The topic of science communication has gained a lot of attention in the last years and no higher educaton institution has not been involved in concepts related to “transfer” activities or the so called “third mission” of higher education institutions.
Due to my current side-project of getting a plagiarised, AI-generated book retracted, I was curious to see how selected top-ranked journals in Educational Technology have been actively retracting articles. I have been using the GoogleScholar ranking and have focused on journals I would include in this list.
Some of my regular readers might remember that I have reported a case of AI-supported plagiarism in a book on learning analytics which has been published in German last year see original post here.
I have long waited before I share a special case of AI generated publishing in the field of educational technology which needs a public reflection and review. Approximately 3 months ago, I have received a citation alert which made me curious.
I have written at the end of the last semester a critical review of the concept of future-skills in German (preprint available here, still in review) In Germany, there is a plethora of activism around this concept and many higher education institutions feel the need to react to the hype around these skills.
During a recent review process I have requested from authors that they should address from which standpoint they have approached their qualitative study. While I was referring in this comment the ontological and theoretical levels as formulated by Twining, Heller, Nussbaum & Tsai (2017) in the guidelines for the journal Computers & Education, the authors have understood my request as a call for a „positionality statement“ in which the authors disclose some of their biographical details (white, cis, middle-age) as potentially influencing their research.
„ChatGPT itself is a neutral tool, and how it is used depends on the intentions of those who use it.“ (Cohen, 2023). This messages is commmunicated by the US-based Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) to its 125 000 members (estimaton) regarding an AI-based tool which is currently pushing the discourse on AI in education.
„This has become a fashionable platitude, which…would result in a…content-free curriculum […]. This downgrading of knowledge is, ironies of ironies, to be implemented in the interest of creating a knowledge-based economy.
Since I am currently often asked about my opinion about ChatGPT I want to share why I do not write about ChatGPT.
The discussion about ChatGPT (Generative Pretrained Transformer) is at least as annoying as the Wordle wave that has hit my social media channels some years ago.