Integrating AI in Knowledge Building

Earlier this week, I had the good fortune of joining a panel organized by my colleageus Seng Chee Tan and⁩ Alwyn Lee at the 2022 Empowering Learners in AI conference. Several colleagues including Leanne Ma (University of Tornoto), Chew Lee Teo (National Institute of Education in Singapore), and Mutlu Cukurova (University College London) were also on the panel. While my colleagues on the panel presented some really exciting new research, I used my time to ask a series of questions.

Network Motifs as Codes

I’ve been working on a framework of applying socio-semantic network analysis to discourse data. Socio-semantic networks are two-mode, dual-layer networks that are made of actors (e.g., learners), semantic entities (e.g., words), and their relations. Socio-semantic network analysis brings together the study of relations among actors (human networks), relations among semantic elements (semantic networks), and relations among these two orders of networks (Basov et al., 2020). Such a dual-layer network analysis approach is not only useful for examining the duality of socio-semantic relations, it also applies to other settings such as socio-ecological analysis that’s interested in the interactions between social structures and ecological resources (Bodin & Tengö, 2012).

What role should A.I. play in education?

Listening to podcasts has become a new habit of mine during the pandemic, when cooking or doing dishes, on the way to pick up my toddler, or when my eyes need a break from the screen. Last week, I listened to an interesting episode of the EdSurge Podcast titled What Role Should AI Play in Education? A Venture Capitalist and an EdTech Critic Face Off. This episode features a discussion between Neil Selwyn and venture capitalist Ryan Craig.

Knowledge Infrastructures: Initial Thoughts

Some initial thoughts on knowledge infrastructures and what it means for knowledge building.

Take note: new note-taking facility in Zotero

Over the years, I have been interested in scholarly workflows and, more recently, knowledge infrastructures – for both knowledge workers and young learners. It has become a hobby for myself to reflect on my own workflows and explore tools that I could add to improve my scholarly practice. I was interested enough in this topic to give a talk on this topic (in Mandarin) last summer. Annotation software as knowledge infrastructure Annotation is, and has always been, an important part of knowledge processes.