Tag Archives: Micro

wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display 2025-03-24 15:28:18⤴

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Likes “Wait, not like that”: Free and open access in the age of generative AI by Molly White.

Irresponsible AI companies are already imposing huge loads on Wikimedia infrastructure, which is costly both from a pure bandwidth perspective, but also because it requires dedicated engineers to maintain and improve systems to handle the massive automated traffic. And AI companies that do not attribute their responses or otherwise provide any pointers back to Wikipedia prevent users from knowing where that material came from, and do not encourage those users to go visit Wikipedia, where they might then sign up as an editor, or donate after seeing a request for support. (This is most AI companies, by the way. Many AI “visionaries” seem perfectly content to promise that artificial superintelligence is just around the corner, but claim that attribution is somehow a permanently unsolvable problem.)

A good post to read or listen to at the beginning of  Scottish AI in Schools week . The article does not want the stable door closed.

Some AI Links & Things to Think About⤴

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A montage of 4 webpage screenshots.

Bookmarked for future reading. AI in education is becoming increasingly confusing.

Education Scotland are running a week #ScotAI25: Scottish AI in Schools 2025 with live lessons for pupils & some cpd for staff. I might try to make some of those.

  • This week I’ve used:
    ChatGPT to make some questions up about a passage of text for an individual in my class; Write an example text about levers; create a formula for a number spreadsheet and create a regular expression.
  • Claude to make a fractions matching game and a trivia quiz.
  • I am occasionally using lovable.dev to play around making an alternative way of posting to WordPress.

I might have used ChatGPT a couple more times in school. Although it is accessible the login options didn’t seem to be so I’ve no history to check.

Quite a few teachers I know use it in some of these ways in a, like me, fairly causal way. This is a lot easier than thinking about any ethical and moral implication.

Listened to: Learning Conversations Artificial Intelligence with Ollie Bray⤴

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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? ↩︎

wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display 2024-05-04 09:58:05⤴

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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.

wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display 2024-04-06 09:28:29⤴

from @ wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display

Read OER24: Gathering Courage by Lorna M. CampbellLorna M. Campbell
How does open education practice sit alongside generative AI? There are some similarities in terms of ethos; GAI repurposes, reuses, and remixes resources, but in a really selfish way.

Every section in Lorna’s post is interesting but this popped right out at me.

micro:bit iOS app update⤴

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I really like the iOS micro:bit app as do my class. I was intrigued by the data feature when it came out but had not used it. Delighted to see this:

Fetch MY_DATA

Selecting this option lets you retrieve data that has been logged during a data-logging session with the micro:bit.  This is only available with Version 2 micro:bits.

iOS App – Summary of changes in August 2023 update : Help & Support

iMac-less in the classroom⤴

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I’ve been lucky, imo, to have been using an old 27 inch iMac as my computer in school since I started 8 years ago. Despite its age it has been a wonderful machine for me. Returning to my classroom last week I found it will no longer start up at all. No response to the power button. This was my Mac when I worked at the Education Computer Centre before being redeployed to the classroom.

Apart from my familiarity with Macs (going back to system 7) a Mac fits really well with a class all using iPads. The ease of sharing via Airdrop is probably the biggest advantage. It’s simplicity and the way it doesn’t depend on the cloud make it useable even if our internet connection is slow or down. I can quickly collect the pupils work via AirDrop and manipulate (print, combine, resize, assess, organise etc) it on my Mac.

I also prefer using the Apple productivity apps on an iPad but like creating & editing them even more on a Mac.

Large screen computers are rare in primary schools but I have been spoiled. We mostly use quite small laptops. I find these quite difficult to work on. If I use a trackpad for more than a few minutes I get pain in my shoulder and a couple of fingers go numb.

As we now only buy Windows machines in my L.A., I have access to a Windows laptop. However, my old fingers are Apple-trained. I am currently using a rather old MacBook Pro. I have the keyboard from the iMac plugged in, along with the mouse. I think I might just buy a cheap screen and add that as well. I can bring it home and make my Mac mini a dual-screen setup when the laptop follows the iMac.

Having used the MacBook for 4 days I realise how many think I’d added to the iMac (and have at home) that make my life easier. I am going to have to spend some time adjusting the MacBook to my habits. The ones l’ve particularly missed so far are:

  • FastScripts and the AppleScripts I run from it. These are pretty simple: resizing images, collections URLS from tabs to a list and the like.
  • HyperKey, that lets me run said scripts from the keyboard.
  • Various shell scripts, mostly for montage and combining images.
  • Alfred, as a launcher and clipboard manager.
  • I’d miss Rectangle if my screen was bigger.

All small things that I use without thinking and make my life simpler.

This week has certainly made me appreciate the technology I’ve been taking for granted. I also need to remind myself that in my time of teaching, I’ve gone from a couple of computers in a whole school without a network, to 1-2-1 iPads in my class today. Can’t complain!

evidence-led innovation⤴

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Ollie Brae’s tweet, leads to Game Over for Maths A-level — Conrad Wolfram

The combination of ChatGPT with its Wolfram plug-in just scored 96% in a UK Maths A-level paper, the exam taken at the end of school, as a crucial metric for university entrance. (That compares to 43% for ChatGPT alone).

Wrong conclusion: ban it. Right conclusion: change what humans are learning so they step up a level, and don’t compete with what AIs do well.

Wolfram goes on to explain that an overhaul of the math curriculum is long overdue, and quotes himself from 3 years ago:

Today’s ecosystem of education doesn’t easily support such subject change. From assessments tied to today’s subjects, to too short a time horizon, to evidence-led innovation rather than innovation-led evidence, there’s everything to prevent core subject change and seemingly nothing to promote it. Except, eventually, after much disarray, cold, hard failure.

My hi-light. Seeing “evidence-led innovation” as part of the problem was interesting.

wwwd – John's World Wide Wall Display 2023-01-27 20:15:23⤴

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Liked One More Reason #ChatGPT Seems Like a Sweetheart by Maha BaliMaha Bali (blog.mahabali.me)

This ChatGPT thing, quite apart from all the other AI writing tools, is disturbingly addictive and… likeable? I had tried before with you.com/chat to make it say mean and biased things, but it wouldn’t. And this surprised me because if it trained on internet data, the internet is full of stuff like that, right? So…

An interesting experience with chatGPT.

Who trained you to be so sensitive and polite and politically correct?

I couldn’t be angry with it, because it was such a sweetheart about not giving me what I wanted.