⚙️ Work
- I renewed my SCUP membership for another year. I don’t think I’ll make it to the annual conference (unless my session proposal makes it off the contingency list). Although, Philadelphia in July could be interesting. Next year’s in Honolulu??? That might be a stretch…
- Our Vice Provost Teaching & Learning just launched their new website, including this page on Generative AI in Teaching and Learning.
- We’re working on an institutional “Natural Language Generators Operating Standard” policy document, covering academic, research, and operational uses of generative AI. I’ve been making contributions to incorporate the guiding principles from our VPTL page on generative AI, and some other teachy-learny bits. The operating standard will have to go through governance for review and approval, but we’re getting there. The tricky bits are related to data classification levels - what types of institutional data/content are allowed to be shared with any third-party, not just genAI - and of course copyright and intellectual property and ethical use of these tools. Anyway. I think I made some good contributions to the Operating Standard draft, adding some things that should make it more useful to people, rather than just being a legalese document of record. Still getting used to being in a position to actually help write these things…
- I’ve been taking Fridays off for the last couple of months to try to burn off some of my vacation balance. In that time, my vacation accrual has gone up by 15 hours. It’s going the wrong way. I’ll need to plan some longer blocks of time off through the summer…
📚 Reading
Here’s the thing. I have a stack of reading, but I just can’t do it. I can’t muster the energy to read anything longer than a few sentences, and very little of what I do read makes sense the first time so I get to re-read things a few times. I spent some quality time in waiting rooms this week, and tried to find some good fiction to read. But I just didn’t want to? Wound up sitting quietly instead. I’m hoping this is tied to the whole insomnia thing, and that I figure that out soon. It feels like I’ve been running at maybe 50% capacity for a while, and that doesn’t feel very good.
🔗 Links
- Alexandre Dulaunoy: RSS Tools - a collection of Python scripts to do handy things with RSS.
- A.J. O’Connell @ EDUCAUSE Review: How (and Why) the University of Michigan Built Its Own Closed Generative AI Tools.
- Benj Edwards @ Ars Technica: Some teachers are now using ChatGPT to grade papers. Oof. Yes, ChatGPT can generate strings of text that look like feedback and grades. But it isn’t giving feedback on student learning, it’s generating text that satisfies the “what words make sense given all of the words you’ve seen?” algorithms. It looks like feedback because it’s seen feedback, but that’s like someone speaking a language by stringing together phonemes without understanding what they’re saying. It sounds good, but means nothing.
- Jerald Pinson @ Phys.org: Scientists CT scanned thousands of natural history specimens, which you can access for free. The openVertebrate collection is hosted by the Florida Museum at the University of Florida, and is funded by the NSF. So far, there are only 19 specimens available, but the 4-year project will produce many more. Amazing. The angler fish looks metal AF. I wonder what a similar project might look like for invertebrates…
- Berthelot et al (2024). Estimating the environmental impact of Generative-AI services using an LCA-based methodology. 31st Conference on Life Cycle Engineering. AI’s impact is kind of huge, and largely invisible. And offloaded to public infrastructure to deal with.
- Evan Halper @ WaPo: Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power (paywall-bypassing link). More, from the “Privatize the profits, socialize the costs” school of economics.
- The Supreme Court of Canada recently ruled that IP addresses are “private” and require a warrant for access by police. We’re looking into what classifying IP addresses as “private” might mean for campus services. We use IP addresses for things like academic integrity investigations. It looks like campus policies trump this, and we’re not The Police (you don’t have to put on the red light), but we need to know for sure what this means. IT and Legal are looking into it.
- Surprisingly, Microsoft is advocating that people should use generative AI in education.
- Michael Webb @ JISC National Centre for AI: Our AI in Education Maturity Model – an update for 2024 (via Stephen Downes, who notes that this “looks like SAMR for AI”)
🍿 Watching
- ★★★★☆ Masters of the Air (AppleTV+). Spielberg and friends, Band of Brothers, but in planes. Kind of the anti-Top-Gun-Maverick. I watched the first 8 episodes, with the finale next week.
- Watched a couple of Flames games this week. Moments of absolutely amazing hockey, interspersed with dumb mistakes. They’ll be rebuilding with some strong rookies and a few deep leaders.
🧺 Other
- I realized (again) that I need to ease off the bike (again). It could be nothing - maybe I’m just fighting something and am just run down? I was off the bike for 4 days to rest, then eased back onto the bike today.
- I saw my GP and we ran some tests to make sure. Thankfully, it’s nothing to worry about, likely related to how I was managing insomnia. Not a super fan of insomnia. Hoping to figure that out soon.
- Switching to Arc didn’t stick. Back to Safari for most things.
- I was summoned for juror selection. This was my first time. About 500 people lined up to get through security and check in. It seemed like about half were rejected at that stage (including me), before going into the courtroom to be interviewed. Rejection! Ouch. Maybe next time, I’ll make it into the courtroom…
- Irwin’s memorial was today. I wasn’t able to go, but think about him every day.
🗓️ Focus for next week
- The last candidate presentations for a faculty position in the TI
- The lunchtime public skating season at the Oval ends this week. Hoping to get 1 or 2 skates in.
- Planning a session for this year’s UCalgary teachy-learny conference, on the whole architecture studio course thing.
- Meetings. TI staff meeting. GFC TLC. Team programming planning.