2024 Week 35

Dad would have been 89 today.

Dad, during Stampede Week in downtown Calgary, sometime in the 1970s? (Zooming into the sign - COWBOY 83, maybe 1983?)

⚙️ Work

Timeline of learning technology platforms

🔗 Links

Webstuff

• Veriphor - Articles on doing stuff with Hugo (via @gohugoio on mastodon)

Microcredentials

• Brown, M., & Duart, J. M. (2024). Exploring gaps in the quality assurance of micro-credentials: A global mapping review of current practices. Journal of Open, Distance, and Digital Education, 1(1), Article 1. https://doi.org/10.25619/2bwhvw68

• Credential Engine: Global Micro-Credential Schema Mapping: A Vital Step Towards Interoperability and Mobility (via Stephen Downes).

  I’d never heard of Credential Engine before this (we’ve been running our own microcredentials platform since 2015, but the interoperability landscape kept changing so it’s mostly just a standalone platform now, with a way for people to add their badges to their LinkedIn thing - which is the interoperability people actually ask for).

  I wonder how this would turn out differently than Mozilla Backpack. It sounds like they’re laying the groundwork to pitch a federated microcredentials repository. Just throw in some blockchain and it’ll be ready for investors. I may need to dial down my cynicism a little.

AI, of course.

• Curtis Sittenfeld @ NYTimes: An Experiment in Lust, Regret and Kissing (gift link). Sittenfeld wrote a 1,000-word beach-read, and had ChatGPT write another before challenging readers to determine who wrote which. (I guessed correctly but ChatGPT does an OK job of cranking out generic drivel, so it could easily have gone the other way…) (and Sittenfeld took a week to write their version, while ChatGPT was done in 17 seconds. Yaaaaay, progress…)

• Arkün-Kocadere, S., & Çağlar Özhan, Şeyma. (2024). Video Lectures With AI-Generated Instructors: Low Video Engagement, Same Performance as Human Instructors. The International Review of Research in Open and Distributed Learning, 25(3), 350–369. https://doi.org/10.19173/irrodl.v25i3.7815

  Instructors make videos to replace lectures. Using generative AI tools to replace the instructors in those lecture-replacement videos may not reduce engagement further (unless the video is boring - then the AI instructor just gets distracting and creepy). This is my shocked face.

• Philippa Hardman: AI-Powered Instructional Design at ASU¹. Arizona State University partnered with OpenAI back in January to build a bunch of stuff on ChatGPT, including projects that explore how the ADDIE instructional design process might adapt in a “post AI” context.

• Mohammad Keyhani: Prompting Progress: The Generative AI & Prompting Course at UCalgary

Tech burnout

• Lauren Coffey @ Inside Higher Ed: Faculty Members Are Burned Out—and Technology Is Partly to Blame (via Tyson Kendon)

  The survey questions look simultaneously overly simplistic and overly generalized, but look! Numbers! (There are currently 2,730,000 hits for “technology fatigue in higher education” in Google Scholar, and any number of them might have better survey data. Including this one from 2020 with similar but less-problematic survey questions)

🍿 Watching

• LoTR: whatever the new series is called. Rings of Power. Started watching season 2. It’s gorgeous, but I can’t stop thinking about how much money was burned to make the series, and how much actual good that money could have done. Tax the rich.

🧺 Other

I’ve been tweaking the theme for this website, and am now using the open source JetBrains Mono font, self-hosted .woff2 files so there’s no tracking etc. Not sure if I’m super fond of the mono font, but it scratches the itch for now.

🗓️ Focus for next week

• Labour Day long weekend. A quick in-and-out visit to Assiniboia, then back to work.