AI Has Some Way to Go Generating Images

Image by Open AI,
19 December 2024

AI generated images have started appearing to illustrate social media posts by individuals, corporations and media companies. These can be a bit odd. An example is an AI generated graphic for Australian Army Innovation Day. This shows a soldier in the foreground apparently looking at a handheld screen, but wearing a completely opaque VR headset over their eyes. Despite all their high tech equipment, none of the soldiers have noticed a drone dropping ordnance on them. The soldier in the foreground has high tech gear, but is wearing old camouflage. This was probably produced with a request like 

Every business is a tech business

Speaking at the launch of the ACS Digital Pulse report John Griggs, ACS CEO, said "Every business is a tech business". This is at the National Press Club in Canberra. The point wat that all businesses need technical staff. The problem is that as the report details, universities cannot produce enough graduates and school leavers don't want to enrol anyway.

The ACS solution is non-traditional paths, through certification, and microcredentials. One problem I can see is convincing the workers, employers and regulators that the alternative pathways are as good as traditional education. This is similar to the poor reputation online learning has had: research shows it is as good, if not better than classroom based learning, but there is still a perception it is inferior. 

The Fax on National Security Secrecy

Greetings from the seminar "Neither Confirm Nor Deny: National Security Secrecy and Australia's Liberal Democracy" from ANU. Emily Hitchman points out that technology has presented a challenge for national security in the past, with fax machines providing a way to breach security long before Wikileaks. This may have an effect on the AUKUS agreement with the USA and UK. One way I suggest would be the question of nuclear weapons. 

ps: I am actually in a bus shelter waiting for a bus to take me to the University. I am listening to the presentation via video conference on my phone. A tip is to use "driving mode": this turns off video and the microphone, avoiding embarrassing images and noises on the conference when you are out and about (it also reduces the bandwidth required on your mobile connection). 

Generative AI in Health Education

Greetings from the ANU Generative AI in Health Education Symposium in the ANU Moot Court in Canberra. This reports on work to produce and trail guidelines for teaching medical students. This felt like an extension of ASCILITE 2024 in Melbourne last week, as it covered some of the same topics and some of the same people were running the event.

Professor Martyn Kirk, Associate Dean Education, College of Health and Medicine, suggested using generative AI for formative assessment, bit not summative. The idea being the AI could be used for helping students learn, but then they be tested at the end to check they really know what they need to know. I suggest blending the assessments, not having this split between formative and summative. In equity terms not having a large test at the end will allow inclusion of students (such as myself) who can't cope with large exams. It will remove the unnecessary anxiety it causes for many other students. It will also result in more authentic testing, under conditions like a workplace.

The guidelines were trailed in second semester 2024. Students were comfortable using the tool (Microsoft Copilot) and found it helpful for learning. Most students did not receive any training on the tool, but did receive guidance on its use. The approach taken was to issue guidance and leave it to course conveners to tell students about it. Staff and students were provided with assistance in the use of such tools. This is similar to the way in the ANU Techlauncher program we ran a workshop to run students through what Copilot could do, or not do, to help them with an assignment. 

One question which came up was the energy used by Generative AI. Students worry about the effect on the environment. In 2008 I was commissioned to design a course on Green Computing. In this students looked at energy consumption by data centers generally. AI is a more energy intensive form of data center. There are ways to reduce the energy use and carbon emissions resulting. This is something which perhaps should be raised with students generally, not just technical specialists.

One of the courses using generative AI was on climate change and health. In this course tutors demonstrated the use of AI to students in their work. This included using AI to simulate a person for the student to interact with. This was done with face to face and online tutorials. In this case students were given prompts to use with the AI. This extended the student's understanding, where previously they just asked one question and pasted the answer. The approach of simulations could be applied, I suggest, in other disciplines. 

In a course on immunology students could use AI for preparing presentations, but not for writing up their laboratory notebook. How you stop students using AI for the notebook is a challenge. One way would be to require the students to compose directly into an online tool. As with the climate change course, students were given sample prompts to help them. 

The symposium then switched from AI for teaching medical students to teaching students to use AI in medicine. Dr Andrew Tagg, Senior Clinical Lecturer at the University of Melbourne and Emergency Consultant at Western Health, Melbourne, pointed out that AI is already used routinely in diagnosis of cancer from x-rays. He argued that AI should be used more widely to deliver medical care. As someone who recently had to wait 11 hours for medical treatment, this could be a good idea. One area where AI might be useful would be in helping patients filling in the forms they are given. 

The issue of the environmental effects of AI came up again in discussion. It was suggested generating one image took as much energy as charging a mobile phone. This sounded an over estimate to me by three orders of magnitude. The Jevons Paradox came up in discussion: rather than saving effort will AI just result in more resources being used, rather than oit being used sparingly.

ps: Greetings from the ANU College of Health & Medicine located between the Canberra public and private hospitals.  Professor Kirk is giving a workshop for the staff and students at the hospital and those of us at the morning symposium were invited along. One tip is if you are having difficulty with your medical student understanding something ask Generative AI explain it to a ten year old. In groups we were tasked with coming up with something. I was teamed with an anesthetist, so we asked Microsoft Copilot to come up with aspects of a particular condition, then produce multiple choice questions. This worked very well. We were then asked to have AI summarise a paper, so I got it to do one of mine, which worked well. I then asked it to make a ten slide presentation in Powerpoint, then add notes and graphics. 

The University as a Sociopath

Previously I wrote about the Loyalty Tax on Academic Staff. The idea being that staff who are loyal to the institution are not rewarded with loyalty, or good conditions, but instead exploited. This may be because, I suggest, the institution suffers from Antisocial personality disorder (ASPD), commonly referred to as sociopathy. It may seem odd to attribute a human condition to an organisations. But organisations are legal persons, in that they can enter contracts, employ people & in the case of educational institutions shape the behaviour of their students. 

Organisations, like sociopaths, may lack empathy & seek to exploit people by manipulating their emotions for their own benefit. This can be seen in advertisements where organisations claim to care about their customers. Obviously an organisation can't really care and is using this marketing device to attract customers. The same can apply to the staff of universities: the university is not capable of caring about the staff, but pretending to do so may be cheaper than providing good wages and conditions. 

This is not to suggest universities are inherently evil. However, we should be careful not to project characteristics, such as care and empathy, ontio an organisation. Staff and students of universities need to carefully check what they are signing up for: what is it agreed they will get. Unwritten understandings are not worth the paper they are not written on. 

There have been numerous studies of ASPD amongst university leadership, such as Perry (2015) and Forster & Lund (2018). However these address the problems individuals can cause within an organisational structure, not the behaviour of the organization itself.

References

Forster, N., & Lund, D. W. (2018). Identifying and dealing with functional psychopathic behavior in higher education. Global Business and Organizational Excellence, 38(1), 22-31. https://doi.org/10.1002/joe.21897

Perry, C. (2015). The “dark traits” of sociopathic leaders: Could they be a threat to universities? The Australian Universities’ Review, 57(1), 17–25. https://search.informit.org/doi/10.3316/informit.306702837325703

ASCILITE 2025 at University of South Australia

Greetings from the closing session of ASCILITE 2024, where University of South Australia  have been announced at the hosts for the conference next year. This will be one of the last events hosted by the university before it formally merges with University of Adelaide. The theme is "Continuous Change" with is appropriate for higher education. Given the Australian Government's failure to have a coherent policy, a better theme might be "Bin Fire". 

Mobile Learning Post COVID-19 in the GenAI Era

Greetings from ASCILITE 2024 where Vickel Narayan, Massey University, New Zealand, is speaking on "Navigating the Terrain:Emerging Frontiers in Learning Spaces, Pedagogies, and Technologies". I am one of the authors on this short paper, along with others in the ASCILITE Mobile Learning Special Interest Group and got to say a few words about it. The challenge is to take learning out of the hands of the teacher and out of the classroom into the real world, of a facsimile of it. Perhaps we need GenAIGogy.

Heutagogy Has Stood the Test of Time, Unlike Powerpoints in Lecture Theatres

Greetings from ASCILITE 2024 at the University of Melbourne. This morning Chris Kenyon is talking about how he co-created heutagogy at Southern Cross University. Originally it was to be autogogy (for "self" directed learning). 

ps: I was a little distracted as the power cable for my laptop is jammed in the table hinge on my chair. The main lecture theatre in Arts West at University of Melbourne has a mains power socket between each seat. About a decade ago I thought this was a good idea. But after a few minutes use of the first installation at ANU it became apparent this is a very bad idea. It is difficult to reach under the chair to plug in the power. 

Art West has the sockets higher up so they are easier to read, but this turns out to be worse. The plug is aligned with the small folding desk on each chair. If you forget to unplug, and fold the table, the cable falls down and jams the hinge. In normal circumstances this is inconvenient, but consider a fire evacuation, with hundreds of people trying to get out in a hurry, entangled in cables. I suggest retaining the sockets for front row seats and removing all others.

Virtual University in Australia?

Torrens Building,
Adelaide, Wikipedia

Greetings from ASCILITE 2024 at University of Melbourne, where Michael Sankey is discussing the virtual university. He nominated Torrens University as the closest to this in Australia, which is a reasonable assessment. However, I doubt that this would be a salable product. As far as I know, there is no regulatory requirement for universities to have campuses. But purely online education is perceived as low quality. For this reason universities emphasise their physical campuses. This at times is farcical, such as multiple institutions who offered courses from the Torrens Building in Adelaide. Each instution would photograph the building, showing their banner only.

Turnitin tracking how students turn in assignments to combat AI

Greetings from the ASCILITE 2024 conference at University of Melbourne. I had intended to go to a research talk, but I couldn't find the "Light Green Room", so I stumbled into a presentation from Turnitin on their AI detection tool (this is in a room with check green carpet & mould coloured roundell patterned wallpaper, so I don;t know what it is called). 

Last year Turnitin released an AI writing report with paraphrase detection. This did not appear to work well and ANU decided to switch it off. But perhaps it is time to look at the product again and see if now works acceptable. One aspect I had difficulty understanding is Turnitin is addressing paper based assessment (are universities really returning to paper based assessment.

Turnitin are building a student composition space. The idea is the student writes their assignment within Turnitin. This is an implementation of the "show your work" approach. The tool will have a word processing function. With this approach you can see when the student did what. 

Turnitin are also building an offline digital exam system. This is similar to standalone products already in use. 

A new similarity report is al in the works for Turnitin. One small example is allowing for margin comments. 

AI & Education at ASCILITE 2024

Greeting from the opening of the ASCILITE 2024 conference at University of Melbourne. In the first presentation, Professor Gregor Kennedy, Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Academic) at UoM drew parallels between the challenges of AI in education today and online learning decades ago. In one way this is reassuring, as we have managed to incorporate online learning. In another way this is troubling, as there are many who still struggle with online learning, or deny its value, despite decades of research and experience. Hopefully we will do better with AI in a couple of decades.

Slow Progress in the Third Space

Greetings from the Third Space Symposium at University of Melbourne. Along with workshops elsewhere on campus, this precedes the ASCILITE 2024 Conference, which starts tomorrow. The symposium was preceded by weeks of Third Space Slowposium. I am still trying to work out what the slowposium is and where it is. But at least I have found the symposium. 

The workshops and symposium are being held in the Arts West building at UoM. The building has the look of an Escher sketch brought to life. Building elements are apparently thrown together at odd angles (as if several buildings were fused). One room is carpeted in a bold tartan, which would be okay but the walls are covered with wallpaper using the same pattern.  There is a very functional circular lecture theatre, but the outside wall consists of wooden studs and noggins with polyester acoustic panels between, giving the look of an unfinished building site. This might all be taken as a metaphor for this space, where we are making it up as we going along, with whatever materials are at hand.