Group items tagged

"Creating an algorithm that discriminates or shows bias isn't as hard as it might seem, however. As a first-year graduate student, my advisor asked me to create a machine-learning algorithm to analyze a survey sent to United States physics instructors about teaching computer programming in their courses."

"Admission algorithms can make or break your academic plans. A Washington Post investigation found 44 schools use prediction software to give applicants a score out of 100 for its admissions process. The score considers different aspects of a student's application from test scores, home address, transcripts, and even what websites they've visited. That's all calculated to rate how strong of a match a student is for a school."

"Looking back on my experience of videoconferencing, I still get an odd emotional pain. The feeling is a kind of shame. Not so much for my own wooden performance and the failure of the technology. But rather a feeling that we have all lost a bit of our humanity through it. My interest in these technologies is ethically motivated. I am not at all happy with the banal dehumanisation that results from bad videoconferencing experiences. If, for example, students and teachers can't express their humanity in education, through its technologies, then we're just not doing it right."

"The system is called as"Intelligent Classroom Behavior Management System" and it is being used at Hangzhou No. 11 High School. With scanning facial expressions the system has the ability to even analysis six types of behaviors by the students such as standing up, reading, writing, hand raising, listening to the teacher, and leaning on the desk."

"Dr Kovanović believes this is a "pointless race to have", given the momentum of the technology and its potential positives. He says AI detection "misses the point". "I think it's much better to sink our effort into how we can use AI productively." He also argued the practice of using anti-plagiarism software to score university students on how likely it was their work was written by AI was causing unnecessary stress. "It's hard to trust that score," he said."

"Dan Gillmor, a journalism professor at Arizona State University, asked the AI to handle one of the assignments he gives his students: writing a letter to a relative giving advice regarding online security and privacy. "If you're unsure about the legitimacy of a website or email, you can do a quick search to see if others have reported it as being a scam," the AI advised in part. "I would have given this a good grade," Gillmor said. "Academia has some very serious issues to confront.""

"The US battle with TikTok over data privacy concerns and Chinese influence has been heating up for years, and recent measures have brought college campuses to the forefront - with a number of schools banning the app entirely on campus wifi. Students have responded, of course, on TikTok. Taking advantage of viral sounds, they have expressed outrage at their favourite app being blocked at universities like Auburn, Oklahoma and Texas A&M in the past few months. "Do they not realize people in college are actually adults?" one user wrote. "We should make our own independent decision to use TikTok or not," another said."

"Brain scans predict students' learning better than exam results and show the underlying structure of thinking. According to recent research published in Science Advances, the conventional exams and grades that schools have long employed may evaluate learning less accurately than brain scans."

"The BBC spoke to several students and parents who vouched for the quality of Byju's learning content - in a country where rote learning is often the norm, Byju's has been credited for deftly using technology to create immersive, engaging lessons. It also claims to have the industry's highest net promoter score (NPS), which measures customer experience and predicts business growth. "

"The debate is whether the ideas noted in an essay or paper come from the student, while the tool can only take credit for the grammar and mechanics of the writing but not the critical thinking. The College Board, which administers Advance Placement (AP) courses, prohibits the use of ChatGPT under any circumstances. On its website, the agency notes, "Like educators across the country, AP teachers are confronting the implications of ChatGPT and other tools.""

"Parent "Portals," as utilized in K12 education, are doing significant harm to student development.[1] For those not familiar, Parent Portals are learning management systems that provide "real time" information to parents of school-aged children: "grades, attendance, assignments, and more." On a daily basis parents can monitor their child's performance in school and intervene at home. In theory, this seems like a good thing. But what is the difference between "real time" data and constant surveillance? In my view, not much. What if surveillance is not conducive to education? I'm working this one out. Let's see where it goes."

"Fluent in Digital Culture - Not Academic Tools"

"But an analysis by the Office of Information Technology Services issued last month "acknowledges that the risks of the use of (facial recognition technology) in an educational setting may outweigh the benefits." The report, sought by the Legislature, noted "the potentially higher rate of false positives for people of color, non-binary and transgender people, women, the elderly, and children." It also cited research from the nonprofit Violence Project that found that 70% of school shooters from 1980 to 2019 were current students. The technology, the report said, "may only offer the appearance of safer schools.""

"What's fascinating about all this is how much of it comes down, not to finance or technology, but to people and what they know. In that sense the FT's deep dive into TSMC's travails reminded me of a striking piece of research conducted decades ago by the philosopher of science Harry Collins when he was a PhD student. Collins was interested in how knowledge gets transferred and intrigued by a particular piece of technology, the TEA laser. This was a device that was comprehensively documented in the physics literature but which research laboratories were unable to replicate. What Collins discovered was that "nobody could make the laser work if they hadn't spent time in a laboratory that already had a working laser. There was very good information in the journals about how to build such a laser. But anybody who tried to put one together using written articles failed. They had something that looked like a laser on their bench, but it wouldn't lase.""

"The combination of ChatGPT with its Wolfram plug-in just scored 96% in a UK Maths A-level paper, the exam taken at the end of school, as a crucial metric for university entrance. (That compares to 43% for ChatGPT alone). If this doesn't shock you, it should. Maths A-level (like its equivalent in many other countries) is held up as the required and essential qualification for much of our populations-the way to be prepared for our upcoming AI age. And yet, here it is, done by those very AIs, better than most of our students."

"Other far more sinister real-world effects of algorithms are well documented. In the US, pedestrians have been mowed down by robotaxis; prisoners denied bail on the advice, in part, of software; in Australia, welfare recipients incorrectly and illegally hounded by an algorithmic debt collector that came to be known as robodebt. In the UK, students took to the streets in 2020 after being denied places at universities by the calculations of digital minions - their chants of "fuck the algorithm" proving a "defining moment" for Kowalkiewicz and an inspiration for his book."

"Concerns about giving voice to the dead do not apply to AI guest speakers who are someone with a specific job, an animal, an object, or a concept such as the Water Cycle. But is it sound pedagogy? Let's consider what teachers can learn about students and AI chatbots from the Eliza Effect. The Eliza Effect is the tendency to project human characteristics onto computers that generate text. Its name comes from Eliza, a therapist chatbot computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum created in the 1960s. Weizenbaum named the chatbot after Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion."

60% of TikTok users and 46% of Instagram users say they feel worse off because of these platforms. 57% and 58% of college students (users and non-users) prefer to live in a world without TikTok and Instagram, respectively. Users would even pay money to see them disappear-$24 on average to eliminate TikTok and $6 to eliminate Instagram.