News of the week: Technology understanding as a subject in primary and lower secondary schools

The government wants to introduce technology literacy in Danish primary and lower secondary schools

The government has announced its plan to introduce the elective subject technology literacy in primary schools for pupils in grades 7-9. At the same time, the government wants to make technology literacy mandatory for all students from 1st to 9th grade by integrating it into selected existing subjects. It is the first time in 30 years that a new subject has been introduced in the Danish school system.

According to their new digitalization strategy, the government wants citizens to understand and be critical of future technology. In this context, they come up with four concrete initiatives.

The government will introduce technology understanding as a subject and independent elective subject in primary and lower secondary schools. They will allocate DKK 160 million for this.
To ensure good support for technology understanding in primary and lower secondary schools, an effort is being initiated to develop the new professionalism in teacher education further. Ten million kroner will be allocated here.
Funds are allocated for, among other things, competence development of teachers and teaching development in higher education. Here, DKK 35 million will be given.
To meet the demand for specialized IT skills, an effort is being organized to strengthen continuing education and training activities in IT and to strengthen vocational master's programs in IT education. Here, DKK 30 million will be allocated.

Source: Ministry of Digitisation and Gender Equality.

Criticism of the government's digitalisation strategy

There have been many people criticizing parts of the proposal. The main criticism is that they have chosen to make an elective rather than an independent, compulsory subject in primary school. This will particularly affect girls since those with a natural interest choose the subject, and according to PROSA, they are already technology-competent boys. At the same time, there are no initiatives in the digitalization strategy aimed at upper secondary education.

Below, we have collected several articles dealing with the government's digitalization strategy:

Chaos at OpenAI – the company behind ChatGPT

Although it doesn't have much to do with artificial intelligence in education, it's worth mentioning.

The wild news of the week is that the board of OpenAI has chosen to fire their CEO, Sam Altman, and subsequently, their chairman, Greg Brockman, has resigned. The basis for the firing was that Sam Altman had not been "honest in his communication" - whatever that means- but there are indications that he had been creating a new start-up. Back in the day, Sam Altman and Greg Brockman started OpenAI and developed it into what it is today.

However, the story does not end here, and the board of OpenAI soon after got cold feet and tried to get Sam Altman back. According to The Information, however, Sam Altman is finally over, and Emmett Shear becomes interim CEO of OpenAI.

Opening conference of the Knowledge Center for Digital Technology Understanding

Monday, 4/12-2023, from 13:30-15:30, the Knowledge Centre for Digital Technology Understanding will hold an opening conference. The conference is fully booked, but it is possible to join online on Zoom. If you are interested in it, sign up here:

News

Scientific articles

Below, we select articles that have a slightly more scientific perspective. These are articles that we read ourselves to keep ourselves updated, and at the same time, we also know that they are not so interesting for most people.

Danish Foundation Models

We have previously discussed the challenges of needing a Danish language model, and more minor languages, such as Danish, have been characterized by high development costs. The Danish Foundation Models project addresses this challenge by developing open, well-documented, high-quality foundation models specific to the Danish language. The project is a collaboration between public and private institutions that ensures high data quality and practical applicability of the models. The project is part of the Center for Language Generation and AI (CLAI) at Aarhus University.

HVL students' use and perceptions of language models in education

A study from the Norwegian university college, Høgskulen på Vestlandet, looked at the students' use and attitudes towards artificial intelligence in the form of ChatGPT and Bard. The results show that out of the 2822 participating students, 24% use the language models regularly, primarily as personal assistants for individual work, including understanding academic material, academic writing, and problem-solving. A large proportion of students (74%) want to learn more about the effective use of language models, and 65% ask for clear guidelines.

Now, you can run thousands of language models on one video card

Researchers at Stanford and UC Berkeley have developed S-LoRA. It is a method that reduces the cost of large language models.

S-LoRA: Serving Thousands of Concurrent LoRA Adapters

The “pretrain-then-finetune” paradigm is commonly adopted in the deployment of large language models. Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), a parameter-efficient fine-tuning method, is often employed to adapt a base model to a multitude of tasks, resulting in a substantial collection of LoRA adapters derived…

arXiv.orgYing Sheng

Recommendation of the week

This week, Jan Damgaard's book AI - Mellem fornuft og følelse was published. The book gives insight into artificial intelligence and the opportunities for companies to exploit the technology. The book's central message is that we should not be afraid of new technology but rather embrace it and take advantage of the many new opportunities. According to Jan, we do this by experimenting and putting our stamp on the development - because artificial intelligence can become a gift to humanity.

The book can be purchased as a physical book or e-book from Djøf Forlag or Saxo.