From DSC: Anyone who is involved in putting on conferences should at least be aware that this kind of thing is now possible!!! Check out the following posting from Adobe (with help from Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).
This year, the organizers — innovative industry event company Beyond Ordinary Events — turned to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to make the impossible “possible.” Leveraging Adobe generative AI technology across products like Adobe Premiere Pro and Acrobat, they distilled hours of video content in minutes, delivering timely dispatches to thousands of attendees throughout the conference.
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For POSSIBLE ’24, Muche had an idea for a daily dispatch summarizing each day’s sessions so attendees wouldn’t miss a single insight. But timing would be critical. The dispatch needed to reach attendees shortly after sessions ended to fuel discussions over dinner and carry the excitement over to the next day.
The workflow started in Adobe Premiere Pro, with the writer opening a recording of each session and using the Speech to Text feature to automatically generate a transcript. They saved the transcript as a PDF file and opened it in Adobe Acrobat Pro. Then, using Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant, the writer asked for a session summary.
It was that fast and easy. In less than four minutes, one person turned a 30-minute session into an accurate, useful summary ready for review and publication.
By taking advantage of templates, the designer then added each AI-enabled summary to the newsletter in minutes. With just two people and generative AI technology, TCS accomplished the impossible — for the first time delivering an informative, polished newsletter to all 3,500 conference attendees just hours after the last session of the day.
Majors like hers are part of a broader wave of less conventional, avant-garde majors, in specialties such as artificial intelligence, that are taking root in American higher education, as colleges grapple with changes in the economy and a shrinking pool of students.
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The trend underscores the distinct ways schools are responding to growing concerns over which degrees provide the best return on investment. As college costs soared to new heights in recent years, saddling many students with crippling loan debt, that discourse has only become increasingly fraught, raising the stakes for schools to prove their degrees leave students better prepared and employable.
“I’m a big believer in the liberal arts, but universities don’t get to print money,” he said. “If enrollment interests are shifting, they have to be able to hire faculty to teach in those areas. Money has to come from someplace.”
From DSC: Years ago, I remember having lunch with one of the finalists for the President position of a local university. He withdrew himself from the search because the institution’s culture would be like oil and water with him at the helm. He was very innovative, and this organization was not. I remember him saying, “The marketplace will determine what that organization ultimately does.” In other words, he was saying that higher education was market-driven. I agreed with him then, and I still agree with that perspective now.
AI is welcomed by those with dyslexia, and other learning issues, helping to mitigate some of the challenges associated with reading, writing, and processing information. Those who want to ban AI want to destroy the very thing that has helped most on accessibility. Here are 10 ways dyslexics, and others with issues around text-based learning, can use AI to support their daily activities and learning.
Are U.S. public schools lagging behind other countries like Singapore and South Korea in preparing teachers and students for the boom of generative artificial intelligence? Or are our educators bumbling into AI half-blind, putting students’ learning at risk?
Or is it, perhaps, both?
Two new reports, coincidentally released on the same day last week, offer markedly different visions of the emerging field: One argues that schools need forward-thinking policies for equitable distribution of AI across urban, suburban and rural communities. The other suggests they need something more basic: a bracing primer on what AI is and isn’t, what it’s good for and how it can all go horribly wrong.
Bite-Size AI Content for Faculty and Staff— from aiedusimplified.substack.com by Lance Eaton Another two 5-tips videos for faculty and my latest use case: creating FAQs!
Despite possible drawbacks, an exciting wondering has been—What if AI was a tipping point helping us finally move away from a standardized, grade-locked, ranking-forced, batched-processing learning model based on the make believe idea of “the average man” to a learning model that meets every child where they are at and helps them grow from there?
I get that change is indescribably hard and there are risks. But the integration of AI in education isn’t a trend. It’s a paradigm shift that requires careful consideration, ongoing reflection, and a commitment to one’s core values. AI presents us with an opportunity—possibly an unprecedented one—to transform teaching and learning, making it more personalized, efficient, and impactful. How might we seize the opportunity boldly?
California and NVIDIA Partner to Bring AI to Schools, Workplaces — from govtech.com by Abby Sourwine The latest step in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s plans to integrate AI into public operations across California is a partnership with NVIDIA intended to tailor college courses and professional development to industry needs.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom and tech company NVIDIA joined forces last week to bring generative AI (GenAI) to community colleges and public agencies across the state. The California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office (CCCCO), NVIDIA and the governor all signed a memorandum of understanding (MOU) outlining how each partner can contribute to education and workforce development, with the goal of driving innovation across industries and boosting their economic growth.
Listen to anything on the go with the highest-quality voices — from elevenlabs.io; via The Neuron
The ElevenLabs Reader App narrates articles, PDFs, ePubs, newsletters, or any other text content. Simply choose a voice from our expansive library, upload your content, and listen on the go.
Per The Neuron
Some cool use cases:
Judy Garland can teach you biology while walking to class.
James Dean can narrate your steamy romance novel.
Sir Laurence Olivier can read you today’s newsletter—just paste the web link and enjoy!
Why it’s important: ElevenLabs shared how major Youtubers are using its dubbing services to expand their content into new regions with voices that actually sound like them (thanks to ElevenLabs’ ability to clone voices).
Oh, and BTW, it’s estimated that up to 20% of the population may have dyslexia. So providing people an option to listen to (instead of read) content, in their own language, wherever they go online can only help increase engagement and communication.
How Generative AI Improves Parent Engagement in K–12 Schools — from edtechmagazine.com by Alexadner Slagg With its ability to automate and personalize communication, generative artificial intelligence is the ideal technological fix for strengthening parent involvement in students’ education.
As generative AI tools populate the education marketplace, the technology’s ability to automate complex, labor-intensive tasks and efficiently personalize communication may finally offer overwhelmed teachers a way to effectively improve parent engagement.
… These personalized engagement activities for students and their families can include local events, certification classes and recommendations for books and videos. “Family Feed might suggest courses, such as an Adobe certification,” explains Jackson. “We have over 14,000 courses that we have vetted and can recommend. And we have books and video recommendations for students as well.”
Including personalized student information and an engagement opportunity makes it much easier for parents to directly participate in their children’s education.
Will AI Shrink Disparities in Schools, or Widen Them? — edsurge.com by Daniel Mollenkamp Experts predict new tools could boost teaching efficiency — or create an “underclass of students” taught largely through screens.
But as generative AI tools like ChatGPT sweep into mainstream business tools, promising to draft properly-formatted text from simple prompts and the click of a button, new questions are rising about what role writing centers should play — or whether they will be needed in the future.
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Writing centers need to find a balance between introducing AI into the writing process and keeping the human support that every writer needs, argues Anna Mills, an English instructor at the College of Marin.
AI can serve as a supplement to a human tutor, Mills says. She encourages her students to use MyEssayFeedback, an AI tool that critiques the organization of an essay, the quality of evidence a student has included to support their thesis or the tone of the writing. Such tools can also evaluate research questions or review a student’s writing based on the rubric for the assignment, she says.
Advanced Voice Mode on ChatGPT features more natural, real-time conversations that pick up on and respond with emotion and non-verbal cues.
Advanced Voice Mode on ChatGPT is currently in a limited alpha. Please note that it may make mistakes, and access and rate limits are subject to change.
From DSC: Think about the impacts/ramifications of global, virtual, real-time language translations!!! This type of technology will create very powerful, new affordances in our learning ecosystems — as well as in business communications, with the various governments across the globe, and more!
Using Class Discussions as AI-Proof Assessments — from edutopia.org by Kara McPhillips Classroom discussions are one way to ensure that students are doing their own work in the age of artificial intelligence.
I admit it: Grading essays has never topped my list of teaching joys. Sure, the moments when a student finally nails a skill after months of hard work make me shout for joy, startling my nearby colleagues (sorry, Ms. Evans), but by and large, it’s hard work. Yet lately, as generative artificial intelligence (AI) headlines swirl in my mind, a new anxiety has crept into my grading life. I increasingly wonder, am I looking at their hard work?
Do you know when I don’t feel this way? During discussions. A ninth grader wiggling the worn corner of her text, leaning forward with excitement over what she’s cleverly noticed about Kambili, rarely makes me wonder, “Are these her ideas?”
While I’ve always thought discussion is important, AI is elevating that importance. This year, I wonder, how can I best leverage discussion in my classroom?
As the needs of the modern workforce evolve at an unprecedented rate, durable, or “soft,” skills are often eclipsing demand for sought-after technical skills in high-demand jobs across industry sectors, geography, and educational level.
Through research, collaboration, and feedback from more than 800 educators, workforce professionals, industry leaders, and policymakers, America Succeeds—a leading educational policy and advocacy group—has developed Durable Skills and the Durable Skills Advantage Framework to provide a common language for the most in-demand durable skills. With 85% of career success being dependent on durable skills, this framework bridges the gap between the skills students are taught in school and evolving workforce needs.
Over the last few years, we’ve been covering New Pathways, which we think of as a framework for school leaders and community members to create supports and systems that set students up for success in what’s next. This might be career exploration, client-connected projects, internships, or entrepreneurial experiences.
But what it really comes down to is connecting learners to real-world experiences and people and helping them articulate the skills that they gain in the process. Along the way, we began to talk a lot about green jobs. Many of the pre-existing pathways in secondary schools point towards CTE programs and trades, which are more in demand than they’ve been in decades.
This coincides with a pivotal moment in the arc of infrastructure redesign and development, one that heavily emphasizes clean energy trajectories and transferable skills. Many of these jobs we refer to as green pathways or requiring some of these green skills.
One leading organization in this space is the Interstate Renewable Energy Council or IREC. I got to sit down with Cynthia Finley, the Vice President of Workforce Strategy at IREC to talk about green pathways and what IREC is doing to increase awareness and exposure of green jobs and skills.
A recent report published by the Identity Theft Resource Center (ITRC) found that data from 2023 shows “an environment where bad actors are more effective, efficient and successful in launching attacks. The result is fewer victims (or at least fewer victim reports), but the impact on individuals and businesses is arguably more damaging.”
One of these attacks involves fake job postings.
The details: The ITRC said that victim reports of job and employment scams spiked some 118% in 2023. These scams were primarily carried out through LinkedIn and other job search platforms.
The bad actors here would either create fake (but professional-looking) job postings, profiles and websites or impersonate legitimate companies, all with the hopes of landing victims to move onto the interview process.
These actors would then move the conversation onto a third-party messaging platform, and ask for identity verification information (driver’s licenses, social security numbers, direct deposit information, etc.).
Hypernatural is an AI video platform that makes it easy to create beautiful, ready-to share videos from anything. Stop settling for glitchy 3s generated videos and boring stock footage. Turn your ideas, scripts, podcasts and more into incredible short-form videos in minutes.
OpenAI is committed to making intelligence as broadly accessible as possible. Today, we’re announcing GPT-4o mini, our most cost-efficient small model. We expect GPT-4o mini will significantly expand the range of applications built with AI by making intelligence much more affordable. GPT-4o mini scores 82% on MMLU and currently outperforms GPT-41 on chat preferences in LMSYS leaderboard(opens in a new window). It is priced at 15 cents per million input tokens and 60 cents per million output tokens, an order of magnitude more affordable than previous frontier models and more than 60% cheaper than GPT-3.5 Turbo.
GPT-4o mini enables a broad range of tasks with its low cost and latency, such as applications that chain or parallelize multiple model calls (e.g., calling multiple APIs), pass a large volume of context to the model (e.g., full code base or conversation history), or interact with customers through fast, real-time text responses (e.g., customer support chatbots).
Also see what this means fromBen’s Bites, The Neuron, and as The Rundown AI asserts:
Why it matters: While it’s not GPT-5, the price and capabilities of this mini-release significantly lower the barrier to entry for AI integrations — and marks a massive leap over GPT 3.5 Turbo. With models getting cheaper, faster, and more intelligent with each release, the perfect storm for AI acceleration is forming.
An internet search for free learning resources will likely return a long list that includes some useful sites amid a sea of not-really-free and not-very-useful sites.
To help teachers more easily find the best free and freemium sites they can use in their classrooms and curricula, I’ve curated a list that describes the top free/freemium sites for learning.
In some cases, Tech & Learning has reviewed the site in detail, and those links are included so readers can find out more about how to make the best use of the online materials. In all cases, the websites below provide valuable educational tools, lessons, and ideas, and are worth exploring further.
How to Kill Student Curiosity in 5 Steps (and What to Do Instead) — from edweek.org by Olivia Odileke The unintentional missteps teachers and administrators are making
I’ve observed five major ways we’re unintentionally stifling curiosity and issue a call to action for educators, administrators, and policymakers to join the curiosity revolution:
This episode of the Next Big Idea podcast, host Rufus Griscom and Bill Gates are joined by Andy Sack and Adam Brotman, co-authors of an exciting new book called “AI First.” Together, they consider AI’s impact on healthcare, education, productivity, and business. They dig into the technology’s risks. And they explore its potential to cure diseases, enhance creativity, and usher in a world of abundance.
Key moments:
00:05 Bill Gates discusses AI’s transformative potential in revolutionizing technology.
02:21 Superintelligence is inevitable and marks a significant advancement in AI technology.
09:23 Future AI may integrate deeply as cognitive assistants in personal and professional life.
14:04 AI’s metacognitive advancements could revolutionize problem-solving capabilities.
21:13 AI’s next frontier lies in developing human-like metacognition for sophisticated problem-solving.
27:59 AI advancements empower both good and malicious intents, posing new security challenges.
28:57 Rapid AI development raises questions about controlling its global application.
33:31 Productivity enhancements from AI can significantly improve efficiency across industries.
35:49 AI’s future applications in consumer and industrial sectors are subjects of ongoing experimentation.
46:10 AI democratization could level the economic playing field, enhancing service quality and reducing costs.
51:46 AI plays a role in mitigating misinformation and bridging societal divides through enhanced understanding.
The team has summarized their primary contributions as follows.
The team has offered the first instance of a simple, scalable oversight technique that greatly assists humans in more thoroughly detecting problems in real-world RLHF data.
Within the ChatGPT and CriticGPT training pools, the team has discovered that critiques produced by CriticGPT catch more inserted bugs and are preferred above those written by human contractors.
Compared to human contractors working alone, this research indicates that teams consisting of critic models and human contractors generate more thorough criticisms. When compared to reviews generated exclusively by models, this partnership lowers the incidence of hallucinations.
This study provides Force Sampling Beam Search (FSBS), an inference-time sampling and scoring technique. This strategy well balances the trade-off between minimizing bogus concerns and discovering genuine faults in LLM-generated critiques.
a16z-backed Character.AI said today that it is now allowing users to talk to AI characters over calls. The feature currently supports multiple languages, including English, Spanish, Portuguese, Russian, Korean, Japanese and Chinese.
The startup tested the calling feature ahead of today’s public launch. During that time, it said that more than 3 million users had made over 20 million calls. The company also noted that calls with AI characters can be useful for practicing language skills, giving mock interviews, or adding them to the gameplay of role-playing games.
Google Translate can come in handy when you’re traveling or communicating with someone who speaks another language, and thanks to a new update, you can now connect with some 614 million more people. Google is adding 110 new languages to its Translate tool using its AI PaLM 2 large language model (LLM), which brings the total of supported languages to nearly 250. This follows the 24 languages added in 2022, including Indigenous languages of the Americas as well as those spoken across Africa and central Asia.
Gen-3 Alpha Text to Video is now available to everyone.
A new frontier for high-fidelity, fast and controllable video generation.
From DSC: Very interesting to see the mention of an R&D department here! Very cool.
Baker said ninth graders inthe R&D department designed the essential skills rubric for their grade so that regardless of what content classes students take, they all get the same immersion into critical career skills. Student voice is now so integrated into Edison’s core that teachers work with student designers to plan their units. And he said teachers are becoming comfortable with the language of career-centered learning and essential skills while students appreciate the engagement and develop a new level of confidence.
… The R&D department has grown to include teachers from every department working with students to figure out how to integrate essential skills into core academic classes. In this way, they’re applying one of the XQ Institute’s crucial Design Principles for innovative high schools: Youth Voice and Choice. .
Client-connected projects have become a focal point of the Real World Learning initiative, offering students opportunities to solve real-world problems in collaboration with industry professionals.
Organizations like CAPS, NFTE, and Journalistic Learning facilitate community connections and professional learning opportunities, making it easier to implement client projects and entrepreneurship education.
Important trend: client projects. Work-based learning has been growing with career academies and renewed interest in CTE. Six years ago, a subset of WBL called client-connected projects became a focal point of the Real World Learning initiative in Kansas City where they are defined as authentic problems that students solve in collaboration with professionals from industry, not-for-profit, and community-based organizations….and allow students to: engage directly with employers, address real-world problems, and develop essential skills.
The Community Portrait approach encourages diverse voices to shape the future of education, ensuring it reflects the needs and aspirations of all stakeholders.
Active, representative community engagement is essential for creating meaningful and inclusive educational environments.
The Portrait of a Graduate—a collaborative effort to define what learners should know and be able to do upon graduation—has likely generated enthusiasm in your community. However, the challenge of future-ready graduates persists: How can we turn this vision into a reality within our diverse and dynamic schools, especially amid the current national political tensions and contentious curriculum debates?
The answer lies in active, inclusive community engagement. It’s about crafting a Community Portrait that reflects the rich diversity of our neighborhoods. This approach, grounded in the same principles used to design effective learning systems, seeks to cultivate deep, reciprocal relationships within the community. When young people are actively involved, the potential for meaningful change increases exponentially.
Although Lindsay E. Jones came from a family of educators, she didn’t expect that going to law school would steer her back into the family business. Over the years she became a staunch advocate for children with disabilities. And as mom to a son with learning disabilities and ADHD who is in high school and doing great, her advocacy is personal.
Jones previously served as president and CEO of the National Center for Learning Disabilities and was senior director for policy and advocacy at the Council for Exceptional Children. Today, she is the CEO at CAST, an organization focused on creating inclusive learning environments in K–12. EdTech: Focus on K–12 spoke with Jones about how digital transformation, artificial intelligence and visionary leaders can support inclusive learning environments.
Our brains are all as different as our fingerprints, and throughout its 40-year history, CAST has been focused on one core value: People are not broken, systems are poorly designed. And those systems are creating a barrier that holds back human innovation and learning.
Dream Machine is an AI model that makes high quality, realistic videos fast from text and images.
It is a highly scalable and efficient transformer model trained directly on videos making it capable of generating physically accurate, consistent and eventful shots. Dream Machine is our first step towards building a universal imagination engine and it is available to everyone now!
Luma AI just dropped a Sora-like AI video generator called Dream Machine.
But unlike Sora or KLING, it’s completely open access to the public.
If 2023 was the year the world discovered generative AI (gen AI), 2024 is the year organizations truly began using—and deriving business value from—this new technology. In the latest McKinsey Global Survey on AI, 65 percent of respondents report that their organizations are regularly using gen AI, nearly double the percentage from our previous survey just ten months ago. Respondents’ expectations for gen AI’s impact remain as high as they were last year, with three-quarters predicting that gen AI will lead to significant or disruptive change in their industries in the years ahead.
Organizations are already seeing material benefits from gen AI use, reporting both cost decreases and revenue jumps in the business units deploying the technology. The survey also provides insights into the kinds of risks presented by gen AI—most notably, inaccuracy—as well as the emerging practices of top performers to mitigate those challenges and capture value. .
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What’s the future of AI?— from mckinsey.com AI is here to stay. To outcompete in the future, organizations and individuals alike need to get familiar fast. This series of McKinsey Explainers dives deep into the seven technologies that are already shaping the years to come.
We’re in the midst of a revolution. Just as steam power, mechanized engines, and coal supply chains transformed the world in the 18th century, AI technology is currently changing the face of work, our economies, and society as we know it. We don’t know exactly what the future will look like. But we do know that these seven technologies will play a big role. .
?ANNOUNCING SHOWRUNNER?
We believe the future is a mix of game & movie.
Simulations powering 1000s of Truman Shows populated by interactive AI characters.
The new Canva Canva announced “a whole new Canva” to improve workplace collaborative creation and a revamped platform to simplify its tools for anyone to use.
At Canva Create, several AI features were announced that enhance the design and content creation process:
Magic Design: Upload an image and select a style to get a curated selection of personalized templates.
Magic Write: An AI-powered copywriting assistant that can generate written content from a text prompt, useful for presentations and website copy.
Magic Eraser: This feature can remove unwanted objects or backgrounds from images.
Magic Edit: Users can swap an object with something else entirely using generative AI.
Beat Sync: Automatically matches video footage to a soundtrack of your choice.
Translate: Automatically translates text in designs to over 100 different languages.
Things might get more interesting in business settings as AI companies start deploying so-called “AI agents,” which can take action by operating other software on a computer or via the internet.
Anthropic, a competitor to OpenAI, announced a major new product today that attempts to prove the thesis that tool use is needed for AI’s next leap in usefulness.
AI’s New Conversation Skills Eyed for Education — from insidehighered.com by Lauren Coffey The latest ChatGPT’s more human-like verbal communication has professors pondering personalized learning, on-demand tutoring and more classroom applications.
ChatGPT’s newest version, GPT-4o ( the “o” standing for “omni,” meaning “all”), has a more realistic voice and quicker verbal response time, both aiming to sound more human. The version, which should be available to free ChatGPT users in coming weeks—a change also hailed by educators—allows people to interrupt it while it speaks, simulates more emotions with its voice and translates languages in real time. It also can understand instructions in text and images and has improved video capabilities.
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Ajjan said she immediately thought the new vocal and video capabilities could allow GPT to serve as a personalized tutor. Personalized learning has been a focus for educators grappling with the looming enrollment cliff and for those pushing for student success.
There’s also the potential for role playing, according to Ajjan. She pointed to mock interviews students could do to prepare for job interviews, or, for example, using GPT to play the role of a buyer to help prepare students in an economics course.
Are Colleges Ready For an Online-Education World Without OPMs?— from edsurge.com by Robert Ubell (Columnist) Online Program Management companies have helped hundreds of colleges build online degree programs, but the sector is showing signs of strain.
For more than 15 years, a group of companies known as Online Program Management providers, or OPMs, have been helping colleges build online degree programs. And most of them have relied on an unusual arrangement — where the companies put up the financial backing to help colleges launch programs in exchange for a large portion of tuition revenue.
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As a longtime administrator of online programs at colleges, I have mixed feelings about the idea of shutting down the model. And the question boils down to this: Are colleges ready for a world without OPMs?
This conversation went in a bunch of unexpected directions. And that’s what’s so fun about it. After all, podcasting is all about bringing audio back and turning learning into leisure. And the question Guy and his partner Mindy Thomas asked a while back was: Why not bring kids in on the fun? Guy shared how his studio, Tinkercast, is leveraging the medium to inspire and educate the next generation of problem solvers.
We discussed the power of audio to capture curiosities and foster imagination, how Tinkercast is doing that in and out of the classroom, and how it can help re-engage students in building needed skills at a critical time. Enjoy!
NEW: Is this America’s next big middle-class job?
28,000 more “technicians” will soon be needed to run giant machines that make tiny semiconductor chips used in phones, cars, missiles, etc.
Education Companies in the Education industry, which includes schools and universities, cut the second-most jobs last monthwith 8,092 for a total of 17,892. That is a 635% increase from the 2,435 cuts announced during the first four months of 2023.
“April is typically the time school districts are hiring and setting budgets for the next fiscal year. Certainly, there are budgetary constraints, as labor costs rise, but school systems also have a retention and recruitment issue,” said Challenger.
The lifetime rate of return for a college education differs significantly by major, but it also varies by a student’s gender and race or ethnicity, according to new peer-reviewed research published in the American Educational Research Journal.
A bachelor’s degree in general provides a roughly 9% rate of return for men, and nearly 10% for women, researchers concluded. The majors with the best returns were computer science and engineering.
Black, Hispanic and Asian college graduates had slightly higher rates of return than their White counterparts, the study found.
