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Watch Philosophy Lectures That Became a Hit During COVID by Professor Michael Sugrue (RIP): From Plato and Marcus Aurelius to Critical Theory
Colin Marshall, Open Culture, 2024/05/29

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The summary in Daily Nous says it all, I think: "You might not have heard the philosophy lectures of Michael Sugrue, who died recently, but hundreds of thousands of others have — 'The type of professor you'd ditch class to go and listen to,' says one YouTube commenter." Open Culture leads with, "If we ask which philosophy professor has made the greatest impact in this decade, there's a solid case to be made for the late Michael Sugrue." If impact is defined as reach, then maybe. Though it might be hard to surpass Peter Adamson's monumental History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps. But the main point here - which surely ought to dominate any discussion of online learning - is that the apparatus of colleges, courses, degrees and credentials is only a very small part of the picture, and that real contributions are being made outside the classroom walls, out in society, where such learning surely belongs.

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Towards Fairness and Justice in AI Education Policymaking - NORRAG -
Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem, NORRAG, 2024/05/29

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This post comes from the larger publication, AI and Digital Inequalities (72 page PDF). Emma Ruttkamp-Bloem argues that such a policy should include "social values such as affirmation of the interconnectedness of all humans with each other, equity and human agency; human rights values such as privacy, transparency and accountability; and research values such as honesty and integrity." She also argues that "three of the biggest obstacles to attaining these goals include digital poverty concerns, the creation of monolithic societies and misinformation." This article is reflective of the publication as a whole (which is definitely worth a read): it is generally policy-based and founded in social justice themes. But the publication as a whole feels a bit lazy, in the sense that it essentially lists important global social justice issues and applies them to AI, with stipulations that AI should mitigate or in some way address these concerns.

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Technology-Integrated Assessment in B.C. Higher Education – BCcampus
Colin Madland, BCcampus, 2024/05/29

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This short article summarizes a longer paper in OTESSA on developing the Technology-Integrated Assessment Framework (19 page PDF) that "serves as a starting point to understand how to improve technology-integrated assessment practices in higher education in British Columbia and beyond." It consists "four components for instructors to consider when planning assessment." Each of these has three or four subcomponments and is based in previous literature on the subject - the purpose of assessment, based on the Bearman et al. model; the duty of care (in law, and also in the sense of communality); technology assessment (the UTAUT model); and assessment design (the five Rs framework). I would have looked for a more critical assessment of each of these (eg. why UTAUT and not UTAUT2?) but that may have taken more space than the journal allowed.

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Training is not the same as chatting: ChatGPT and other LLMs don’t remember everything you say
Simon Willison, 2024/05/29

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This is something I've also noticed while working with ChatGPT. It will appear to remember what you say, but it's not totally reliable. So when I day "do it the same as last time but make it green" sometimes it will work and sometimes it won't. Simon Willison says, "This can be quite unintuitive: these tools imitate a human conversational partner, and humans constantly update their knowledge based on what you say to to them." But I don't know about that. Ask a student to write a paragraph. Then give them a green pen and ask them to write the same paragraph. I'm pretty sure the two paragraphs will be different. Whenever we come up with something creative, we make it up from scratch almost every time, unless we have an eidactic memory, which more of us don't.

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The Reason That Google's AI Suggests Using Glue on Pizza Shows a Deep Flaw With Tech Companies' AI Obsession
Frank Landymore, Futurism, 2024/05/29

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I've mentioned the AI suggestion of using glue in pizza in a talk. This article reports on the source of the recommendation to a 11-year old Reddit comment posted by a user with a crass name "that was almost certainly meant as a joke." We are all agreed, I think, that adding glue to pizza is a bad idea. But we are not agreed, I think, on what large languiage models (LLM) are supposed to do. They're not encyclopedias. They are language learning systems. The sentence "put glue on pizza to prevent the cheese from sliding off" is a perfectly well-formed sentence. It also happens to be false (or at the very least, bad advice). LLMs are designed to address the first problem, and not so much the second. When in the future we get LLMs that are supposed to be reliable and accurate, we won't use Redit posts to decide what is good advice and what is not (or, at least, I hope not, though I'd be interested to see what the ethics of the AITA subreddit looks like. Via Michelle Manafy.

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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