By the end of last year, a steady trickle of research had already begun to reveal the harm wrought by prolonged school closures and the transition to virtual instruction. But this fall brought the most definitive evidence yet of the scale of learning lost over more than two years of COVID-disrupted schooling: fresh testing data from the National Assessment of Educational Progress, sometimes called the Nation’s Report Card, pointing to severe declines in core subjects.
From DSC: While not minimizing the impact of the “learning loss” that is often written about, I do wonder if maybe the types of learning going on during the pandemic weren’t captured on a standardized test. Maybe the types of learning that our youth and families learned about help set them up for our present VOCA (Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity) world. And for a future where change doesn’t seem to be slowing down anytime soon.
Some of the types of learning that might not show up on the standardized tests include:
Dealing with life’s challenges and tumultuous changes
Being flexible
Adapting
The importance of having sufficient Internet connections and the corresponding hardware and software to keep on learning remotely
Where or to whom does one go to for help?
Also, as has been said elsewhere, bashing online learning or virtual instruction is often unfair. The remote learning that teachers and faculty members were thrust into lacked appropriate instructional design. Many teachers and faculty members hadn’t yet been trained on how to put together solid online-based courses and/or to use the tools that are required to offer such courses. Also, many in society didn’t have Internet access (or insufficient access), a quiet place to study and/or participate in online-based learning.
Professors, programmers and journalists could all be out of a job in just a few years, after the latest chatbot from the Elon Musk-founded OpenAI foundation stunned onlookers with its writing ability, proficiency at complex tasks, and ease of use.
The system, called ChatGPT, is the latest evolution of the GPT family of text-generating AIs. Two years ago, the team’s previous AI, GPT3, was able to generate an opinion piece for the Guardian, and ChatGPT has significant further capabilities.
In the days since it was released, academics have generated responses to exam queries that they say would result in full marks if submitted by an undergraduate, and programmers have used the tool to solve coding challenges in obscure programming languages in a matter of seconds – before writing limericks explaining the functionality.
Is the college essay dead? Are hordes of students going to use artificial intelligence to cheat on their writing assignments? Has machine learning reached the point where auto-generated text looks like what a typical first-year student might produce?
And what does it mean for professors if the answer to those questions is “yes”?
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Scholars of teaching, writing, and digital literacy say there’s no doubt that tools like ChatGPT will, in some shape or form, become part of everyday writing, the way calculators and computers have become integral to math and science. It is critical, they say, to begin conversations with students and colleagues about how to shape and harness these AI tools as an aide, rather than a substitute, for learning.
“Academia really has to look at itself in the mirror and decide what it’s going to be,” said Josh Eyler, director of the Center for Excellence in Teaching and Learning at the University of Mississippi, who has criticized the “moral panic” he has seen in response to ChatGPT. “Is it going to be more concerned with compliance and policing behaviors and trying to get out in front of cheating, without any evidence to support whether or not that’s actually going to happen? Or does it want to think about trust in students as its first reaction and building that trust into its response and its pedagogy?”
ChatGPT is incredibly limited, but good enough at some things to create a misleading impression of greatness.
it’s a mistake to be relying on it for anything important right now. it’s a preview of progress; we have lots of work to do on robustness and truthfulness.
1/Large language models like Galactica and ChatGPT can spout nonsense in a confident, authoritative tone. This overconfidence – which reflects the data they’re trained on – makes them more likely to mislead.
The thing is, a good toy has a huge advantage: People love to play with it, and the more they do, the quicker its designers can make it into something more. People are documenting their experiences with ChatGPT on Twitter, looking like giddy kids experimenting with something they’re not even sure they should be allowed to have. There’s humor, discovery and a game of figuring out the limitations of the system.
And on the legal side of things:
In the legal education context, I’ve been playing around with generating fact patterns and short documents to use in exercises.
From DSC: I was watching a sermon the other day, and I’m always amazed when the pastor doesn’t need to read their notes (or hardly ever refers to them). And they can still do this in a much longer sermon too. Not me man.
It got me wondering about the idea of having a teleprompter on our future Augmented Reality (AR) glasses and/or on our Virtual Reality (VR) headsets. Or perhaps such functionality will be provided on our mobile devices as well (i.e., our smartphones, tablets, laptops, other) via cloud-based applications.
One could see one’s presentation, sermon, main points for the meeting, what charges are being brought against the defendant, etc. and the system would know to scroll down as you said the words (via Natural Language Processing (NLP)). If you went off script, the system would stop scrolling and you might need to scroll down manually or just begin where you left off.
For that matter, I suppose a faculty member could turn on and off a feed for an AI-based stream of content on where a topic is in the textbook. Or a CEO or University President could get prompted to refer to a particular section of the Strategic Plan. Hmmm…I don’t know…it might be too much cognitive load/overload…I’d have to try it out.
And/or perhaps this is a feature in our future videoconferencing applications.
But I just wanted to throw these ideas out there in case someone wanted to run with one or more of them.
Along these lines, see:
Tell me you’re not going to want a pair of #AR glasses ?
One of the best decisions I’ve ever made as a prof is to start building my classes to start with 1 week of onboarding followed by just 12 weeks of content. Last 2 weeks are just catchup and reassessment. Course is basically over at Thanksgiving.
There’s a certain feeling that happens when a new technology adjusts your thinking about computing. Google did it. Firefox did it. AWS did it. iPhone did it. OpenAI is doing it with ChatGPT.
In 2023, businesses will realise that, in order to get out of FAQ Land, they need to synchronise business systems together to deliver personalised transactional experiences for customers.
“We finally have the technologies to do all the things we imagined 10 years ago.”
As I prepared to teach my first educational videography course earlier this year, I found that we lacked a common vocabulary for talking about how we design learning with video in mind. Since then, I’ve been advancing the term “video paratext” to reflect the myriad ways that we design educational guidance, prompts, activities or interactive elements to surround or be included within a video.
I pulled the word “paratext” from the field of poetry translation because, personally, I love the “paratext” that precedes or follows a poem—or even interrupts it. At poetry readings in particular, I lean into the words that a poet shares before or after reading each poem. Paratext helps me connect with and make sense of the poem.
Likewise, I ask educators to consider how to help students connect with videos through various prompts and activities that surround, or are included within, the video.” Might such “paratext” inspire students to take a closer look at a video they’ve watched, the way I might want to reread a poem to see how it works or what it means?
The Society for the Teaching of Psychology (STP) curates and distributes teaching and advising materials to all teachers of psychology (e.g., 4-year instructors, 2-year instructors, and high-school teachers). The resources available below are documents that can pertain to any aspect of teaching. (NOTE: Syllabi have their own listings under Project Syllabus.)
Instructors have generously shared classroom activities, annotated bibliographies, film guides, lab manuals, advising aids, textbook compendiums, and much more. Notations indicate those that developed from Instructional Resource Awards.
Collaborative learning is particularly helpful in statistics education. Technology can facilitate and promote collaborative exploration and inquiry allowing students to generate their own knowledge of a concept or new method in a constructivist learning environment. Group interactions have an important role in questioning and critiquing individual perspectives in a mutually supportive fashion so that a clear understanding of statistical concepts energy and knowledge of statistical ideas develops. Research has shown that it is important to discuss the output and results with the students and require them to provide explanations and justifications for the conclusions they draw from the output and to be able to communicate their conclusions effectively.
I get this question all the time in coaching and training sessions! First, let’s be clear about the definition of blended learning.
Blended learning is the combination of active, engaged learning online with active, engaged learning offline to provide students with more control over the time, place, pace, and path of their learning.
Key Statement: Intentionally developing a welcoming classroom environment increases student engagement and cultivates meaningful classroom relationships.
Keywords: engagement, motivation, relationship
Although researchers suggest flipped classrooms, engaging humor, and online polling, I have found taking a more personal approach to engagement to be successful, specifically the following three guidelines: show your human side, share your professional experiences and wisdom, and admit your mistakes.
A growth mindset can help us view feedback as a good thing, which ultimately makes performance reviews more effective. After all, we want to learn, grow, and improve our skills. People with a fixed mindset view criticism as an attack on their self-worth. Growth mindset, by contrast, leaves room for the possibility that we all have blind spots — and that your manager may have valuable insights on how you can hone your skills. Feedback, in other words, isn’t personal. A manager may critique our performance, but a growth mindset helps keep us from tying our performance to our identity.
What is Book Creator? Tips & Tricks — from techlearning.com by Erik Ofgang Book Creator is a free tool that allows users to create multimedia ebooks
Excerpt:
Book Creator is a free education tool designed to enable students to engage with class material in a direct and active way by creating multimedia ebooks with a variety of functions.
Available as a web app on Chromebooks, laptops, and tablets, and also as a standalone iPad app, Book Creator is a digital resource that helps students explore their creative sides while learning.
The tool lends itself well to active learning and collaborative projects of all kinds, and is appropriate for various subjects and age groups.
Implementing UDL with a Focus on Accessibility UDL is a proven methodology that benefits all students, but when instructors embrace universal design, they need to consider how their decisions will affect students with disabilities.
Some key considerations to keep in mind:
Instructional materials should not require a certain type of sensory perception.
A presentation that includes images should have accurate alternative text (also called alt text) for those images.
Transcripts and captions should be provided for all audio content.
Color alone should not be used to convey information, since some students may not perceive color (or have different cultural understandings of colors).
Student presentations should also follow accessibility guidelines. This increases the student’s workload, but it’s an excellent opportunity to teach the importance of accessibility.
There is a misconception that interest-led learning is not appropriate for a high school education in your homeschool. The good news is that all the same benefits of interest-led learning still apply in the middle and high school years.
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Think of an interest-led homeschool as one that functions more as a college than a high school. Just as a college student declares a major and the bulk of their study is in that topic area with supplemental general education, your interest-led high school can function the same way.
Allowing interests to guide the educational path you take in your high school has tremendous benefits including:
Less resistance
Less learner anxiety
Increased self-confidence in learning
More in-depth studies in topics of interest
Self-motivated learning that can be applied in later college and career settings
MADE Podcast on Branching Scenarios — from christytuckerlearning.com by Christy Tucker My interview for the MADE podcast on branching scenarios: when to use them, challenges, tools, planning, and getting started.
Excerpt:
MADE is the Media and Design in Education team for the University of Toronto. Inga Breede from this educational technology group recently interviewed me for their podcast. We talked about scenario-based learning and specifically about branching scenarios.
What we discussed
We covered several topics in our 20-minute conversation.
When should branching scenarios be used in learning experiences?
What are some of the challenges and limitations that designers typically come across when they’re building a branching scenario?
What are the key components to consider in the planning stage?
What are my favorite tools to use to build branching scenarios?
For learning designers who are interested in scenario building, where can they begin their journey of discovery?
Female students show a stronger preference for contributing to remote classes via text chat than their male counterparts, according to peer-reviewed research published in PLOS One, an open-access journal.
Researchers also found all students were more likely to use the chat function to support or amplify their peers’ comments than to diminish them.
Given these findings, the researchers suggested incorporating text chats into class discussions could boost female participation in large introductory science classrooms, where women are less likely to participate than men.
From the 45+ #books that I’ve read in last 2 years here are my top 10 recommendations for #learningdesigners or anyone in #learninganddevelopment
Speaking of recommended books (but from a more technical perspective this time), also see:
10 must-read tech books for 2023 — from enterprisersproject.com by Katie Sanders (Editorial Team) Get new thinking on the technologies of tomorrow – from AI to cloud and edge – and the related challenges for leaders
OpenAI has built the best Minecraft-playing bot yet by making it watch 70,000 hours of video of people playing the popular computer game. It showcases a powerful new technique that could be used to train machines to carry out a wide range of tasks by binging on sites like YouTube, a vast and untapped source of training data.
The Minecraft AI learned to perform complicated sequences of keyboard and mouse clicks to complete tasks in the game, such as chopping down trees and crafting tools. It’s the first bot that can craft so-called diamond tools, a task that typically takes good human players 20 minutes of high-speed clicking—or around 24,000 actions.
The result is a breakthrough for a technique known as imitation learning, in which neural networks are trained to perform tasks by watching humans do them.
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The team’s approach, called Video Pre-Training (VPT), gets around the bottleneck in imitation learning by training another neural network to label videos automatically.
“Most language learning software can help with the beginning part of learning basic vocabulary and grammar, but gaining any degree of fluency requires speaking out loud in an interactive environment,” Zwick told TechCrunch in an email interview. “To date, the only way people can get that sort of practice is through human tutors, which can also be expensive, difficult and intimidating.”
Speak’s solution is a collection of interactive speaking experiences that allow learners to practice conversing in English. Through the platform, users can hold open-ended conversations with an “AI tutor” on a range of topics while receiving feedback on their pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary.
It’s one of the top education apps in Korea on the iOS App Store, with over 15 million lessons started annually, 100,000 active subscribers and “double-digit million” annual recurring revenue.
If you last checked in on AI image makers a month ago & thought “that is a fun toy, but is far from useful…” Well, in just the last week or so two of the major AI systems updated.
You can now generate a solid image in one try. For example, “otter on a plane using wifi” 1st try: pic.twitter.com/DhiYeVMEEV
So, is this a cool development that will become a fun tool for many of us to play around with in the future? Sure. Will people use this in their work? Possibly. Will it disrupt artists across the board? Unlikely. There might be a few places where really generic artwork is the norm and the people that were paid very little to crank them out will be paid very little to input prompts. Look, PhotoShop and asset libraries made creating company logos very, very easy a long time ago. But people still don’t want to take the 30 minutes it takes to put one together, because thinking through all the options is not their thing. You still have to think through those options to enter an AI prompt. And people just want to leave that part to the artists. The same thing was true about the printing press. Hundreds of years of innovation has taught us that the hard part of the creation of art is the human coming up with the ideas, not the tools that create the art.
A quick comment from DSC: Possibly, at least in some cases. But I’ve seen enough home-grown, poorly-designed graphics and logos to make me wonder if that will be the case.
How to Teach With Deep Fake Technology — from techlearning.com by Erik Ofgang Despite the scary headlines, deep fake technology can be a powerful teaching tool
Excerpt:
The very concept of teaching with deep fake technology may be unsettling to some. After all, deep fake technology, which utilizes AI and machine learning and can alter videos and animate photographs in a manner that appears realistic, has frequently been covered in a negative light. The technology can be used to violate privacy and create fake videos of real people.
However, while these potential abuses of the technology are real and concerning that doesn’t mean we should turn a blind eye to the technology’s potential when using it responsibly, says Jaime Donally, a well-known immersive learning expert.
From DSC: I’m still not sure about this one…but I’ll try to be open to the possibilities here.
Recently, we spoke with three more participants of the AI Explorations program to learn about its ongoing impact in K-12 classrooms. Here, they share how the program is helping their districts implement AI curriculum with an eye toward equity in the classroom.
A hitherto stealth legal AI startup emerged from the shadows today with news via TechCrunch that it has raised $5 million in funding led by the startup fund of OpenAI, the company that developed advanced neural network AI systems such as GPT-3 and DALL-E 2.
The startup, called Harvey, will build on the GPT-3 technology to enable lawyers to create legal documents or perform legal research by providing simple instructions using natural language.
The company was founded by Winston Weinberg, formerly an associate at law firm O’Melveny & Myers, and Gabriel Pereyra, formerly a research scientist at DeepMind and most recently a machine learning engineer at Meta AI.
Associate Professor Constantinos Coursaris, Associate Professor Camille Grange, Pierre-Majorique Léger, Dr. Annemarie Lesage, and Professor Sylvain Sénécal, UX Design and Evaluation, HEC Montréal
Is GoodCourse the future of corporate learning? — from businesscloud.co.uk by Jonathan Symcox Micro-learning platform’s short-form content and TikTok-style explainer videos have the potential to transform development in the workplace
“The reason TikTok is so popular is because it’s short-form and engaging; the opposite to the usual two-hour training course.
“Spacing out micro-learning chunks across the course of a year gives you a much better chance of retaining it and actually acting on it. That’s why GoodCourse is built to engage a Gen Z workforce.”
