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The future of assessment: embracing AI and EdTech - Jisc
Olly Newton, JISC, 2024/08/20

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This is a surface-level discussion of the use of AI in assdessment. "While there are concerns about AI's role in education, particularly regarding fairness and the potential for misuse," writes Olly Newton, "there is also a significant opportunity for AI to enhance the assessment process." One example I would adduce is Bolton College's work (more) (video) in formative assessment. We also have another Jisc article, Sue Attewell on Embracing Generative AI in Assessments: A Guided Approach (7 page PDF).

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One thing often happens at keynotes and conferences. It surprised me….
Donald Clark, Donald Clark Plan B., 2024/08/20

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I think this is a really important point: "AI is welcomed by those with dyslexia, and other learning issues, helping to mitigate some of the challenges associated with reading, writing, and processing information. Those who want to ban AI want to destroy the very thing that has helped most on accessibility." I find that a lot of opposition to AI is from people who have things - they have content, they have skills, they have jobs, whatever. But the real promise of AI, to my mind, is in extending some of this to people who have not. This is a theme I think could and should be expanded. Via Harold Jarche.

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Announcing the Winners of the 2023-24 Tools Competition
Kristyn Manoukian, et al., Learning Engineering - Google Groups, 2024/08/20

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It started as an oddity. After Kristyn Manoukian announced the winners of the 2023-24 Tools Competition, a commenter write that "I wanted to test that, but when trying to register with the app, it only accepted the first nine digits of my ten digit US phone number." My first thought was of the irony in that, but the question quickly turned to whether judges had actually tried the application, and from there to the opacity of the judging process. Organized by the Learning Agency and Georgia State University, and in support of the field of learning engineering, the competition awarded more than $8 million in prizes, so it's no small thing. Funding (presumably, but it's not clear) came from supporters such as the Walton Family Foundation, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Ballmer Group,  OpenAI, and more.

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NVIDIA: Copyrighted Books Are Just Statistical Correlations to Our AI Models
Ernesto Van der Sar, TorrentFreak, 2024/08/20

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This is a fairly in-depth look at the details of a case between content authors and Nvidia, a manufacturer of AI chips. Some parts aren't in contention - for example, "the company's use of the 'Books3' dataset, which was scraped from the library of 'pirate' site Bibliotik." But others are contested. There are two major elements here. First, is the copying of a book for the purposes of analyzing it fair use? Second, and more significantly, is the extraction of certain 'facts' from the book fair use? Eg. suppose I learn from a book that "the Battle of Hastings was in 1066" (which, in fact, I did). If I restate it, is that fair use? It seems so. But what about things like grammatical principles and word order? We start a sentence 'The battle of Hastings...' but never 'Battle the of Hastings'. This, Nvidia argues, is what it extracts from books. Not the content.

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Text-to-speech brain implant restores ALS patient's voice
Nancy Lapid, Reuters, 2024/08/20

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This sort of advance is becoming more commonplace. "The researchers implanted four microelectrode arrays manufactured by Blackrock Neurotech that recorded neural activity in areas of the brain associated with language and speech, using 256 intracortical electrodes... by the second day of use, the patient was communicating using a 125,000-word vocabulary, according to the study." What's significant here is that the machine isn't recording 'thoughts', but rather, articulations of those thoughts using what might be called our 'inner voice'. So it's more like speaking through an internal microphone that it is having a machine sift through your brain to figure out what you're trying to say.

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College Writing Centers Worry AI Could Replace Them - EdSurge News
Maggie Hicks, EdSurge, 2024/08/20

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Based on my own experience using ChatGPT to learn Python programming, I would say that AI has a lot of potential in teaching students to write well. As a result, "some college writing instructors worry that the growth of new AI tools may tempt colleges to rely too heavily on the technology or even eliminate." Ultimately, the best advice is that "writing centers need to find a balance between introducing AI into the writing process and keeping the human support that every writer needs, argues Anna Mills, an English instructor at the College of Marin."

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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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