writing - Learning Ecosystems

I’m a Student. You Have No Idea How Much We’re Using ChatGPT. — from chronicle.com by

Excerpt:

There’s a remarkable disconnect between how professors and administrators think students use generative AI on written work and how we actually use it. Many assume that if an essay is written with the help of ChatGPT, there will be some sort of evidence — it will have a distinctive “voice,” it won’t make very complex arguments, or it will be written in a way that AI-detection programs will pick up on. Those are dangerous misconceptions. In reality, it’s very easy to use AI to do the lion’s share of the thinking while still submitting work that looks like your own.

The common fear among teachers is that AI is actually writing our essays for us, but that isn’t what happens. You can hand ChatGPT a prompt and ask it for a finished product, but you’ll probably get an essay with a very general claim, middle-school-level sentence structure, and half as many words as you wanted. The more effective, and increasingly popular, strategy is to have the AI walk you through the writing process step by step.

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From DSC:
The idea of personalized storytelling is highly intriguing to me. If you write a story for someone with their name and character in it, they will likely be even more engaged with the story/content. Our daughter recently did this with a substitute teacher, who she really wanted to thank before she left (for another assignment at another school). I thought it was very creative of her.

How Your Students are Using AI — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman

Excerpts:

Here’s are the five biggest lessons we’ve learned:

1. Many students are already embracing AI in their day to day study
2. Students need AI education, and fast.
3. Students have a preference for free or low-cost alternatives to often expensive, paid-for services
4. Students find value in personalised, dialogue-based learning experiences
5. Ed Tech companies will need to evolve in order to survive.
  .

Curricular Resources about AI for Teaching (CRAFT) — from craft.stanford.edu
A project from the Stanford Graduate School of Education

Excerpt:

We’re building resources to teach AI literacies for high school and college instructors and assembling them into a full curriculum that will be deployed in a course with the National Educational Equity Lab offered in Fall 2023.
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AI video is getting insanely powerful.

Soon, you’ll be able to create a Hollywood-grade movie from your pocket.

Here’s the most breathtaking AI-generated videos I’ve seen:

— The AI Solopreneur (@aisolopreneur) May 11, 2023

ChatGPT has changed the world.

It does lack in some areas, but my favorite use case is leveraging it to teach me things twice as fast.

Here are the 10 best prompts to learn anything faster:

— Rowan Cheung (@rowancheung) May 11, 2023

Why I’m Excited About ChatGPT — from insidehighered.com by Jennie Young
Here are 10 ways ChatGPT will be a boon to first-year writing instruction, Jennie Young writes.

Excerpt:

But from my perspective as a first-year writing program director, I’m excited about how this emerging technology will help students from all kinds of educational backgrounds learn and focus on higher-order thinking skills faster. Here are 10 reasons I’m excited about ChatGPT.

? stfu and take my money

This is the most impressive campaign I’ve seen from a mega brand so far using AI & StableDiffusion.

Would love a breakdown of how this was all done.

pic.twitter.com/H5ryW3owi4

— Linus (???) (@LinusEkenstam) May 12, 2023

edX Debuts Two AI-Powered Learning Assistants Built on ChatGPT — from press.edx.org; with thanks to Matthew Tower for this resource
edX plugin launches in ChatGPT plugin store to give users access to content and course discovery
edX Xpert delivers AI-powered learning and customer support within the edX platform

Excerpt:

LANHAM, Md. – May 12, 2023 – edX, a leading global online learning platform from 2U, Inc. (Nasdaq: TWOU), today announced the debut of two AI-powered innovations: the new edX plugin for ChatGPT and edX Xpert, an AI-powered learning assistant on the edX platform. Both tools leverage the technology of AI research and deployment company OpenAI to deliver real-time academic support and course discovery to help learners achieve their goals.

Three-Dimensional Narratives Spring from Antique Books in Emma Taylor’s Meticulous Paper Sculptures [Mothes]

On 05/03/2023, in art, creativity, design, reading, writing, by Daniel Christian

Three-Dimensional Narratives Spring from Antique Books in Emma Taylor’s Meticulous Paper Sculptures — from thisiscolossal.com by Kate Mothes

Also see:

Barry Underwood Illuminates Human Presence in the Landscape in Geometric Light Sculptures — from thisiscolossal.com by Kate Mothes

Poetry writing about Flint murals allows for ‘creative freedom’ in this high school classroom [Goetz]

On 04/28/2023, in animation, art, creativity, education, Emotion, engagement / engaging students, history, ideas, instructional design, K-12 related, Learning Experience Design, Michigan, society, sociology, student-related, teachers, writing, youth, by Daniel Christian

Poetry writing about Flint murals allows for ‘creative freedom’ in this high school classroom — from mlive.com by Dylan Goetz (behind paywall)

Excerpt:

It’s a new tradition in the curriculum of the senior-level English class, where teacher Carrie Mattern asks her students to seek out a mural in Flint and write poetry about it.

This year, there was a focus on writing around cultural grief and the process of healing.

It’s become a favorite assignment for the students who’ve worked on the project, who say it allows them to use “creative freedom” in a way that other classes don’t.
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Also see:

How to Create Compelling Writing Assignments in a ChatGPT Age [Lang]

On 04/11/2023, in colleges, community colleges, experimentation, faculty, higher education, human-computer interaction (HCI), instructional design, intelligent systems, Learning Experience Design, teaching & learning, tools, United States, universities, writing, by Daniel Christian

How to Create Compelling Writing Assignments in a ChatGPT Age — from chronicle.com by James M. Lang
A recent book offers a road map to new kinds of assignments to inspire your students to write.

Excerpt:

A few days after I returned from the conference, I received a book in the mail that affirmed my newfound sense that 2023 has the potential to usher in an age of creative thinking about teaching and writing: Jessica Singer Early’s Next Generation Genres: Teaching Writing for Civic and Academic Engagement. Although her book doesn’t directly address ChatGPT, it offers exactly the kind of innovative ideas we need as we wrestle — or dance — with the implications of artificial intelligence for college teaching.
…
Clearly Jessica Singer Early has joined the leaning-into camp, seeing artificial intelligence as another invitation to reinvent ourselves in the classroom — just as she encourages readers to do in Next Generation Genres, and as this teacher plans to do in the fall.

We Can’t Keep ChatGPT Out of the Classroom, so Let’s Address the ‘Why’ Behind Our Fears [Domínguez]

On 03/24/2023, in Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning / Deep Learning / Algorithms, education, education technology, ideas, instructional design, K-12 related, learning, learning ecosystem, teachers, trends, writing, youth, by Daniel Christian

We Can’t Keep ChatGPT Out of the Classroom, so Let’s Address the ‘Why’ Behind Our Fears — from edsurge.com by Alice Domínguez

Excerpt:

ChatGPT offers us an opportunity to address our fears, release our fixation on preventing cheating and focus our attention on more worthy priorities: providing students with compelling reasons to write, inviting them to wrestle with important questions and crafting a piece of writing that cannot be mistaken for a robot’s work.

“Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot” + “A new era for AI and Google Workspace”

On 03/18/2023, in 24x7x365 access, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, content development, aggregation, repositories, emerging technologies, experimentation, Google, Microsoft, productivity / tips and tricks, tools, usability, user experience (UX), vendors, writing, by Daniel Christian

Copilot — A whole new way to work — from news.microsoft.com

Copilot in Word writes, edits, summarizes and creates right alongside people as they work.
Copilot in PowerPoint enables the creation process by turning ideas into a designed presentation through natural language commands.
Copilot in Excel helps unlock insights, identify trends or create professional-looking data visualizations in a fraction of the time.
Copilot in Outlook can help synthesize and manage the inbox to allow more time to be spent on actually communicating.
Copilot in Teams makes meetings more productive with real-time summaries and action items directly in the context of the conversation.
Copilot in Power Platform will help developers of all skill levels accelerate and streamline development with low-code tools with the introduction of two new capabilities within Power Apps and Power Virtual Agents.
Business Chat brings together data from across documents, presentations, email, calendar, notes and contacts to help summarize chats, write emails, find key dates or even write a plan based on other project files.

Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot – your copilot for work — from blogs.microsoft.com by Jared Spataro

“Today marks the next major step in the evolution of how we interact with computing, which will fundamentally change the way we work and unlock a new wave of productivity growth,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft. “With our new copilot for work, we’re giving people more agency and making technology more accessible through the most universal interface — natural language.”

Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot — A whole new way to work — from microsoft.com by Colette Stallbaumer

Excerpt:

Copilot is integrated into Microsoft 365 in two ways. It works alongside you, embedded in the Microsoft 365 apps you use every day—Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, Teams, and more—to unleash creativity, unlock productivity, and uplevel skills. Today, we’re also announcing an entirely new experience: Business Chat. Business Chat works across the LLM, the Microsoft 365 apps, and your data—your calendar, emails, chats, documents, meetings, and contacts—to do things you’ve never been able to do before. You can give it natural language prompts like “tell my team how we updated the product strategy” and it will generate a status update based on the morning’s meetings, emails, and chat threads.

A new era for AI and Google Workspace — from workspace.google.com by Johanna Voolich Wright

Excerpt:

As we embark on this next journey, we will be bringing these new generative-AI experiences to trusted testers on a rolling basis throughout the year, before making them available publicly.

With these features, you’ll be able to:

draft, reply, summarize, and prioritize your Gmail
brainstorm, proofread, write, and rewrite in Docs
bring your creative vision to life with auto-generated images, audio, and video in Slides
go from raw data to insights and analysis via auto-completion, formula generation, and
contextual categorization in Sheets
generate new backgrounds and capture notes in Meet
enable workflows for getting things done in Chat

Here’s a look at the first set of AI-powered features, which make writing even easier.

What would higher ed (or even K-12) look like if you could completely scrap it and start over? [Carty]

On 03/11/2023, in business side of he, colleges, community colleges, cost of getting a degree, dangers of the status quo, Design Thinking, higher education, K-12 related, learning ecosystem, liberal arts, reinvent, United States, universities, vision/possibilities, vocational / trades, writing, by Daniel Christian

Transfers From Community College Continue to Fall — from insidehighered.com by Sara Weissman
Despite the decline in transfers, a new report also says six-year college completion rates among transfer students improved.

Excerpt:

Transfers between community colleges and four-year institutions continued to drop last fall, an ongoing trend since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a new report from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. But the report also contains some good news, including that six-year college completion rates among transfer students improved, despite the disruptive nature of the pandemic.
…
“Upward transfer has continued to decline pretty steadily at this point in every year since the pandemic,” Shapiro said during a media briefing Wednesday. “This suggests that baccalaureate attainment is beginning to appear increasingly out of reach for community college students,” particularly for students enrolled in urban and suburban community colleges, which saw steeper declines in transfers to universities than community colleges in towns or rural areas.

The Librarian: Can we prompt ChatGPT to generate reliable references? — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman

Lessons Learned

Always assume that ChatGPT is wrong until you prove otherwise.
Validate everything (and require your students to validate everything too).
Google Scholar is a great tool for validating ChatGPT outputs rapidly.
The prompt works better when you provide a subject area, e.g. visual anthropology, and then a sub-topic, e.g. film making.
Ignore ChatGPT’s links – validate by searching for titles & authors, not URLs.
Use intentional repetition, e.g. of Google Scholar, to focus ChatGPT’s attention.
Be aware: ChatGPT’s outputs end at 2021. You need to fill in the blanks since then.

Using Stories to Support Mathematical Thinking in Young Students [Crawford-McKinney & Özgün-Koca]

On 03/02/2023, in education, Emotion, homeschooling/homeschoolers, ideas, K-12 related, pedagogy, student-related, teachers, teaching & learning, writing, by Daniel Christian

Using Stories to Support Mathematical Thinking in Young Students — from edutopia.org by Kathleen Crawford-McKinney and Asli Özgün-Koca
Children’s books often contain valuable lessons that can help young students begin to think like mathematicians.

Excerpt:

Many students and teachers view math as a subject for numbers and computation, instead of one that benefits from discussion and interpretation. Based on our experience as children’s literature and mathematics teacher-educators, we’ve found that providing the context to mathematical problems through literature supports students’ learning—children’s books can be used to integrate math and literacy and to provide context for math.

Also from edutopia.org, see:

Things Professional Writers Do That Students Should Too — by Andrew Boryga
Everyone gets stumped when they begin a new writing project—even the professionals. Here are some strategies the world’s best writers use to push past the doldrums and generate higher-quality writing.

Excerpt:

Asking students to read aloud, while focusing on things like tone, sentence structure, and cadence, is a simple, effective, and researched-backed way to improve their writing—particularly during the revision stage.

That insight got us thinking about other easy strategies—used by real pros—that students can also employ to improve their writing.

The Power of a Compliment — by Scott Wisniewski
A project that invites students to anonymously compliment their classmates and teachers has improved the culture at one high school.

Excerpt:

A small act of kindness can change the complexion of someone’s day. Giving someone a compliment, telling them how much they mean to you, or just sharing words of encouragement can change a person’s overall outlook.

Some Ideas for Using ChatGPT in Middle and High School Classes

On 02/24/2023, in Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning / Deep Learning / Algorithms, education technology, innovation, instructional design, K-12 related, Learning Experience Design, pedagogy, teachers, teaching & learning, tools, writing, by Daniel Christian

Some Ideas for Using ChatGPT in Middle and High School Classes — from edutopia.org by Geoff Richman
Teachers can use tools like ChatGPT as one strategy in their efforts to teach students how to think critically and write effectively.

Excerpts:

There can be an upside, however. In a social studies classroom, students might craft a prompt about a topic they’ve been considering and then examine the machine’s response in forensic detail. This may involve a sentence-by-sentence dissection of what the AI has written. By unearthing possible inconsistencies or straight-up inaccuracies, students reinforce their correct understanding of the topic.
…
For a playful exercise, share two or three pieces of human writing from the past year or two and slip in an example from ChatGPT, and have students discuss what makes these examples human—or decidedly not. Nuance, passion, and, perhaps, even fallibility will be clues that students can investigate.

Why Faculty Must Learn to Swim in Other Waters — from insidehighered.com by Rachel Toor, professor of creative writing at Eastern Washington University in Spokane.

Excerpts:

Academics, even with the best intentions, and especially if we’ve never left school, don’t realize that we’re all swimming in our own little pond.

Most faculty members continue to teach how they were taught. We focus on our disciplines. We indoctrinate students into academic conventions and genres. We sling jargon like short-order cooks. We ask students to write 20-page research papers—the likes of which few professions would ever require.

But how often do faculty members require students to create final projects that will help them get a job?

How many professors are adept at writing a one-page job cover letter? Or a one-page résumé?

From DSC:
I appreciate these great thoughts here from Rachel Toor. Besides helping students learn about networking (and actually putting those skills into practice), applying their research skills to finding good job/organization fits, write effective cover letters, etc., I think such real-world skill development needs to be integrated into the very core of what they are teaching. It needs to be integrated into the curriculum.

ChatGPT for Spanish Classrooms [Biscotti] + other tools-related postings

On 02/14/2023, in 21st century, Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning / Deep Learning / Algorithms, bots, education technology, internet, K-12 related, languages and translation, liberal arts, podcasting, productivity / tips and tricks, professional development, teachers, teaching & learning, tools, Uncategorized, vendors, writing, by Daniel Christian

ChatGPT for Spanish Classrooms — from rdene915.com by Nicole Biscotti, M. Ed.

Excerpt:

ChatGPT is just what the busy Spanish teacher necesita – no wasted time searching for the perfect “lectura” (text). Effective language instruction is coupled with learning about culture and now I’m able to generate texts in seconds AND I can even center them around a Latin American country, cultural point of interest, holiday, grammatical structure, etc. Differentiation and personalized learning, those lofty teaching ideals that can feel a bit heavy when you mean well but have 35 kids in your room, have become that much easier to attain with ChatGPT. It’s possible to generate texts about diverse aspects of culture in seconds and make adjustments for interests, length, rigor, etc. (Kuo & Lai, 2006) (Salaberry, 1999; Rost, 2002).

CURATING YOUR CLASSROOM WITH 9 MUST-HAVE TOOLS FOR RESOURCE COLLECTION – EASY EDTECH PODCAST 202 — from classtechtips.com by Monica Burns

Description:

How do you share resources with students? In this episode, we’ll focus on what happens after you find the very best resources to share with students. You’ll also hear about nine digital tools to help educators build a resource collection for students. So whether you have ten great resources on endangered species to share with your fourth graders or a dozen tutorial videos to share with your eleventh graders, this episode is for you!

50+ Useful AI Writing Tools to Know (2023) — from hongkiat.com

Excerpt:

AI writing tools generate content based on the keywords or prompt provided by users. You can then improve upon the output and make it suitable according to your own requirements.

There are different types of AI writing tools and in this post we are featuring some of the best ones. From content generators and editors to translators and typing assistants, there’s a whole gamut of AI-powered writing tools in the list. Take a look and see if one (or more) catches your interest.

How to Use Minecraft as a Teaching Tool — from intelligenthq.com

Excerpt:

Kids today have grown up with Minecraft, so it’s easy to get them enthusiastic about lessons using it. They can build anything they like, and use Minecraft skins to make the characters they create uniquely their own, getting them especially enthusiastic and involved in their lessons.

Teachers who learn how to use Minecraft as a teaching tool have found that it noticeably improves problem solving, creativity, and the ability to work together. It teaches both 21st century skills and timeless lessons.

On a somewhat related note, also see:

Master The Art Of The Internet With These 10 Tips — from lawtechnologytoday.org
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DC: I hope you’re right Martin! “Blogs are back baby” [Martin Weller]

On 02/14/2023, in blogs / blogging / vlogging, communications, communities of practice, education technology, tools, UK, writing, by Daniel Christian

Blogs are back baby — from blog.edtechie.net by Martin Weller

Excerpt:

The conclusion I take from all this (which I carefully assembled so I could draw the conclusion I want), is that there is a desire to have a core place on the net, that is not subject to the whims of billionaires, institutions or markets, where you can engage in a range of dialogue, from personal to professional, and that you enjoy revisiting. Ladies and gentleman, I give you, the blog.

From DSC:
I hope you’re right Martin!!! I still really appreciate blogs, as readers of this Learning Ecosystems blog might have guessed.

Take Your Words From Lecture to Page [Toor]

On 01/31/2023, in adjunct faculty, career development, colleges, communications, community colleges, faculty, higher education, productivity / tips and tricks, publishing, real-world assignments, research, skills, story, storytelling, United States, universities, writing, by Daniel Christian

Take Your Words From Lecture to Page — from chronicle.com by Rachel Toor
What compelling lecturers do, and how their techniques can translate to good writing.

Excerpts:

Thing is, many of the moves that the best lecturers make on the stage can translate to the page and help you draw in readers. That is especially important in writing textbooks and other work for general readers. If you can bring the parts of yourself that work in the classroom to the prose, you will delight readers as much as you do your students.

Narrative can be key. Data and research aren’t enough in either the classroom or on the page. People like to be told stories. If you want to be persuasive in both realms, use narrative to make arguments. Don’t forget that much scholarly work is really a quest. What journey can you take a reader on?
…
It’s a performance on the page, too. A great lecture is a performance. So is great writing.
…
Raise real questions the reader will want answers to.

From DSC:
A few items re: ChatGPT — with some items pro-chat and other items against the use of ChatGPT (or at least to limit its use).

How About We Put Learning at the Center? — from insidehighered.com by John Warner
The ongoing freak-out about ChatGPT sent me back to considering the fundamentals.

Excerpt:

So, when people express concern that students will use ChatGPT to complete their assignments, I understand the concern, but what I don’t understand is why this concern is so often channeled into discussions about how to police student behavior, rather than using this as an opportunity to exam the kind of work we actually ask students (and faculty) to do around learning.

If ChatGPT can do the things we ask students to do in order to demonstrate learning, it seems possible to me that those things should’ve been questioned a long time ago. It’s why I continue to believe this technology is an opportunity for reinvention, precisely because it is a threat to the status quo.

Top AI conference bans use of ChatGPT and AI language tools to write academic papers — from theverge.com by James Vincent; with thanks to Anna Mills for this resource
AI tools can be used to ‘edit’ and ‘polish’ authors’ work, say the conference organizers, but text ‘produced entirely’ by AI is not allowed. This raises the question: where do you draw the line between editing and writing?

Excerpt:

The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) announced the policy earlier this week, stating, “Papers that include text generated from a large-scale language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT are prohibited unless the produced text is presented as a part of the paper’s experimental analysis.” The news sparked widespread discussion on social media, with AI academics and researchers both defending and criticizing the policy. The conference’s organizers responded by publishing a longer statement explaining their thinking. (The ICML responded to requests from The Verge for comment by directing us to this same statement.)

I am protective of my organic writing process, but when it’s time to edit, ChatGPT sometimes helps me notice which sentences aren’t quite put together as they should be. When I ask it why it suggested a revision, it sometimes describes a word choice nuance I hadn’t thought of.

— Anna Mills, amills@mastodon.oeru.org, she/her (@EnglishOER) January 5, 2023

How to… use AI to teach some of the hardest skills — from oneusefulthing.substack.com by Ethan Mollick
When errors, inaccuracies, and inconsistencies are actually very useful

Excerpt:

Instead, I want to discuss the opportunity provided by AI, because it can help us teach in new ways. The very things that make AI scary for educators — its tedency to make up facts, its lack of nuance, and its ability to make excellent student essays — can be used to make education better.

This isn’t for some future theoretical version of AI. You can create assignments, right now, using ChatGPT, that we will help stretch students in knew ways. We wrote a paper with the instructions. You can read it here, but I also want to summarize our suggestions. These are obviously not the only ways to use AI to educate, but they solve some of the hardest problems in education, and you can start experimenting with them right now.

NYC education department blocks ChatGPT on school devices, networks — from ny.chalkbeat.org by Michael Elsen-Rooney

Excerpt:

New York City students and teachers can no longer access ChatGPT — the new artificial intelligence-powered chatbot that generates stunningly cogent and lifelike writing — on education department devices or internet networks, agency officials confirmed Tuesday.

Teachers v ChatGPT: Schools face new challenge in fight against plagiarism — from straitstimes.com by Osmond Chia; with thanks to Stephen Downes for this resource

Excerpt:

SINGAPORE – Teachers in Singapore say they will likely have to move from assignments requiring regurgitation to those that require greater critical thinking, to stay ahead in the fight against plagiarism.

This comes on the back of the rise of ChatGPT, an intelligent chatbot that is able to spin essays and solve mathematical equations in seconds.

ChatGPT Is Not Ready to Teach Geometry (Yet) — from educationnext.org by Paul T. von Hippel
The viral chatbot is often wrong, but never in doubt. Educators need to tread carefully.

Excerpt:

Can ChatGPT provide feedback and answer questions about math in a more tailored and natural way? The answer, for the time being, is no. Although ChatGPT can talk about math superficially, it doesn’t “understand” math with real depth. It cannot correct mathematical misconceptions, it often introduces misconceptions of its own; and it sometimes makes inexplicable mathematical errors that a basic spreadsheet or hand calculator wouldn’t make.

Here, I’ll show you.

Addendum on 1/9/23:

9 ways ChatGPT saves me hours of work every day, and why you’ll never outcompete those who use AI effectively. — from .linkedin.com by Santiago Valdarrama

A list for those who write code:

1. Explaining code…
Improve existing code…
Rewriting code using the correct style…
Rewriting code using idiomatic constructs…
Simplifying code…
Writing test cases…
Exploring alternatives…
Writing documentation…
Tracking down bugs…

Learning Ecosystems

Three-Dimensional Narratives Spring from Antique Books in Emma Taylor’s Meticulous Paper Sculptures [Mothes]

How to Create Compelling Writing Assignments in a ChatGPT Age [Lang]

“Introducing Microsoft 365 Copilot” + “A new era for AI and Google Workspace”

DC: I hope you’re right Martin! “Blogs are back baby” [Martin Weller]

Take Your Words From Lecture to Page [Toor]

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