Multilitteratus Incognitus

When I first started teaching graduate courses back in 2012 (wow...time flies), my hallmark course was titled The Design and Instruction of Online Courses .  Most of my students were folks who were learning to be instructional designers, or faculty who wanted to learn to teach online and had some years of teaching in person under their belt.  One of the most common things I heard in that class was that it was easier when teaching on campus to determine if students were engaged or paying attention.  Just by looking at them, you could determine this by their facial expressions and body language. Eh...OK🤷‍♂️.  While I don't disagree that some people may have this ability some of the time with some of the students in front of them, I still think that people tend to overestimate their ability to do this. Fast forward to today, browsing through the r/Professors subreddit, one tends to find posts asking fellow redditors how they can tell if their student's work is generate...

When it comes to reading trade magazines, I tend to have an on-again, off-again relationship. I think that I am now in the "on-again" part of that relationship with TD Magazine. In a recent(ish) issue of TD, I came across an article titled " Prompting is the problem ," which piqued my interest (edit: archive link didn't work - saving placeholder in case I find a solution). I think there are pros and cons here, so I don't want to dwell on just the negative. For example, the author writes that... "Here's an inconvenient truth: Because AI systems are probabilistic and in motion, the same request won't always give the same answer—and the same model won't behave the same way month to month. Research demonstrates measurable behavioral drift across major large-language-model providers." Yes, it's true that LLMs are probabilistic, and they won't have consistent known outputs for known inputs. As learning design professionals, we should ...

It's the winter break, and now that I have some actual downtime, I decided to do some Microsoft training. I think the last time I had the mental space to do any of this on the Microsoft Education was sometime in 2021 (if the last badge earned is any indication). Anyway, I went through the course offerings to see what's on tap at Microsoft, and I came upon a whole load of AI-related things. Cool. While I've been paying attention to this whole AI thing, I haven't really paid that  much attention to what corporate training is saying about their products (and how they might be used).  I've seen some colleagues post their badges on LinkedIn, so I thought I'd also follow the AI for Educators  learning path on Microsoft Education to get conversant with what others on my campus are experiencing through these trainings. Now, AI has been touted as a time saver on a variety of fronts, a claim that I think has yet to pan out.  As I was going through the AI for Educators ...

Academic AI-Slop (ChatGPT Produced) Happy end of the semester, and almost the end of the calendar year! Alright, I'll own up to it. The title of this post probably doesn't hit the mark ;-) One more calendar year is in the can, and for me, it was a year of (potential) endings, a year of (potentially) new beginnings, and a year where things changed much more so than I expected in my teaching practice. I won't dwell too much on the endings and beginnings in this post because those things are best viewed in retrospect, so they might take a few years to distill down to a post.  I did want to reflect a bit on my teaching practice. As I look back at the year of teaching, I think this year marked an inflection point: the year I started seeing AI-slop as student submissions.  Interestingly enough, it wasn't my graduate students, but my faculty learners  in some of the various workshops I facilitate that submitted such work as part of their coursework.  Can I prove it?  N...

All right!  With all that pondering and throat-clearing done (see my previous series of posts), I was wondering what piques my interest in this LLM-hyped world from a practical side . I've been somewhat active in critiquing this whole thing over the past two years, but beyond creating AI images for the blog (or to amuse myself), or using ChatGPT to make silly little genre-busting poems (again amusement and play), and or using ChatGPT to give me a boilerplate letter that I can then tweak (marginal utility, but I guess if organization ask for things that can be boilerplated, they get something that is boilerplate).  I don't mean to dismiss the value of experimentation or play, they are valuable and low-stress ways to get to know a tool and then you may get an AHA!!! moment of a sort. I've been thinking of something more structured.  I was listening to a relatively recent episode (it was recent when I started writing this darned post!_ of the Vergecast , titled  The Ch...

Bing Image Creator: A Syllabus Wow...it's been almost two months since I started this post! It's hard to believe that it took this long to return to this thought experiment.  Just to remind the diligent reader of this blog, this came out of not one, not two, but multiple places on the web (including professional development conferences!) whereby instructional designers (and other professionals) were demonstrating the use of GPT to put together quick and dirty course outlines for the busy adjunct. While I've got issues with this framing, I'll put those aside for now.  I thought that it might be interesting to actually go through the process to create a course outline and syllabus for a course that I used to teach often before I started my doctoral journey. The course is INSDSG 684: The Design and Instruction of Online Courses , a graduate course in the MEd program of Instructional Design at UMass Boston. I think it's important to start with a course that you know so...

Me again, anime-style AI (or at least what nightCafe thinks I look like in this setting) Alright, so here's my final post on session one of #etmooc2.  You can find post 1 and post 2 on this blog. For this post, I thought I'd post some prompts and responses from my playing with ChatGPT.  Fair warning, I tried to write a profanity-laden email (it sounds badly written IMO, but still has lots of profanities). I tried to channel the r/antiwork subreddit. I guess a content warning is appropriate. Here are some more ChatGPT prompting...about me. I have underlined  all of the information I think is wrong This can be wrong either to a small extent - i.e., it's exaggerated; or to a large extent - i.e., it's factually wrong. Prompt: Please give me an author biography for Dr. Apostolos Koutropoulos that is 200-300 words Attempt 1: Dr. Apostolos Koutropoulos is an educator, researcher, and advocate for open education and open technologies. He was born in New York City and raised ...

Another me in a Star Trek setting, by NightCafe This is a continuation of my previous post from the other day . I didn't want to leave things in all negative terms, so here's part II with some thoughts on how AI might be used (or at least areas of AI that I am warming up on).  This isn't a posting about the current state of AI, but rather a 5 (or 10) year look out.  This is mostly inspired by a recent tweet by Tim Fawns , who asked folks to think not about the just present, but the near future. So...with that in mind, here are some use-cases that I can think of (some of which have been borrowed and adapted from the first #etmooc session). Use Case 1: Getting your biography starter pack from ChatGPT.  I like writing.  I don't like writing about myself .  It feels very toot your own horn -like, and I've always never liked those people .  I acknowledge that to get ahead in life, and in academia, you have to do some of that self-promotion. Still, I don't like w...

Me in a Star Trek-themed anime AI image Just as session 2 of #etmooc2 is scheduled for this evening, I just caught up with the first session over the last few days. The recording can be found here , and it's funny that it took me 3 days to complete.  Part of it was because I could only really do 20-minute increments (with notes and reactions), and part of it was because I paused to experiment with things mentioned. Part of the session was really dedicated to identifying ways in which this kind of technology can help with what we do.  Essentially flipping the script and going from "ZOMG! ChatGPT is used for cheating" getting to "how to use ChatGPT to help us with learning?"  There were a number of examples used in this brainstorming session which present for red flags for me.  I did think of a few examples of my own that may (or may not) be good examples of what you could use tech like this for.  I'll start with my concerns though. Example 1: Using ChatGPT to...

#wilty A few weeks ago I decided to ask ChatGPT to tell me a little bit about myself. Part of it was curiosity, while part of it was because I needed to write a short bio and I just felt uninspired.  The first time the query ran, ChatGPT told me that it didn't know who I was.  That's fine, I thought to myself, because it would be weird to be known like that. After all, I don't really consider myself to be anything big in academia. This past week I decided to try again just to see if anything had changed in the world of ChatGPT. And lo and behold it had! Now ChatGPT seems to know who I am...sort of... Prompt: Who is Dr. Apostolos Koutropoulos? Response: Dr. Apostolos Koutropoulos is an educator, researcher, and entrepreneur who has worked in various fields related to technology and education. He is currently an Associate Professor of Instructional Technology at the University of Massachusetts Boston and the founder of several EdTech companies . Koutropoulos has published ...