Thursday, August 10, 2023

Eportfolios and AI tools: webinar notes

 Attended the Eportfolio workshop - how to get started with AI tools for portfolios. The session was delivered both online and f2f (La Trobe- Melbourne) and organised by ePortfolios Australia and ePortfolios Ireland

The session was presented by Dr. Megan Mize who is Director of ePortfolios and Digital Initiatives in the Digital Initiatives Success Centre at Old Dominion University

Alison Miller welcomes everyone and acknowledges Country and the various organisations who have contributed towards this webinar. Helen Chen introduces AAEEBL - Association for authenic, experiential and evidence-based learning. Megan begins with overviewing the AI tools that are already part of eportfolio practice. Slide deck of presentations are found at google docs

AI's current role could be to support grammar/syntax, accessibility, colour design and content generation. All of these have been available even before advent of ChatGPT. Introduces ideas of how to leverage Gen AI for faculty to provide more individualised support to learners. Proposed the Riff chatbot as a tool which has potential (as discussed with Leticia Britos Cavagnaro).

Riff chatbot can be useful to help learners how to practice reflection. A demo /try out of Riff chatbot followed for participants to evaluate the tool. The chatbot provides some good prompts on statements which were presented to it - a bit similar to 'ask watson' it repeats back what you contribute but pushes the user to 'dig deeper'. Riff chatbot has option of linking with Moodle. Check this blog for using chatbot to support reflective activity and up-coming book by Cavagnaro.

Then provided an opportunity to try another chatbot - Poe chat. Difficulties getting in through institutional and gmail :( (but did arrive in my institutional after about 10 minutes). Demo undertaken to show capabilities of the chatbot. Prompt engineering is important. Tried the 'colour my site' chat which was set up to provide more targeted information to users. Demonstrated how to set up the chatbot to undertake more targeted responses. An authentic activity not only for teachers but also across many occupations. For example, setting up a bot for a business to answer client enquiries etc. Testing the bot is important to see how it responses to a range of inputs. 

Then provided opportunity to 'build a bot' on Poe. Straight-forward process. Also accessible as IOS or Android app. Poe uses ChatGPT and Claude, so not sure how different the outputs are to just using ChatGPT. Claude has a better privacy policy when compared to many other Gen AI tools. 

Discussed the challenges and the need to test extensively, ensure learners triangulate the outputs, and be aware that 'input = output' holds, and the privacy and ethical issues around using the chatbots. Possibilities for learner driven personalised learning are many. 

Then discussed the ethical concerns with regards to AI and eportfolios, summarised in this blog. Q & A followed with most focusing on practicalities and logistics of using chatbots to support personalised learning.

A good session, providing good examples of how to better use AI to support learning, especially for reflective learning. 

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