danaleeling

Day one was still in the add/drop period with three of eighteen absent. Coverage focused on the course syllabus, calendar, learning outcomes, and the nature of the course.  Tuesday started with tech Tuesday, app downloads, app demonstrations, and submitting screenshots. Then measurement and density were introduced.  Tuesday morning opened with coverage of what apps to download. The introduction overlooked coverage of the screenshot assignment. Then the metric system and measurement were introduced.  The introduction began with space, time, matter, and energy. Energy was then set aside. Typical variables were listed followed by the metric system units used for those measurements, both MKS and CGS. The concept that one cubic centimeter is one milliliter of water and is one gram was introducted. 500 ml bottles of water were massed, with the newer bottle coming in at 501 grams. Two 500 ml bottles massed 996 grams, just shy of a kilogram.  ...

"Princeton will now require instructors in exam rooms for the first time since 1893" - The House of El . A former Yap campus instructor, used to say, "Tests don't test." The college president has encouraged the development of curricula that is inclusive of AI. I still have tests and quizzes in my courses, but they are done unproctored, outside of class, on the students' own time, in Moodle. The tests are obviously open book and open world. The tests are also not used to assess learning. More complex assignments and projects are used to assess learning.  I spent time during this between-terms break consuming videos on AI in education and upcoming developments in AI. I can see around me the issues El describes in the video: instructors, and institutions, trying to find ways to retain an educational structure that predates 1893. Proctors, lock down browsers, paper and pencil in class exercises and assessments.  A study on how to redevelop the college curricula ...

If a category in Moodle contains items with different total possible points, the ability to drop the lowest grade is disabled.  In the above image there are learning outcomes attached to the assignments. The learning outcomes are scored based on the number of ratings. There are four ratings being used: optimal, sufficient, suboptimal, and no evidence. Moodle automatically assigns points to ratings in a monotonic sequence. Four rating, four points maximum.  Because the assignment are 30 points and the outcomes are four, dropping the lowest is disabled. One might reason that not including the outcomes in the aggregation would resolve this issue. In the above the outcomes are no longer included in the grade aggregation. But dropping the lowest remains disabled. The code underneath the gradebook still sees the four point student learning outcomes.  One option is to use subcategories. Moving the assignments into one category and the learning outcomes into another restores the ...

Upon uploading a video , YouTube now transcribes the audio, runs that transcript through Gemini, and then produces prompt suggestions as questions in a dialog box at the upper right. The dialog box appears if one clicks on the Ask dialog below the video. The video title and description are now trimmed to half the video width to accommodate the Ask dialog. This is not a feature I enabled. This happened automatically after uploading my video. ​ Some sources online indicate that a related or similar feature may have been made available to YouTube Premium users a year ago. At Google I/O roughly two weeks ago Sundar Pichai said "It's been 10 years since we pivoted the company to be AI first. We knew how profound it would be to advancing our mission."  I have seen a video clip with outtakes from Google I/O that indicate that a related feature, Ask YouTube, is new. As I do not recall seeing the Gemini Ask prompt in previous uploads, I take this to be a server side update that...

"Future jobs depend on being better than AI" Born after the advent of LLM AI he will grow up in a world infused with AI and will never have known a time before AI.  What if humans cannot be better than AI? What future jobs can humans do in a world where humans cannot be better than AI? Watching a presentation on education in this age of AI the presenter recommended aligning education with future employment where humans are better than AI. The presenter also recommended having students analyze AI where responses had gaps and cracks. The history of science and religion teaches that a God of the gaps is problematic. AI is in its infancy, the hallucinations, gaps, cracks, and errors will shrink if not disappear. An OpenAI internal model just solved an open problem in discrete geometry through reasoning, not brute force. AI will correctly solve any mathematics problem. Why would humans need to spend decades learning to do something that AI has learned to do in a frac...

In Nature Volume 652 from 16 April 2026 on page 543 Chris Bivins argues that the world needs more taxonomists. One particular line in the article caught my attention, "But when I find a fungus that lacks a name, I can still hold it, examine it under a microscope, compare it to known species and begin the work of description. An LLM cannot. It has no access to the physical world, only to text."  That LLM's only have access to text is simply not true. LLM's are now quite proficient at image analysis. Give the LLM images of known fungal species and the LLM can begin the work of description, potentially highlighting similarities and differences to known species. I gave Google Gemini app this image: And the prompt "Describe this photo along with the likely identification of the organisms in the photo." The response started at the blue diamond: This image captures a close-up look at a brush-footed butterfly resting amidst lush green foliage. Visual Description The...