etc. That's why it's so hard to focus on advantages by inputs, that is, to "focus on closing gaps between affluent students and their disadvantaged peers, not between high-achieving students and their lower-achieving peers." Not that I disagree with Petrilli here. But we need an analysis of what those advantages are - and this is exactly the sort of analysis to which some critics are most vehemently opposed.

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How to think like a Bayesian
Michael G Titelbaum, Psyche, 2024/01/10

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This article is really wordy but it also addresses a really important concept: prior probabilities, and in particular, Bayes's theorem. Scroll down for the 'key points'. There are some good examples; I like this one: suppose there's a disease that affects 1 in a hundred people. But there's a test for the disease, and it's 90% accurate. So you test someone, and it indicates that the person has the disease. How likely is it that they actually do have the disease? You might be tempted to say '90%'. But what Bayes's theorem tells us is that because the prior probability is so low - only one in a hundred - that for every one person who actually has the disease there are 10 people who were mislabeled by the test. So even if the test is accurate there's only about an 11 percent chance that they actually have the disease. Here's an online Bayes Calculator you can play with.

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10 Neat Ways to Group Students in the Art Room for Collaborative Projects
Jackie Myers, The Art of Education University, 2024/01/10

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I don't use technology - whether made of popsicle sticks or anything else - to group people in a room. I just start at one side of the room and start counting numbers - "one, two, three, four..." - assigning each person a number. The people with the same number become a group. It's fast and very effectively shuffles people. That is all.

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Plagiarism Detection Tools Offer a False Sense of Accuracy
Tara García Mathewson, The Markup, 2024/01/10

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This is not the first time someone has said this, and it won't be the last, as it becomes apparent that plagiarism tools - whether based on AI or not - are an unreliable indicator of the originality of a paper. Numerous factors play into this - that there are only so many ways to make a point, that there are various ways to reference an original source, that the reuse of a phrase may be incidental rather than core to the paper. And so on. I mean, I wrote the preceding sentences off the top of my head, after having read the article, and yet I couldn't swear that they are 100% original and would pass a plagiarism checker. Would it matter if there was some overlap? Should I check everything I write against TurnItIn? You know what would be better than a system that makes blanket assertions of cheating? A system that simply inserted a link to the original text. Then it doesn't matter what out intentions were, doesn't matter whether we used quotation marks, doesn't matter whether we were 'cheating'.

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Make the indie web easier
Giles Turnbull, gilest.org, 2024/01/10

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This post has earned some discussion on Mastodon and I admit it appeals to me also. "If we seriously, truly want the independent, non-enshittified personal web to flourish, we need to make it easier for people to join in." I am totally 100% in agreement with this. But this isn't it: "Why not build static website generators that people can just unzip, upload to the shared hosting they've just paid for, and start using via a browser?" This is way too complex. I've been thinking about this a lot. It needs to be as easy to start as clicking on a button, entering your email, and clicking on a link in your email. Now I don't want to start a project I can't finish, but this would be a starting point, wouldn't it?

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What It Takes to Be an Effective Public Scholar
Frederick Hess, Education Next, 2024/01/10

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I'm not going to be on Frederick Hess's 2024 Edi-Scholar Public Influence Rankings, and it's OK, I'm not bothered by it a bit. But what does bother me is the idea that Hess would think his representation of "what it takes to be an effective public scholar" is in any sense correct. As I've often said in the past, list like these are not assessments of quality, they're marketing tools, a tool to lobby to behave in a certain way, prioritize certain functions, or say the right things. University ranking initiatives have been playing this game for years (at least, until they started pulling out of them). And in just that way, to get on Hess's list, you have to already be what Hess thinks is a good public scholar - probably from Stanford, Harvard or Columbia; affiliated with book publishers; and engaged with the (U.S.) education press (and therefore talking about the issues that matter to the press, like charter schools and culture wars). And, of course, selected by Hess & co.  to actually be a part of the rankings. Obviously I don't do any of that, and that's why I don't care whether I'm on Hess's list. You shouldn't care about Hess's list either.

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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