Here we are again!

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Since ChatGPT was first launched towards the end of 2022, there has been much alarm expressed in schools and colleges, in discussion forums, blogs and other social media platforms, in the educational press and in the general press too. There has also been calmer discussion; we shall come to that.

ChatGPT is an artificial intelligence (AI) text-generator, developed by OpenAI.  Its appearance marks a huge step forward in the evolution of AI.  To now, text-based AI has been uninspiring and flawed: think of the chatbots used by many support centres Continue reading

Who’s your friend?

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

One of the consequences of the death of Queen Elizabeth II last month is that over 800 individuals and companies who at the time of her death held a Royal Warrant for providing goods or services to senior members of the Royal Household need to re-apply for the warrant.  Many may lose their warrant if King Charles III (and any other member of the royal family whom he appoints as a grantor) does not share the Queen’s tastes or needs. In addition, the warrant is not granted for the lifetime of the royal who grants the honour, every warrant holder needs to re-apply every five years to ensure that the Royal Household still uses the product or service.

When a royal warrant is cancelled or expires, the ex-warrant holder must remove the royal insignia from their labels, letter-heads and anywhere else they display the arms and the message “By appointment to Her Majesty the Queen” or “By appointment to His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales” – declarations which must now be updated.  (For more information on this, see the Royal Warrants page of the Royal Family website or the FAQs page on the Royal Warrant Holders Association website.)

The Royal Warrant is, of course, highly prized and not easily obtained. Continue reading

Reader beware – different views of point

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Do you use Reader View?  Do you recommend it to your students?  I often use Reader View when available, especially if I want to print out or save a PDF version of the page I am looking at and there is no ready-made PDF version already linked on the page.

Reader and Reader View are extensions or apps which enable “clean” views of the page you are looking at, keeping the textual matter but avoiding the advertisements, embedded videos, navigation and sidebar matter and other distractions.

Here, for instance, is a page on MacWorld, How to enable Reader View automatically for websites in mobile and desktop Safari:

The advertisements flicker and change, the video clip plays automatically and floats so that it is always on the screen, there are several more distractions as you scroll through the article.

These distractions disappear Continue reading

By any other brand-name, not so sweet?

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Something is afoot in the world of reference generators. The American company Chegg, which claims to be  “all about removing the obstacles that stand in the way of the education YOU want and deserve” [Chegg: What we’re about], seems to be buying up service after service.

They already own CitationMachine,  BibMe, EasyBib, and CiteThisForMe. None of them is particularly good at what they claim to do, and (in their free versions and since being taken over by Chegg) they are bedevilled by splash and flash advertising (as with Citation Machine, illustrated on the right).

Several of my earlier posts point directly or indirectly to shortcomings in these services.  Their auto-citation generators leave much to be desired. They also leave much to be edited or added after the reference is auto-generated. A common plaint is that students don’t do this – they unthinkingly and uncritically accept auto-generated output no matter how many errors or omissions.  Alas, the manual form-filling modes are often not much better. Too often Continue reading

Smoke and mirrors

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

“Technological solutionism” – a term coined by Evgeny Morozov – offers us solutions to problems we often do not know we have. Some might feel that it sometimes creates new problems, too often without solving the problems it is designed to solve. So often and too often, it fails to do what it says on the tin.

On the other hand, technological solutionism can make big money for the companies behind the so-called solutions. It can blind us to other, often more workable, often more less expensive and more low-tech strategies, approaches and solutions.  Worse still, it can divert attention from the real problems, including situations which might cause the problems in the first place.

I have blogged before about technological solutions which promise far more than they deliver. Turnitin and EasyBib are the ones which come most readily to mind. You can name your own “favourites.”

And now, Microsoft has just released enhancements to Office 365. The announcement is made in an Office Blog article posted on 26 July 2016 with the snappy-catchy title New to Office 365 in July—new intelligent services Researcher and Editor in Word, Outlook Focused Inbox for desktop and Zoom in PowerPoint. The piece is written by Kirk Koenigsbauer. He is a corporate vice president for the Office team, heavy-hitting stuff indeed.  In this post, we’ll be looking just at Researcher and Editor.

In the blog, we read that

Researcher is a new service in Word that helps you find and incorporate reliable sources and content for your paper in fewer steps. Right within your Word document you can explore material related to your topic and add it—and its properly-formatted citation—in one click. Researcher uses the Bing Knowledge Graph to pull in the appropriate content from the web and provide structured, safe and credible information.

and that

Editor assists you with the finishing touches by providing an advanced proofing and editing service. Leveraging machine learning and natural language processing—mixed with input from our own team of linguists—Editor makes suggestions to help you improve your writing.

Powerful tools indeed.  If they work.

Given the first look that Microsoft gives us, they have a long way to go.

First, Researcher. The section heading in the blog reads Continue reading

When you get wrong answers to the wrong questions…

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

There has been a bit of a splash in the last few days, publicity regarding a study of Turnitin by Susan Schorn of the University of Texas.

iSchoolGuide, for instance, splashed an item by Sara Guaglione: University Of Texas At Austin Writing Coordinator Susan E. Schorn Finds Turnitin Software Misses 39 Percent Of Plagiarized Sources, and EducationDive posts a similar take on the story, this by  Tara García Mathewson, Plagiarism detection software often ineffective.

There is not a lot new here, not for regular readers of this blog. Turnitin is ineffective.

Both articles are based on a post in InsideHigherEd by Carl Straumsheim, What Is Detected? worth reading, for its content and for the comments it has generated. Again, not a lot new, not for regular readers of this blog. Turnitin is ineffective (as are other so-called plagiarism detectors, it is not just Turnitin which is problematic).

Straumsheim goes further (than Guaglione and Mathewson), pointing to Turnitin’s propensity to assign false negatives Continue reading

What’s better than a book … ?

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

A LinkedIn alert this morning caught my eye.  The heading reads Do you have a ‘Learning Commons’ at your school? You should! and it’s been posted by Maxine Driscoll.

“Meeting the needs of 21st Century learners.
I had an amazing experience last week. I was invited to visit the new Learning Commons at Kardinia International College a K-12 school in Australia and was blown away by what I saw! 21st Century thinking, creativity, courage and conviction! Here is…”

I like the learning commons concept. It’s exciting, it enables a refreshingly different approach to teaching and to learning. It makes learning more enjoyable, and reports promise great things. It may well be too early to say if the benefits are real, but there are aspects of learning commons that any library can use to advantage.

The post to which Maxine Driscoll’s LinkedIn alert refers is, Continue reading