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TRU Digital Detox 2023
Posts will appear here through the Detox period and will be archived on this site thereafter.
Where Do We Go From Here?
It’s been a wild year to be writing a Digital Detox about artificial intelligence; it has felt like the landscape was always shifting under my feet, and while I always read a lot to prepare for the annual Digital Detox, this year it has been like trying to catch an avalanche in a snow shovel….
Is Higher Ed Too Rigid to Save Itself?: Planning for the Future
Over the course of the last seven weeks, what I have hoped to show is the way that all the choices we have made in higher ed have led up to this place where a tool like ChatGPT causes utter panic. A system that demands teaching be done by a precarious work force at scale…
Robots Marking Robots: The AI Arms Race
Hello Detox readers, and greetings from deep within my plague house. As most parents of young children will confirm, everything is a virus and the children are always unwell; my little germ factory came home early from school on Tuesday and hasn’t been back since. My thoughts are with anyone who is also living in…
Whose Evaluation Is It, Anyway?: Outsourcing Teacherly Judgement
An unpopular thing about me is I always basically enjoyed marking. Like, not the grading part — I always struggled with numerating the denominator and I just don’t believe there’s a meaningful difference between a B- essay and a C+ one in the honest-to-goodness real world — but the marking part? Entering into discourse with…
Breaking What Was Already Broken: AI and Writing Assignments
This week’s post shares a bunch of intellectual air with John Warner’s thinking about AI writing and undergraduate assessment. There’s often a lot of alignment between my thinking and John’s when it comes to talking about writing assessment, but he published first, so let me point you to his excellent piece, ChatGPT Can’t Kill Anything…
Losing the Plot: From the Dream of AI to Performative Equity
A question I have been thinking a lot about this week is whether there is any equitable use of artificial intelligence, given all we talked about in last week’s post about algorithmic bias. Is there any way to imagine ourselves into a future where artificial intelligences really can do the work of decision making more…
Whither Comes the Data: Current Uses of AI and Data Set Training in Higher Ed
The ChatGPT handwringing of late has bothered me, not least because it is cloaked in a kind of shock, like the domain of higher education has suddenly been sullied by this profane technology. But babes, it was always already here. Many faculty are learning about the impacts of artificial intelligence on their own practice as…
Ground Rules for the Robot Wars: Defining Our Terms
The first time I used ChatGPT, I was fascinated. You stick in a prompt and it spits out something. The prose is grammatically correct. It’s coherent. It knows basic paragraph structure and it connects ideas together. It obeys the prompts and offers a kind of clarity, if we define clarity in terms of accurate prose….
Digital Detox 2023 Preview: Robot Invasion 101
It’s hard not to be aware of the encroachment of artificial intelligences* on our teaching and learning spaces if you work in education these days. The launch of ChatGPT a few weeks ago has caught many teachers and learners off guard with its level of sophistication and its capacity to absorb the seemingly mundane writing…
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