Uncategorized

The little chatbot that couldn’t

Chatbots are not capable of understanding, or analysis, or even differentiating between truth and fiction. All they can do is fit together something that looks like language. Which makes it desperately worrying when teachers use them for marking, lawyers use them for coming up with arguments to use in court, or they get used for anything requiring analysis or accuracy.

Uncategorized

Teacher Guide to AI – please help!

We must educate ourselves, and our children, to be in a position to be rationally sceptical of technological hype. As a society, we need some inoculation against magical technological thinking. But where do teachers and schools start? Without a background in Artificial Intelligence, how can we expect teachers to inoculate our kids against the hype? How do we teach them to be more savvy and compassionate consumers and makers of technology? That’s where we come in. Laura Summers from Debias AI and Dr Linda McIver from the Australian Data Science Education Institute are putting together a teacher’s guide to AI, but we need your help to make sure the guide is exactly what you need. To that end we’ve put together a survey. We would love it if you could fill it out and share it with all of your teacher friends.

Uncategorized

Learning to be wrong

When you penalise wrong answers, you build in a sense of shame and failure to being wrong that most people never get over. It leads to cheating, to covering up of mistakes, and to avoiding doing things where being wrong is a possibility. How about, instead, we make it the default that you assume that you will be wrong in numerous ways. We make it a fundamental part of the process to figure out those ways, and even reward the finding of those mistakes. In doing so, we give people the freedom to explore, to try new things, and, above all, to learn without fear.

Andrew Leigh on Data & Politics

"The rise of populism has been substantial across the advanced world, indeed across developing countries as well. So those of us who believe in data need to be strong proponents of the publication of those data even when it produces results that make us uncomfortable.