GenAI Digest September 2024
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Autumn Recommendations
Guidance: UNESCO has released new AI competency frameworks for students and teachers. Built around a Human-centered Mindset, the competencies look at ethics, techniques, design, pedagogy and professional development.
Tools: About - GoblinTools: Goblin tools are designed to help neurodivergent people with tasks they find overwhelming or difficult - here is a useful review Goblin Tools Ai Tutorial: Support for Executive Function, Tasks, Writing, and More (youtube.com)
Podcast: AI Education Podcast: Series 9 Episode 7 - Rose Luckin - Satnav for the mind? (aipodcast.education) - UCL’s Prof Rose Luckin, a longstanding expert in AI in education discusses AI on this great podcast.
Academic: The rapid rise of generative AI and its implications for academic integrity: Students’ perceptions and use of chatbots for assistance with assessments - ScienceDirect - Gruenhagen and co analyse a survey of over 300 Australian university students on their use of generative AI. The authors suggest that “the higher education sector faces the challenge of not only defining clear policies and guidelines about ethical and academically honest ways to use and integrate generative AI tools into university education and assessments, but also to rethink the design of assessment pieces”.
Media: Why are London-based students using AI more than the rest of the UK? | Wonkhe (Sunday Blake) & Access to premium AI services is a significant concern for students | Wonkhe (Naima Rahman and Gunter Saunders) - Wonkhe providing two stories touching on the concerns from students about inequality of access to GenAI tools and the reasons for this.
Research Blog: How is generative AI changing social science? - Thomas Robinson (LSE) highlights three ways in which AI is reshaping research across the social sciences and how it raises questions around the reflexivity of social science outputs in a world where AI is increasingly mainstream.
Tech: The AI Scientist: Towards Fully Automated Open-Ended Scientific Discovery (sakana.ai) - Sakana AI is a Japanese AI company funded by Nvidia and big Japanese tech companies. It has an AI Scientist to carry-out complete research projects - the question is: what implications does this type of tech have for students and researchers in universities around the globe?
Guidance: Use of generative Artificial Intelligence in PGR programmes - York Graduate Research School, University of York: The University of York’s Graduate Research School and Department of Computer Science combined to produce some really useful guidance for use of Generative AI in your PhD which is useful for all students and staff.
“The problem is that students do not always have equal access to AI tools, for instance, not all students can afford to pay for access to higher-spec tools that require subscriptions to use them. Additionally, not all students have the same level of skills and competence to know how to use AI in the permitted way. ”