In the fifth free webinar on AI for Education, I am joined by Dean Pearman, Head of Education at Beaconhills College and Tom Oliphant, Head of Technology and Enterprise at St John’s Grammar School. We explore questions about creativity, design and the new skills that are emerging. Join us to invest in your AI Literacy. Expand your toolset, broaden your understanding, and challenge your thinking.
You are watching the fourth free webinar, a dialogue about AI for education with Sophie Fenton, Steve Brophy and hosted by Tom Barrett Building Blocks – key AI concepts to learn. Practical frameworks for navigating the challenges of AI for education. Be part of a dialogue on provocations about AI and human centred education, truth and identity.
Using ChatGPT in Math Lesson Planning — from edutopia.org by Kristen Moore Artificial intelligence tools are useful beyond language arts classes. Math teachers can use them to save time and create interesting lessons.
Democratic Inputs to AI — from openai.com Our nonprofit organization, OpenAI, Inc., is launching a program to award ten $100,000 grants to fund experiments in setting up a democratic process for deciding what rules AI systems should follow, within the bounds defined by the law.
AI Canon — from a16z.com (Andreessen Horowitz) by Derrick Harris, Matt Bornstein, and Guido Appenzeller; via The Neuron newsletter
Excerpts:
Research in artificial intelligence is increasing at an exponential rate. It’s difficult for AI experts to keep up with everything new being published, and even harder for beginners to know where to start. So, in this post, we’re sharing a curated list of resources we’ve relied on to get smarter about modern AI. We call it the “AI Canon” because these papers, blog posts, courses, and guides have had an outsized impact on the field over the past several years.
NVIDIA ACE for Games is a new foundry for intelligent in-game characters powered by generative AI. Developers of middleware, tools, and games can use NVIDIA ACE for Games to build and deploy customized speech, conversation, and animation AI models in their software and games.
From DSC: I can’t wait to see this type of thing integrated into educational games/simulations/training.
Last night, Jensen Huang of NVIDIA gave his very first live keynote in 4-years.
The most show-stopping moment from the event was when he showed off the real-time AI in video games. A human speaks, the NPC responds, in real time and the dialogue was generated with AI on the fly. pic.twitter.com/TDoUM1zSiy
Bill Gates says AI is poised to destroy search engines and Amazon — from futurism.com by Victor Tangermann Who will win the AI [competition]? (DSC: I substituted the word competition here, as that’s what it is. It’s not a war, it’s a part of America’s way of doing business.)
“Whoever wins the personal agent, that’s the big thing, because you will never go to a search site again, you will never go to a productivity site, you’ll never go to Amazon again,” Gates said during a Goldman Sachs event on AI in San Francisco this week, as quoted by CNBC.
These AI assistants could “read the stuff you don’t have time to read,” he said, allowing users to get to information without having to use a search engine like Google.
The online learning platform edX introduced two new tools on Friday based on OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology: an edX plugin for ChatGPT and a learning assistant embedded in the edX platform, called Xpert.
According to the company, its plugin will enable ChatGPT Plus subscribers to discover educational programs and explore learning content such as videos and quizzes across edX’s library of 4,200 courses.
Bing is now the default search for ChatGPT— from theverge.com by Tom Warren; via superhuman.beehiiv.com The close partnership between Microsoft and OpenAI leads to plug-in interoperability and search defaults.
Excerpt:
OpenAI will start using Bing as the default search experience for ChatGPT. The new search functionality will be rolling out to ChatGPT Plus users today and will be enabled for all free ChatGPT users soon through a plug-in in ChatGPT.
Students with mobility challenges may find it easier to use generative AI tools — such as ChatGPT or Elicit — to help them conduct research if that means they can avoid a trip to the library.
Students who have trouble navigating conversations — such as those along the autism spectrum — could use these tools for “social scripting.” In that scenario, they might ask ChatGPT to give them three ways to start a conversation with classmates about a group project.
Students who have trouble organizing their thoughts might benefit from asking a generative AI tool to suggest an opening paragraph for an essay they’re working on — not to plagiarize, but to help them get over “the terror of the blank page,” says Karen Costa, a faculty-development facilitator who, among other things, focuses on teaching, learning, and living with ADHD. “AI can help build momentum.”
ChatGPT is good at productive repetition. That is a practice most teachers use anyway to reinforce learning. But AI can take that to the next level by allowing students who have trouble processing information to repeatedly generate examples, definitions, questions, and scenarios of concepts they are learning.
It’s not all on you to figure this out and have all the answers. Partner with your students and explore this together.
The creator of advanced chatbot ChatGPT has called on US lawmakers to regulate artificial intelligence (AI). Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, testified before a US Senate committee on Tuesday about the possibilities – and pitfalls – of the new technology. In a matter of months, several AI models have entered the market. Mr Altman said a new agency should be formed to license AI companies.
Artificial intelligence was a focus on Capitol Hill Tuesday. Many believe AI could revolutionize, and perhaps upend, considerable aspects of our lives. At a Senate hearing, some said AI could be as momentous as the industrial revolution and others warned it’s akin to developing the atomic bomb. William Brangham discussed that with Gary Marcus, who was one of those who testified before the Senate.
We’re rolling out web browsing and Plugins to all ChatGPT Plus users over the next week! Moving from alpha to beta, they allow ChatGPT to access the internet and to use 70+ third-party plugins. https://t.co/t4syFUj0fLpic.twitter.com/Mw9FMpKq91
Are you ready for the Age of Intelligence? — from linusekenstam.substack.com Linus Ekenstam Let me walk you through my current thoughts on where we are, and where we are going.
From DSC: I post this one to relay the exponential pace of change that Linus also thinks we’ve entered, and to present a knowledgeable person’s perspectives on the future.
Catastrophe / Eucatastrophe — from oneusefulthing.org by Ethan Mollick We have more agency over the future of AI than we think.
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
Every organizational leader and manager has agency over what they decide to do with AI, just as every teacher and school administrator has agency over how AI will be used in their classrooms. So we need to be having very pragmatic discussions about AI, and we need to have them right now: What do we want our world to look like?
Also relevant/see:
That wasn’t Google I/O — it was Google AI — from technologyreview.com by Mat Honan If you thought generative AI was a big deal last year, wait until you see what it looks like in products already used by billions.
Google is in trouble.
I got early ‘Alpha’ access to GPT-4 with browsing and ran some tests.
How might we develop and deploy beneficial, safe artificial general intelligence for humanity? Reid and Aria are joined by Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, and Greg Brockman, OpenAI co-founder and president. Sam and Greg trace their journey—from articulating their mission to early company projects and decisions to scaling and sharing GPT-4 with the world. They also explore the transformative impact artificial intelligence can have on other industries, like energy, medicine, education, and law. Plus, GPT-4 offers a poetic perspective on a piece of code. .
Let’s look at some ideas of how law schools could use AI tools like Khanmigo or ChatGPT to support lectures, assignments, and discussions, or use plagiarism detection software to maintain academic integrity.
In particular, we’re betting on four trends for AI and L&D.
Rapid content production
Personalized content
Detailed, continuous feedback
Learner-driven exploration
In a world where only 7 percent of the global population has a college degree, and as many as three quarters of workers don’t feel equipped to learn the digital skills their employers will need in the future, this is the conversation people need to have.
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Taken together, these trends will change the cost structure of education and give learning practitioners new superpowers. Learners of all backgrounds will be able to access quality content on any topic and receive the ongoing support they need to master new skills. Even small L&D teams will be able to create programs that have both deep and broad impact across their organizations.
Generative AI is set to play a pivotal role in the transformation of educational technologies and assisted learning. Its ability to personalize learning experiences, power intelligent tutoring systems, generate engaging content, facilitate collaboration, and assist in assessment and grading will significantly benefit both students and educators.
With today’s advancements in generative AI, that vision of personalized learning may not be far off from reality. We spoke with Dr. Kim Round, associate dean of the Western Governors University School of Education, about the potential of technologies like ChatGPT for learning, the need for AI literacy skills, why learning experience designers have a leg up on AI prompt engineering, and more. And get ready for more Star Trek references, because the parallels between AI and Sci Fi are futile to resist.
NVIDIA today introduced a wave of cutting-edge AI research that will enable developers and artists to bring their ideas to life — whether still or moving, in 2D or 3D, hyperrealistic or fantastical.
Around 20 NVIDIA Research papers advancing generative AI and neural graphics — including collaborations with over a dozen universities in the U.S., Europe and Israel — are headed to SIGGRAPH 2023, the premier computer graphics conference, taking place Aug. 6-10 in Los Angeles.
The papers include generative AI models that turn text into personalized images; inverse rendering tools that transform still images into 3D objects; neural physics models that use AI to simulate complex 3D elements with stunning realism; and neural rendering models that unlock new capabilities for generating real-time, AI-powered visual details.
Also relevant to the item from Nvidia (above), see:
From DSC:
As Rob Toews points out in his recent article out at Forbes.com, we had better hope that the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) builds out the capacity to make chips in various countries. Why? Because:
The following statement is utterly ludicrous. It is also true. The world’s most important advanced technology is nearly all produced in a single facility.
What’s more, that facility is located in one of the most geopolitically fraught areas on earth—an area in which many analysts believe that war is inevitable within the decade.
The future of artificial intelligence hangs in the balance.
The Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) makes***all of the world’s advanced AI chips.***Most importantly, this means Nvidia’s GPUs; it also includes the AI chips from Google, AMD, Amazon, Microsoft, Cerebras, SambaNova, Untether and every other credible competitor.
Across all socioeconomic and racial groups, Americans want an education system that goes beyond college preparation and delivers practical skills for every learner, based on their own needs, goals and vision for the future.
We believe that this can be achieved by making the future of learning more personalized, focused on the needs of individual learners, with success measured by progress and proficiency instead of point-in-time test scores.
Change is hard, but we expect our students to take risks and fail every day. We should ask no less of ourselves.
Microsoft has launched a GPT-4 enhanced Edge browser.
By integrating OpenAI’s GPT-4 technology with Microsoft Edge, you can now use ChatGPT as a copilot in your Bing browser. This delivers superior search results, generates content, and can even transform your copywriting skills (read on to find out how).
Benefits mentioned include: Better Search, Complete Answers, and Creative Spark.
The new interactive chat feature means you can get the complete answer you are looking for by refining your search by asking for more details, clarity, and ideas.
From DSC: I have to say that since the late 90’s, I haven’t been a big fan of web browsers from Microsoft. (I don’t like how Microsoft unfairly buried Netscape Navigator and the folks who had out-innovated them during that time.) As such, I don’t use Edge so I can’t fully comment on the above article.
But I do have to say that this is the type of thing that may make me reevaluate my stance regarding Microsoft’s browsers. Integrating GPT-4 into their search/chat functionalities seems like it would be a very solid, strategic move — at least as of late April 2023.
Speaking of new items coming from Microsoft, also see:
[On 4/27/23], Microsoft Designer, Microsoft’s AI-powered design tool, launched in public preview with an expanded set of features.
Announced in October, Designer is a Canva-like web app that can generate designs for presentations, posters, digital postcards, invitations, graphics and more to share on social media and other channels. It leverages user-created content and DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s text-to-image AI, to ideate designs, with drop-downs and text boxes for further customization and personalization.
…
Designer will remain free during the preview period, Microsoft says — it’s available via the Designer website and in Microsoft’s Edge browser through the sidebar. Once the Designer app is generally available, it’ll be included in Microsoft 365 Personal and Family subscriptions and have “some” functionality free to use for non-subscribers, though Microsoft didn’t elaborate.
A few current categories of AI in Edtech particularly jump out:
Teacher Productivity and Joy: Tools to make educators’ lives easier (and more fun?) by removing some of the more rote tasks of teaching, like lesson planning (we counted at least 8 different tools for lesson planning), resource curation and data collection.
Personalization and Learning Delivery: Tools to tailor instruction to the particular interests, learning preferences and preferred media consumption of students. This includes tools that convert text to video, video to text, text to comic books, Youtube to notes, and many more.
Study and Course Creation Tools: Tools for learners to automatically make quizzes, flashcards, notes or summaries of material, or even to automatically create full courses from a search term.
AI Tutors, Chatbots and Teachers: There will be no shortage of conversational AI “copilots” (which may take many guises) to support students in almost any learning context. Many Edtech companies launched their own during the conference. Possible differentiators here could be personality, safety, privacy, access to a proprietary or specific data set, or bots built on proprietary LLMs.
Simplifying Complex Processes: One of the most inspiring conversations of the conference for me was with Tiffany Green, founder of Uprooted Academy, about how AI can and should be used to remove bureaucratic barriers to college for underrepresented students (for example, used to autofill FAFSA forms, College Applications, to search for schools and access materials, etc). This is not the only complex bureaucratic process in education.
Educational LLMs: The race is on to create usable large language models for education that are safe, private, appropriate and classroom-ready. Merlyn Mind is working on this, and companies that make LLMs are sprouting up in other sectors…
This week I spent a few days at the ASU/GSV conference and ran into 7,000 educators, entrepreneurs, and corporate training people who had gone CRAZY for AI.
No, I’m not kidding. This community, which makes up people like training managers, community college leaders, educators, and policymakers is absolutely freaked out about ChatGPT, Large Language Models, and all sorts of issues with AI. Now don’t get me wrong: I’m a huge fan of this. But the frenzy is unprecedented: this is bigger than the excitement at the launch of the i-Phone.
Second, the L&D market is about to get disrupted like never before. I had two interactive sessions with about 200 L&D leaders and I essentially heard the same thing over and over. What is going to happen to our jobs when these Generative AI tools start automatically building content, assessments, teaching guides, rubrics, videos, and simulations in seconds?
The answer is pretty clear: you’re going to get disrupted. I’m not saying that L&D teams need to worry about their careers, but it’s very clear to me they’re going to have to swim upstream in a big hurry. As with all new technologies, it’s time for learning leaders to get to know these tools, understand how they work, and start to experiment with them as fast as you can.
Speaking of the ASU+GSV Summit, see this posting from Michael Moe:
Last week, the 14th annual ASU+GSV Summit hosted over 7,000 leaders from 70+ companies well as over 900 of the world’s most innovative EdTech companies. Below are some of our favorite speeches from this year’s Summit…
High-quality tutoring is one of the most effective educational interventions we have – but we need both humans and technology for it to work. In a standing-room-only session, GSE Professor Susanna Loeb, a faculty lead at the Stanford Accelerator for Learning, spoke alongside school district superintendents on the value of high-impact tutoring. The most important factors in effective tutoring, she said, are (1) the tutor has data on specific areas where the student needs support, (2) the tutor has high-quality materials and training, and (3) there is a positive, trusting relationship between the tutor and student. New technologies, including AI, can make the first and second elements much easier – but they will never be able to replace human adults in the relational piece, which is crucial to student engagement and motivation.
ChatGPT, Bing Chat, Google’s Bard—AI is infiltrating the lives of billions.
The 1% who understand it will run the world.
Here’s a list of key terms to jumpstart your learning:
Being “good at prompting” is a temporary state of affairs.The current AI systems are already very good at figuring out your intent, and they are getting better. Prompting is not going to be that important for that much longer. In fact, it already isn’t in GPT-4 and Bing. If you want to do something with AI, just ask it to help you do the thing. “I want to write a novel, what do you need to know to help me?” will get you surprisingly far.
…
The best way to use AI systems is not to craft the perfect prompt, but rather to use it interactively. Try asking for something. Then ask the AI to modify or adjust its output. Work with the AI, rather than trying to issue a single command that does everything you want. The more you experiment, the better off you are. Just use the AI a lot, and it will make a big difference – a lesson my class learned as they worked with the AI to create essays.
From DSC: Agreed –> “Being “good at prompting” is a temporary state of affairs.” The User Interfaces that are/will be appearing will help greatly in this regard.
From DSC: Bizarre…at least for me in late April of 2023:
FaceTiming live with AI… This app came across the @ElunaAI Discord and I was very impressed with its responsiveness, natural expression and language, etc…
Feels like the beginning of another massive wave in consumer AI products.
The rise of AI-generated music has ignited legal and ethical debates, with record labels invoking copyright law to remove AI-generated songs from platforms like YouTube.
Tech companies like Google face a conundrum: should they take down AI-generated content, and if so, on what grounds?
Some artists, like Grimes, are embracing the change, proposing new revenue-sharing models and utilizing blockchain-based smart contracts for royalties.
The future of AI-generated music presents both challenges and opportunities, with the potential to create new platforms and genres, democratize the industry, and redefine artist compensation.
The Need for AI PD — from techlearning.com by Erik Ofgang Educators need training on how to effectively incorporate artificial intelligence into their teaching practice, says Lance Key, an award-winning educator.
“School never was fun for me,” he says, hoping that as an educator he could change that with his students. “I wanted to make learning fun.” This ‘learning should be fun’ philosophy is at the heart of the approach he advises educators take when it comes to AI.
At its 11th annual conference in 2023, educational company Coursera announced it is adding ChatGPT-powered interactive ed tech tools to its learning platform, including a generative AI coach for students and an AI course-building tool for teachers. It will also add machine learning-powered translation, expanded VR immersive learning experiences, and more.
Coursera Coach will give learners a ChatGPT virtual coach to answer questions, give feedback, summarize video lectures and other materials, give career advice, and prepare them for job interviews. This feature will be available in the coming months.
From DSC: Yes…it will be very interesting to see how tools and platforms interact from this time forth. The term “integration” will take a massive step forward, at least in my mind.
A New Era for Education — from linkedin.com by Amit Sevak, CEO of ETS and Timothy Knowles, President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
It’s not every day you get to announce a revolution in your sector. But today, we’re doing exactly that. Together, we are setting out to overturn 117 years of educational tradition. … The fundamental assumption [of the Carnegie Unit] is that time spent in a classroom equals learning. This formula has the virtue of simplicity. Unfortunately, a century of research tells us that it’s woefully inadequate.
From DSC: It’s more than interesting to think that the Carnegie Unit has outlived its usefulness and is breaking apart. In fact, the thought is very profound.
If that turns out to be the case, the ramifications will be enormous and we will have the opportunity to radically reinvent/rethink/redesign what our lifelong learning ecosystems will look like and provide.
So I appreciate what Amit and Timothy are saying here and I appreciate their relaying what the new paradigm might look like. It goes with the idea of using design thinking to rethink how we build/reinvent our learning ecosystems. They assert:
It’s time to change the paradigm. That’s why ETS and the Carnegie Foundation have come together to design a new future of assessment.
Whereas the Carnegie Unit measures seat time, the new paradigm willmeasureskills—with a focus on the ones we know are most important for success in career and in life.
Whereas the Carnegie Unit never leaves the classroom, the new paradigm willcapture learning wherever it takes place—whether that is in after-school activities, during a work-experience placement, in an internship, on an apprenticeship, and so on.
Whereas the Carnegie Unit offers only one data point—pass or fail—the new paradigm willgenerate insights throughout the learning process, the better to guide students, families, educators, and policymakers.
I could see this type of information being funneled into peoples’ cloud-based learner profiles — which we as individuals will own and determine who else can access them. I diagrammed this back in January of 2017 using blockchain as the underlying technology. That may or may not turn out to be the case. But the concept will still hold I think — regardless of the underlying technology(ies).
For example, we are seeing a lot more articles regarding things like Comprehensive Learner Records (CLR) or Learning and Employment Records (LER; examplehere), and similar items.
Speaking of reinventing our learning ecosystems, also see:
The NVIDIA research team just dropped a new research paper on creating high-quality short videos from text prompts. This technique uses Video Latent Diffusion Models (Video LDMs), which work efficiently without using too much computing power.
It can create 113 frame-long videos at 1280×2048 resolution, rendered at 24 FPS, resulting in 4.7-second clips. The team first trained the model on images, then added a time dimension to make it work with videos.
This new research is impressive. At the current pace of development, we may soon be able to generate full-length movies from just a handful of text prompts within the next few years.
