Lorna M. CampbellHow does open education practice sit alongside generative AI? There are some similarities in terms of ethos; GAI repurposes, reuses, and remixes resources, but in a really selfish way.
Every section in Lorna’s post is interesting but this popped right out at me.
As each new wave of technology ripples through society, we need to decide if and how to integrate the technology into our learning environments. That was true with personal computers, then with the internet, and now with generative AI technologies.
I just listened to the generated audio rather than read this.
Really powerful summary between the instructionist and constructionist approaches to AI in education. Resnick is of course the father of scratch, so is firmly on the constructionist side.
There are powerful ideas and examples of the ways AI could support a constructionist approach to learning and the 4Ps projects, passion, peers, and play.
I started to pull out quotes, but it easier to suggest you just read the whole thing.
I worry that inertia and market pressures will push the educational uses of generative AI in this direction.
This would be the worry.
The piece finishes with
The choice is up to us. The choice is more educational and political than technological. What types of learning and education do we want for our children, our schools, and our society? All of us—as teachers, parents, school administrators, designers, developers, researchers, policymakers—need to consider our values and visions for learning and education, and make choices that align with our values and visions. It is up to us.
I do wonder if, in the mainstream, we have much choice. I don’t think that many decisions about educational technology have been very pure, the power of the big companies is massive. We should be thankful that the more open, non-commercial like scratch exists.
My class joined in the ‘ AI Wonderland: Unleash Creativity with Make it hAPPen (P4-P7)’ webinar on Monday. It was a useful introduction for their age group on a topic we had not explored in class. In Teams I noticed this TeachMeet1 too. I finally signed up for it on Wednesday.
Given it started at 3:30 on Thursday and school finished for the easter holidays at 2:30, it was a bit of a rush.
I had planned, the night before, to talk a bit about using ChatGPT for creating H5P content in Glow Blogs. I knocked up a quick keynote of screenshots to avoid the danger of live.
ChatGPT can quickly produce information which, once checked, can be used to create H5P content. What is especially useful is that it can format the information to work with HP5 textual inputs. I’ve put some instructions on the Glow Blogs H5P examples site.
The TeachMeet was quite quiet, 3:30 on the last day of term was probably tricky for most folk. I enjoyed the other things shared, although I didn’t grab any links, except for Diffit. I hope to get the rest when the recording is released.
Most of the sharing mirrored mine in that they involved creating resources, quizzes and the like. One idea that stood out, and one I intend to use, was taking an interesting phrase from pupils’ writing and using it as an image prompt in Bing (I believe). This was demonstrated to the whole class and sounds like it would generate interesting discussions.
I’ve used some of the free AI tools, mostly ChatGPT, for a while now. Mostly for simple text generation and some JavaScript or AppleScript help. I don’t doubt that, despite some glitches, that it is potential useful and interesting.
There are a lot of difficult and awkward questions around the use of GPT in teaching & learning. I’ve read a fair bit of discussion around the ethics at both ends of the process, but not much discussing the primary school level.
Things that worry me, beyond my knowledge, time, brain power or pay grade2:
I’ll keep using AI in a casual way with minimum risk (I hope), but it feels like education is stepping into a can of worms in the same sort of way we have adopted most technology, in a rather haphazard way.
Feature image is an old gif I made from a public domain photo a few years ago.
This is a blast from the past. This was one of the first applications I saw first apps when I first used computers. My classes at the time really enjoyed using this.
The other apps I remember from those days included Claris Works1 and HyperCard2
Amazing to see a Mac with kid pix running in emulation at archive.org. It feels snappier than the LCs we had back then.
A pity I can’t get it going on iOS as I’d love to see my current class using it. The is a dialogue to input your name and I can’t type in it on iPad. Workarounds welcome.
The featured image is of the ‘bomb’ eraser ,which my pupils would use endlessly.
I’ve mentioned the app Aiko a couple of time. Until now I’d used it to transcribe podcasts to quote. Today noticed that it could export transcriptions as subtitle .srt files and I gave it a couple of wee videos that I had to remove1 from the Glow Blogs2 help site to comply with accessibility guidelines. Suffice to say I was very impressed with the results. Aiko is free and available for mac and iOS. Cute icon too.
I found my old iPod last night, took a while to get it to boot, but I recorded a microcast just for nostalgia. I use this quite a lot around 2005-9 to record podcasts with my primary classes. There seem to be some interesting crackles added this time.
Suprisingly it mounted on my mac, I could drag the wav file to the desktop and convert to mp3, no other editing.
Continue reading
I’ve now been running blogs with & for my classes since 2005. I still find them a really useful tool for teaching and learning. The focus and content has changed continually over the years.
Back in the noughties I was keen on having my class blog kept up by pupils (archive.org link).
I find this harder to organise now, not sure if it is my age, the demands of the curriculum or something else. Pupils in my class now post to their e-Portfolios1 and add pieces of work to the class blog which I collate into posts. I also pinch quotes from their e-portfolios for the class blog2.
Like my own blog here I still find my class blog a great resource to remember & review. Of course it is a curated view. Much depends on what I am finding most interesting at the time. I both enjoy reading back and use it as a tool when asked for feedback or a record of some sort.
I was somewhat cheered up by Matt Mullenweg’s birthday. Sometimes it feels like WordPress is focused on content management. Matt’s post show that blogging is still loved.
While content management is a main focus of Glow Blogs my love is blogging. I still think we are only scratching the surface of the use of WordPress in school3.
My class finished a wee podcast episode today. As usual I find this a very worthwhile exercise in class.
I am a fan of micro:bits too, these look like great lessons, nicely packaged. CC BY-NC too.
I’ve mostly been avoiding Twitter/X recently, but I still get emails. This looks like it might be fun in class.
I don’t really do much with spotify either, but looking for a poetry podcast I found this one and enjoyed this episode.
At work I get emails about scratch. I often miss these or don’t pay enough attention. There is also a scratch blog on medium. I thought I could subscribe to that in an RSS reader. Couldn’t see a rss link so I searched for more information. Ironically the first two medium articles I found needed a paid account to read. Eventually I just pasted the link into Inoreader which did auto discovery. I also found the email archive on mailchimp and subscribed to that too.
It seems to me that it is getting harder to be a wee bit technical. Like hiding full URLs in the address bar, or making it difficult to find an episode page for a podcast to link to. No RSS link buttons or links to audio files. These changes may have been made in the name of simplification or to make pages a bit stickier but cause frustration here.
