Group items tagged

"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."

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.

"re than a thousand British schools are monitoring pupils' online communication for bullying and self-harm using software that analyses and translates slang for teachers. The software uses a constantly updated dictionary which includes words that most adults would not understand. These include acronyms such as "gnoc" (get naked on camera) and "dirl" (die in real life) and words such as Bio-Oil, a commercial product which can be used by children who self-harm to reduce the appearance of scarring."

It suggests how dependent on technology universities have become in their attempts to stop students copying work from the internet

"As part of her undergraduate research, Alice Xue studied whether a machine could pass a Visual Turing Test by producing images that people cannot tell were made by a machine. Xue trained an algorithm using 2,192 traditional Chinese landscape paintings collected from art museums. The resulting AI-generated paintings were mistaken for being made by humans 55 per cent of the time."