Copim is a community of people and organisations working to build a fairer, more open future for scholarly books. Together, we collaborate on community-led and values-driven initiatives, which help to support open access authors, publishers and readers. Initially formed around the Community-led Open Publication Infrastructures for Monographs [COPIM] project (2019–2023), the Copim community continues to grow and develop through its work on the Open Book Futures project (2023–2026) and its wider activities.
Maximizing learning with effective GenAI prompt writing: An instructor’s resource for students | Resource Library | Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning | University of Calgary
As workplaces start seeing the benefits of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools for productivity, proficiency, and creativity, higher education can play a key role in helping students develop the necessary skills for the successful and responsible use of GenAI (Keyhani et al, 2023). Course instructors can guide their students further towards AI literacy, which is essential for future professionals across diverse disciplines. Purpose: This resource aims to provide educators with practical strategies on how to help students learn to effectively write GenAI prompts and therefore, develop essential GenAI competencies. This resource is from the University of Calgary Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, h/t to my good friend D'Arcy Norman https://social.ds106.us/@dnorman/112565718798313607
A critique of Cara.app: the 'No AI' Instagram and Artstation copycat child. - David Revoy
Cara.app is a relatively new social media platform: a kind of fusion between an Instagram timeline with a share button, and an Artstation portfolio layout on the user's profile. Almost every artist I know is opening a Cara.app profile right now and posting about it on every social media site. Some influencers, like industry veteran Bobby Chiu, even praise the platform and openly urge everyone to move to it. So, on my side, the same story as with any digital art phenomenon: lots of PMs, emails, asking me what I think about it, hence my motivation to write a bit more about it on the blog. I opened a profile about it on https://cara.app/deevad. I read the available documentation, and here is my analysis and critique with all the elements I had. As usual, I may revise my opinion and will update the post if new sources that I missed appear in the comments.
Here is a super-simple technique to fix low engagement in a community platform such as Discord, Slack, Discourse, Higher Logic, Vanilla Logic, or Khoros. I break this down into 3 steps that helps you to generate interesting discussions in your chat channel, forum, or elsewhere. There are two main reasons for low engagement: members don't know when to start discussions, and there's no trigger to draw responses...here's how we fix that in 3 simple steps: (1) Identify Topics: Find topics your community is interested in. Use tools like ChatGPT for suggestions. For example, in an Asana community, discussions could go beyond just comparing it to monday.com. (2) Select Members: Identify members likely interested in the chosen topic. This requires understanding your community’s interests. Look at past discussions, event attendees, and comments. Aim to list at least four or five people who might engage. (3) Kickoff Discussions: Ask a community member to start the discussion and tag the identified members. This approach addresses both the hesitation to start and the lack of response triggers. These techniques can significantly improve community engagement in platforms such as Slack, Discord, Discourse, BuddyBoss, Vanilla Forums, Higher Logic, and more.
Benchmarking for Open Universities: Guidelines and Good Practices – UNESCO IITE
The publication ‘Benchmarking for Open Universities: Guidelines and Good Practices’ has been released by UNESCO IITE within the project ‘Promoting ICT Capacity Building and Open Education in the Era of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Technologies’. It is elaborated with the support of Shanghai Open University and substantive inputs by international experts and representatives of open universities from different countries worldwide, including Botswana, Canada, China, Cyprus, Ghana, Greece, India, Indonesia, Kuwait, Lebanon, Malaysia, Nepal, Nigeria, Pakistan, South Africa, Thailand, The Gambia, Türkiye, United Kingdom, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. The publication addresses the issue of quality as applied to the performance of open and distance learning universities and intends to raise awareness about benchmarking methodology as a tool for quality assessment and improvement. It advocates the idea of developing a quality culture and extending the scope of quality assurance agenda within institutions.
Here we seek streams by which the knowledges and voices of Ancient Wisdom can illuminate the present, weaving a global community that is in harmony with nature. We drink from ancestral wells, listen to the spirits that moved in our ancestors, draw from the past to restore and rebuild, and grow a future in which life is cherished. This platform was created to connect people with ancient wisdom, and with transformational leaders, spiritual teachers and healers who carry this wisdom. In the spirit of Sankofa we carry this into the modern day to help bring solutions to global problems.
I stumbled upon LLM Kryptonite and no one wants to fix it • The Register
Neural nets with flaws can be harmless … yet dangerous. So why are reports of problems being roundly ignored? I set to work on writing a prompt for that classifier, beginning with something very simple – not very different from a prompt I'd feed into any chatbot. To test it before I started consuming expensive API calls, I popped it into Microsoft Copilot Pro. Underneath the Microsoft branding, Copilot Pro sits on top of OpenAI's best-in-class model, GPT-4. Typed the prompt in, and hit return. The chatbot started out fine – for the first few words in its response. Then it descended into a babble-like madness. Which went on and on and on and on and … on. Somehow, it couldn't even stop babbling. I ran through every chatbot I could access and – with the single exception of Anthropic's Claude 3 Sonnet – I managed to break every single one of them. Uh, oops? What do I do now? On the one hand, I had work to do. On the other hand, I'd run into a big, pervasive something caused by my quite innocuous prompt. I guess I should tell someone?
Study Finds That 52 Percent of ChatGPT Answers to Programming Questions Are Wrong
The only problem? A team of researchers from Purdue University presented research this month at the Computer-Human Interaction conference that shows that 52 percent of programming answers generated by ChatGPT are incorrect. That's a staggeringly large proportion for a program that people are relying on to be accurate and precise, underlining what other end users like writers and teachers are experiencing: AI platforms like ChatGPT often hallucinate totally incorrectly answers out of thin air. For the study, the researchers looked over 517 questions in Stack Overflow and analyzed ChatGPT's attempt to answer them. "We found that 52 percent of ChatGPT answers contain misinformation, 77 percent of the answers are more verbose than human answers, and 78 percent of the answers suffer from different degrees of inconsistency to human answers," they wrote.
Mapping the Mind of a Large Language Model Anthropic
Today we report a significant advance in understanding the inner workings of AI models. We have identified how millions of concepts are represented inside Claude Sonnet, one of our deployed large language models. This is the first ever detailed look inside a modern, production-grade large language model. This interpretability discovery could, in future, help us make AI models safer. We mostly treat AI models as a black box: something goes in and a response comes out, and it's not clear why the model gave that particular response instead of another. This makes it hard to trust that these models are safe: if we don't know how they work, how do we know they won't give harmful, biased, untruthful, or otherwise dangerous responses? How can we trust that they’ll be safe and reliable? Opening the black box doesn't necessarily help: the internal state of the model—what the model is "thinking" before writing its response—consists of a long list of numbers ("neuron activations") without a clear meaning. From interacting with a model like Claude, it's clear that it’s able to understand and wield a wide range of concepts—but we can't discern them from looking directly at neurons. It turns out that each concept is represented across many neurons, and each neuron is involved in representing many concepts.
Pluralistic: Linkrot (21 May 2024) Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The thing is, object permanence is hard. Life comes at you quickly. It's very hard to remember facts, and the order in which those facts arrived – it's even harder to remember how you felt about those facts in the moment. This is where blogging comes in – for me, at least. Back in 1997, Scott Edelman – editor of Science Fiction Age – asked me to take over the back page of the magazine by writing up ten links of interest for the nascent web. I wrote that column until the spring of 2000, then, in early 2001, Mark Frauenfelder asked me to guest-edit Boing Boing, whereupon the tempo of my web-logging went daily. I kept that up on Boing Boing for more than 19 years, writing about 54,000 posts. In February, 2020, I started Pluralistic.net, my solo project, a kind of blog/newsletter, and in the four-plus years since, I've written about 1,200 editions containing between one and twelve posts each. This gigantic corpus of everything I ever considered to be noteworthy is immensely valuable to me. The act of taking notes in public is a powerful discipline: rather than jotting cryptic notes to myself in a commonplace book, I publish those notes for strangers. This imposes a rigor on the note-taking that makes those notes far more useful to me in years to come. Better still: public note-taking is powerfully mnemonic. The things I've taken notes on form a kind of supersaturated solution of story ideas, essay ideas, speech ideas, and more, and periodically two or more of these fragments will glom together, nucleate, and a fully-formed work will crystallize out of the solution.
Algorithmic Justice League - Unmasking AI harms and biases
In today’s world, AI systems are used to decide who gets hired, the quality of medical treatment we receive, and whether we become a suspect in a police investigation. While these tools show great promise, they can also harm vulnerable and marginalized people, and threaten civil rights. Unchecked, unregulated and, at times, unwanted, AI systems can amplify racism, sexism, ableism, and other forms of discrimination. The Algorithmic Justice League’s mission is to raise awareness about the impacts of AI, equip advocates with empirical research, build the voice and choice of the most impacted communities, and galvanize researchers, policy makers, and industry practitioners to mitigate AI harms and biases. We’re building a movement to shift the AI ecosystem towards equitable and accountable AI.
500.000+ Open-licensed SVG Vector and Icons Search, explore and edit the best-fitting free icons or vectors for your projects using a wide variety vector library. Download free SVG vectors and icons for commercial use.
Let's burst some bubbles (again)! - by Alexandra Mihai
Welcome to a new issue of “The Educationalist”! I don’t know about you, but I really miss the flexibility we had during the pandemic and all the opportunities to connect, with one click, to so many amazing colleagues from across the world. It felt very liberating and inspiring to be able to have these conversations and often to establish close collaborations across borders and even across disciplines. With most conferences and events back to in person mode, I find it much harder to put into practice my collaboration ideas. Committing to be in one place (which often requires travelling long distances) at a certain time as a group is not easy. I totally get that. But it feels like these constraints make our experience poorer. This is why today’s newsletter is a call to try and bring that spirit back. If you recognise this feeling, please read on and share your ideas! Enjoy the rest of the week!
Opinion | Learning Through Love (or the Absence of Love) | Observatory - Institute for the Future of Education
Paulo Freire used to say, “No one saves anyone—no one is saved alone—people save each other through the mediation of the collective.” To achieve this feat, the great Brazilian pedagogue proposes that the community first must go to school. We all know that among the privileges that can be had at birth, the greatest is arriving in a context of love. Being loved is the essential resource, that is, the one that will allow the person to take full advantage of all those that come later, including food (eating disorders are generated in contexts in which food – breast milk or any other – reaches the child amid affective turbulence).
The most harmful belief I had as a beginner photographer — aows
I used to think that good photographers consistently take great photographs, and only rarely they make something subpar. Surely, their “keeper rate” was much better than mine. This was one of the most harmful beliefs I held when I was taking my first steps in photography. Because when you don’t allow yourself to fail, you play it safe; and when you play it safe, there’s no growth. Making a bad photograph is not the risk: the lack of experimentation and play is the real danger.
FOSSEE (Free/Libre and Open Source Software for Education) project promotes the use of FLOSS tools in academia and research. The FOSSEE project is part of the National Mission on Education through Information and Communication Technology (ICT), Ministry of Education (MoE), Government of India. Below is the list of projects which are promoted by FOSSEE.
The NPR Model of Teaching through Storytelling - Faculty Focus | Higher Ed Teaching & Learning
NPR listeners have had the experience of sitting in their car with the radio on after arriving at their destination simply because they could not tear themselves away from a fascinating segment. By contrast, most online students have had the experience of suffering through boring course content that produces little knowledge retention. The difference is not between entertainment and learning. NPR has some of the most educational content available, so much so that I use a series of NPR stories about healthcare financing and reform in my medical ethics course. The difference is in the way that the information is conveyed, and by adopting the simple principles used by NPR a faculty member can radically transform the power and effectiveness of their online content.
Offline collaborative learning approach for remote Northern Territory students — Charles Darwin University
Digital learning systems are crucial for education and data collected can analyse students learning performances to improve support. The purpose of this study is to design and build an asynchronous hardware and software system that can store data on a local device until able to share. It was developed for staff and students at university who are using the limited internet access in areas such as remote Northern Territory. This system can asynchronously link the users’ devices and the central server at the university using unstable internet. Design/methodology/approach – A Learning Box has been build based on minicomputer and a web learning management system (LMS). This study presents different options to create such a system and discusses various approaches for data syncing. The structure of the final setup is a Moodle (Modular Object Oriented Developmental Learning Environment) LMS on a Raspberry Pi which provides a Wi-Fi hotspot. The authors worked with lecturers from X University who work in remote Northern Territory regions to test this and provide feedback. This study also considered suitable data collection and techniques that can be used to analyse the available data to support learning analysis by the staff. This research focuses on building an asynchronous hardware and software system that can store data on a local device until able to share. It was developed for staff and students at university who are using the limited internet access in areas such as remote Northern Territory. This system can asynchronously link the users’ devices and the central server at the university using unstable internet. Digital learning systems are crucial for education, and data collected can analyse students learning performances to improve support.
Snap Slides: a Lightweight HTML Presentation Framework - thanks to the CSS Scroll Snap module - Yihui Xie | 谢益辉
I do not remember when or how I first encountered the CSS Scroll Snap technique, but when I saw it, one thing came to my mind immediately: can we use this technique to make slides? (Spoiler: the answer later was YES) If you have not heard of it before, here is a quick introduction on MDN to get you started. Basically, it enables elements to “snap” as you scroll over them, which means as soon as you scroll onto an element, it will just quickly jump into your view, instead of waiting for you to continuously scroll over it. If you have used mobile devices to view photos, you should be familiar with this user experience. Slides give us a similar experience. If we have an HTML page with multiple sections, we could make each section “snap” using this CSS technique. Then this continuous page just becomes a series of “slides”!
Hi and welcome to User Inyerface, a challenging exploration of user interactions and design patterns. To play the game, simply fill in the form as fast and accurate as possible.
Enabling continuous access to education in low to no connectivity areas A great digital divide exists today, where two-thirds of the world’s children aged 3-17 years old, and 759 million 15-24 years old do not have access to the internet in their homes. This lack of connectivity, affecting low-income countries and rural regions in greater proportions, put children and youth from these areas at greater risk for missing out on education, perpetuating inequalities. The Learning Passport’s Offline Model enables learners and teachers to continue their education in low to no connectivity areas, helping to bridge the digital learning gap. The offline model utilises two general concepts to provide digital learning experiences in areas without connectivity.
iziCast | Icecast, Shoutcast and RTMP client for iOS
iziCast is a versatile audio and video broadcasting application for Icecast, Shoutcast and RTMP. You can broadcast and record audio from the internal microphone or external audio devices. Besides that you can also broadcast local audio files from your device. With the integrated Audiobus support you can even broadcast audio content from other Audiobus enabled apps. Live video from your camera can be broadcasted to any RTMP compatible service, such as YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, Telegram and many more. Any of the supported audio sources listed above can be combined with your live camera. This versatility allows you to use iziCast in different scenarios like broadcasting live events, IRL, hosting a radio show/podcast or play along with your instrument to audio tracks.
Pitch Drop experiment - School of Mathematics and Physics - University of Queensland
We're home to the famous Pitch Drop experiment, which holds the Guinness World Record for the longest-running laboratory experiment. The experiment demonstrates the fluidity and high viscosity of pitch, a derivative of tar that is the world's thickest known fluid and was once used for waterproofing boats. Thomas Parnell, UQ's first Professor of Physics, created the experiment in 1927 to illustrate that everyday materials can exhibit quite surprising properties. At room temperature pitch feels solid - even brittle - and can easily be shattered with a hammer. But, in fact, at room temperature the substance - which is 100 billion times more viscous than water - is actually fluid. You can watch the experiment's live video stream at http://thetenthwatch.com/ More than 35,000 people from some 160 countries are registered to view the stream.
2023 edition of Facts and Figures is the International Telecommunication Union ITU’s independent, meticulously researched, and timely snapshot of the state of digital connectivity around the world. The Facts and Figures series is an important record of where we are – and a good motivator to drive us to where we want to be. By mapping important data sets, we have a better understanding of how and where to put our resources and efforts towards achieving our goal of universal and meaningful connectivity. There are reasons to be optimistic. According to our estimates, just over two-thirds of the world’s population are now online, with some 280 million new Internet users in 2023. Connectivity is progressing everywhere, but at different pace. On average, connectivity in the least-connected countries is tending to grow faster than that in other countries, but from an extremely low base. Currently, there is no evidence at the aggregate level of catch up or leapfrogging.
to be my line of work. I had the opportunity to design with real working prototypes, not green screens and After Effects, so there certainly are some interactions in the video which I'm a little skeptical of, given that I've actually tried them and the animators presumably haven't. But that's not my problem with the video. My problem is the opposite, really — this vision, from an interaction perspective, is not visionary. It's a timid increment from the status quo, and the status quo, from an interaction perspective, is terrible. This matters, because visions matter. Visions give people a direction and inspire people to act, and a group of inspired people is the most powerful force in the world. If you're a young person setting off to realize a vision, or an old person setting off to fund one, I really want it to be something worthwhile. Something that genuinely improves how we interact. This little rant isn't going to lay out any grand vision or anything. I just hope to suggest some places to look.
What if there was a place where researchers, clinicians, and service users, and the wider public could share their knowledge in a way that was easy to understand and accessible to everyone? That’s where The Collaborative Library comes in! We’re an online platform dedicated to bringing scientific knowledge to the masses by providing a space for people to share plain language summaries of research articles. And the best part…? Anyone can contribute, collaborate, and help make science more fun and accessible! At The Collaborative Library, we’re driven by a greater purpose—to create change and promote open access to knowledge. We believe in rewarding those who contribute to scientific advancement and sharing research implications in an accessible way. Integrity and honesty are at the heart of everything we do. We also value trust, fairness, respect, and responsibility as our guiding principles. Together, we’ll build a resource that no one single person can build alone. Knowledge is power, and we’re committed to sharing it widely and fairly.
