Category: Uncategorized
-
The platform economy of GenAI in education
I have been out of the social media limelight for the past 6 months. In the face of the incessant and at times overwhelming discourse around GenAI I reacted – like I suspect many colleagues – in a slightly antagonistic fashion. I felt a compulsion to slip unseen in my empirical work and educational program development,…
-
Plug-and-Play Education: Knowledge and Learning in the Age of Platforms and Artificial Intelligence (2024)
If you know me, you know I am a slow writer and nowhere as prolific as I should be. Completing and submitting a (short) monograph is a big deal – and a huge relief – for me, so I am sharing the news here. To celebrate, and to inject a bit of life into my…
-
ChatGPT and reflective writing
The question of whether ChatGPT can write reflectively is of particular interest in tertiary education, where the ability to reflect critically on past experiences is considered an important dimension of authentic learning. A paper published in the journal Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence (Li et al. 2023) recently made the remarkable claim that ChatGPT “may…
-
AI and the bitter truth that brute force won
Richard Sutton is one of the foremost authorities in Artificial Intelligence. His dedicated Wikipedia page credits him as one of the founders of modern computational reinforcement learning, which refers to fully adaptive AI systems that can improve through trial-and-error interaction. In 2019, Sutton wrote a short post on his ‘incomplete ideas’ blog, pondering the ‘bitter…
-
A short illuminated story about ChatGPT hallucinating an essay
This “story” is inspired by a real-life assessment scenario. It accurately reproduces an interaction with ChatGPT, only slightly abridged. The assessment task (reflective essay on the impact of globalisation on education, from a subjective point of view) is authentic, and the Chinese perspective reflects the current pattern in Australian post-graduate HE. The images have been…
-
Some thoughts about the automation of educational labour
Work automation involves two different scenarios. The first scenario entails the development software or hardware systems that can augment social practices; the second scenario is based on the creation of autonomous, self-organising systems that can completely supplant humans in a particular line of work. This distinction has been captured effectively by Aaron Benanav: ‘with labour-augmenting…
-
Tilting at Windmills: Don Quixote as a metaphor for the relationship between generative AI and educational assessment
This is a transcript (slightly edited and shortened) of a talk I gave as part of Edinburgh’s Centre for Research in Digital Education Seminars Series. The full recording is here The explosion of generative AI in 2022 has been felt keenly in education. Whether or not we are facing a truly disruptive set of circumstances…
-
What is a platform?
In layman terms, digital platforms are networked software environments that offer disparate services and affordances. They operate by mediating between the supply and demand of services, or between people seeking informal sociality and entertainment. While broadly accurate and easy to grasp, this definition is clearly insufficient, as it encompasses very diverse enterprises operating in different…
automatED 