Learning ecosystems
As today’s global knowledge society becomes increasingly interconnected and begins to morph into a global learning society, it is likely that formal, nonformal, and informal learning will become increasingly interconnected. For instance, there has been an explosion of new self-directed e-learning platforms such as Khan Academy, Open Courseware, and YouTube, among others, that help educate billions of people around the world.
A learning ecosystem includes all the elements that contribute to a learner’s overall learning experience. The components of a learning ecosystem are numerous, including people, technology platforms, knowledge bases, culture, governance, strategy, and other internal and external elements that have an impact on learning.Therefore, moving forward, it is crucial to integrate learning across formal, nonformal, and informal learning processes and activities in a more strategic way.
New research examining the effects of language modeling AI like ChatGPT on different occupations and industries finds that certain jobs, like telemarketers and teachers, are more “exposed” to the technology than others, such as psychologists and counselors.
Feb 1 (Reuters) – ChatGPT, the popular chatbot from OpenAI, is estimated to have reached 100 million monthly active users in January, just two months after launch, making it the fastest-growing consumer application in history, according to a UBS study on Wednesday.
The report, citing data from analytics firm Similarweb, said an average of about 13 million unique visitors had used ChatGPT per day in January, more than double the levels of December.
“In 20 years following the internet space, we cannot recall a faster ramp in a consumer internet app,” UBS analysts wrote in the note.
From DSC: This reminds me of the current exponential pace of change that we are experiencing…
CES is more than just a neon-drenched show-and-tell session for the world’s biggest tech manufacturers. More and more, it’s also a place where companies showcase innovations that could truly make the world a better place — and at CES 2023, this type of tech was on full display. We saw everything from accessibility-minded PS5 controllers to pedal-powered smart desks. But of all the amazing innovations on display this year, these three impressed us the most…
From DSC: A few items re: ChatGPT — with some items pro-chat and other items against the use of ChatGPT (or at least to limit its use).
How About We Put Learning at the Center? — from insidehighered.com by John Warner The ongoing freak-out about ChatGPT sent me back to considering the fundamentals.
Excerpt:
So, when people express concern that students will use ChatGPT to complete their assignments, I understand the concern, but what I don’t understand is why this concern is so often channeled into discussions about how to police student behavior, rather than using this as an opportunity to exam the kind of work we actually ask students (and faculty) to do around learning.
If ChatGPT can do the things we ask students to do in order to demonstrate learning, it seems possible to me that those things should’ve been questioned a long time ago. It’s why I continue to believe this technology is an opportunity for reinvention, precisely because it is a threat to the status quo.
Top AI conference bans use of ChatGPT and AI language tools to write academic papers — from theverge.com by James Vincent; with thanks to Anna Mills for this resource AI tools can be used to ‘edit’ and ‘polish’ authors’ work, say the conference organizers, but text ‘produced entirely’ by AI is not allowed. This raises the question: where do you draw the line between editing and writing?
Excerpt:
The International Conference on Machine Learning (ICML) announced the policy earlier this week, stating, “Papers that include text generated from a large-scale language model (LLM) such as ChatGPT are prohibited unless the produced text is presented as a part of the paper’s experimental analysis.” The news sparked widespread discussion on social media, with AI academics and researchers both defending and criticizing the policy. The conference’s organizers responded by publishing a longer statement explaining their thinking. (The ICML responded to requests from The Verge for comment by directing us to this same statement.)
I am protective of my organic writing process, but when it’s time to edit, ChatGPT sometimes helps me notice which sentences aren’t quite put together as they should be. When I ask it why it suggested a revision, it sometimes describes a word choice nuance I hadn’t thought of.
— Anna Mills, amills@mastodon.oeru.org, she/her (@EnglishOER) January 5, 2023
Instead, I want to discuss the opportunity provided by AI, because it can help us teach in new ways. The very things that make AI scary for educators — its tedency to make up facts, its lack of nuance, and its ability to make excellent student essays — can be used to make education better.
This isn’t for some future theoretical version of AI. You can create assignments, right now, using ChatGPT, that we will help stretch students in knew ways. We wrote a paper with the instructions. You can read it here, but I also want to summarize our suggestions. These are obviously not the only ways to use AI to educate, but they solve some of the hardest problems in education, and you can start experimenting with them right now.
New York City students and teachers can no longer access ChatGPT — the new artificial intelligence-powered chatbot that generates stunningly cogent and lifelike writing — on education department devices or internet networks, agency officials confirmed Tuesday.
SINGAPORE – Teachers in Singapore say they will likely have to move from assignments requiring regurgitation to those that require greater critical thinking, to stay ahead in the fight against plagiarism.
This comes on the back of the rise of ChatGPT, an intelligent chatbot that is able to spin essays and solve mathematical equations in seconds.
ChatGPT Is Not Ready to Teach Geometry (Yet)— from educationnext.org by Paul T. von Hippel The viral chatbot is often wrong, but never in doubt. Educators need to tread carefully.
Excerpt:
Can ChatGPT provide feedback and answer questions about math in a more tailored and natural way? The answer, for the time being, is no. Although ChatGPT can talk about math superficially, it doesn’t “understand” math with real depth. It cannot correct mathematical misconceptions, it often introduces misconceptions of its own; and it sometimes makes inexplicable mathematical errors that a basic spreadsheet or hand calculator wouldn’t make.
From DSC: For all you folks out there who like to fish, you have to check this out! (Though I don’t think even this high-tech fishing rod could help me out.)
Handy Geng [shows off his] latest build: a multifunctional fishing rod with an ice-breaking shovel on one end, a smartphone-controlled motorized reel, accent lighting, and the ability to detect when a fish is on the hook. It also works as a pot stand for cooking your fresh catch.
The global education market is set to reach at least $10T by 2030 as population growth in developing markets fuels a massive expansion and technology drives unprecedented re-skilling and up-skilling in developed economies. The next decade will see an additional 350 million post secondary graduates and nearly 800 million more K12 graduates than today. Asia and Africa are the driving force behind the expansion. The world needs to add 1.5 million teachers per year on average, approaching 100 million in total in order to keep pace with the unprecedented changes ahead in education around the world.
OpenAI has built the best Minecraft-playing bot yet by making it watch 70,000 hours of video of people playing the popular computer game. It showcases a powerful new technique that could be used to train machines to carry out a wide range of tasks by binging on sites like YouTube, a vast and untapped source of training data.
The Minecraft AI learned to perform complicated sequences of keyboard and mouse clicks to complete tasks in the game, such as chopping down trees and crafting tools. It’s the first bot that can craft so-called diamond tools, a task that typically takes good human players 20 minutes of high-speed clicking—or around 24,000 actions.
The result is a breakthrough for a technique known as imitation learning, in which neural networks are trained to perform tasks by watching humans do them.
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The team’s approach, called Video Pre-Training (VPT), gets around the bottleneck in imitation learning by training another neural network to label videos automatically.
“Most language learning software can help with the beginning part of learning basic vocabulary and grammar, but gaining any degree of fluency requires speaking out loud in an interactive environment,” Zwick told TechCrunch in an email interview. “To date, the only way people can get that sort of practice is through human tutors, which can also be expensive, difficult and intimidating.”
Speak’s solution is a collection of interactive speaking experiences that allow learners to practice conversing in English. Through the platform, users can hold open-ended conversations with an “AI tutor” on a range of topics while receiving feedback on their pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary.
It’s one of the top education apps in Korea on the iOS App Store, with over 15 million lessons started annually, 100,000 active subscribers and “double-digit million” annual recurring revenue.
If you last checked in on AI image makers a month ago & thought “that is a fun toy, but is far from useful…” Well, in just the last week or so two of the major AI systems updated.
You can now generate a solid image in one try. For example, “otter on a plane using wifi” 1st try: pic.twitter.com/DhiYeVMEEV
So, is this a cool development that will become a fun tool for many of us to play around with in the future? Sure. Will people use this in their work? Possibly. Will it disrupt artists across the board? Unlikely. There might be a few places where really generic artwork is the norm and the people that were paid very little to crank them out will be paid very little to input prompts. Look, PhotoShop and asset libraries made creating company logos very, very easy a long time ago. But people still don’t want to take the 30 minutes it takes to put one together, because thinking through all the options is not their thing. You still have to think through those options to enter an AI prompt. And people just want to leave that part to the artists. The same thing was true about the printing press. Hundreds of years of innovation has taught us that the hard part of the creation of art is the human coming up with the ideas, not the tools that create the art.
A quick comment from DSC: Possibly, at least in some cases. But I’ve seen enough home-grown, poorly-designed graphics and logos to make me wonder if that will be the case.
How to Teach With Deep Fake Technology — from techlearning.com by Erik Ofgang Despite the scary headlines, deep fake technology can be a powerful teaching tool
Excerpt:
The very concept of teaching with deep fake technology may be unsettling to some. After all, deep fake technology, which utilizes AI and machine learning and can alter videos and animate photographs in a manner that appears realistic, has frequently been covered in a negative light. The technology can be used to violate privacy and create fake videos of real people.
However, while these potential abuses of the technology are real and concerning that doesn’t mean we should turn a blind eye to the technology’s potential when using it responsibly, says Jaime Donally, a well-known immersive learning expert.
From DSC: I’m still not sure about this one…but I’ll try to be open to the possibilities here.
Recently, we spoke with three more participants of the AI Explorations program to learn about its ongoing impact in K-12 classrooms. Here, they share how the program is helping their districts implement AI curriculum with an eye toward equity in the classroom.
A hitherto stealth legal AI startup emerged from the shadows today with news via TechCrunch that it has raised $5 million in funding led by the startup fund of OpenAI, the company that developed advanced neural network AI systems such as GPT-3 and DALL-E 2.
The startup, called Harvey, will build on the GPT-3 technology to enable lawyers to create legal documents or perform legal research by providing simple instructions using natural language.
The company was founded by Winston Weinberg, formerly an associate at law firm O’Melveny & Myers, and Gabriel Pereyra, formerly a research scientist at DeepMind and most recently a machine learning engineer at Meta AI.
Associate Professor Constantinos Coursaris, Associate Professor Camille Grange, Pierre-Majorique Léger, Dr. Annemarie Lesage, and Professor Sylvain Sénécal, UX Design and Evaluation, HEC Montréal
Is GoodCourse the future of corporate learning? — from businesscloud.co.uk by Jonathan Symcox Micro-learning platform’s short-form content and TikTok-style explainer videos have the potential to transform development in the workplace
“The reason TikTok is so popular is because it’s short-form and engaging; the opposite to the usual two-hour training course.
“Spacing out micro-learning chunks across the course of a year gives you a much better chance of retaining it and actually acting on it. That’s why GoodCourse is built to engage a Gen Z workforce.”
November 13, 2022 Projections show the global population will surpass 8 billion people on November 15, and in 2023, India is expected to surpass China to become the world’s most populous nation. It was only 11 years ago that the world reached the last billion; these milestones generate considerations of resource allocation, food security, climate change, and more. Already, one in nine people can’t get enough to eat every day, even while 33 to 40 percent of our food is lost or wasted each year, according to research from senior partners Clarisse Magnin and Björn Timelin. As we continue to grow, how can we support an unprecedented population while raising the quality of life for all? Explore our insights to learn more about how to avoid a food crisis, common misconceptions around global migration, the future of an aging population, and more.
This week on Tuesday, it’s projected that a baby will be born somewhere on Planet Earth that brings the population to 8 billion people. Notably, the global population reached 7 billion people just eleven years ago. When I was born, in 1962, there was 3 billion people, and the United States had a population of 180 million versus roughly 335 million today.
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What we know from Nobel Laureate Economist James Heckman out of the University of Chicago is that $1 invested in early childhood education produces a $7 return in economic gain. Moreover, while investment in education produces a compelling return at all stages, the earlier you invest in education, the higher the return.
As the metaverse becomes a fully realized, interoperable and persistent platform, the need for a codified and clearly defined system of applicable laws will be tremendous.
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The applicability and sufficiency of existing intellectual property laws are being tested as we speak in the metaverse. Heavyweight companies such as Walmart, Hermès, Nike and Roblox are all actively seeking judicial determinations as to their respective trademark rights in the metaverse.
Why does this matter to you? If you buy a music album and receive a digital file, is this a purchase of digital goods? What if you listen to the same album on a streaming service? If you buy virtual sneakers for your metaverse avatar, is this a purchase of digital goods or just a part of the service provided by the metaverse operator? As purchasing habits increasingly move online or into the digital space, and especially with the rise in popularity of “metaverses”, the need for clarity and regulation in this area will become more and more apparent.
Building a virtual world often involves just that—buildings. But developers of metaverse properties may not know which legal rights are at issue. Can a virtual world incorporate a rendition of a real-life building without infringing on the rights of real-life property owners? Does the architect, owner, or user of a brick-and-mortar building have any rights to assert against a twin building in the metaverse? How does the developer of a virtual building take the building from one virtual world to another?
The answer depends on—and may vary based on—who is asserting the rights, whether copyrights or trademarks are at issue, and whether any of these rights have been assigned to another party.
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These questions all remain unsettled in the context of the metaverse, so developers should proceed with caution until courts put their own stake in the ground on these issues.
