The conclusion I take from all this (which I carefully assembled so I could draw the conclusion I want), is that there is a desire to have a core place on the net, that is not subject to the whims of billionaires, institutions or markets, where you can engage in a range of dialogue, from personal to professional, and that you enjoy revisiting. Ladies and gentleman, I give you, the blog.
From DSC: I hope you’re right Martin!!! I still really appreciate blogs, as readers of this Learning Ecosystems blog might have guessed.
? I’m in love with this instructional routine: Slow Reveal Graphs! Start with a graph stripped of context and gradually reveal its labels, numbers, and title as students talk about what they see. Genius!
Have you made video journals with your students? Earlier this year on the blog, I shared some of the reasons why this medium is worth considering. Today on the blog, we’ll look at six apps and websites to make video journals alongside a few more reasons why video journals are worth considering.
There are several reasons why a teacher might introduce video journals to their students. First, video journals can be a powerful tool for self-reflection and personal growth. By creating and reflecting on videos of themselves, students can better understand their own thoughts, feelings, and behaviors and identify areas for improvement.
Video journals can also provide a creative outlet for students to express themselves. Students may enjoy experimenting with different video-editing techniques and sharing their work with their peers. This experience using video tools can transfer to additional learning experiences, especially because video journals can help students practice their communication skills in speaking and visual storytelling.
However, in making some adjustments for an online experience, I soon realized that I was able, actually, to enhance aspects of the Read-a-thon and thus the course as well. For the first time, I could choose to invite the wider Milton community to the event, encouraging people to join from many different points across the country and potentially around the globe!
I like certain kinds of management technologies that help me with record keeping and organization. But I don’t love them. I love technologies of communication because, I think, they’re at the heart of teaching and learning — creating opportunities for human beings to think together, to study something together.
Take Your Words From Lecture to Page — from chronicle.com by Rachel Toor What compelling lecturers do, and how their techniques can translate to good writing.
Excerpts:
Thing is, many of the moves that the best lecturers make on the stage can translate to the page and help you draw in readers. That is especially important in writing textbooks and other work for general readers. If you can bring the parts of yourself that work in the classroom to the prose, you will delight readers as much as you do your students.
Narrative can be key. Data and research aren’t enough in either the classroom or on the page. People like to be told stories. If you want to be persuasive in both realms, use narrative to make arguments. Don’t forget that much scholarly work is really a quest. What journey can you take a reader on?
… It’s a performance on the page, too. A great lecture is a performance. So is great writing.
… Raise real questions the reader will want answers to.
Closing the digital divide in Black America— from mckinsey.com Five steps could help to bring broadband and digital equity to every Black household in the United States—urban and rural—while bolstering efforts to create a more inclusive economy.
Excerpt:
But broadband access is only part of a much bigger picture. Ensuring all Americans can fully participate in civic life and the digital economy requires affordable subscriptions, internet-enabled devices, applications, digital skills, and high-quality technical support. For example, while smartphone and tablet penetration are approximately equal among White, Black, and Hispanic and Latino adults in the United States, only 69 percent of Black Americans and 67 percent of Hispanic Americans have desktop or laptop computers, compared with 80 percent of White Americans (Exhibit 1).5 A 2020 OECD survey found that roughly half of Black workers had the advanced or proficient digital skills needed to thrive in our increasingly tech-driven economy, compared with 77 percent of White workers.6
The idea that the space in which you do something, affects the thing you do is the basic premise behind active learning classrooms (ALCs).
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The biggest message I get from this study is that in order to have success with active learning classrooms, you can’t just build them — they have to be introduced as part of an ecosystem that touches almost all parts of the daily function of a university: faculty teaching, faculty development and support, facilities, and the Registrar’s Office to name a few. Without that ecosystem before you build an ALC, it seems hard to have success with students after it’s built. You’re more likely to have an expensive showcase that looks good but ultimately does not fulfill its main purpose: Promoting and amplifying active learning, and moving the culture of a campus toward active engagement in the classroom.
From DSC: Thank you Robert for your article/posting here! And thank you for being one of the few faculty members who:
Regularly share information out on LinkedIn, Twitter, and your blog (something that is all too rare for faculty members throughout higher education)
Took a sabbatical to go work at a company that designs and develops numerous options for implementing active learning setups throughout the worlds of higher education, K12 education, and the corporate world as well. You are taking your skills to help contribute to the corporate world, while learning things out in the corporate world, and then taking these learnings back into the world of higher education.
This presupposes something controversial: That the institution will take a stand on the issue that there is a preferred way to teach, namely active learning, and that the institution will be moving toward making active learning the default pedagogy at the institution. Putting this stake in the ground, and then investing not only in facilities but in professional development and faculty incentives to make it happen, again calls for vigorous, sustained leadership — at the top, and especially by the teaching/learning center director.
Five Ways to Strengthen the Employee-Employer Relationship in 2023— from sloanreview.mit.edu by Ally MacDonald; with thanks to Roberto Ferraro for this resource Organizational experts offer insights on how to make meaningful changes to engage employees in the coming year.
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
Before 2020, the structure of jobs evolved sluggishly and unimaginatively, despite evidence that traditional ways of working often harmed employee well-being. The past two years have provided leaders with an opportunity to rethink how their employees work. Those seizing this chance are applying an R&D mindsetto how jobs are designed, with the goal of structuring work in ways that allow their employees to thrive while on the job and in their nonwork lives as well. It is these forward-thinking leaders who will make 2023 the most innovative year ever when it comes to how people work.
From DSC: I like the idea of an R&D mindset. Very nice.
From DSC:
Check out the items below. As with most technologies, there are likely going to be plusses & minuses regarding the use of AI in digital video, communications, arts, and music.
DC: What?!? Wow. I should have seen this coming. I can see positives & negatives here. Virtual meetings could become a bit more creative/fun. But apps could be a bit scarier in some instances, such as with #telelegal.
A growth mindset can help us view feedback as a good thing, which ultimately makes performance reviews more effective. After all, we want to learn, grow, and improve our skills. People with a fixed mindset view criticism as an attack on their self-worth. Growth mindset, by contrast, leaves room for the possibility that we all have blind spots — and that your manager may have valuable insights on how you can hone your skills. Feedback, in other words, isn’t personal. A manager may critique our performance, but a growth mindset helps keep us from tying our performance to our identity.
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The beauty of growth mindset is that it’s self-reinforcing. As you gain more confidence in your own ability to learn and grow, each feedback conversation becomes easier than the last. You become more capable of discussing high-stakes issues with honesty and transparency because neither side feels threatened.
From DSC: I was watching a sermon the other day, and I’m always amazed when the pastor doesn’t need to read their notes (or hardly ever refers to them). And they can still do this in a much longer sermon too. Not me man.
It got me wondering about the idea of having a teleprompter on our future Augmented Reality (AR) glasses and/or on our Virtual Reality (VR) headsets. Or perhaps such functionality will be provided on our mobile devices as well (i.e., our smartphones, tablets, laptops, other) via cloud-based applications.
One could see one’s presentation, sermon, main points for the meeting, what charges are being brought against the defendant, etc. and the system would know to scroll down as you said the words (via Natural Language Processing (NLP)). If you went off script, the system would stop scrolling and you might need to scroll down manually or just begin where you left off.
For that matter, I suppose a faculty member could turn on and off a feed for an AI-based stream of content on where a topic is in the textbook. Or a CEO or University President could get prompted to refer to a particular section of the Strategic Plan. Hmmm…I don’t know…it might be too much cognitive load/overload…I’d have to try it out.
And/or perhaps this is a feature in our future videoconferencing applications.
But I just wanted to throw these ideas out there in case someone wanted to run with one or more of them.
Along these lines, see:
Tell me you’re not going to want a pair of #AR glasses ?
How to Communicate with Brevity — from qaspire.com by Tanmay Vora; with thanks to Roberto Ferraro for this resource We live in a world of information overload. In such a world, communicating with brevity is a gift to others.
To which Dan Laurence (also from Australia) replied:
It took some finding, but you’ll find it was one G. H. Reavis 1937 in a children’s picture book entitled ‘The Animal School’. Reavis was a school principal in the south of the US. Layers of contextual conotations here.
And there were a couple of other people who replied as well. And here I am in Michigan (USA) learning about the origins of this image/graphic. I just like the web-based collaboration going on here. There are opportunities to network and to learn from each other via social media.
For now, I still like using Twitter and I still benefit from using it — and I hope that continues.
From DSC: I received an email the other day re: aTytoCare Exam Kit.It said (with some emphasis added by me):
With a TytoCare Exam Kit connected to Spectrum Health’s 24/7 Virtual Urgent Care, you and your family can have peace of mind and a quick, accurate diagnosis and treatment plan whenever you need it without having to leave your home.
Your TytoCare Exam Kit will allow your provider to listen to your lungs, look inside your ears or throat, check your temperature, and more during a virtual visit.
Why TytoCare?
Convenience – With a TytoCare Exam Kit and our 24/7/365 On-Demand Virtual Urgent Care there is no drive, no waiting room, no waiting for an appointment.
Peace of Mind – Stop debating about whether symptoms are serious enough to do something about them.
Savings – Without the cost of gas or taking off work, you get the reliable exams and diagnosis you need. With a Virtual Urgent Care visit you’ll never pay more than $50. That’s cheaper than an in-person urgent care visit, but the same level of care.
From DSC:
It made me reflect on what #telehealth has morphed into these days. Then it made me wonder (again), what #telelegal might become in the next few years…? Hmmm. I hope the legal field can learn from the healthcare industry. It could likely bring more access to justice (#A2J), increased productivity (for several of the parties involved), as well as convenience, peace of mind, and cost savings.
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.
