Poem Portrait⤴

from

For todays TDC I headed over to Google’s Poem Portraits, as the prompt suggested, and gave it the word breakfast. I let it take my photo while it generated this poem.

Our breakfast stems were drowned with the stars,
My fancy wastes the sun. The fire is formed.

poem-portrait
poem-portrait flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

Impact of AI on EDI practice⤴

from @ Melissa Highton

If you search for ‘impact of AI on EDI’, you mostly get returns discussing Electronic Data Interchange. But with a few tweaks we can find a growing corpus of information.

We can use AI to speed up  some of our EDI tasks, But there are big risks if we don’t actually know what we are doing.

EDI policies available from universities are all fairly similar, so a quick query to ELM (or similar LLM) will move you forward fast, although it may cite the wrong law. ELM can very quickly produce a workplace menopause policy, for instance. HR colleagues may fear for their jobs.  However constant vigilance is needed.  I particularly notice that AI will reference ‘The Equalities Act’  which is incorrect, there are not many equalities, just Equality. Equality Act 2010

That said, the law is also not keeping up with AI

In the future it may be a requirement that all employees have AI training AI Literacy – Questions & Answers | Shaping Europe’s digital future

In the recent Fife NHS Employment Tribunal, there has been concern that one or other of the judges involved was relying on AI misinformation Judge Kemp denies use of AI in Peggie judgment | Scottish Legal News.  The ruling had to be corrected several times and an appeal is planned.

It may be tempting to use AI to understand organisational data, but it seems likely that the result will be as biased as the historic data that you use. If we have not in the past gathered data about our particular demographics, the data will not be there for the models to learn.

It may even re-write history. Despite we know about holocaust deniers and historical revisionists, our new race awareness trainings for staff and students does not even touch on concerns about how people may learn abut history from AI .

Similarly, our consent training and sexual harassment training make no reference to online harms or consent of images. Deepfakes, revenge porn and image abuse are facilitated by AI. There is no reason to think that the people in the University of Edinburgh population are different from all others. The adding of image creation functionality to ELM has been a particular area of concern for me. Just because other tools do it, doesn’t seem like a good enough reason to outweigh the risks.

How are we helping our students to recognise fake images? Do our ‘report and support’ systems include support for detection?

Our students and staff are just as likely as any to put themselves in risky situations of scams and fakers. How are we teaching them to be safe, what does ‘safe spaces’  and ‘active bystander’ even mean in this new era?

In organisations such as ours, where concerns are consistently raised about unconscious bias, it is naive to think that this problem has been ‘fixed’.  The AI will amplify the biases of those who use it, and may be a dangerous tool in the hands of management ( including human resource management).

The demographics of people who work in AI are skewed heavily in favour of men, and in Scotland, white men.I see this at every meeting discussing ELM. We must do more to get diversity in the thinking about how tools will be used and the opportunities they afford. One woman in the room is not enough. Building an AI profession for everyone: diversity at the heart of the UK’s tech future | BCS

Recruitment, retention and career progression are particularly vulnerable areas. If past hiring decisions favored certain demographics, AI systems may replicate these patterns, disadvantaging underrepresented groups.

It is clear that while some people are championing the use of AI with enthusiasm, it is likely to have a disproportionate impact on particular groups, and that is where EDI leadership must be alert. The UNESCO study find harms to women and girls, negative content about gay people and particular ethnic groups and racial stereotyping.

Bias is being discussed in popular magazines and in academic studies, but still targeted mostly at people who are interested in stories about AI, rather than the general public. eg:

I had hoped that digital accessibility would be an area of positive enhancement, and transform the lives of people with disabilities, and this does seem to be an area in which significant gains are being made. As I age and my eyes and ears let me down, I am hopeful for the many AI enhancements I will be able to access.

But there is still the underlying risk that developers who use AI to write code will be drawing on a historical mass of legacy code which did not include the features of accessibility and no-one will be checking.

What can we do:

  • Update all our EDI training offers to include content about the impact of AI.
  • Quickly target training at HR professionals, disability support staff, welfare advisers, safety staff, network groups, occupational health and well-being professionals and EDI leaders to ensure they understand the impact AI may be having.
  • Engage IT professionals and web developers in discussions about using AI in accessibility checking and coding.
  • Take care that any AI training we develop and deliver covers these topics above.
  • Take care that any AI tools we develop and deliver make considerable investment to be better for All.

 

 

 

Text Weave⤴

from

For today’s TDC, as it is Good Friday, I chose a passage from Nietzsche:

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”  Nietzsche Die Fröhliche Wissenschaft, 125

 

Text weave
Text weave flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license

Applying Cognitive Science to Questioning: Timing⤴

from @ Memory and Metacognition Updates

Hello! As mentioned previously, I have been busy working on a book, leading to less frequent posts so far this year. The book is called The Psychology of Education, and will be published by Open University Press. I submitted the first draft last week, and can now focus more on these updates!

I thought I’d pick up on the issue of questioning. I’ve discussed this before (see update #106) but there’s much more to say on this key facet of pedagogy.

In the previous post, I made links with:

  • Retrieval practice, particularly when whole-group questioning is used (e.g. with the help of mini whiteboards);

  • Self-explanation and other techniques that prompt learners to think more deeply and make conceptual links.

These examples show that while questioning can be used to check for knowledge (a formative assessment strategy), it also plays a role in what is studied to be retained securely and flexibly in memory.

three glowing red question marks among a bunch of gray ones
Image via Pixabay: link here.

There are many more links that can be made between questioning and cognitive science, however. Here are couple of major ones to start with, and I will share more very soon.

Questioning and the spacing effect

While we sometimes think of the spacing effect in terms of delays of days or weeks, early research like Glenberg (1976) or Ross and Landauer (1978) studied much briefer time gaps between items – seconds or minutes. This is exactly what happens in a single lesson or practice session. It can inform an educator who wonders: how long should I leave it before repeating a question or example?

Ross and Landauer (1978) note that the spacing effect is “remarkably robust in both scope and size”. They add that “two immediately successive presentations are hardly more effective than a single presentation, while two well-spaced presentations are about twice as effective as one” (p. 669).

The benefits are apparent. In practice, educators can consider asking a question – or repeating one – after a short delay. This could include:

  • Rather than asking a question immediately after students engage with an explanation or text, waiting until after the subsequent task.

  • Repeating a question that students got wrong, but waiting a few minutes to do so.

  • Interleaving questions on topics B and C, so that a few seconds pass before students hear another question on topic A

I feel that these and other applications can become habits in classroom situations, but can also be supported by simple tweaks to planning.

Review and exit questions

Are there benefits of asking review questions at the end of a class, tutorial or lecture? Following on closely from the points above, delayed practice, even if the delay is rather short, could make the practice more impactful. It therefore makes some sense to repeat questions (or ask similar ones) when a class is near its end.

I do have some reservations about commonly used ‘exit tickets’, though, when used formatively to (supposedly) demonstrate that learning objectives have been achieved.

The trouble is that this demonstrates performance, not learning (see update #89). It does not account for forgetting, and is tapping into the retrieval strength of memories rather than their storage strength.

Correct answers on such exit tickets could also generate metacognitive errors among both students and teachers, leading them to mistakenly think that the material is permanently stored in memory after the initial lesson or lecture, when in reality, a lot of forgetting is likely to occur.

So, while end-of-class questions are useful as delayed practice, it’s important that they are not seen as the end of the process. Repeating the questions after a further delay (e.g. after 1–2 weeks) would be an improvement, helping to achieve further consolidation and highlighting the extent of forgetting to students.

As I’ve focused on the spacing effect today, I’ll share a classic paper that had a big influence on me during the early days as a teacher, when I first began to think about applying the effect in the classroom:

Dempster, F. N. (1988). The spacing effect: A case study in the failure to apply the results of psychological research. American Psychologist, 43(8), 627–634.

All the best for the coming week,

Jonathan

Last time: Purposes of Education, Part 2

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