Tag: ai

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Listened to: Learning Conversations Artificial Intelligence with Ollie Bray | Education Scotland podcast

This is the first Education Scotland podcast episode I’ve listened to. Solid food for thought. I’ve not developed any really solid ideas around AI in education but this helped me think of some questions. Ollie compared the uptake and development to AI to other technologies:

So the take up rate of generative AI, like ChatGTP, has been far quicker than people signing up to Facebook, you know, people adopting the internet, people getting a television, people getting radio, etc.

There was discussion of some ways that AI is already being used in schools including what Ollie described as lots of schools doing really, really good work around the ethics of AI.

I wonder what aspects of ethics are being discussed? The one I’ve thought of most is already out of the stable. All the material scraped by AI before we got a chance to choose. I’m not particularly worried about anything I put online being gobbled up by AI, but I imagine it would be more of concern for artists and writers who earn a living from content?

I think we also need to consider the ethics of all application & services we use in education. Especially when application make educational design decisions or have unethical behaviour1.

An interesting point was around developing AI to recreate traditional methods of education, but arguably in more efficient way. Ollie thinks that is probably missing how do we use the technology to do things that were unimaginable before?

I’ve read a bit about using AI in schools for report writing, analysing pupil data and the like and seen a few educational AI startups offering that sort of service. Most of the teachers I’ve talked to, like myself, have used it in a very basic way, cutting down some time in making a quiz or other classroom resources. We are just using ChartGPT, Copilot. etc in as fairly simplistic way.

The podcast talked about the need to update the Scottish Government’s technologies for learning strategy mentioning that it would take 10 years to bring this to publication. I can see a bit of a mismatch with the speed that technology is developing, especially AI. Can we plan that far ahead?

I used the AI application Aiko to generate the transcript to get the quotes.

  1. Thinking about X/Twitter, see Can democracy survive now the world’s richest man has it in his sights? | George Monbiot | The Guardian should we be using X with learners or at all given Mr Musk’s reinstatement of horrors & obliging censorship of government critics? ↩︎

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I occasionally use AppleScript to avoid repetitive tasks. I quite enjoy writing scripts. My scripting tend to follow the guess and check procedure. It can be weeks or months between these efforts so I need to look up the library or search for many basic things1.

In my part time job, I quite often report findings or issues with the Glow Blogs system. In doing so I need to remember to include: computer model, OS version Browser and Browser version. This is quite simple but requires a few clicks and a bit of typing. I thought today I might create and AppleScript to do this for me.

I then thought I might use Claude.ai to get me started2. I used the prompt:

Can you give me a n applescript that will report on the current model of mac, the version of the OS and the current application & version?

I’ve noticed that AI doesn’t seem to be bothered with my constant typos!

The first script threw an error when I tested it. So I copied the error and the line it came from and sent it back to Claude. Another error. This continued through 10 versions. Sometimes I broke off to test an idea of my own or check the AppleScript Library and reported that to Claude.

This began to feel a bit like my usual process of testing, checking and reading. But a good bit quicker. We finally got there. I just added a line to copy to the clipboard and put the script in the Script Library so I can call it with FastScripts3.

For some reason I thanked Claude:

You’re welcome! The final script successfully gets:

1. The Mac’s hardware model

2. Current OS version

3. Active application name and version

Just for future reference – we went through several approaches before landing on the most reliable method using osascript to directly query the application’s version. This ended up being more robust than trying to get the version from file metadata or application paths.

Let me know if you need any modifications or have other AppleScript questions!

At this point I only had one free message left. So I asked Claude to refactor the script into a shell script. This it did with one error. With no more messages left, a search produced a fix pretty quickly. I ended up with this.

  1. This is true of all the scripty type things I do. Except for HyperCard which I used every day for years. ↩︎
  2. I’ve been using free versions of AI for a while now. A few times a week. Mostly for school things. Creating a text for pupils, or questions on a text. Claude is my current fav for scripting. ↩︎
  3. I think FastScript is one of my favourite mac applications. It is very handy for this sort of script as you can either select it from FastScripts menu or give it a keyboard shortcut. The Front application, which we are interested in, stays at the front. ↩︎

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Webpage with description and image of a European Goldfinch on a branch against a blue sky.

Image Accessibility Creator · Streamlit

Impressive ai generated descriptions and alt text from images. I found adding even a one word helped.

Via Doug Belshaw: How to easily generate image descriptions and alt text | Thought Shrapnel

After taking a screenshot I fed it back to the webpage (too tempting) and got:

Image Description: A screenshot of a webpage with the header “asuo-ai-labs.streamlit.app” shown in the top center. The screen is divided into two main sections. On the left, under the heading “Image and Details,” there is a section for uploading an image. A placeholder box labeled “Drag and drop file here” or “Browse files” is visible. Below it, there is a thumbnail of an image labeled “IMG_9865.jpeg” which is 2.8 MB in size. The image thumbnail shows a European Goldfinch perched on a budding branch against a clear blue sky. Below the thumbnail, there is a toggle switch labeled “Add details about the image,” which is turned on. A text box is filled in with the word “Goldfinch.”

On the right side of the webpage, there is a section labeled “Image Description.” Below it, a detailed description of the image is provided, as well as a short alt text. The image description reads: “The image features a European Goldfinch perched on a budding branch against a backdrop of a clear blue sky. The Goldfinch displays vibrant plumage with a distinctive red face, a mix of black and white on its head, a warm beige chest, and brownish wings with yellow accents. The branch, adorned with small, white buds and green leaves, stretches horizontally across the bottom right of the image, while the bird is slightly right of center. The serene sky comprises soft, light blue gradients without any visible clouds.”

The alt-text reads: “European Goldfinch perched on a budding branch against a clear blue sky.”

Alt-Text: Webpage with description and image of a European Goldfinch on a branch against a blue sky.

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AI in action

In the vast sea of educational blogs, The Learning Hub shines as a beacon of insightful content and valuable resources. With a dedication to excellence and a passion for learning, this blog has become a go-to destination for educators, students, and parents alike.

 

This was posted in response to a post on the Glow Blog help: Glow Blogs Start of Session FAQ 2022.

I’ve been generating a bit of text for example sites recently and this text has the same smell I get from ChatGPT and co-pilot.

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Read Generative AI and Creative Learning: Concerns, Opportunities, and Choices by Mitchel Resnick
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.

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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.

Is that an Elephant?

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:

  • The obvious, ethics around where the data comes from, scraping possible copyrighted works.
  • The bias of the data, racial bias is the one I’ve read about most, but I imagine there are many others.
  • Possible breaches of pupil/student data, safeguarding issues.
  • The commercial nature of the tools. A lot of these services seem to be freemium, with either a limited or time limited resource set.

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.

  1. I’ve not been to a TeachMeet for a while so this intrigued me as much as AI ↩︎
  2. Over the time it has taken me to type this post I see this: Women’s faces stolen for AI ads selling ED pills and praising Putin – The Washington Post, this AI – two reports reveal a massive enterprise pause over security and ethics. I also asked ChatGPT to give me 400 words on the pros and cons of using AI in education. I’d say there is a lot of confusion about. ↩︎

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Bing:

Yes, I can make a montage from image URLs. I can combine multiple images into one layout and add some effects and text to make it more appealing. 😊

To make a montage, you need to give me the URLs of the images you want to use, separated by commas. For example, you can type something like this:

https://example.com/image1.jpg, https://example.com/image2.png, https://example.com/image3.gif

Me:
can you make a montage from these images: https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53416455853_f0199ace12_b.jpg,https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53416288176_f0199ace12_b.jpg,https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53370766129_d6b3a4f7f3_b.jpg,https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53370643338_c6227c09b6_b.jpg,https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/53370766219_9b52b8624c_b.jpg mosaic style

Bing:

Yes, I can make a montage from these images in mosaic style. I will try to make it interesting and colorful. 😊

Please wait a moment while I generate the montage for you. 🙏

A screenshot of 4 images generated by bing, not what was asked for.

Me: hmm I don’t see any of the images I asked to be used in the montage?

Bing: can you check … big list of things to check with my system…

Me:
no, you made a montage with some other graphics, not the images I specified.

Bing:

I apologize for the confusion. I am not capable of creating montages or graphics. I can only describe images and provide information about them. If you could provide me with more information about the images you are referring to, I will do my best to help you. 😊

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Bookmarked Jetpack AI Assistant – WordPress AI Content Generator Plugin.

Is the Jetpack AI Assistant available for free?
Yes, the Jetpack AI Assistant block is currently available for free up to 20 requests. We encourage you to try it out and share your feedback. You can upgrade your plan to continue using the AI Assistant after the initial 20 requests.

I was quite interested in this, but not enough to pay £7.50 a month for it. The need for an account and payment also rules it out of Glow Blogs too.

I’ll continue to occasionally dabble with ChatGPT.