News

This week's news we rushed through includes "Study Buddy or Influencer?", the Australian Parliamentary Inquiry into the use of Gen AI in the Australia Education System https://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/House/Employment_Education_and_Training/AIineducation/Report

NSW EduChat has been extended for all teachers in all New South Wales Schools - https://www.innovationaus.com/nsw-teachers-to-get-time-saving-genai-tool/ Learn more about the NSW EduChat chatbot in the first episode of Series 9

Microsoft announced Copilot Wave 2 https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2024/09/16/microsoft-365-copilot-wave-2-pages-python-in-excel-and-agents/

OpenAI's new model o1-preview came out - and it's much, much better and logical reasoning and maths Find out what people think by looking at what Ethan Mollick is saying about it (and, as I suggest on the podcast, keenly watch Dan Hart's posts as he's benchmarking it now in the context of EduChat)

Google released a podcast-generator as part of NotebookLM, which turns any kind of paper/book etc into a short podcast. To find out what it's like I gave it the top research paper from the podcast last time and you can compare it versus me! There's a quick demo review by Ethan here and you can login and have a play directly here: https://notebooklm.google.com/ (it has two main uses, because on top of this autopodcast, it's original purpose was to allow you give it a pile of documents and it can work with all of them at the same time for q&a, summaries etc)

Research

Here's the links to all nine papers we discussed in this week's episode:

Generative AI in Real-World Workplaces https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/uploads/prodnew/2024/07/Generative-AI-in-Real-World-Workplaces.pdf

Can Large Language Models Make the Grade? https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3657604.3664693

PlagBench: Exploring the Duality of Large Language Models in Plagiarism Generation and Detection https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.16288

The global landscape of academic guidelines for generative AI and Large Language Models https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.18842

"Is ChatGPT a Better Explainer than My Professor?": Evaluating the Explanation Capabilities of LLMs in Conversation Compared to a Human Baseline https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.18512

Perceived Impact of Generative AI on Assessments: Comparing Educator and Student Perspectives in Australia, Cyprus, and the United States https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666920X24000729

Jill Watson: Scaling and Deploying an AI Conversational Agent in Online Classrooms https://dilab.gatech.edu/publications/jill-watson-scaling-and-deploying-an-ai-conversational-agent-in-online-classrooms/ https://dilab.gatech.edu/test/wp-content/uploads/2024/05/ITS2024_JillWatson_paper.pdf

Integrating AI in College Education: Positive yet Mixed Experiences with ChatGPT https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.05810

The AI Companion in Education: Analyzing the Pedagogical Potential of ChatGPT in Computer Science and Engineering https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.05205