Category: Pedagogy
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Science Fiction Worldbuilding with Generative AI
It’s been a while since I made a creative post highlighting some of the creative multimodal capabilities of GenAI. It can be easy to get swept up in the drama of recent events like OpenAI’s board firing its CEO (and his subsequent possible flight to Microsoft, or return to OpenAI…). It’s also easy to focus…
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AI Q&A: Anna Mills on balancing the critical and creative aspects of generative AI
This post is the first in a series of Q&A interviews with educators working with generative AI. These posts will explore K-12 and tertiary perspectives of teachers, academics, and professionals who are grappling with the implications of these new technologies. Anna Mills is a community college writing teacher, open textbook author, and an advocate for…
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The AI Iceberg: Understanding ChatGPT
Analogies are useful for understanding complex ideas, and there are plenty of complexities for educators trying to wrap their heads around ChatGPT. In this post, I’ll try to explain some of the features of the chatbot and the model it’s built on top of. I’m deliberately avoiding any kind of analogy that represents the AI…
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Artificial Intelligence and Film Studies: Midjourney versus CAMELS
CAMELS? As an English teacher, I’ve done a lot of analytical film studies over the years. The biggest problem is always students’ grasp of technical language: film analysis tends to drift off into character and plot description, even more so than for written texts. So, when I teach film, I lean more into my Media…
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A Brief History of Artificial Intelligence
Like any complex technology, Artificial Intelligence has its roots in a number of fields. From philosophy to computer science, mathematics to linguistics, tracing the history of AI and automation is a difficult business. The field was officially named in the 1950s, but ideas about automated machines have existed since long before then. This is a…
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Using ChatGPT for Conferencing and Feedback
I’ve used conferencing for years as my main form of feedback and assessment. I stopped collecting piles of books, stopped writing margin notes that no-one ever read, and stopped correcting work like a human spell-checker. Aside from the hours of time saved by not “correcting” work, I also built stronger relationships with students as a…
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Practical Strategies for ChatGPT in education
ChatGPT isn’t the first AI language model, but it’s definitely the one that has taken AI mainstream. Beyond the media hype about cheating, there are some very practical uses for these new technologies for teachers. This post covers six areas where teachers could use ChatGPT with examples of the kinds of prompt you can use…