The technology will continue to improve so that that simulated gymnastics videos will look less and less bizarre, but people who can use AI to create flawless gymnastics videos aren’t actually learning gymnastics. No human being will become a better gymnast thanks to a better AI simulation of a gymnastics routine. More convincing AI-generated…
Touched up and created an infographic for a web page that I first posted in Nov 2000.
As those familiar with the liberal arts know, in antiquity there were seven such arts. Three formed the trivium of the humanities: rhetoric, grammar, and logic. And four formed the quadrivium of the sciences: music, arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy. The assertion was this was the knowledge one required to participate as a citizen, as a…
The new AI advanced version of Google Search, aka Google SGE or Search Generative Experience, provides wicked smart AI answers to your queries. And if you ask it how to pass kidney stones quickly, Google will tell you to drink at least two quarts of urine every 24 hours. Source: Google SGE Recommends You Drink…
How to Disagree Academically: Using Graham’s “Disagreement Hierarchy” to organize a college term paper.
Dr. David von Schlichten honors the spectrum of motivations (not always financial) featured during Seton Hill‘s “Celebration of Scholarship.”
MLA In-text citations: Writing that got you through high school won’t do in college.
In my lit classes, I’m definitely teaching more short stories and fewer novels that I used to. I’ve expanded the time I spend on note-taking, synthesizing quotes from different sources, and why at the college level it’s not a good paragraph if it simply introduces “One quote that supports my position,” repeats three or four…
Book historian Irene O’Daly notes that the passage crossed out in a medieval manuscript matches where the scribe accidentally turned two pages while copying out a printed book, showing that manuscript culture continued to exist even after the printing press was introduced. (It’s the third of three examples she uses.)
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If you are writing an academic paper that quotes from an author that uses the ellipsis in a way that differs from MLA style (such as the script of a modern play that uses “…” to indicate when a speaker is interrupted, or a graphic novel that might use “…” to indicate a meaningful silence…
In September, 2003, I was blogging about What the NY Times called the “campus fad” of Internet plagiarism. “What Does a Professor Do All Day?” (Clearly we are wasting our time whenever we are not standing in front of a classroom.) “Graphic Artist Carefully Assigns Ethnicities To Anthropomorphic Recyclables“ Leni Riefenstahl Dies (although she distanced…
A very fluffy article that does a good job diving into an everyday thing and sharing expert opinions. While some of these sources are simply random people, others have specialized skills and training that makes their opinions newsworthy enough to provide some substance to a not-exactly-hard-news story. Some of us just can’t get our thoughts…
In a writing-intensive class, students need to write extensively to the point that the teacher cannot possibly grade all of it. — Edutopia via NCTE Good advice from an article by Kara Douma, reprinted by NCTE. I need to hear that. The referees don’t score every practice. The coaches don’t give you feedback after…
We ask students to cite encyclopedia articles, dictionaries, news interviews with experts, and in-person conversations. A generative text-generation tool that scrapes published work and uses a statistical model to emulate a response that mimics the way the humans in its database have responded to similar prompts is formally something like a conversation, and the MLA’s…
Think of ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of all the text on the Web. It retains much of the information on the Web, in the same way that a jpeg retains much of the information of a higher-resolution image, but, if you’re looking for an exact sequence of bits, you won’t find it; all you will ever get is…