Also relevant/see:


Learning Designers will have to adapt or die. 10 ways to UPSKILL to AI…. — from donaldclarkplanb.blogspot.com by Donald Clark

Learning Designers need to upskill


From Ethan Mollick on LinkedIn:

Take a look at this simulated negotiation, with grading and feedback. Prompt: “I want to do deliberate practice about how to conduct negotiations. You will be my negotiation teacher. You will simulate a detailed scenario in which I have to engage in a negotiation. You will fill the role of one party, I will fill the role of the other. You will ask for my response to in each step of the scenario and wait until you receive it. After getting my response, you will give me details of what the other party does and says. You will grade my response and give me detailed feedback about what to do better using the science of negotiation. You will give me a harder scenario if I do well, and an easier one if I fail.”

Samples from Bing Creative mode and ChatGPT-4 (3.5, the free version, does not work as well)


I’m having a blast with ChatGPT – it’s testing ME! — from by Mark Mrohs
Using ChatGPT as an agent for asynchronous active learning

I have been experimenting with possible ways to incorporate interactions with ChatGPT into instruction. And I’m blown away. I want to show you some of what I’ve come up with.

 

Canva’s New AI Wonder Tools — from wondertools.substack.com  by Jeremy Caplan
A magic eraser, a branding kit, AI presentations, and more new features

Excerpt:

Canva launched a bunch of new features at a live event viewed by 1.5 million people globally. The Australian company is no longer an upstart. 125 million people use it monthly, including 13 million paid subscribers yielding $1.4 billion in revenue. Canva’s increasingly competing with Adobe to help people create eye-catching visuals. Here are its most useful new tricks.

 

How to use AI to do practical stuff: A new guide — from oneusefulthing.substack.com by Ethan Mollick
People often ask me how to use AI. Here’s an overview with lots of links.

Excerpts:

We live in an era of practical AI, but many people haven’t yet experienced it, or, if they have, they might have wondered what the big deal is. Thus, this guide. It is a modified version of one I put out for my students earlier in the year, but a lot has changed. It is an overview of ways to get AI to do practical things.

I want to try to show you some of why AI is powerful, in ways both exciting and anxiety-producing.

The Six Large Language Models


Also see Ethan’s posting:

Power and Weirdness: How to Use Bing AI
Bing AI is a huge leap over ChatGPT, but you have to learn its quirks


 

Teaching: What You Can Learn From Students About ChatGPT — from chronicle.com by Beth McMurtrie

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

Like a lot of you, I have been wondering how students are reacting to the rapid launch of generative AI tools. And I wanted to point you to creative ways in which professors and teaching experts have helped involve them in research and policymaking.

At Kalamazoo College, Autumn Hostetter, a psychology professor, and six of her students surveyed faculty members and students to determine whether they could detect an AI-written essay, and what they thought of the ethics of using various AI tools in writing. You can read their research paper here.

Next, participants were asked about a range of scenarios, such as using Grammarly, using AI to make an outline for a paper, using AI to write a section of a paper, looking up a concept on Google and copying it directly into a paper, and using AI to write an entire paper. As expected, commonly used tools like Grammarly were considered the most ethical, while writing a paper entirely with AI was considered the least. But researchers found variation in how people approached the in-between scenarios. Perhaps most interesting: Students and faculty members shared very similar views with each scenario.

 


Also relevant/see:

This Was Written By a Human: A Real Educator’s Thoughts on Teaching in the Age of ChatGPT — from er.educause.edu educause.org by Jered Borup
The well-founded concerns surrounding ChatGPT shouldn’t distract us from considering how it might be useful.


 

 

From DSC:
After seeing this…

…I wondered:

  • Could GPT-4 create the “Choir Practice” app mentioned below?
    (Choir Practice was an idea for an app for people who want to rehearse their parts at home)
  • Could GPT-4 be used to extract audio/parts from a musical score and post the parts separately for people to download/practice their individual parts?

This line of thought reminded me of this posting that I did back on 10/27/2010 entitled, “For those institutions (or individuals) who might want to make a few million.”

Choir Practice -- an app for people who want to rehearse at home

And I want to say that when I went back to look at this posting, I was a bit ashamed of myself. I’d like to apologize for the times when I’ve been too excited about something and exaggerated/hyped an idea up on this Learning Ecosystems blog. For example, I used the words millions of dollars in the title…and that probably wouldn’t be the case these days. (But with inflation being what it is, heh…who knows!? Maybe I shouldn’t be too hard on myself.) I just had choirs in mind when I posted the idea…and there aren’t as many choirs around these days.  🙂

 

The above Tweet links to:

Pause Giant AI Experiments: An Open Letter — from futureoflife.org
We call on all AI labs to immediately pause for at least 6 months the training of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4.



However, the letter has since received heavy backlash, as there seems to be no verification in signing it. Yann LeCun from Meta denied signing the letter and completely disagreed with the premise. (source)


In Sudden Alarm, Tech Doyens Call for a Pause on ChatGPT — from wired.com by Will Knight (behind paywall)
Tech luminaries, renowned scientists, and Elon Musk warn of an “out-of-control race” to develop and deploy ever-more-powerful AI systems.


 
 

Evolving Zoom IQ, our smart companion, with new features and a collaboration with OpenAI — from blog.zoom.us

Excerpt:

Today we’re announcing that we’re evolving the capabilities of Zoom IQ to become a smart companion that empowers collaboration and unlocks people’s potential by summarizing chat threads, organizing ideas, drafting content for chats, emails, and whiteboard sessions, creating meeting agendas, and more.

 


Also from Julie Sobowale, see:

  • Law’s AI revolution is here — from nationalmagazine.ca
    At least this much we know. Firms need to develop a strategy around language models.

Also re: legaltech, see:

  • Pioneers and Pathfinders: Richard Susskind — from seyfarth.com by J. Stephen Poor
    In our conversation, Richard discusses the ways we should all be thinking about legal innovation, the challenges of training lawyers for the future, and the qualifications of those likely to develop breakthrough technologies in law, as well as his own journey and how he became interested in AI as an undergraduate student.

Also re: legaltech, see:

There is an elephant in the room that is rarely discussed. Who owns the IP of AI-generated content?

 

ChatGPT and AI Applications for In-house Lawyers — from docket.acc.com by Spiwe L. Jefferson

Excerpt:

The explosive emergence of ChatGPT as a consumer tool has catapulted Artificial Intelligence (AI) and its subfield, natural language processing (NLP), to the technology stage. As AI and NLP continue to evolve, the use of AI-powered tools, such as the Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT), in the legal industry has become increasingly prevalent. Many lawyers are experimenting with AI and grappling with its applications to streamline practices and improve efficiency.

While GPT and other AI-powered tools can potentially revolutionize aspects of the legal profession, it is important to consider the current limitations and potential pitfalls in implementing these technologies.

017 | Post-Event Learnings w/ AI Prompts |Brainyacts #17 — from thebrainyacts.beehiiv.com

Excerpt:

Earlier this week some of you were at Legalweek in New York. Others of you joined Terri Mottershead and the Centre for Legal Innovation to talk about what consultants think about ChatGPT/Generative AI.

Far too many of us attend these events and never take the time to invest in ourselves and our organizations by capturing our learnings and insights.

In fact, I will go a step further.

If your organization paid for you to go, there is an obligation to transfer your personal experience into one that benefits the organization. Sort of a return on investment for the $ and time away from the office.

 


Also relevant/see:

We have moved from Human Teachers and Human Learners, as a diad to AI Teachers and AI Learners as a tetrad.


 

Law has a magic wand now — from jordanfurlong.substack.com by Jordan Furlong
Some people think Large Language Models will transform the practice of law. I think it’s bigger than that.

Excerpts:

ChatGPT4 can also do things that only lawyers (used to be able to) do. It can look up and summarize a court decisionanalyze and apply sections of copyright law, and generate a statement of claim for breach of contract.

What happens when you introduce a magic wand into the legal market? On the buyer side, you reduce by a staggering degree the volume of tasks that you need to pay lawyers (whether in-house or outside counsel) to perform. It won’t happen overnight: Developing, testing, revising, approving, and installing these sorts of systems in corporations will take time. But once that’s done, the beauty of LLMs like ChatGPT4 is that they are not expert systems. Anyone can use them. Anyone will.

But I can’t shake the feeling that someday, we’ll divide the history of legal services into “Before GPT4” and “After GPT4.” I think it’s that big.


From DSC:
Jordan mentions: “Some people think Large Language Models will transform the practice of law. I think it’s bigger than that.”

I agree with Jordan. It most assuredly IS bigger than that. AI will profoundly impact many industries/disciplines. The legal sector is but one of them. Education is another. People’s expectations are now changing — and the “ramification wheels” are now in motion.

I take the position that many others have as well (at least as of this point in time) that take the position that AI will supplement humans’ capabilities and activities. But those who know AI-driven apps will outcompete those who don’t know about such apps. 

 

We Can’t Keep ChatGPT Out of the Classroom, so Let’s Address the ‘Why’ Behind Our Fears — from edsurge.com by Alice Domínguez

Excerpt:

ChatGPT offers us an opportunity to address our fears, release our fixation on preventing cheating and focus our attention on more worthy priorities: providing students with compelling reasons to write, inviting them to wrestle with important questions and crafting a piece of writing that cannot be mistaken for a robot’s work.

 

The Ultimate Compilation of 101 GPT-4 L&D Prompts — from innovationlounge.notion.site

Examples:

  1. Design a personalized learning plan for a new employee joining a software development team, including onboarding, skill assessment, and ongoing development.
  2. Describe a strategy for implementing a mentorship program within an organization to improve employee development and retention.
  3. Suggest a framework for evaluating the effectiveness of a company’s existing learning and development programs.
  4. Propose a gamification strategy for engaging employees in a company-wide training program on diversity and inclusion.
  5. Identify potential barriers to effective remote learning and provide recommendations for overcoming them in a virtual training environment.
  6. Develop a plan for a “lunch-and-learn” series to encourage cross-functional collaboration and skill-sharing among employees.
  7. Recommend a variety of cost-effective resources (books, online courses, webinars, etc.) for training employees in project management skills.
  8. Design a three-month training program for a sales team to improve their negotiation and closing skills, including specific activities and milestones.
  9. Outline a strategy for integrating microlearning techniques into an organization’s existing training approach to boost knowledge retention and engagement.
  10. Suggest an approach for identifying and addressing skills gaps within a team or department, including assessment tools and targeted training resources.
 
© 2025 | Daniel Christian