“The pods would be moved up and down the structure … as the status of each household changed.” Archura’s confidence faltered as she explained this. “That was an idea from two members of the team. The rest just wanted to install a community garden at the top of the tower.”More
Tag Archives: education
The infodemic (V)
“The learning module wanted my daughter to compose an essay on why mitochondria migrate south for the winter!” The face of a distraught parent addressed her audience at one corner. Another video showed a bemused apprentice setting his blowtorch onto a rack of haute couture, as instructed. Soon the tabletop was littered with recorded images of instances and complaints of rogue instructor droid outcomes, their audio streams rising to a crescendo before stopping abruptly.More
Counterfactual AI (III)
Here’s what went wrong. “The linguistic patterns in the false texts began to surface. The droids started to synthesise and generate the kind of nonsense that went into the rogue training data. The patterns in the perverse training texts began to emerge, in classes, online resources, and through the students, trainees, apprentices under their charge.”More
Predicting AI “misconduct”
A recent headline in the Higher Education section of The Guardian said “Thousands of UK university students caught cheating using AI.” I could see that coming! It is as if some headlines (taglines, tweets and chyrons) are ready and waiting for a report, evidence base, study or authorised opinion to make them real. To help…More
Mobile AI does fieldwork
My book came out this week: AI and Language in the Urban Context published open access (i.e. free to download) by Routledge. In that book I advance the case that places and spaces are enjoyed, appreciated, resisted, interpreted and even created through language — including conversations. LLM applications are evolving constantly. It’s feasible to think…More
What’s wrong with pluralism
I’ve had many conversations with chatGPT on subjects as diverse as writing computer code to comparing and contrasting ideas from philosophy. The performance is impressive. It is a little like talking with an extremely well-informed and patient tutor. It is also unlike that kind of pedagogic human-human interaction in several respects. It becomes obvious to…More
What’s next
Industry, education and everyday users are making increasing use of large language models (LLMs) driven in part by the prominence of ChatGPT and other AI tools. The technology is developing at a pace. The analysis of commentators, critics and legislators also gain traction as they evaluate the implications of the technology and seek to influence…More
Disintegrated intelligence
One of the impediments to convincingly intelligent systems is that their functions are specific. A smart chess playing program may be able to win against a chess master, but it can’t author a blog about AI, or make an omelette. Nor can it play other games, such as Pictionary — that is, unless it’s programmed…More
Evaluating the flipped classroom
Here’s an evaluation to conclude my documentation of the flipped classroom experiment. There were four main sources of data for assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the course and our application of the flipped classroom model: (1) reflections by the teaching staff, (2) attendance records taken in class using attendance software and engagement monitoring via the VLE (virtual…More
Flipped classroom 101
What is a lecture? In the 1980s with Jacques Derrida’s radical hermeneutics in full flow, we read about and practiced the lec(ri)ture, an inversion of the lecturing format — the insertion of laughter (ri) into the standard, conventional idea that knowledge could be delivered by talking to a group of people sitting in front of you. Scholar of English literature Gregory Ulmer asserted…More