What is education for, how do we measure it, how SHOULD we measure it, and how can we fix it? At the moment we're mostly measuring atar and student retention as the most important outcomes of the system. How many kids make it to year 12 and what do they score? We should be measuring: covid deniers, flat earthers, anti vaxxers, sovereign citizens, people with blind faith in technology.
Tag: education
Mark Stickells on AI & the role of Humanities in STEM
Taking a different tack with this episode, a wonderful chat with the remarkable Mark Stickells, AM, CEO of Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre, on AI and the role of Humanities in STEM. "I fundamentally believe knowledge is a human insight. And we work with these tools that are incredibly powerful, but can be incredibly stupid." "We… Continue reading Mark Stickells on AI & the role of Humanities in STEM
Set an AI to Catch an AI
we can't detect AI enabled writing with any reasonable degree of confidence. And no, we can't mark student work with LLMs, or solve real world problems with LLMs, or replace the people doing jobs requiring judgement, compassion, or rationality with LLMs. Not without suffering painful regrets when it comes time to deal with the consequences!
Making Sense of AI
So you haven’t got time to read through hefty books about the AI industry. You’ve had fun with image generators, and you find chatbots useful although occasionally alarming. But there’s information firing at you from all directions, and it’s wildly contradictory, alarming, exciting, and horrifying, all at the same time. What the heck are you supposed to do?
Scaling scams
It's important, when you're making graphs, to think about the story you want to tell with the data, and what type of graph, and what features of the graph, will help you tell that story.
Likewise, when you're looking at someone else's graph, we all need to apply that critical data literacy and look at the scale on the y axis, as well as checking the labels, finding out the origin of the data, and considering whether the graph is accurate, a valid way to display that data, and what story it might be trying to tell you.