Tag Archives: writing

Speculative Futures on ChatGPT and Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI): A Collective Reflection from the Educational Landscape⤴

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A Collective Reflection from the Educational Landscape
“A Collective Reflection from the Educational Landscape” flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

On 22nd January an invite appeared in my inbox

I am writing to invite you for a collaborative paper on ChatGPT and AI…The planned paper will adopt a speculative future design methodology.

Each of us was invited to write two short stories, one positive and one negative, and then we were invited into a collaborative Google Doc. Over the next few weeks I watched the paper evolve as we wrote and edited together. The final paper was published yesterday and, as Jon Dron says, the stories themselves make great reading.

It’s amazing how quickly things can happen with the right catalyst. Thanks Aras!

Bozkurt, A., Xiao, J., Lambert, S., Pazurek, A., Crompton, H., Koseoglu, S., Farrow, R., Bond, M., Nerantzi, C., Honeychurch, S., Bali, M., Dron, J., Mir, K., Stewart, B., Costello, E., Mason, J., Stracke, C. M., Romero-Hall, E., Koutropoulos, A., Toquero, C. M., Singh, L Tlili, A., Lee, K., Nichols, M., Ossiannilsson, E., Brown, M., Irvine, V., Raffaghelli, J. E., Santos-Hermosa, G Farrell, O., Adam, T., Thong, Y. L., Sani-Bozkurt, S., Sharma, R. C., Hrastinski, S., & Jandrić, P. (2023). Speculative futures on ChatGPT and generative artificial intelligence (AI): A collective reflection from the educational landscape. Asian Journal of Distance Education, 18(1), 53-130. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7636568

Writer’s Silence⤴

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Scotch Argus Butterfly
“Scotch Argus Butterfly” flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

I am reduced to silence

Promising ideas dance at the edge of my mind

Quietly vanishing when caught on paper

Inky moths, stilled by a lepidopterist’s pin

Dying, dissolving, leaving me bereft

Exhausted by the effort of achieving nothing, I submit to this uneasy silence

And so the dance begins again

Getting back into the habit⤴

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I haven’t written much here recently. I used to write at least one post a month, but once I started posting my Silent Sunday photo posts time has passed my by without me noticing that has been all I’ve been posting. I love my daily and weekly challenges, but I miss the peace that reflective writing brings to me.

As time passes, it gets harder to get back into the habit. It’s easy to press publish on an imperfect post when it’s written quickly – but when posts become irregular it’s somehow harder to release them into the world, and I hesitate to write unless I have something polished.

I should know better – I do know better. A strand of my PhD thesis was about being ‘good enough’ rather than ‘perfect’, and I have learnt to let go of my makes and remixes and not to worry that they are rough around the edges. I know it too, really, when I write – but somehow I have got out of the habit of talking out loud.

So now, with only minutes before I need to go and cook tea, I am going to hit publish in this post and promise myself to remember to talk out loud here, sometimes.

Goodbye to 2022⤴

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Dad giving his father of the bride speech.

Some people walk around talking to themselves, the world at large, or anyone who might listen. Others of us blog. I often use this space to work out what I am thinking by writing out my thoughts – as Laurel Richardson says, writing can itself be a method of enquiry. Other times I write out the words that have been occupying my thoughts because they keep repeating themselves to me until I allow them to trickle out into the world. But for the last month I have found myself with sort of writer’s block – whenever I sit down to write, I find I cannot. It seems that my mind will not allow me the space to write until I have said this.

My father died on December 2nd, 2022. On January 3rd, 2023 we go through the final rites of passage. I feel very lucky that I had time near the end to sit by his bed and tell him how much he meant to me, and how much I will miss him. But this end was a long time coming – vascular dementia is a cruel disease that takes people away a little bit at a time.

Father was always a talker – we could, and did, spend many hours talking about philosophy. He loved talking about the books I was reading for my studies, and bought many of them for himself. When I was away I’d ring him on a Sunday at 10pm and we’d talk for an hour, hang up and he would ring me back so we could talk for another hour. But as his dementia progressed he stopped having anything to say, and he would hand the phone over to mother instead. Gradually, I realised, dad was slipping away.

And then he broke his hip, and never walked again. Instead of coming home, he moved to a care home. Then lockdown happened, and … he kept slipping gradually away.

The picture at the top of this post is of father giving a speech at my wedding – you can see from my face that he has just told some sort of dad joke. This is how I remember him – proud of his family and happy to tell the world how proud he was.

Rest in Peace, dad. I miss you.

Researcher Visibility⤴

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Lurker
“Lurker” flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license

In my last post I shared a quote from Joanne McNeil introducing the idea of researcher as lurker. Since then I have been thinking at some reasons for researchers to show or hide themselves from their participants, and the related issues of visibility of data and ethical considerations. Here is my starter for ten about levels of researcher visibility and possible research reasons.

Researcher VisibilityResearch Reason
Status as researcher disclosed to participants from the outsetParticipatory research
Ethnography
Status as researcher initially hidden (not disclosed to participants), disclosed at/after data analysis stageConcerns about researcher influencing behaviour (e.g. Hawthorne effect).
Later disclosed so participants can authenticate interpretation
Status as researcher never disclosed to participants during data collection or analysis stageParticipant point of view not relevant
Researcher as ‘god-like’/expert
Data is being collected after the event
Participants are anonymous
Data VisibilityHow?
Public throughoutOpen research/open data
Public at publication of projectShared to institutional database
Shared with participantsVarious ways
Shared on requestVarious ways
Never shared 

My next stage is to think through types of ethical (approval) to match these.

[I think more and more, by the way, that the insistence on the need for ethical approval by institutional gatekeepers is problematic (and not at all ethical). I say something about this in my PhD thesis (see ~ p 82).]

Chicago author-date with ibid⤴

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One of my supervisors recently suggested:

“Just a stylistic thing going forward, but where you have recently cited the same author, you can use Ibid (e.g. (Ibid: 2) or similar), rather than include their names again”

This is great advice and something I had seen before. I use Mendeley Desktop as my academic library and reference manager, which plays nicely with my writing workflow. I am used to using the so-called “Harvard” citation style, otherwise known as “author-date” because it looks like this: (Cartier-Bresson, 1999) but had not worked out how to have the software automatically detect when ibid. is appropriate.

The key to it is in the citation style or .csl file that tells your typesetting program how to format citations. There are thousands of these, publicly accessible over at the Zotero Style Repository or Github. I wanted to use a popular csl style using the globally recognised Chicago Style Manual but the use of ibid has been deprecated there. They favour the use of a short form citation which is well suited to the numbered footnote alternative to author-date.

With a little leg work I found that it is quite easy to adapt the current Chicago author-date .csl file to include the ibid feature from its numbered footnote sister.

The adaptation

Starting with a copy of the author-date .csl file (obviously change the name), find the <citation> tag and merge the equivalent code from the fullnote with ibid .csl file. It should look like this:

<citation et-al-min="4" et-al-use-first="1" disambiguate-add-year-suffix="true" disambiguate-add-names="true" disambiguate-add-givenname="true" givenname-disambiguation-rule="primary-name" collapse="year" after-collapse-delimiter="; ">
    <layout prefix="(" suffix=")" delimiter="; ">
      <group delimiter=", ">
        <choose>
        <if position="ibid-with-locator">
          <group delimiter=", ">
            <text term="ibid"/>
            <text macro="point-locators-subsequent"/>
          </group>
        </if>
        <else-if position="ibid">
          <text term="ibid"/>
        </else-if>
        <else>
            <group delimiter=", ">
              <text macro="contributors-short"/>
              <text macro="date-in-text"/>
              <text macro="point-locators"/>
            </group>
        </else>
        </choose>
      </group>
    </layout>
</citation>

It is also necessary to pull in the point-locators-subsequent macro. Paste it below the other macros in the .csl file.

Usage

All that is required now is to point the rendering software to the style file, in my case, by editing the yaml header in my markdown document, or the _config.yml file for this site.

I don’t feel that I should push this back to the open source repositories because it’s just my own hack that works for me, but you can download my version of chicago-author-date-with-ibid.csl to adapt for your own use.

References

  1. Cartier-Bresson, Henri. 1999. The Mind’s Eye : Writings on Photography and Photographers. New York, N.Y: Aperture.

Chicago author-date with ibid⤴

from

One of my supervisors recently suggested:

“Just a stylistic thing going forward, but where you have recently cited the same author, you can use Ibid (e.g. (Ibid: 2) or similar), rather than include their names again”

This is great advice and something I had seen before. I use Mendeley Desktop as my academic library and reference manager, which plays nicely with my writing workflow. I am used to using the so-called “Harvard” citation style, otherwise known as “author-date” because it looks like this: (Cartier-Bresson, 1999) but had not worked out how to have the software automatically detect when ibid. is appropriate.

The key to it is in the citation style or .csl file that tells your typesetting program how to format citations. There are thousands of these, publicly accessible over at the Zotero Style Repository or Github. I wanted to use a popular csl style using the globally recognised Chicago Style Manual but the use of ibid has been deprecated there. They favour the use of a short form citation which is well suited to the numbered footnote alternative to author-date.

With a little leg work I found that it is quite easy to adapt the current Chicago author-date .csl file to include the ibid feature from its numbered footnote sister.

The adaptation

Starting with a copy of the author-date .csl file (obviously change the name), find the <citation> tag and merge the equivalent code from the fullnote with ibid .csl file. It should look like this:

<citation et-al-min="4" et-al-use-first="1" disambiguate-add-year-suffix="true" disambiguate-add-names="true" disambiguate-add-givenname="true" givenname-disambiguation-rule="primary-name" collapse="year" after-collapse-delimiter="; ">
    <layout prefix="(" suffix=")" delimiter="; ">
      <group delimiter=", ">
        <choose>
        <if position="ibid-with-locator">
          <group delimiter=", ">
            <text term="ibid"/>
            <text macro="point-locators-subsequent"/>
          </group>
        </if>
        <else-if position="ibid">
          <text term="ibid"/>
        </else-if>
        <else>
            <group delimiter=", ">
              <text macro="contributors-short"/>
              <text macro="date-in-text"/>
              <text macro="point-locators"/>
            </group>
        </else>
        </choose>
      </group>
    </layout>
</citation>

It is also necessary to pull in the point-locators-subsequent macro. Paste it below the other macros in the .csl file.

Usage

All that is required now is to point the rendering software to the style file, in my case, by editing the yaml header in my markdown document, or the _config.yml file for this site.

I don’t feel that I should push this back to the open source repositories because it’s just my own hack that works for me, but you can download my version of chicago-author-date-with-ibid.csl to adapt for your own use.

References

  1. Cartier-Bresson, Henri. 1999. The Mind’s Eye : Writings on Photography and Photographers. New York, N.Y: Aperture.

Chicago author-date with ibid⤴

from

One of my supervisors recently suggested:

“Just a stylistic thing going forward, but where you have recently cited the same author, you can use Ibid (e.g. (Ibid: 2) or similar), rather than include their names again”

This is great advice and something I had seen before. I use Mendeley Desktop as my academic library and reference manager, which plays nicely with my writing workflow. I am used to using the so-called “Harvard” citation style, otherwise known as “author-date” because it looks like this: (Cartier-Bresson, 1999) but had not worked out how to have the software automatically detect when ibid. is appropriate.

The key to it is in the citation style or .csl file that tells your typesetting program how to format citations. There are thousands of these, publicly accessible over at the Zotero Style Repository or Github. I wanted to use a popular csl style using the globally recognised Chicago Style Manual but the use of ibid has been deprecated there. They favour the use of a short form citation which is well suited to the numbered footnote alternative to author-date.

With a little leg work I found that it is quite easy to adapt the current Chicago author-date .csl file to include the ibid feature from its numbered footnote sister.

The adaptation

Starting with a copy of the author-date .csl file (obviously change the name), find the <citation> tag and merge the equivalent code from the fullnote with ibid .csl file. It should look like this:

<citation et-al-min="4" et-al-use-first="1" disambiguate-add-year-suffix="true" disambiguate-add-names="true" disambiguate-add-givenname="true" givenname-disambiguation-rule="primary-name" collapse="year" after-collapse-delimiter="; ">
    <layout prefix="(" suffix=")" delimiter="; ">
      <group delimiter=", ">
        <choose>
        <if position="ibid-with-locator">
          <group delimiter=", ">
            <text term="ibid"/>
            <text macro="point-locators-subsequent"/>
          </group>
        </if>
        <else-if position="ibid">
          <text term="ibid"/>
        </else-if>
        <else>
            <group delimiter=", ">
              <text macro="contributors-short"/>
              <text macro="date-in-text"/>
              <text macro="point-locators"/>
            </group>
        </else>
        </choose>
      </group>
    </layout>
</citation>

It is also necessary to pull in the point-locators-subsequent macro. Paste it below the other macros in the .csl file.

Usage

All that is required now is to point the rendering software to the style file, in my case, by editing the yaml header in my markdown document, or the _config.yml file for this site.

I don’t feel that I should push this back to the open source repositories because it’s just my own hack that works for me, but you can download my version of chicago-author-date-with-ibid.csl to adapt for your own use.

References

  1. Cartier-Bresson, Henri. 1999. The Mind’s Eye : Writings on Photography and Photographers. New York, N.Y: Aperture.

The emergence of participatory learning: authenticity, serendipity and creative playfulness⤴

from

Thesis word cloud

Today I got the final confirmation that I have been awarded my PhD in Education, with the title The emergence of participatory learning: authenticity, serendipity and creative playfulness. The thesis is now uploaded to my Uni library repository, and anyone who likes can read it.

Thanks again CLMOOC, for everything. Hat tip to DS106.

The emergence of participatory learning: authenticity, serendipity and creative playfulness⤴

from

Thesis word cloud

Today I got the final confirmation that I have been awarded my PhD in Education, with the title The emergence of participatory learning: authenticity, serendipity and creative playfulness. The thesis is now uploaded to my Uni library repository, and anyone who likes can read it.

Thanks again CLMOOC, for everything. Hat tip to DS106.