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Where Open Education Meets Generative AI: OELMs
David Wiley, improving learning, 2024/12/13

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David Wiley has advanced his thinking of open education and artificial intelligence beyond 'open prompts' to a more broad-based Open Educational Language Models (OELMs) that "bring together a collection of openly licensed components that allow an openly licensed language model to be used easily and effectively in support of teaching and learning." He doesn't go deeply enough, however. He includes in his proposed stack 'open weights', which are the so-called 'open LLMs' offered by Meta, Mistral and IBM, followed by 'fine-tuning with OER' (whatever that might mean exactly) and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) with OER. But there's (at least) two more crucial layers, and so I've modified his diagram: open data, which is the content used to train the AI (a recent example is the ); and open algorithms, the part nobody (not even OSI) includes as part of 'open', which is the design of the core AI architecture. And because we must must must have a new algorithm, I call it Open Educational Artificial Intelligence (OEAI), pronounced 'aye'.

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Surveillance and Datafication in Higher Education: Documentation of the Human
Leslie Gourlay, Postdigital Science and Education, 2024/12/13

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Interesting commentary comparing two 'datafying technologies' in higher education and academia: learning analytics and the h-index metric. The author argues that "despite important differences, both of these technologies share features discussed in the literature." Specifically, they create what might be called an 'imaginarium' of the subject - a picture of a characteristic successful model of the person in question, a model that can be seen as discriminating against identifiable groups. The H-Index, for example, "favours a large number of papers which have garnered roughly equal numbers of citations, arising relatively quickly after a paper has been published," and posits "an implicitly privileged scholar working full-time in a position of high professional security and prestige, shielded from the pressures and blocks to success listed above," a caricature that the Dall-e image captures perfectly. Via Linda Castañeda.

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I analyzed 15 years of testimonials from users of 750words.com to learn how their private journaling habits have helped them | by Buster Benson | 750 Words | Dec, 2024 | Medium
Buster Benson, Medium, 2024/12/13

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You can stop reading about a third of the way through. This is where the testimonials start, and it's nothing but testimonials through to the end. But the first part of the article is a fun story about using ChatGPT to sort through a large spreadsheet extracting the right testimonials for the author's purpose. "It was only after several hours of work that I realized ChatGPT was coming up with its own testimonials that matched what I was looking for." ChatGPT's short-term memory is not good (and its long-term memory is almost non-existent). It's easy to forget that when working with it. Via Laura Hilliger.

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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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