Ed tech must reads: column #80

May 12, 2023

First published in Campus Morning Mail 9th May, 2023

Assessment is clearly an integral part of learning and determining whether learning has occurred, but less thought is often given to how it shapes what students are learning and how. This insightful article from Fischer, Bearman, Boud and Tai at Deakin’s CRADLE (of course) takes an ethnographical approach to exploring how physics students navigate a number of summative assessment tasks. It notes that they make independent evaluative judgements about they way they study as much as their work itself and highlights the value of authentic assessments at a program level and partnering with students on curriculum design.

Given the towering stack of (virtual) articles in my own reading list, there is a certain appeal in the idea of feeding it to a robot and simply asking my questions. This article outlines the practicalities of this somewhat involved process, but it should be noted that the ‘token’ (words or word fragments) limits on Large Language Models such as GPT4 range from between 2000 to 32000, so it is likely able to ingest more a mound than a mountain of papers. But one day.

How to cite ChatGPT from APA Style

I am highly aware that some people feel that citing ChatGPT is akin to citing Clippy or Grammarly but this is the world we now live in and as GenAI tools become part of our work processes they need to integrate with other practices. The APA explains here why the use of GenAI differs from ‘personal communications’ and offers a format for in-text and reference citations. It also notes the importance of adding an appendix detailing the prompts and processes used with these tools.

Now that everyone with an opinion seems to have self-identified as a GenAI expert, which at least gives the epidemiologists in the room a breather, a lot of the discussion in this space seems to have settled into a number of repeated talking points. This post from Glenda Morgan examines five key themes that emerge whenever a new Ed Tech appears (MOOCs, Learning Analytics, Mixed/Augmented Reality) and considers their validity in this new context. This includes a preoccupation with trendiness, exaggerated results, technology solutionism, overemphasis on application to learning and moral panics.