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
Tag Archives: education
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
Even more radical pedagogy
This week Beatriz Colomina spoke at the Andrew Carnegie Lecture Series at the University of Edinburgh on radical pedagogy. That prompted me to rush to Jacques Rancière’s book The Ignorant Schoolmaster, which she referenced. The book is a satirical quasi-historical account of an actual nineteenth century French schoolteacher who practiced liberal teaching methods, and sought to emancipate…More
Making friends
People don’t attract enemies. Nor do they collect them. They make enemies. Enemies aren’t out there, pre-existing, like wasps or storm clouds. Enemies are manufactured by our actions and circumstances. It takes a concerted effort to surround yourself with enemies. Enemies are like friends in this respect. We make friends. We would probably not ask,…More