2024 Week 32

⚙️ Work

  • A vendor (who is not currently part of our centrally licensed campus online platforms) notified on Monday that they are changing their business model and will start charging students $15 USD each to access their previously-“free” platform. Or, the university can sign on to a new $8,500 USD per year campus license.
  • A second vendor did the same, but thoughtfully picked October as the license transition date - a month into the fall semester. Cool.
  • We started planning the 2025 University of Calgary Conference on Post-secondary Learning and Teaching. I think it’s going to be another great one!

🔗 Links

Edtech

  • OpenETC published their 2024 report. The OpenETC initiative is an incredible example of collaboration to utilize shared institutional resources to provide services to instructors and students across all institutions. Amazing work, fostering creativity and innovation using a responsible and sustainable model. And, given the vocal pushback of OpenETC members to publishing resources as PDF, I had to chuckle a bit when I saw that it’s shared as a PDF file rendered by Flipbook…

Digital Literacy

I’ve been thinking about ranges of technological capabilities, and sketched out a model that could be used to describe these. And thought “there are no original ideas” and did a quick search for the terms I was using and quickly found several related articles. I still may expand this into a full post if I get a chance…

So that’s one of the things that people are full of anxieties about LLMs and their corporate systems, particularly that use reinforcement learning with human feedback. And I have to, repeatedly say it’s a text technology, just like the word processor. Just like the internet. Just like the web. Just like Wikipedia. And there was a lot of anxiety about Wikipedia, particularly in education: “What are we going to do about Wikipedia?” “Everybody’s just going to, just going to rip off Wikipedia for their papers.” We’ve worked it out. I mean, we ended up teaching people how to use Wikipedia. There are citations; we say “this is probably a good place to start your research and then go to these citations.” I think people are very confused about LLMs at this point, and our libraries at MIT are advising people to cite LLMs, although they’re also saying LLMs aren’t authors so there are—anyway, there’s, there’s lots to be said about that because it makes sense to describe things about your process.

and

I assign students to outright generate a paper. Generate an academic paper about a very obscure sort of topic. So we had, in this case GPT NeoX, generate a paper about it and then comment on that paper…. One student said, “yeah, once I started finding things that just are totally wrong, this made me hyper-attentive. And I was looking everything up.” Students have different perspectives on this, and I know people in our Writing Center and the Writing, Rhetoric and Professional Studies (WRAP) section of MIT are very much trying to figure out what’s going on. A lot of the students I talk to don’t use chat, GPT or LLMs. I can see why people might attempt to make some use of this in certain contexts. It was a stimulating discussion, that class.

Also, Re-mediate looks amazing! I love the “note from the editor” chart to describe the articles in the issue! (But web pages should not be published as javascript to be rendered - what an insane publishing platform! It’s literally impossible to link to individual articles because they don’t exist outside of javascript??? And a magazine without RSS??? They’ve only published “issue 0”, so I’m hopeful that they’ll fix this stuff and publish actual web pages at some point…)

editor’s note graphic from the re-mediate issue

Design

(I was going to link to a thing on AI and learning design, but it’s on Substack and I won’t be linking to or supporting those who chose to use nazi-enabling platforms…)

Sustainability of work

  • Monika Burman @ Automatic.design: Space for Life: A Sabbatical Story.

    Automattic gives employees a three month sabbatical every five years. Read this reflection from design program manger, Monika, on her recent sabbatical.

    With 2 levels of the org chart above me currently gone on research leaves, I keep thinking about how restorative and rejuvenating and creativity-inspiring sabbaticals are. Would be.

Climate change

  • Global Carbon Project: percentage of global fossil fuel emissions (since 1751) occurring in my lifetime (via Information is Beautiful) (I couldn’t find the image on the GlobalCarbonProject.org website so I cached a copy here)

    percentage of global fossil fuel emissions (since 1751) occurring in my lifetime

    So 75% of all carbon emissions released since we as a civilization started burning fossil fuels at scale have happened since I was born.

    At least we’re taking it seriously and are working hard to reduce emissions from burning fossil fuels to generate energy…

  • David Climenhaga @ The Tyee: How the UCP Gutted Alberta’s Renewable Energy Future. I am shocked - SHOCKED - to read that Alberta’s moratorium on clean energy projects, which forced the cancellation of projects both planned and actually-started, has gutted our province’s renewable energy roadmap.

    These (cancelled) projects would have generated approximately the same amount of power as is used by 98 per cent of Alberta homes annually.

    Which connects nicely to one of the charts produced in the Global Carbon Project report:

    Global CO2 Pathways Using Remaining Carbon Budgets

    In order to make the line go down, we need significant reductions to carbon release in the next few years (actually, we need the line to go significantly below 0 for many many years in order to remove carbon from the atmosphere - just reducing our annual dump of carbon isn’t enough). And yet we’re doing everything we can as a province to ignore that and to make the line go up. Always up. Up is life. (Until it isn’t)

    Jesus Christ, this province is exhausting.

🍿 Watching

  • ★★★☆☆ Kong: Skull Island. I somehow didn’t see this when it came out. A dumb, dumb, “what’s the craziest bullshit that could happen, and multiply by 10” combined with “let’s combine terrible strategy and stupid tactics and see what happens.” Anyway. Still a fun movie. Apocalypse Now meets Full Metal Jacket meets Rampage.

🧺 Other

I’m trying to shift back to taking notes in a notebook rather than just typing everything. I was debating picking up a Remarkable 2, but holy crap they’re expensive. Then I considered replacing my 9 year old iPad, but holy crap have they gotten expensive (and I’d probably wind up using it basically like my laptop, so… not worth it). I’m back to just using my moleskine notebook, and using the iPhone Genius Scan app (using the free license) to “scan” notebook pages. I can export PDFs of the notebook page scans to a folder in my iCloud filesystem, and then I have a Shortcut to import anything in that folder into my Obsidian notes, where I can then move them into the right places along with the rest of my digital notes. Seems to work ok so far. Now I need to figure out how to modify my Obsidian dataviews to include PDF files…

So far, the biggest drawbacks are Obsidian’s lack of Properties for PDF files (no tags, links to other notes, other metadata), the inability to paste content (mostly from online meetings/webinars), and the inability to just add a Task inline in a note (but I can easily add them to a Daily note or whatever).

The biggest benefit has been shifting from stenographer to note-taker.

🗓️ Focus for next week

  • Team-hosted sessions, including Learning Technologies Forum and AI Conversations.
  • Meetings are starting to ramp up as we prep for the fall semester

Last updated: August 10, 2024