Arrived yesterday evening to Dunedin after the Whitireia and Weltec research hui to join the OPSITAra research conference, an annual event to share the research that is undertaken across Otago Polytechnic, Southern Institute of Technology and Ara Institute of Canterbury.
I made it to the book launch and caught up with things and people.
Friday morning dawned fine. Breakfast presented some time to touch base with several with similar research interests.
I then presented on our AI journey thus far, proposing that teachers using AI, shift from being 'guides on the side' to 'conductors of learning'.
Following on is Joe Taylor and Phil Osborne from OP on 'Making Feedback Matter: Exploring Student Engagement with Summative Assessment Feedback in the Bachelor of Applied Management Programme'. Shared the need to improve the summative feedback process. Provided background and rationale. We do not understand how students use (or not use) summative feedback. Summarised the literature on feedback. Focused on the work of Hattie (2015) on visible learning to higher education. Overall feedback is high, meaning feedback has a powerful influence on learning. However, feedback for formative assessment is more impactful than summative feedback. Summarised the work of 'delivering effective student feedback in higher ed. (Williams, 2024). Stressed the importance of feedback literacy. It is teacher responsibility to ensure students understand the importance of feedback to their learning.
Then a presentation with Phil Osborne from OP on 'Exploring Neurodiverse Learners’ (NDL) Use of Artificial Intelligence in Tertiary Education' on work with Mairead Fountain and Rachel van Gorp. Sought to find out what are the best practice uses of AI by NDLs. Participants from a range of disciplines, length of time in study and range of neurodiversity. Qualitative through interviews (transcribed using Teams - and 24 turnaround back to interviewees for their comment), Use a copilot agent ' thematic analysis assistant' with reference to University of Auckland (Braun and Clarke) site on thematic analysis. Shared the prompt used. Also examples, key themes and process of cross checking / triangulation processes across the data. Preliminary insights include that NDLs use AI in nuanced and strategic ways; emotional support, accuracy concerns, ethical awareness and need for institutional clarity were other common perspectives. Shared whether the agent could then connect the data to the literature. However, as it was an analysis agent, this did not work well.
Poster presentations then took place.
The second keynote at the conference is with Dr. Gianna Leoni, who presents on 'Kaitiakitanga: Protecting Mana Motuhake in the Age of AI'. Began with setting the context and the objectives of Te Hiku media, committed to revitalisation of Te Reo Māori. The maintain a large archive of the language and a digital transition of these began in 2013. In 2018 they began work to teach computers to speak in Māori. Today the emphasis is on indigenous language revitalisation. Access to the language is important for the Māori diaspora with a large population of Māori living outside of Aotearoa. Currently, AI is able to play a role but its used carefully. Presented on the importance of the transcription of video archives and the challenges with accents and dialects in Māori. AI can accelerate the process but needs careful training to deal with the variants of Te Reo. AI needs sufficient CPU/computing capacities; specialised / contextualised algorithms and 'clean data'. Important to understand how machine learning/AI brings together the key principles of computer science and linguistics. The contribution from Te Hiku is to advise on domain knowledge (needs to be accessible and authentic to stakeholders; investing in people; ); data (authentic data required; currently most of the data is crowdsourced and not necessarily accurate or trustworthy; unbiased data; secure; whakapapa-based; gathered through community events). Shared the mainstream automatic speech recognition, OpenAIs whisper model and its lack of capability with Te Reo Māori therefore the need for a local focus.
Data on bilingual data is especially difficult as for many Māori's main language, especially away from Aotearoa is not Māori. Shared how their work is being shared and used by the communities who need the tools, information, and knowledge. Through apps - whare korero, live streaming and Māori learning resources and apps based on traditional Māori pedagogy. Shared the work on a Māori parts of speech tagger, to help produce reliable translations (see Kaituhi, spell/grammar checkers, speech to text transcribers, life captioning, text to speech technology to generate synthetic voices, screen reader in Māori etc. Encouraged feedback on the apps and other tools so that they can be improved. There is a Kaitiakitanga licence for Kōrero Māori. Open to collaborative projects :)
The conference closed with prizes best presentation and best presentation by a new/emerging researcher. Scott Klenner provided closing address, thanks, acknowledgements and karakia.
I then join the Ara contingent to back to Christchurch by van. It was a warm NW summer day, so tops were made to top up on drinks, and snacks :)
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