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.
Dylan Wiliam, Emeritus Professor at the Institute of Education: Assessment for Learning in the Classroom, and From Teachers to Schools: Scaling Up Professional Development for Formative Assessment. Dylan Wiliam (@dylanwiliam) on Twitter Welcome to…
I was thinking of Dylan Williams the other day and remembered David Noble, my partner in Edutalk partner had interviewed him back in 2012. This was the second round of AIFL in Scotland.
I gave it a listen on the way to work this morning. It is a great interview. Dylan is very positive about teaching, makes some great points and David asks great questions. I think it is still relevant 11 years later!
Well, I think that Scotland did a very good job of kicking off this process right at the end of the 1990s, the early 2000s.
So I think that the original focus was very welcome, the idea of assessment is for learning. I think people got slightly seduced by the tips and techniques rather than thinking about this as being a vehicle for teacher learning. So I think it got rather, and this may be inevitable for any innovation, it got rather packaged as being a thing that schools could do. And many schools think they’ve done assessment is for learning, and so they’re moving on to the next thing.
“inevitable for any innovation” – My emphasis.
After listening to this I though I might like to grab some quotes so remembered I’d downloaded the free app Aiko, which is an AI-powered audio transcription, and ran the audio through it. After a hiccup when the app though the language was Welsh it seemed to do a great job. I’ve added it to the original post. David & I alway regretted not being able to provide accessible transcriptions of our broadcasts/podcasts. I am wondering about picking out some other episodes to transcribe. The audio is not attributed to the two different speakers, but I think it is easy enough to understand.
Radio Edutalk is a project I am extremely please to have been part of. We were a bit ahead of the podcast curve, but it gave me an amazing opportunity to talk to all sort of amazing educators. It ran from 2009 till 2019 starting as an open to any contributor, mobile podcast and developing to include regular internet radio broadcasts which were archived as podcasts. About EDUtalk has a bit more information.
BBC Radio 4 – Word of Mouth, Chatbots 1
Like lots of other folk I’ve been reading plenty about Large Language Models, AI & Chatbots and playing with some of the toys.
I really liked Professor Bender’s approach and method. I also found this a very easy listen. My mind has tended to wander off when reading blogs post about AI. Very clear on the “not intelligent” and the risks associated with chatbots trained on large piles of language.
And specifically the things that they’re predicting is what would be a plausible next word given all the preceding words here and then again and then again and again.
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And so that’s linguistically interesting that once you get to billions of words of text, there’s enough information in there just in the distribution of words to stick with things that are both grammatical and seemingly coherent.
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So that’s a cool observation and it’s dangerous because we tend to react to grammatical, fluent, coherent, seeming text as authoritative and reliable and valuable.
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So instead of talking about automatic speech recognition, I prefer to talk about automatic transcription because that describes what we’re using it for and doesn’t attribute any cognition to the system that is doing the task for us.2
