⚙️ Work

• We hosted a visiting delegation from the German Parliamentary Committee on Education, Research and Technology Assessment. Lots of great questions and discussion. Having a UCP “observer” tagging along was new for me.
• Meetings etc.

🔗 Links

AI

• JR Dingwall @ JR Blogwall: Wow Us with your Simulacrum.

  All of those NotebookLM-generated podcast “conversations” are simulacra. They’re shallow. It’s like a semantic uncanny valley, internally consistent but lacking connections to anything not in their seed documents.

• Tom Woodward @ Bionic Teaching: Three AI workshops: 1 for worldbuilding, 1 for productivity, and 1 for non-standard uses

• Ethan Mollick @ One Useful Thing: Thinking Like an AI.

  Who knew, that in 2024 we’d still be getting new LLM explainers. This is a good overview of how LLMs work, from the perspective of someone who uses them rather than one who builds them.

• Journal of Cinema and Media Studies, Teaching Media, Volume 9, No. 2 (Summer 2024) (via Derritt Mason)

• Queens University: Guidance on the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence in Assessment (October 2024) (via Gavan Watson and Soroush Sabbaghan on LinkedIn)

• Dario Amodei: Machines of Loving Grace.

  The CEO of Anthropic wrote a 14,000-word blog post about how “powerful AI” is going to be awesome. I mean, sure. I’d love for many of his ideas to come true - especially on the timeline that he’s writing about. Curing cancer? Kind of important to me. Etc. Given that he probably makes more in an hour than I do in a year, this blog post probably cost like $1M to write. So, it’s absolutely got an agenda behind it, which is almost certainty “golly, I actually do enjoy having gobs of money and I’d like to continue getting incredibly richer.” And the pretentious title was lifted from an uncited 1967 poem by Richard Brautigan, which can be read as a satire rather than evangelizing techno-utopia.

• Alva Noë @ aeon: Rage against the machine

  Here’s the critical upshot: human beings are not merely doers (eg, games players) whose actions, at least when successful, conform to rules or norms. We are doers whose activity is always (at least potentially) the site of conflict. Second-order acts of reflection and criticism belong to the first-order performance itself. These are entangled, and with the consequence that you can never factor out, from the pure exercise of the activity itself, all the ways in which the activity challenges, retards, impedes and confounds. To play piano, for example – that other keyboard technology – is to fight with the machine, to battle against it.

  and

  Humans aren’t trained up. We have experience. We learn. And for us, learning a language, for example, isn’t learning to generate ‘the next token’. It’s learning to work, play, eat, love, flirt, dance, fight, pray, manipulate, negotiate, pretend, invent and think. And crucially, we don’t merely incorporate what we learn and carry on; we always resist. Our values are always problematic. We are not merely word-generators. We are makers of meaning.

• John Nosta @ Psychology Today: Beyond Tools: LLMs and the Emergence of Extended Cognition (via Howard Rheingold).

  When we engage with an LLM, we’re compelled to externalize our internal thought processes, making them more visible and, therefore, more amenable to refinement. Like a skillful conversation partner, the system prompts us to clarify our assumptions and elaborate on our logic, creating a feedback loop that leads to deeper understanding.

Active Learning

• Najafi, H., Rolheiser, N. C., & Gordon, K. A. (2024). Teaching in Active Learning Classrooms at a Canadian University. The Canadian Journal for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, 15(2). https://doi.org/10.5206/cjsotlrcacea.2024.2.14408

  Overall, instructors would benefit from advance notice of ALC room assignment, just-in-time and self-directed opportunities regarding integrating Active Learning strategies in instruction, and access to orientation sessions and multimedia documentation developed for different types of ALCs.

  But, thankfully, we now have a journal article to say that academically.

Edtech

• Howard Rheingold @ Connected Learning Alliance: 100 interviews with digital media / edtech pioneers

• Melanie Latham @ TRU: H5P in the Classroom (via Brian Lamb).

  A team from TRU presented at the 2024 Moodle Moot conference about their work to integrate H5P into their Moodle LMS. Golly, it’d be nice if we could do something similar in Brightspace.¹

Surveillance Tech

• Brian Krebs @ KrebsonSecurity: The Global Surveillance Free-for-All in Mobile Ad Data

  I mean. We all know that cell phones are surveillance devices. But holy hell, seeing how cheap and easy it is to do stuff like this is still just mind-boggling to me. People freak out about teh gubmint tracking people with 5G chips hidden in vaccines, but everyone carries around a tracking collar that’s hooked up to warrantless global surveillance platforms.

🍿 Watching

• ★★★★☆ Trying (Season 4, AppleTV). Another fave in our house. Season 4 is strong so far.
• ★☆☆☆☆ Bad monkey (AppleTV). Nope. Didn’t finish the first episode
• ★★★★☆ Slow horses (Season 4, AppleTV). What a great show. Season 4 just keeps ramping it up. Amazing.
• ★★★★★ Airplane! (1980). Maybe the 20th time I’ve watched it and I still giggle through the entire movie. It’s a big building with patients, but that’s not important right now.

🗓️ Focus for next week

• Meetings
• Tour of Bow Valley College’s AR/VR studio
• Learning Technologies Advisory Committee
• AI
• A TI leadership team workshop