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Artificial Intelligence for Open Universities in Asia: Lessons from Robert Moses' Low Parkway Bridges
Junhong Xiao, Open University Malaysia, 2024/06/21

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At last November's ICDE conference, writes Junhong Xiao, "the president of an open university (OU) outlined the ambition of building a global digital university in his keynote speech." But is this the right ambition? Xiao makes the comparison with the parkway bridges built extra-low "to keep buses from the city away from Jones Beach – buses presumably filled with the poor blacks and Puerto Ricans Moses despised." In the same way, "if improperly or blindly adopted, AI can turn discriminatory and, in the case of OU education in Asia, may lead to more harm than good." AI is expensive. The cost of deploying AI may create a barrier against lower income institutions and students. He has a point. I have zero interest in AI - or any educational technology - if all it does is help the already-advantaged. Quality, to my mind, is meaningless without access.

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GPT Builder is being retired
Microsoft Support, 2024/06/21

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GPT Builder was a nifty tool for people building custom GPTs. "Builders can use a conversational interface to create their GPT without having to manually fill out the required fields." It is being shut down in Microsoft's CoPilot. Microsoft reports, "we are shifting our focus on GPTs to Commercial and Enterprise scenarios and are stopping GPT efforts in consumer Copilot." Anything you built in GPT Builder will be deleted (I was feeling badly about not building anything but I feel better now). There's a ton of coverage online and people gloating about how there's no business model for AI, all of which seems overblown to me.

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Harvard Business Publishing Education
Ethan Mollick, Lilach Mollick, Harvard Business School Publishing, 2024/06/21

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"We've found GPT-4 class models particularly effective in creating role-play scenarios" (76 page PDF), write the authors. In this article they describe some of their techniques: crafting prompts to the AI knows its role, creating a variety of scenario options, and having it provide a positinve and supportive experience for students (you don't want it to turn toward the dark side). There's a really nice 'negotiation role-play prompt' provided as an example. What I like about this is that it plays to the strength of the AI, where it doesn't matter if it hallucinates (that actually makes the scenario better) and where it doesn't depend on factual knowledge.

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A Long Guide to Giving a Short Academic Talk
Benjamin Noble, 2024/06/21

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I've given tons of talks, some of them short, and while I see the appeal in this approach ('giving a talk is like selling yourself') and while there is some truth in it, I think the overall approach is misguided. Forget about selling; it's more like entertaining than selling. For one thing, I think readers should ignore the 'anatomy of a short talk' offered in this paper. That's a recipe for a snooze-fest. No, the main rule is this: start with the demo. In other words, show something right off the top. Present the main idea right away. Go straight to the most interesting thing. Take any questions the audience may have. Only then do you explain what you were up to: what problem you were trying to solve, maybe, or what theory you think this shows.

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Measuring data rot: An analysis of the continued availability of shared data from a Single University
Kristin A. Briney, PLOS ONE, 2024/06/21

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People like to say that "what's on the internet is forever" but older hands know that stuff disappears all the time. This is known as 'link rot' and this paper (14 page PDF) studies the rate of link rot in a university website and open data service. "A surprising 13.4% of shared URL links pointed to a website homepage rather than a specific record on a website. After testing, 5.4% the 2166 supplemental data links were found to be no longer available... Links from older publications were more likely to be unavailable, with a data disappearance rate estimated at 2.6% per year."

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Institutionalising a transdisciplinary curriculum: assemblages, territories, and refrains - Higher Education
Jack Tsao, Gray Kochhar-Lindgren, Adrian Man Ho Lam, Higher Education, 2024/06/21

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I did not enjoy this paper at all. In a nutshell: universities are dealing with 'supercomplexity' in and among the various disciplines, which pushes researching in one discipline across boundaries into other disciplines, creating what might be thought of as 'border wars' among them. To resist this, practitioners at the University of Hong Kong have implemented what they call a 'Common Core' to negotiate and facilitate these cross-boundary influences. We don't learn anything about the Common Core itself, though we read a bit about the 'de-territorialism' process involved in creating it. "Such an assemblage," write the authors, "creates a transversal curricular construction of refrains rather than one that relies on the tired dichotomies between the 'specialised' and the 'general' or the 'horizontal' and the 'vertical.'" The relatively simple story I relate here is presented in this paper with heavy and unnecessary layers of theory. I suppose that's what's needed to get published in the journal, but it otherwise serves no useful purpose. Image: Turner et al., Creativity and Innovative Processes: Assemblages and Lines of Flight.

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Learning is prickly
David Hopkins, Education & Leadership, 2024/06/21

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I'm sure this metaphor appeals to a lot of people. "Learning's 'prickliness' is the inherent discomfort it brings. As workers, parents, and friends, we are often required to step out of our comfort zone, confront challenging situations and grapple with complex concepts." But the thing with metaphors is that they don't work for everyone. The challenges of learning are right where I feel at home, for example. What some people find prickly I find soothing and engaging. Your cactus is my aloe.

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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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