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Ed Webb

CRITICAL AI: Adapting College Writing for the Age of Large Language Models such as Chat... - 1 views

criticalai.org/...-some-next-steps-for-educators

AI education opinion internet analysis pedagogy

shared by Ed Webb on 28 Jan 23 - Cached
  • In the long run, we believe, teachers need to help students develop a critical awareness of generative machine models: how they work; why their content is often biased, false, or simplistic; and what their social, intellectual, and environmental implications might be. But that kind of preparation takes time, not least because journalism on this topic is often clickbait-driven, and “AI” discourse tends to be jargony, hype-laden, and conflated with science fiction.
  • Make explicit that the goal of writing is neither a product nor a grade but, rather, a process that empowers critical thinking
  • Students are more likely to misuse text generators if they trust them too much. The term “Artificial Intelligence” (“AI”) has become a marketing tool for hyping products. For all their impressiveness, these systems are not intelligent in the conventional sense of that term. They are elaborate statistical models that rely on mass troves of data—which has often been scraped indiscriminately from the web and used without knowledge or consent.
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  • LLMs usually cannot do a good job of explaining how a particular passage from a longer text illuminates the whole of that longer text. Moreover, ChatGPT’s outputs on comparison and contrast are often superficial. Typically the system breaks down a task of logical comparison into bite-size pieces, conveys shallow information about each of those pieces, and then formulaically “compares” and “contrasts” in a noticeably superficial or repetitive way. 
  • In-class writing, whether digital or handwritten, may have downsides for students with anxiety and disabilities
  • ChatGPT can produce outputs that take the form of  “brainstorms,” outlines, and drafts. It can also provide commentary in the style of peer review or self-analysis. Nonetheless, students would need to coordinate multiple submissions of automated work in order to complete this type of assignment with a text generator.  
  • No one should present auto-generated writing as their own on the expectation that this deception is undiscoverable. 
  • LLMs often mimic the harmful prejudices, misconceptions, and biases found in data scraped from the internet
  • Show students examples of inaccuracy, bias, logical, and stylistic problems in automated outputs. We can build students’ cognitive abilities by modeling and encouraging this kind of critique. Given that social media and the internet are full of bogus accounts using synthetic text, alerting students to the intrinsic problems of such writing could be beneficial. (See the “ChatGPT/LLM Errors Tracker,” maintained by Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis.)
  • Since ChatGPT is good at grammar and syntax but suffers from formulaic, derivative, or inaccurate content, it seems like a poor foundation for building students’ skills and may circumvent their independent thinking.
  • Good journalism on language models is surprisingly hard to find since the technology is so new and the hype is ubiquitous. Here are a few reliable short pieces.     “ChatGPT Advice Academics Can Use Now” edited by Susan Dagostino, Inside Higher Ed, January 12, 2023  “University students recruit AI to write essays for them. Now what?” by Katyanna Quach, The Register, December 27, 2022  “How to spot AI-generated text” by Melissa Heikkilä, MIT Technology Review, December 19, 2022  The Road to AI We Can Trust, Substack by Gary Marcus, a cognitive scientist and AI researcher who writes frequently and lucidly about the topic. See also Gary Marcus and Ernest Davis, “GPT-3, Bloviator: OpenAI’s Language Generator Has No Idea What It’s Talking About” (2020).
  • “On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots” by Emily M. Bender, Timnit Gebru, et al, FAccT ’21: Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency, March 2021. Association for Computing Machinery, doi: 10.1145/3442188. A blog post summarizing and discussing the above essay derived from a Critical AI @ Rutgers workshop on the essay: summarizes key arguments, reprises discussion, and includes links to video-recorded presentations by digital humanist Katherine Bode (ANU) and computer scientist and NLP researcher Matthew Stone (Rutgers).
Ed Webb

ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web | The New Yorker - 0 views

www.newyorker.com/...pt-is-a-blurry-jpeg-of-the-web

AI internet analysis opinion LLMs writing education pedagogy

shared by Ed Webb on 10 Feb 23 - Cached
  • Think of ChatGPT as a blurry JPEG of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a JPEG retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is an approximation. But, because the approximation is presented in the form of grammatical text, which ChatGPT excels at creating, it’s usually acceptable. You’re still looking at a blurry JPEG, but the blurriness occurs in a way that doesn’t make the picture as a whole look less sharp.
  • a way to understand the “hallucinations,” or nonsensical answers to factual questions, to which large-language models such as ChatGPT are all too prone. These hallucinations are compression artifacts, but—like the incorrect labels generated by the Xerox photocopier—they are plausible enough that identifying them requires comparing them against the originals, which in this case means either the Web or our own knowledge of the world. When we think about them this way, such hallucinations are anything but surprising; if a compression algorithm is designed to reconstruct text after ninety-nine per cent of the original has been discarded, we should expect that significant portions of what it generates will be entirely fabricated.
  • ChatGPT is so good at this form of interpolation that people find it entertaining: they’ve discovered a “blur” tool for paragraphs instead of photos, and are having a blast playing with it.
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  • large-language models like ChatGPT are often extolled as the cutting edge of artificial intelligence, it may sound dismissive—or at least deflating—to describe them as lossy text-compression algorithms. I do think that this perspective offers a useful corrective to the tendency to anthropomorphize large-language models
  • Even though large-language models often hallucinate, when they’re lucid they sound like they actually understand subjects like economic theory
  • The fact that ChatGPT rephrases material from the Web instead of quoting it word for word makes it seem like a student expressing ideas in her own words, rather than simply regurgitating what she’s read; it creates the illusion that ChatGPT understands the material. In human students, rote memorization isn’t an indicator of genuine learning, so ChatGPT’s inability to produce exact quotes from Web pages is precisely what makes us think that it has learned something. When we’re dealing with sequences of words, lossy compression looks smarter than lossless compression.
  • starting with a blurry copy of unoriginal work isn’t a good way to create original work
  • If and when we start seeing models producing output that’s as good as their input, then the analogy of lossy compression will no longer be applicable.
  • Even if it is possible to restrict large-language models from engaging in fabrication, should we use them to generate Web content? This would make sense only if our goal is to repackage information that’s already available on the Web. Some companies exist to do just that—we usually call them content mills. Perhaps the blurriness of large-language models will be useful to them, as a way of avoiding copyright infringement. Generally speaking, though, I’d say that anything that’s good for content mills is not good for people searching for information.
  • Having students write essays isn’t merely a way to test their grasp of the material; it gives them experience in articulating their thoughts. If students never have to write essays that we have all read before, they will never gain the skills needed to write something that we have never read.
  • Sometimes it’s only in the process of writing that you discover your original ideas. Some might say that the output of large-language models doesn’t look all that different from a human writer’s first draft, but, again, I think this is a superficial resemblance. Your first draft isn’t an unoriginal idea expressed clearly; it’s an original idea expressed poorly, and it is accompanied by your amorphous dissatisfaction, your awareness of the distance between what it says and what you want it to say. That’s what directs you during rewriting, and that’s one of the things lacking when you start with text generated by an A.I.
  • What use is there in having something that rephrases the Web?
Ed Webb

Reflections on open courses « Connectivism - 0 views

www.connectivism.ca/?p=267

connectivism open education collaboration pedagogy technology

shared by Ed Webb on 22 Aug 10 - Cached
  • There is value of blending traditional with emergent knowledge spaces (online conferences and traditional journals) - Learners will create and innovate if they can express ideas and concepts in their own spaces and through their own expertise (i.e. hosting events in Second Life) - Courses are platforms for innovation. Too rigid a structure puts the educator in full control. Using a course as a platform fosters creativity…and creativity generates a bit of chaos and can be unsettling to individuals who prefer a structure with which they are familiar. - (cliche) Letting go of control is a bit stressful, but surprisingly rewarding in the new doors it opens and liberating in how it brings others in to assist in running a course and advancing the discussion. - People want to participate…but they will only do so once they have “permission” and a forum in which to utilize existing communication/technological skills.
  • The internet is a barrier-reducing system. In theory, everyone has a voice online (the reality of technology ownership, digital skills, and internet access add an unpleasant dimension). Costs of duplication are reduced. Technology (technique) is primarily a duplicationary process, as evidenced by the printing press, assembly line, and now the content duplication ability of digital technologies. As a result, MOOCs embody, rather than reflect, practices within the digital economy. MOOCs reduce barriers to information access and to the dialogue that permits individuals (and society) to grow knowledge. Much of the technical innovation in the last several centuries has permitted humanity to extend itself physically (cars, planes, trains, telescopes). The internet, especially in recent developments of connective and collaborative applications, is a cognitive extension for humanity. Put another way, the internet offers a model where the reproduction of knowledge is not confined to the production of physical objects.
  • Knowledge is a mashup. Many people contribute. Many different forums are used. Multiple media permit varied and nuanced expressions of knowledge. And, because the information base (which is required for knowledge formation) changes so rapidly, being properly connected to the right people and information is vitally important. The need for proper connectedness to the right people and information is readily evident in intelligence communities. Consider the Christmas day bomber. Or 9/11. The information was being collected. But not connected.
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  • The open model of participation calls into question where value is created in the education system. Gutenberg created a means to duplicate content. The social web creates the opportunity for many-to-many interactions and to add a global social layer on content creation and knowledge growth.
  • Whatever can be easily duplicated cannot serve as the foundation for economic value. Integration and connectedness are economic value points.
  • In education, content can easily be produced (it’s important but has limited economic value). Lectures also have limited value (easy to record and to duplicate). Teaching – as done in most universities – can be duplicated. Learning, on the other hand, can’t be duplicated. Learning is personal, it has to occur one learner at a time. The support needed for learners to learn is a critical value point.
  • Learning, however, requires a human, social element: both peer-based and through interaction with subject area experts
  • Content is readily duplicated, reducing its value economically. It is still critical for learning – all fields have core elements that learners must master before they can advance (research in expertise supports this notion). - Teaching can be duplicated (lectures can be recorded, Elluminate or similar webconferencing system can bring people from around the world into a class). Assisting learners in the learning process, correcting misconceptions (see Private Universe), and providing social support and brokering introductions to other people and ideas in the discipline is critical. - Accreditation is a value statement – it is required when people don’t know each other. Content was the first area of focus in open education. Teaching (i.e. MOOCs) are the second. Accreditation will be next, but, before progress can be made, profile, identity, and peer-rating systems will need to improve dramatically. The underlying trust mechanism on which accreditation is based cannot yet be duplicated in open spaces (at least, it can’t be duplicated to such a degree that people who do not know each other will trust the mediating agent of open accreditation)
  • The skills that are privileged and rewarded in a MOOC are similar to those that are needed to be effective in communicating with others and interacting with information online (specifically, social media and information sources like journals, databases, videos, lectures, etc.). Creative skills are the most critical. Facilitators and learners need something to “point to”. When a participant creates an insightful blog post, a video, a concept map, or other resource/artifact it generally gets attention.
  • Intentional diversity – not necessarily a digital skill, but the ability to self-evaluate ones network and ensure diversity of ideologies is critical when information is fragmented and is at risk of being sorted by single perspectives/ideologies.
  • The volume of information is very disorienting in a MOOC. For example, in CCK08, the initial flow of postings in Moodle, three weekly live sessions, Daily newsletter, and weekly readings and assignments proved to be overwhelming for many participants. Stephen and I somewhat intentionally structured the course for this disorienting experience. Deciding who to follow, which course concepts are important, and how to form sub-networks and sub-systems to assist in sensemaking are required to respond to information abundance. The process of coping and wayfinding (ontology) is as much a lesson in the learning process as mastering the content (epistemology). Learners often find it difficult to let go of the urge to master all content, read all the comments and blog posts.
  • e. Learning is a social trust-based process.
  • Patience, tolerance, suspension of judgment, and openness to other cultures and ideas are required to form social connections and negotiating misunderstandings.
  • An effective digital citizenry needs the skills to participate in important conversations. The growth of digital content and social networks raises the need citizens to have the technical and conceptual skills to express their ideas and engage with others in those spaces. MOOCs are a first generation testing grounds for knowledge growth in a distributed, global, digital world. Their role in developing a digital citizenry is still unclear, but democratic societies require a populace with the skills to participate in growing a society’s knowledge. As such, MOOCs, or similar open transparent learning experiences that foster the development of citizens confidence engage and create collaboratively, are important for the future of society.
Ed Webb

moonbell - 0 views

wms.selene.jaxa.jp/...moonbell_en.html

moon music generator cool

shared by Ed Webb on 31 Aug 09 - Cached
  • Ed Webb on 31 Aug 09
     
    Lunar topography music generator. Via @bruces via @peterhorvath
Ed Webb

What Bruce Sterling Actually Said About Web 2.0 at Webstock 09 | Beyond the Beyond from... - 0 views

blog.wired.com/...what-bruce-ster.html

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Mar 09 - Cached
  • things in it that pretended to be ideas, but were not ideas at all: they were attitudes
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 25 Mar 09
       
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  • A sentence is a verbal construction meant to express a complete thought. This congelation that Tim O'Reilly constructed, that is not a complete thought. It's a network in permanent beta.
  • This chart is five years old now, which is 35 years old in Internet years, but intellectually speaking, it's still new in the world. It's alarming how hard it is to say anything constructive about this from any previous cultural framework.
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  • "The cloud as platform." That is insanely great. Right? You can't build a "platform" on a "cloud!" That is a wildly mixed metaphor! A cloud is insubstantial, while a platform is a solid foundation! The platform falls through the cloud and is smashed to earth like a plummeting stock price!
  • luckily, we have computers in banking now. That means Moore's law is gonna save us! Instead of it being really obvious who owes what to whom, we can have a fluid, formless ownership structure that's always in permanent beta. As long as we keep moving forward, adding attractive new features, the situation is booming!
  • Web 2.0 is supposed to be business. This isn't a public utility or a public service, like the old model of an Information Superhighway established for the public good.
  • it's turtles all the way down
  • "Tagging not taxonomy." Okay, I love folksonomy, but I don't think it's gone very far. There have been books written about how ambient searchability through folksonomy destroys the need for any solid taxonomy. Not really. The reality is that we don't have a choice, because we have no conceivable taxonomy that can catalog the avalanche of stuff on the Web.
  • JavaScript is the duct tape of the Web. Why? Because you can do anything with it. It's not the steel girders of the web, it's not the laws of physics of the web. Javascript is beloved of web hackers because it's an ultimate kludge material that can stick anything to anything. It's a cloud, a web, a highway, a platform and a floor wax. Guys with attitude use JavaScript.
  • Before the 1990s, nobody had any "business revolutions." People in trade are supposed to be very into long-term contracts, a stable regulatory environment, risk management, and predictable returns to stockholders. Revolutions don't advance those things. Revolutions annihilate those things. Is that "businesslike"? By whose standards?
  • I just wonder what kind of rattletrap duct-taped mayhem is disguised under a smooth oxymoron like "collective intelligence."
  • the people whose granular bits of input are aggregated by Google are not a "collective." They're not a community. They never talk to each other. They've got basically zero influence on what Google chooses to do with their mouseclicks. What's "collective" about that?
  • I really think it's the original sin of geekdom, a kind of geek thought-crime, to think that just because you yourself can think algorithmically, and impose some of that on a machine, that this is "intelligence." That is not intelligence. That is rules-based machine behavior. It's code being executed. It's a powerful thing, it's a beautiful thing, but to call that "intelligence" is dehumanizing. You should stop that. It does not make you look high-tech, advanced, and cool. It makes you look delusionary.
  • I'd definitely like some better term for "collective intelligence," something a little less streamlined and metaphysical. Maybe something like "primeval meme ooze" or "semi-autonomous data propagation." Even some Kevin Kelly style "neobiological out of control emergent architectures." Because those weird new structures are here, they're growing fast, we depend on them for mission-critical acts, and we're not gonna get rid of them any more than we can get rid of termite mounds.
  • Web 2.0 guys: they've got their laptops with whimsical stickers, the tattoos, the startup T-shirts, the brainy-glasses -- you can tell them from the general population at a glance. They're a true creative subculture, not a counterculture exactly -- but in their number, their relationship to the population, quite like the Arts and Crafts people from a hundred years ago. Arts and Crafts people, they had a lot of bad ideas -- much worse ideas than Tim O'Reilly's ideas. It wouldn't bother me any if Tim O'Reilly was Governor of California -- he couldn't be any weirder than that guy they've got already. Arts and Crafts people gave it their best shot, they were in earnest -- but everything they thought they knew about reality was blown to pieces by the First World War. After that misfortune, there were still plenty of creative people surviving. Futurists, Surrealists, Dadaists -- and man, they all despised Arts and Crafts. Everything about Art Nouveau that was sexy and sensual and liberating and flower-like, man, that stank in their nostrils. They thought that Art Nouveau people were like moronic children.
  • in the past eighteen months, 24 months, we've seen ubiquity initiatives from Nokia, Cisco, General Electric, IBM... Microsoft even, Jesus, Microsoft, the place where innovative ideas go to die.
  • what comes next is a web with big holes blown in it. A spiderweb in a storm. The turtles get knocked out from under it, the platform sinks through the cloud. A lot of the inherent contradictions of the web get revealed, the contradictions in the oxymorons smash into each other. The web has to stop being a meringue frosting on the top of business, this make-do melange of mashups and abstraction layers. Web 2.0 goes away. Its work is done. The thing I always loved best about Web 2.0 was its implicit expiration date. It really took guts to say that: well, we've got a bunch of cool initiatives here, and we know they're not gonna last very long. It's not Utopia, it's not a New World Order, it's just a brave attempt to sweep up the ashes of the burst Internet Bubble and build something big and fast with the small burnt-up bits that were loosely joined. That showed more maturity than Web 1.0. It was visionary, it was inspiring, but there were fewer moon rockets flying out of its head. "Gosh, we're really sorry that we accidentally ruined the NASDAQ." We're Internet business people, but maybe we should spend less of our time stock-kiting. The Web's a communications medium -- how 'bout working on the computer interface, so that people can really communicate? That effort was time well spent. Really.
  • The poorest people in the world love cellphones.
  • Digital culture, I knew it well. It died -- young, fast and pretty. It's all about network culture now.
  • There's gonna be a Transition Web. Your economic system collapses: Eastern Europe, Russia, the Transition Economy, that bracing experience is for everybody now. Except it's not Communism transitioning toward capitalism. It's the whole world into transition toward something we don't even have proper words for.
  • The Transition Web is a culture model. If it's gonna work, it's got to replace things that we used to pay for with things that we just plain use.
  • Not every Internet address was a dotcom. In fact, dotcoms showed up pretty late in the day, and they were not exactly welcome. There were dot-orgs, dot edus, dot nets, dot govs, and dot localities. Once upon a time there were lots of social enterprises that lived outside the market; social movements, political parties, mutual aid societies, philanthropies. Churches, criminal organizations -- you're bound to see plenty of both of those in a transition... Labor unions... not little ones, but big ones like Solidarity in Poland; dissident organizations, not hobby activists, big dissent, like Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia. Armies, national guards. Rescue operations. Global non-governmental organizations. Davos Forums, Bilderberg guys. Retired people. The old people can't hold down jobs in the market. Man, there's a lot of 'em. Billions. What are our old people supposed to do with themselves? Websurf, I'm thinking. They're wise, they're knowledgeable, they're generous by nature; the 21st century is destined to be an old people's century. Even the Chinese, Mexicans, Brazilians will be old. Can't the web make some use of them, all that wisdom and talent, outside the market?
  • I've never seen so much panic around me, but panic is the last thing on my mind. My mood is eager impatience. I want to see our best, most creative, best-intentioned people in world society directly attacking our worst problems. I'm bored with the deceit. I'm tired of obscurantism and cover-ups. I'm disgusted with cynical spin and the culture war for profit. I'm up to here with phony baloney market fundamentalism. I despise a prostituted society where we put a dollar sign in front of our eyes so we could run straight into the ditch. The cure for panic is action. Coherent action is great; for a scatterbrained web society, that may be a bit much to ask. Well, any action is better than whining. We can do better.
Ed Webb

Clear backpacks, monitored emails: life for US students under constant surveillance | E... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...ce-us-schools-safety-shootings

surveillance US USA edtech education privacy

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Dec 19 - No Cached
  • This level of surveillance is “not too over-the-top”, Ingrid said, and she feels her classmates are generally “accepting” of it.
  • One leading student privacy expert estimated that as many as a third of America’s roughly 15,000 school districts may already be using technology that monitors students’ emails and documents for phrases that might flag suicidal thoughts, plans for a school shooting, or a range of other offenses.
  • Some parents said they were alarmed and frightened by schools’ new monitoring technologies. Others said they were conflicted, seeing some benefits to schools watching over what kids are doing online, but uncertain if their schools were striking the right balance with privacy concerns. Many said they were not even sure what kind of surveillance technology their schools might be using, and that the permission slips they had signed when their kids brought home school devices had told them almost nothing
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  • When Dapier talks with other teen librarians about the issue of school surveillance, “we’re very alarmed,” he said. “It sort of trains the next generation that [surveillance] is normal, that it’s not an issue. What is the next generation’s Mark Zuckerberg going to think is normal?
  • “It’s the school as panopticon, and the sweeping searchlight beams into homes, now, and to me, that’s just disastrous to intellectual risk-taking and creativity.”
  • “They’re so unclear that I’ve just decided to cut off the research completely, to not do any of it.”
  • “They are all mandatory, and the accounts have been created before we’ve even been consulted,” he said. Parents are given almost no information about how their children’s data is being used, or the business models of the companies involved. Any time his kids complete school work through a digital platform, they are generating huge amounts of very personal, and potentially very valuable, data. The platforms know what time his kids do their homework, and whether it’s done early or at the last minute. They know what kinds of mistakes his kids make on math problems.
  • Felix, now 12, said he is frustrated that the school “doesn’t really [educate] students on what is OK and what is not OK. They don’t make it clear when they are tracking you, or not, or what platforms they track you on. “They don’t really give you a list of things not to do,” he said. “Once you’re in trouble, they act like you knew.”
  • As of 2018, at least 60 American school districts had also spent more than $1m on separate monitoring technology to track what their students were saying on public social media accounts, an amount that spiked sharply in the wake of the 2018 Parkland school shooting, according to the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive advocacy group that compiled and analyzed school contracts with a subset of surveillance companies.
  • Many parents also said that they wanted more transparency and more parental control over surveillance. A few years ago, Ben, a tech professional from Maryland, got a call from his son’s principal to set up an urgent meeting. His son, then about nine or 10-years old, had opened up a school Google document and typed “I want to kill myself.” It was not until he and his son were in a serious meeting with school officials that Ben found out what happened: his son had typed the words on purpose, curious about what would happen. “The smile on his face gave away that he was testing boundaries, and not considering harming himself,” Ben said. (He asked that his last name and his son’s school district not be published, to preserve his son’s privacy.) The incident was resolved easily, he said, in part because Ben’s family already had close relationships with the school administrators.
  • there is still no independent evaluation of whether this kind of surveillance technology actually works to reduce violence and suicide.
  • Certain groups of students could easily be targeted by the monitoring more intensely than others, she said. Would Muslim students face additional surveillance? What about black students? Her daughter, who is 11, loves hip-hop music. “Maybe some of that language could be misconstrued, by the wrong ears or the wrong eyes, as potentially violent or threatening,” she said.
  • The Parent Coalition for Student Privacy was founded in 2014, in the wake of parental outrage over the attempt to create a standardized national database that would track hundreds of data points about public school students, from their names and social security numbers to their attendance, academic performance, and disciplinary and behavior records, and share the data with education tech companies. The effort, which had been funded by the Gates Foundation, collapsed in 2014 after fierce opposition from parents and privacy activists.
  • “More and more parents are organizing against the onslaught of ed tech and the loss of privacy that it entails. But at the same time, there’s so much money and power and political influence behind these groups,”
  • some privacy experts – and students – said they are concerned that surveillance at school might actually be undermining students’ wellbeing
  • “I do think the constant screen surveillance has affected our anxiety levels and our levels of depression.” “It’s over-guarding kids,” she said. “You need to let them make mistakes, you know? That’s kind of how we learn.”
Ed Webb

William Davies · How many words does it take to make a mistake? Education, Ed... - 0 views

www.lrb.co.uk/...does-it-take-to-make-a-mistake

education tools technology edtech opinion analysis humanities UK Britain higher-ed surveillance politics STEM

shared by Ed Webb on 21 Feb 22 - Cached
  • The problem waiting round the corner for universities is essays generated by AI, which will leave a textual pattern-spotter like Turnitin in the dust. (Earlier this year, I came across one essay that felt deeply odd in some not quite human way, but I had no tangible evidence that anything untoward had occurred, so that was that.)
  • To accuse someone of plagiarism is to make a moral charge regarding intentions. But establishing intent isn’t straightforward. More often than not, the hearings bleed into discussions of issues that could be gathered under the heading of student ‘wellbeing’, which all universities have been struggling to come to terms with in recent years.
  • I have heard plenty of dubious excuses for acts of plagiarism during these hearings. But there is one recurring explanation which, it seems to me, deserves more thoughtful consideration: ‘I took too many notes.’ It isn’t just students who are familiar with information overload, one of whose effects is to morph authorship into a desperate form of curatorial management, organising chunks of text on a screen. The discerning scholarly self on which the humanities depend was conceived as the product of transitions between spaces – library, lecture hall, seminar room, study – linked together by work with pen and paper. When all this is replaced by the interface with screen and keyboard, and everything dissolves into a unitary flow of ‘content’, the identity of the author – as distinct from the texts they have read – becomes harder to delineate.
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  • This generation, the first not to have known life before the internet, has acquired a battery of skills in navigating digital environments, but it isn’t clear how well those skills line up with the ones traditionally accredited by universities.
  • From the perspective of students raised in a digital culture, the anti-plagiarism taboo no doubt seems to be just one more academic hang-up, a weird injunction to take perfectly adequate information, break it into pieces and refashion it. Students who pay for essays know what they are doing; others seem conscientious yet intimidated by secondary texts: presumably they won’t be able to improve on them, so why bother trying? For some years now, it’s been noticeable how many students arrive at university feeling that every interaction is a test they might fail. They are anxious. Writing seems fraught with risk, a highly complicated task that can be executed correctly or not.
  • Many students may like the flexibility recorded lectures give them, but the conversion of lectures into yet more digital ‘content’ further destabilises traditional conceptions of learning and writing
  • the evaluation forms which are now such a standard feature of campus life suggest that many students set a lot of store by the enthusiasm and care that are features of a good live lecture
  • the drift of universities towards a platform model, which makes it possible for students to pick up learning materials as and when it suits them. Until now, academics have resisted the push for ‘lecture capture’. It causes in-person attendance at lectures to fall dramatically, and it makes many lecturers feel like mediocre television presenters. Unions fear that extracting and storing teaching for posterity threatens lecturers’ job security and weakens the power of strikes. Thanks to Covid, this may already have happened.
  • This vision of language as code may already have been a significant feature of the curriculum, but it appears to have been exacerbated by the switch to online teaching. In a journal article from August 2020, ‘Learning under Lockdown: English Teaching in the Time of Covid-19’, John Yandell notes that online classes create wholly closed worlds, where context and intertextuality disappear in favour of constant instruction. In these online environments, readingis informed not by prior reading experiences but by the toolkit that the teacher has provided, and ... is presented as occurring along a tramline of linear development. Different readings are reducible to better or worse readings: the more closely the student’s reading approximates to the already finalised teacher’s reading, the better it is. That, it would appear, is what reading with precision looks like.
  • an injunction against creative interpretation and writing, a deprivation that working-class children will feel at least as deeply as anyone else.
  • There may be very good reasons for delivering online teaching in segments, punctuated by tasks and feedback, but as Yandell observes, other ways of reading and writing are marginalised in the process. Without wishing to romanticise the lonely reader (or, for that matter, the lonely writer), something is lost when alternating periods of passivity and activity are compressed into interactivity, until eventually education becomes a continuous cybernetic loop of information and feedback. How many keystrokes or mouse-clicks before a student is told they’ve gone wrong? How many words does it take to make a mistake?
  • In the utopia sold by the EdTech industry (the companies that provide platforms and software for online learning), pupils are guided and assessed continuously. When one task is completed correctly, the next begins, as in a computer game; meanwhile the platform providers are scraping and analysing data from the actions of millions of children. In this behaviourist set-up, teachers become more like coaches: they assist and motivate individual ‘learners’, but are no longer so important to the provision of education. And since it is no longer the sole responsibility of teachers or schools to deliver the curriculum, it becomes more centralised – the latest front in a forty-year battle to wrest control from the hands of teachers and local authorities.
  • Constant interaction across an interface may be a good basis for forms of learning that involve information-processing and problem-solving, where there is a right and a wrong answer. The cognitive skills that can be trained in this way are the ones computers themselves excel at: pattern recognition and computation. The worry, for anyone who cares about the humanities in particular, is about the oversimplifications required to conduct other forms of education in these ways.
  • Blanket surveillance replaces the need for formal assessment.
  • Confirming Adorno’s worst fears of the ‘primacy of practical reason’, reading is no longer dissociable from the execution of tasks. And, crucially, the ‘goals’ to be achieved through the ability to read, the ‘potential’ and ‘participation’ to be realised, are economic in nature.
  • since 2019, with the Treasury increasingly unhappy about the amount of student debt still sitting on the government’s balance sheet and the government resorting to ‘culture war’ at every opportunity, there has been an effort to single out degree programmes that represent ‘poor value for money’, measured in terms of graduate earnings. (For reasons best known to itself, the usually independent Institute for Fiscal Studies has been leading the way in finding correlations between degree programmes and future earnings.) Many of these programmes are in the arts and humanities, and are now habitually referred to by Tory politicians and their supporters in the media as ‘low-value degrees’.
  • studying the humanities may become a luxury reserved for those who can fall back on the cultural and financial advantages of their class position. (This effect has already been noticed among young people going into acting, where the results are more visible to the public than they are in academia or heritage organisations.)
  • given the changing class composition of the UK over the past thirty years, it’s not clear that contemporary elites have any more sympathy for the humanities than the Conservative Party does. A friend of mine recently attended an open day at a well-known London private school, and noticed that while there was a long queue to speak to the maths and science teachers, nobody was waiting to speak to the English teacher. When she asked what was going on, she was told: ‘I’m afraid parents here are very ambitious.’ Parents at such schools, where fees have tripled in real terms since the early 1980s, tend to work in financial and business services themselves, and spend their own days profitably manipulating and analysing numbers on screens. When it comes to the transmission of elite status from one generation to the next, Shakespeare or Plato no longer has the same cachet as economics or physics.
  • Leaving aside the strategic political use of terms such as ‘woke’ and ‘cancel culture’, it would be hard to deny that we live in an age of heightened anxiety over the words we use, in particular the labels we apply to people. This has benefits: it can help to bring discriminatory practices to light, potentially leading to institutional reform. It can also lead to fruitless, distracting public arguments, such as the one that rumbled on for weeks over Angela Rayner’s description of Conservatives as ‘scum’. More and more, words are dredged up, edited or rearranged for the purpose of harming someone. Isolated words have acquired a weightiness in contemporary politics and public argument, while on digital media snippets of text circulate without context, as if the meaning of a single sentence were perfectly contained within it, walled off from the surrounding text. The exemplary textual form in this regard is the newspaper headline or corporate slogan: a carefully curated series of words, designed to cut through the blizzard of competing information.
  • Visit any actual school or university today (as opposed to the imaginary ones described in the Daily Mail or the speeches of Conservative ministers) and you will find highly disciplined, hierarchical institutions, focused on metrics, performance evaluations, ‘behaviour’ and quantifiable ‘learning outcomes’.
  • If young people today worry about using the ‘wrong’ words, it isn’t because of the persistence of the leftist cultural power of forty years ago, but – on the contrary – because of the barrage of initiatives and technologies dedicated to reversing that power. The ideology of measurable literacy, combined with a digital net that has captured social and educational life, leaves young people ill at ease with the language they use and fearful of what might happen should they trip up.
  • It has become clear, as we witness the advance of Panopto, Class Dojo and the rest of the EdTech industry, that one of the great things about an old-fashioned classroom is the facilitation of unrecorded, unaudited speech, and of uninterrupted reading and writing.
Ed Webb

Study Finds No Link Between Social-Networking Sites and Academic Performance - Wired Ca... - 0 views

chronicle.com/...25541

social networking socialnetworking generations facebook education students attention

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Jul 10 - Cached
  • no connection between time spent on social-networking sites and academic performance
  • The trouble with social media is it stunts the development of social skills. Now we learn that time spent on social media does not damage GPA, which implies it's benign. What a tragedy. And precisely the mistaken impression that social development stunting craves.
  • The study in question focused only on first-year students, and traditional ones at that. (A read through of the study revealed the sample included mostly 18- and 19-year-olds and a few (3%) 20-29-year-olds).
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Such a broad generalization based on one narrowly defined study, along with the suggestion that college students should be unconcerned about how much time they spend on SNS, is, at best, naive and, at worst, irresponsible.
  • Will there soon be a study determining that partying had no effect on grades, despite "how often students used them or how many they used"?
Ryan Burke

What are we trying to do here? - 6 views

I've been adding things that in many cases have broader potential use, so have not added specific department tags - where they apply, I add them. Looks like I'm the only one adding bookmarks at th...

welcome

started by Ryan Burke on 16 Mar 09 4 follow-ups, last by Ryan Burke on 16 Apr 09
Ed Webb

Op-Ed Contributor - Lost in the Cloud - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...20zittrain.html

tools cloud cloudcomputing innovation law

shared by Ed Webb on 20 Jul 09 - Cached
  • the most difficult challenge — both to grasp and to solve — of the cloud is its effect on our freedom to innovate.
  • Apple can decide who gets to write code for your phone and which of those offerings will be allowed to run. The company has used this power in ways that Bill Gates never dreamed of when he was the king of Windows: Apple is reported to have censored e-book apps that contain controversial content, eliminated games with political overtones, and blocked uses for the phone that compete with the company’s products. The market is churning through these issues. Amazon is offering a generic cloud-computing infrastructure so anyone can set up new software on a new Web site without gatekeeping by the likes of Facebook. Google’s Android platform is being used in a new generation of mobile phones with fewer restrictions on outside code. But the dynamics here are complicated. When we vest our activities and identities in one place in the cloud, it takes a lot of dissatisfaction for us to move. And many software developers who once would have been writing whatever they wanted for PCs are simply developing less adventurous, less subversive, less game-changing code under the watchful eyes of Facebook and Apple.
Ed Webb

Bad News : CJR - 0 views

www.cjr.org/...bad_news.php

news tools howard_rheingold rheingold journalism facts factcheck bullshit

shared by Ed Webb on 15 Mar 10 - Cached
  • Students in Howard Rheingold’s journalism class at Stanford recently teamed up with NewsTrust, a nonprofit Web site that enables people to review and rate news articles for their level of quality, in a search for lousy journalism.
  • the News Hunt is a way of getting young journalists to critically examine the work of professionals. For Rheingold, an influential writer and thinker about the online world and the man credited with coining the phrase “virtual community,” it’s all about teaching them “crap detection.”
  • last year Rheingold wrote an important essay about the topic for the San Francisco Chronicle’s Web site
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • What’s at stake is no less than the quality of the information available in our society, and our collective ability to evaluate its accuracy and value. “Are we going to have a world filled with people who pass along urban legends and hoaxes?” Rheingold said, “or are people going to educate themselves about these tools [for crap detection] so we will have collective intelligence instead of misinformation, spam, urban legends, and hoaxes?”
  • I previously called fact-checking “one of the great American pastimes of the Internet age.” But, as Rheingold noted, the opposite is also true: the manufacture and promotion of bullshit is endemic. One couldn’t exist without the other. That makes Rheingold’s essay, his recent experiment with NewsTrust, and his wiki of online critical-thinking tools” essential reading for journalists. (He’s also writing a book about this topic.)
  • I believe if we want kids to succeed online, the biggest danger is not porn or predators—the biggest danger is them not being able to distinguish truth from carefully manufactured misinformation or bullshit
  • Ed Webb on 15 Mar 10
     
    As relevant to general education as to journalism training
Ed Webb

Social Media and Young Adults | Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project - 0 views

www.pewinternet.org/...al-Media-and-Young-Adults.aspx

pew media social media SocialMedia USA survey generations generational

shared by Ed Webb on 29 Mar 10 - Cached
  • the move to Facebook -- which lacks a specific tool for blogging within the network -- may have contributed to the decline of blogging among young adults and teens
  • “Microblogging and status updating on social networks have replaced old-style ‘macro-blogging’ for many teens and adults,”
Ed Webb

Google and Meta moved cautiously on AI. Then came OpenAI's ChatGPT. - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...chatgpt-google-meta

AI tech technology business ethics

shared by Ed Webb on 29 Jan 23 - Cached
  • The surge of attention around ChatGPT is prompting pressure inside tech giants including Meta and Google to move faster, potentially sweeping safety concerns aside
  • Tech giants have been skittish since public debacles like Microsoft’s Tay, which it took down in less than a day in 2016 after trolls prompted the bot to call for a race war, suggest Hitler was right and tweet “Jews did 9/11.”
  • Some AI ethicists fear that Big Tech’s rush to market could expose billions of people to potential harms — such as sharing inaccurate information, generating fake photos or giving students the ability to cheat on school tests — before trust and safety experts have been able to study the risks. Others in the field share OpenAI’s philosophy that releasing the tools to the public, often nominally in a “beta” phase after mitigating some predictable risks, is the only way to assess real world harms.
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • Silicon Valley’s sudden willingness to consider taking more reputational risk arrives as tech stocks are tumbling
  • A chatbot that pointed to one answer directly from Google could increase its liability if the response was found to be harmful or plagiarized.
  • AI has been through several hype cycles over the past decade, but the furor over DALL-E and ChatGPT has reached new heights.
  • Soon after OpenAI released ChatGPT, tech influencers on Twitter began to predict that generative AI would spell the demise of Google search. ChatGPT delivered simple answers in an accessible way and didn’t ask users to rifle through blue links. Besides, after a quarter of a century, Google’s search interface had grown bloated with ads and marketers trying to game the system.
  • Inside big tech companies, the system of checks and balances for vetting the ethical implications of cutting-edge AI isn’t as established as privacy or data security. Typically teams of AI researchers and engineers publish papers on their findings, incorporate their technology into the company’s existing infrastructure or develop new products, a process that can sometimes clash with other teams working on responsible AI over pressure to see innovation reach the public sooner.
  • Chatbots like OpenAI routinely make factual errors and often switch their answers depending on how a question is asked
  • To Timnit Gebru, executive director of the nonprofit Distributed AI Research Institute, the prospect of Google sidelining its responsible AI team doesn’t necessarily signal a shift in power or safety concerns, because those warning of the potential harms were never empowered to begin with. “If we were lucky, we’d get invited to a meeting,” said Gebru, who helped lead Google’s Ethical AI team until she was fired for a paper criticizing large language models.
  • Rumman Chowdhury, who led Twitter’s machine-learning ethics team until Elon Musk disbanded it in November, said she expects companies like Google to increasingly sideline internal critics and ethicists as they scramble to catch up with OpenAI.“We thought it was going to be China pushing the U.S., but looks like it’s start-ups,” she said.
Ed Webb

The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret | WIRED - 0 views

www.wired.com/...search-race-has-a-dirty-secret

AI LLMs climate emissions internet analysis energy

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Feb 23 - Cached
  • The race to build high-performance, AI-powered search engines is likely to require a dramatic rise in computing power, and with it a massive increase in the amount of energy that tech companies require and the amount of carbon they emit.
  • Every time we see a step change in online processing, we see significant increases in the power and cooling resources required by large processing centres
  • third-party analysis by researchers estimates that the training of GPT-3, which ChatGPT is partly based on, consumed 1,287 MWh, and led to emissions of more than 550 tons of carbon dioxide equivalent—the same amount as a single person taking 550 roundtrips between New York and San Francisco
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • There’s also a big difference between utilizing ChatGPT—which investment bank UBS estimates has 13 million users a day—as a standalone product, and integrating it into Bing, which handles half a billion searches every day.
  • Data centers already account for around one percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to the International Energy Agency. That is expected to rise as demand for cloud computing increases, but the companies running search have promised to reduce their net contribution to global heating. “It’s definitely not as bad as transportation or the textile industry,” Gómez-Rodríguez says. “But [AI] can be a significant contributor to emissions.”
  • The environmental footprint and energy cost of integrating AI into search could be reduced by moving data centers onto cleaner energy sources, and by redesigning neural networks to become more efficient, reducing the so-called “inference time”—the amount of computing power required for an algorithm to work on new data.
Ed Webb

Keep the 'Research,' Ditch the 'Paper' - Commentary - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 1 views

chronicle.com/...144653

education research writing assignments

shared by Ed Webb on 29 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • we need to construct meaningful opportunities for students to actually engage in research—to become modest but real contributors to the research on an actual question. When students write up the work they’ve actually performed, they create data and potential contributions to knowledge, contributions that can be digitally published or shared with a target community
  • Schuman’s critique of traditional writing instruction is sadly accurate. The skill it teaches most students is little more than a smash-and-grab assault on the secondary literature. Students open a window onto a search engine or database. They punch through to the first half-dozen items. Snatching random gems that seem to support their preconceived thesis, they change a few words, cobble it all together with class notes in the form of an argument, and call it "proving a thesis."
  • What happens when a newly employed person tries to pass off quote-farmed drivel as professional communication?
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Generally these papers are just pumped-up versions of the five-paragraph essay, with filler added. Thesis-driven, argumentative, like the newspaper editorials the genre is based on, this "researched writing" promises to solve big questions with little effort: "Reproductive rights resolved in five pages!"
  • Actual writing related to research is modest, qualified, and hesitant
  • our actual model involves elaborately respectful conversation, demonstrating sensitivity to the most nuanced claims of previous researchers
  • Academic, legal, medical, and business writing has easily understandable conventions. We responsibly survey the existing literature, formally or informally creating an annotated bibliography. We write a review of the literature, identifying a "blank" spot ignored by other scholars, or a "bright" spot where we see conflicting evidence. We describe the nature of our research in terms of a contribution to the blank or bright spot in that conversation. We conclude by pointing to further questions.
  • Millions of pieces of research writing that aren’t essays usefully circulate in the profession through any number of sharing technologies, including presentations and posters; grant and experiment proposals; curated, arranged, translated, or visualized data; knowledgeable dialogue in online media with working professionals; independent journalism, arts reviews, and Wikipedia entries; documentary pitches, scripts and storyboards; and informative websites.
  • real researchers don’t write a word unless they have something to contribute. We should teach our students to do the same
Ed Webb

Liberal Education Today : What Function for Study Abroad? Service Learning in Internati... - 0 views

let.blog.nitle.org/...international-studies-programs

studyabroad NITLE servicelearning technology

shared by Ed Webb on 01 Oct 09 - Cached
  • a trend toward the integration of service learning into study abroad and global studies more generally at the liberal arts colleges I work with
  • an element to the study abroad experience that goes beyond cultural immersion. Students grapple with important and timely issues
  • I am currently working with Andy Wallis from Whittier College and Chris Boyland from Bryn Mawr College on planning a virtual program for later the Fall semester, and the integration of service learning with international education was one of the issues that most resonated on the survey we are conducting to help us develop a program responsive to the needs and interests of folks at NITLE’s participating colleges.
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