Despite occasional silicon-valley-venture-capital-frosting that sticks in my craw1, I’ve been really enjoying the Latent Space AI engineering podcasts. There is technical stuff that’s beyond what I can understand at times but the majority of it is understandable, adds interesting depth to my AI knowledge, and has led to me to interesting things outside of AI. […]
Category: Reflections
AI can’t count letters?
I saw someone posting about how ChatGPT 4o kept miscounting the number of r’s in strawberry. They went into a long series of attempts to get it to count the correct number of r’s. It was very similar to the struggle I had trying to get ABCABC rhyme patterns. When I came across this particular […]
Hunting Cryptids
I saw Martin’s post on Sasquatch Hunting in Ed Tech and found it interestingly coincidental. Coincidental enough that I thought I’d make another post with a focus entirely on me that only loosely addresses what he’s writing about. It’s interesting to think about the similarity of patterns here between myself and the people I’d see […]
Known Problems with Our Academic Software Purchasing Process
That’s K.P.O.A.S.P.P. for those of you playing along at home. Anyway, here’s how I ended up writing up our issues with academic software purchasing. I think it’s got to be hitting other places as well. More stuff, more complexity, more concerns, and less people and funds can’t be unique to our organization. Even without financial […]
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Necessary FUD?
I wrote the following document to try to pretty aggressively discourage instructors from using all the free/freemium products out there. It falls pretty heavily on the FUD side of things. I have mixed feelings about writing it. I think it does paint an accurate picture of the environment and of just how hard it is […]
Workshops, speakers, energy, and flow
Way back in the dawn of time (2009), I was more tightly integrated into a unit that was more focused on staff development writ large. We had experiences, trainings, and professional growth.I’ve thought about those three categories of offerings quite a bit since then. With some slight tweaks, I feel like they apply well to […]
Three O’s for Software Mangement
In my continuing saga1 of trying to explain how managing software costs time and energy, I decided to use the letter 0. In a perfect world, I’d do an explainer video with muppets with 0 as the letter of the day. Onboarding Whether you are preparing to bring something on or bringing it on, that’s […]
The overhead of scarcity
I’m reading a fantasy/sci-fi series called the Broken Earth.1 A theme running through it is the laws/rules that apply during times of environmental upheaval (fifth seasons). Essentially, it’s your basic post-apocalyptic, dystopian Earth with frequent geological turmoil that lead to hard times. As a result, they’ve got a bunch of rules (stone loreLore that’s carved […]
Categorizing institutional AI use
I feel like we’re in a weird place with AI. I imagine most institutions are. We’ve had AI in various products for quite some time and haven’t really thought too much about it. If we’re going to think about AI across the institution, it’s important that we include the older stuff, the stuff that might […]
Roughing out some AI thoughts
I’m starting to rough out some things we’ll need to try to get right about AI . . . Obviously these are just notes and aren’t meant to be anything other than stuff I’m trying to shape into coherent thoughts. I do intend to get the AI initiatives by various edu institutions into something more […]