The Thomson Reuters Institute’s biennial report found that growth of ALSPs has “dramatically accelerated.” It is up 45% since the last report in 2021, with a compound annual growth rate of 20% for fiscal years 2020 and 2021…https://t.co/cVNH8dKHRs via @ABAJournal#legal
Alternative legal services providers, or ALSPs, have shown accelerated growth and now make up $20.6 billion of the legal market, according to a report published Tuesday.
The Thomson Reuters Institute’s biennial report found that growth of ALSPs has “dramatically accelerated.” It is up 45% since the last report in 2021, with a compound annual growth rate of 20% for fiscal years 2020 and 2021, according to the report, titled Alternative Legal Services Providers 2023: Accelerating growth & expanding service categories.
The American Bar Association’s policymaking body rejected a plan Monday that would end the requirement that ABA-accredited law schools use the Law School Admission Test or another standardized assessment in admissions.
The ABA House of Delegates voted against the change to the organization’s policy that mandates admissions tests — exams detractors say contribute to middling diversity in legal education. Nearly 600 officials comprise the House of Delegates, which took a voice vote on the plan, meaning a precise count was not available.
However, the proposal isn’t dead. It could be revived and approved unilaterally by the Council of the Section of Legal Education and Admissions to the Bar…
Excerpts:
Every year, 20 million Americans find themselves in state civil courts facing life-altering events such as divorce, child custody deliberations, eviction, and missed bills.
But unlike in criminal courts, where defendants have a constitutional right to legal representation, the same guarantee isn’t afforded in state civil courts. Most people in these courts are low- to middle-income and unable to afford help. They must strike out on their own to blindly navigate byzantine legal protocols.
“The civil justice system is broken in our state courts,” says Utah Law Professor Anna Carpenter, whose research examines state civil courts, the judges who preside in them, and access to justice. She is part of a four-person research team that pioneered a new body of scholarship that analyzes state civil courts.
“I challenge anyone, especially lawyers, to go sit in one of these courtrooms and watch the tragic, day-to-day reality,” Carpenter says. “You’ll see why we believe these courts are the emergency rooms of our justice system.”
Perhaps the biggest failure of the current education ecosystem is its inability to envision what the future holds for our students and to make systemic changes now to prepare them for that future. Shackled to a monolithic, change-resistant system, school and district leaders continue to make incremental and piecemeal changes to a broken system expecting to get different outcomes.
In an analogous way, almost all public-school systems are like Blockbusters in the late 1990s — unwilling to assess the impact of technological advances and consider how they might need to revisit their design principles. In the end, if an organization does not move purposefully toward some likely future, then any path forward will do, and it is likely to be the path they are currently on.
From DSC: The following quote…
Using a split-screen strategy, a district would not attempt to make systemic changes district-wide. Rather, it would implement transformative changes in one or two schools while continuing to make incremental improvements in the rest of the district. Once the schools operating with the new system principles achieve the outcomes and succeed, they will become proof points to allow the district to implement systemic change in even more schools over a period of time.
…made me think of a graphic (see below) — and an article out at evoLLLtion.com — I developed a while back re: the need for more Trim Tab Groups. I think we’re talking about the same thing here.
Not a Pyramid, But a Garden
Instead of a pyramid, let’s adopt a new image, a more organic one. School communities are webs of complex relationships, like gardens. Imagine if we all understood a school community like a Three Sisters Garden. In this Indigenous agricultural practice, corn, beans and squash grow together to create a sustainable cycle of growth in which the whole garden can thrive. Corn provides the tall stalks for the beans to climb. The large squash plant leaves provide shade so the soil can retain moisture, and the beans provide the nitrogen to fertilize the soil. The garden does not rely on the exploitation of one crop to allow the rest to grow.
From DSC: Re: the emphasized text immediately above…that sounds like a learning ecosystem to me! 🙂
Streamlined and personalized teaching Some examples of how we’ve seen educators exploring how to teach and learn with tools like ChatGPT:
Drafting and brainstorming for lesson plans and other activities
Help with design of quiz questions or other exercises
Experimenting with custom tutoring tools
Customizing materials for different preferences (simplifying language, adjusting to different reading levels, creating tailored activities for different interests)
Providing grammatical or structural feedback on portions of writing
Use in upskilling activities in areas like writing and coding (debugging code, revising writing, asking for explanations)
Critique AI generated text
While several of the above draw on ChatGPT’s potential to be explored as a tool for personalization, there are risks associated with such personalization as well, including student privacy, biased treatment, and development of unhealthy habits. Before students use tools that offer these services without direct supervision, they and their educators should understand the limitations of the tools outlined below.
Also relevant/see:
Designing Assignments in the ChatGPT Era — from insidehighered.com by Susan D’Agostino Some instructors seek to craft assignments that guide students in surpassing what AI can do. Others see that as a fool’s errand—one that lends too much agency to the software.
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
David Wiley wrote a thoughtful post on the ways in which AI and Large Language Models (LLMs) can “provide instructional designers with first drafts of some of the work they do.” He says “imagine you’re an instructional designer who’s been paired with a faculty member to create a course in microeconomics. These tools might help you quickly create first drafts of” learning outcomes, discussion prompts, rubrics, and formative assessment items. The point is that LLMs can quickly generate rough drafts that are mostly accurate drafts, that humans can then “review, augment, and polish,” potentially shifting the work of instructional designers from authors to editors. The post is well worth your time.
… The question that I’d like to spend some time thinking about is the following: What new knowledge, capacities, and skills do instructional designers need in their role as editors and users of LLMs?
This resonated with me. Instructional Designer positions are starting to require AI and ML chops. I’m introducing my grad students to AI and ChatGPT this semester. I have an assignment based on it.
The practical guide to using AI to do stuff— from oneusefulthing.substack.com by Ethan Mollick; with thanks to Sam DeBrule for this resource. Ethan Mollick is a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania where he studies entrepreneurship & innovation, as well as how we can better learn and teach. A resource for students in my classes (and other interested people).
Excerpts:
My classes now require AI (and if I didn’t require AI use, it wouldn’t matter, everyone is using AI anyway). But how can students use AI well? Here is a basic tutorial and guide I am providing my classes. It covers some of the many ways to use AI to be more productive, creative, and successful, using the technology available in early 2023, as well as some of the risks.
… Come up with ideas Open Source Option: Nothing very good Best free (for now) option: ChatGPT (registration may require a phone number) Best option if ChatGPT is down: OpenAI Playground .
Also relevant/see:
It was nice talking to @lapiaenrose for the @WIRED article on #ChatGPT and #education. I shared how I use LLMs in class and suggested that banning them would not remove the need for redesigning both the learning goals and assessment methods. #AIEthicshttps://t.co/30tqFN1FSS
They see an education and skills gap: Forty-four percent said that school only taught them very basic computing skills, while 37% said that school education (for children under age 16) didn’t prepare them with the technology skills they needed for their planned careers. Forty percent consider learning new digital skills essential to future career options.
It’s clear that Gen Z see technology as pivotal for their future prosperity. It is now up to us—leading technology providers, governments, and the public sector—to work together and set them up for success by improving the quality and access to digital learning. Forty-four percent of Gen Z feel educators and businesses should work together to bridge the digital skills gap, and with the speed at which technology continues to evolve, this will require constant collaboration.
Aongus Hegarty, president of international markets at Dell Technologies
AI raises floor, not ceiling.
Basic writers ?? Good writers
Basic designers ?? Good designers
Basic instructors ?? Good instructors
Experts see fewer benefits
AI ?? speed + ideation but better to be original + unique as expert. That’s ? AI
From DSC: Let’s put together a nationwide campaign that would provide a website — or a series of websites if an agreement can’t be reached amongst the individual states — about learning how to learn. In business, there’s a “direct-to-consumer” approach. Well, we could provide a “direct-to-learner” approach — from cradle to grave. Seeing as how everyone is now required to be a lifelong learner, such a campaign would have enormous benefits to all of the United States. This campaign would be located in airports, subway stations, train stations, on billboards along major highways, in libraries, and in many more locations.
We could focus on things such as:
Quizzing yourself / retrieval practice
Spaced retrieval
Interleaving
Elaboration
Chunking
Cognitive load
Learning by doing (active learning)
Journaling
The growth mindset
Metacognition (thinking about one’s thinking)
Highlighting doesn’t equal learning
There is deeper learning in the struggle
…and more.
NOTE:
The URL I’m using above doesn’t exist, at least not at the time of this posting.
But I’m proposing that it should exist.
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
In spite of our tendency to break things down into tidy time frames, like a new year or academic semester, change constantly turns over the status quo. Especially in the world of technology, where disruptive innovation may evolve rapidly from the fringe to the mainstream.
“At ASU’s Enterprise Technology, we work in spaces where technology is not just revolutionizing higher education, but the world at large,” said Lev Gonick, chief information officer at Arizona State University. “We strive to be proactive, not reactive, to new paradigms changing the ways in which we work, learn and thrive.”
Thus, the top higher education technology trends to watch out for in 2023 include Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), Augmented Reality (AR), Digital Twins, the Metaverse (including digital avatars and NFT art for use in the Metaverse and other Web3-based virtual environments), Internet of Things (IoT), Blockchain, Cloud, Gamification, and Chatbots. These technologies will support the expansion of the Digital Transformation of higher education going forward.
14 Technology Predictions for Higher Education in 2023 — from campustechnology.com by Rhea Kelly How will technologies and practices like artificial intelligence, predictive analytics, digital transformation, and change management impact colleges and universities this year? Here’s what the experts told us.
Excerpt:
In an open call on LinkedIn, we asked higher education and ed tech industry leaders to forecast the most important trends to watch in the coming year. Their responses reflect both the challenges on the horizon — persistent cyber attacks, the disruptive force of emerging technologies, failures in project management — as well as the opportunities that technology brings to better serve students and support the institutional mission. Here are 14 predictions to help steer your technology efforts in 2023.
Here’s the list of sources: https://t.co/fJd4rh8kLy. The larger resource area at https://t.co/bN7CReGIEC has sample ChatGPT essays, strategies for mitigating harm, and questions for teachers to ask as well as a listserv.
— Anna Mills, amills@mastodon.oeru.org, she/her (@EnglishOER) January 11, 2023
Microsoft is reportedly eyeing a $10 billion investment in OpenAI, the startup that created the viral chatbot ChatGPT, and is planning to integrate it into Office products and Bing search.The tech giant has already invested at least $1 billion into OpenAI. Some of these features might be rolling out as early as March, according to The Information.
This is a big deal. If successful, it will bring powerful AI tools to the masses.So what would ChatGPT-powered Microsoft products look like? We asked Microsoft and OpenAI. Neither was willing to answer our questions on how they plan to integrate AI-powered products into Microsoft’s tools, even though work must be well underway to do so. However, we do know enough to make some informed, intelligent guesses. Hint: it’s probably good news if, like me, you find creating PowerPoint presentations and answering emails boring.
I have maintained for several years, including a book ‘AI for Learning’, that AI is the technology of the age and will change everything. This is unfolding as we speak but it is interesting to ask who the winners are likely to be.
People who have heard of GPT-3 / ChatGPT, and are vaguely following the advances in machine learning, large language models, and image generators. Also people who care about making the web a flourishing social and intellectual space.
That dark forest is about to expand. Large Language Models (LLMs) that can instantly generate coherent swaths of human-like text have just joined the party.
It is in this uncertain climate that Hassabis agrees to a rare interview, to issue a stark warning about his growing concerns. “I would advocate not moving fast and breaking things.”
…
“When it comes to very powerful technologies—and obviously AI is going to be one of the most powerful ever—we need to be careful,” he says. “Not everybody is thinking about those things. It’s like experimentalists, many of whom don’t realize they’re holding dangerous material.” Worse still, Hassabis points out, we are the guinea pigs.
Demis Hassabis
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
Hassabis says these efforts are just the beginning. He and his colleagues have been working toward a much grander ambition: creating artificial general intelligence, or AGI, by building machines that can think, learn, and be set to solve humanity’s toughest problems.Today’s AI is narrow, brittle, and often not very intelligent at all. But AGI, Hassabis believes, will be an “epoch-defining” technology—like the harnessing of electricity—that will change the very fabric of human life. If he’s right, it could earn him a place in history that would relegate the namesakes of his meeting rooms to mere footnotes.
But with AI’s promise also comes peril.In recent months, researchers building an AI system to design new drugs revealed that their tool could be easily repurposed to make deadly new chemicals. A separate AI model trained to spew out toxic hate speech went viral, exemplifying the risk to vulnerable communities online. And inside AI labs around the world, policy experts were grappling with near-term questions like what to do when an AI has the potential to be commandeered by rogue states to mount widespread hacking campaigns or infer state-level nuclear secrets.
Headteachers and university lecturers have expressed concerns that ChatGPT, which can provide convincing human-sounding answers to exam questions, could spark a wave of cheating in homework and exam coursework.
Now, the bot’s makers, San Francisco-based OpenAI, are trying to counter the risk by “watermarking” the bot’s output and making plagiarism easier to spot.
Students need now, more than ever, to understand how to navigate a world in which artificial intelligence is increasingly woven into everyday life. It’s a world that they, ultimately, will shape.
We hail from two professional fields that have an outsize interest in this debate. Joanne is a veteran journalist and editor deeply concerned about the potential for plagiarism and misinformation. Rebecca is a public health expert focused on artificial intelligence, who champions equitable adoption of new technologies.
We are also mother and daughter. Our dinner-table conversations have become a microcosm of the argument around ChatGPT, weighing its very real dangers against its equally real promise. Yet we both firmly believe that a blanket ban is a missed opportunity.
ChatGPT: Threat or Menace? — from insidehighered.com by Steven Mintz Are fears about generative AI warranted?
The rapid pace of change is driven by a “perfect storm” of factors, including the falling cost of computing power, the rise of data-driven decision-making, and the increasing availability of new technologies. “The speed of current breakthroughs has no historical precedent,”concluded Andrew Doxsey, co-founder of Libra Incentix, in an interview. “Unlike previous technological revolutions, the Fourth Industrial Revolution is evolving exponentially rather than linearly. Furthermore, it disrupts almost every industry worldwide.”
An updated version of the AI chatbot ChatGPT was recently released to the public.
I got the chatbot to write cover letters for real jobs and asked hiring managers what they thought.
The managers said they would’ve given me a call but that the letters lacked personality.
.
I mentor a young lad with poor literacy skills who is starting a landscaping business. He struggles to communicate with clients in a professional manner.
I created a GPT3-powered Gmail account to which he sends a message. It responds with the text to send to the client. pic.twitter.com/nlFX9Yx6wR
AI already does and will continue to impact education – along with every other sector.
Innovative education leaders have an opportunity to build the foundation for the most personalized learning system we have ever seen.
Action
Education leaders need to consider these possible futures now. There is no doubt that K-12 and higher ed learners will be using these tools immediately. It is not a question of preventing “AI plagiarism” (if such a thing could exist), but a question of how to modify teaching to take advantage of these new tools.
From DSC: They go on to list some solid ideas and experiments to try out — both for students and for teachers. Thanks Nate and Rachelle!
On the education front, federal legislation serves as an umbrella for many state and local policies and programs. Education policy is further fragmented into K–12 and postsecondary silos.
An all-one-system approach to youth policy would support young people along the entire continuum of their journey from school to work. It would help them attain both postsecondary education and quality work experience to support their transitions from education to good jobs. In this modernized approach, preschools, elementary and secondary schools, community colleges, four-year universities, employers, and governments would all follow an integrated playbook, helping to smooth out young people’s path from pre-K–12 to college and work. To transform youth policy, systemic reforms should incorporate the following:
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.
Issues like chronic absenteeism in big urban and rural districts, the impact of classroom shootings on kids, and schools’ struggles to handle teenagers’ mental-health challenges might not be day-to-day concerns for college leaders and those who work with them. But these will matter to higher ed in the not-so-distant future, as those K-to-12 students make their way to college. And they could matter even more if those students don’t ever even make it to college.
Words of wisdom:
Those of us who might be a little higher-ed siloed in our thinking on education would do well to widen our perspective.
From DSC: And it isn’t just about the impacts of COVID-19 either — though those things are very important. We would do well to get out of our siloes and practice some high-level design thinking to implement a cradle-to-grave, lifelong learning ecosystem. The vocational and corporate training worlds are highly relevant here as well.
