Ed tech must reads: column #77

April 21, 2023

First published in Campus Morning Mail 18th April, 2023

Another day, another mind bending development in AI land. One of the new exciting new toys is AutoGPT, a Python app published to GitHub on the 30th of March. It can access the Internet and uses GPT4 to iterative set itself a series of tasks to perform to achieve whatever goal you initially set for it. Essentially you can tell it to do X, it will identify that it needs to do A, B and C to achieve this and then also that it needs to do D, E and F to get A done. Then it goes off and does it, checking in with you from time to time that it is on track. One example cited mentions that AutoGPT had been asked to create an app and recognised that the user didn’t have Node software. So, it worked out how to install that, did that and continued. Wild times. I’m not entirely sure what the educational applications are but it might have saved Aneesha Bakharia (UQ) some time.

Aneesha Bakharia was one of the expert panellists in the TELedvisors/CCCL AI webinar earlier this year and continues to impress with her new AI based online module creation tool, Eduweaver. It allows users to nominate a topic and the tool outputs a set of simple text content and MCQ pages. She offers examples covering Meteorology, Learning Analytics, Javascript and more.

As with most new tools, AutoGPT has its challenges to work through. This in dept post from Han Xiao, founder of Jina AI offers a fairly comprehensive breakdown of some of the practical challenges that users might face with this just-over-two-week-old technology. It gets techy but the jist isn’t too hard to pick up.

Empowering learners for the age of AI from Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence (Open Access)

For a slightly more scholarly take on the current mess/age of wonder, this recent issue of Computers and Education: Artificial Intelligence features articles from George Siemens, Dragan Gašević, Lina Markauskaite, Kirsty Kitto, Simon Buckingham Shum, and a host of other luminaries on many facets of what we can and should do next with AI in education.

And now for something (almost) completely different, this article from Joanna Tai, Margaret Bearman, Mollie Dollinger and Rola Ajjawi proposes some simple yet essential changes in the way that universities handle assessment, including more student choice, more feedback and greater inclusivity.