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.
Drew Builds Stuff has an office in the basement of his parents’ house. Because of its subterranean location, it doesn’t get much light. To brighten things up, he built a window wall out of three 75? 4K TVs, resulting in a 12-foot diagonal image. Since he can load up any video footage, he can pretend to be anywhere on Earth.
From DSC: Perhaps some ideas here for learning spaces!
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.
A class-action lawsuit filed in a federal court in California this month takes aim at GitHub Copilot, a powerful tool that automatically writes working code when a programmer starts typing. The coder behind the suit argues that GitHub is infringing copyright because it does not provide attribution when Copilot reproduces open-source code covered by a license requiring it.
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Programmers have, of course, always studied, learned from, and copied each other’s code. But not everyone is sure it is fair for AI to do the same, especially if AI can then churn out tons of valuable code itself, without respecting the source material’s license requirements. “As a technologist, I’m a huge fan of AI ,” Butterick says. “I’m looking forward to all the possibilities of these tools. But they have to be fair to everybody.”
Whatever the outcome of the Copilot case, Villa says it could shape the destiny of other areas of generative AI. If the outcome of the Copilot case hinges on how similar AI-generated code is to its training material, there could be implications for systems that reproduce images or music that matches the style of material in their training data.
Also related to AI and art/creativity from Wired.com, see:
Picture Limitless Creativity at Your Fingertips— by Kevin Kelly Artificial intelligence can now make better art than most humans. Soon, these engines of wow will transform how we design just about everything.
Who Will Own the Art of the Future? — by Jessica Rizzo OpenAI has announced that it’s granting Dall-E users the right to commercialize their art. For now.
Why did movements over the last two decades to raise standards, improve educator quality, upgrade curriculum, enable choice, leverage assessment, instill accountability, and increase funding appear to have such a limited impact on college and career readiness?
One potential answer: Nearly all of these reforms left the basic tenets of the industrial-paradigm classroom intact.
The last few years have taken a toll on our teachers. The COVID-19 pandemic, ongoing cultural divisions, and the Uvalde, Texas, massacre all weigh heavily. Morale is at an all-time low. Now is the time to rethink the teaching profession.
Magnifier has a new Door Detection optionon iOS 16, which helps blind and low-vision users locate entryways when they arrive at their destination. The tool can tell you how far away the door is, if the door is open or closed, how to open it (push it, turn the knob, pull the handle, etc.), what any signs say (like room numbers), what any symbols mean (like people icons for restrooms), and more.
From DSC: By the way, this kind of feature would be great to work in tandem with devices such as the Double Robotics Telepresence Robot — i.e., using Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communications to let the robot and automatic doors communicate with each other so that remote students can “get around on campus.”
Along the lines of accessibility-related items, also relevant/see:
Microsoft has announced a sign language view for Teams to help signers and others who use sign language. The information on screen will be prioritised on centre stage, in a consistent location, throughout every meeting.
When sign language view is enabled, the prioritised video streams automatically appear at the right aspect ratio and at the highest available quality. Like pinning and captioning, sign language view is personal to each user and will not impact what others see in the meeting.
Soaring Travel Costs Put Lawyers Back on Zoom –– from kift.com Matthew Parsons Rising airfares and travel costs are prompting legal professionals involved in dispute resolutions to return to video conferencing.
With the cost of international air travel rising sharply, remote hearings are a practical alternative to in-person proceedings. International travel is expensive, and the virtual option means that it is no longer necessary to count travel as a “cost of doing business” when pursuing an international dispute. The widespread use of technology in global dispute resolution proceedings gives attorneys and their clients the option to participate remotely, which is a compelling cost saver for all parties.
Most debt lawsuits get decided without a fight. Michigan leaders want to change the rules. — from mlive.com by Matthew Miller Excerpt:
Most of the 1.9 million debt collection cases filed in Michigan’s district courts over the past decade or so never went to trial. Usually, the defendants don’t show up to court, and debt collectors win by default, according to data compiled by the Michigan Justice for All Commission. In most cases, the courts end up garnishing defendants’ wages, income tax returns or other assets, sometimes on the basis of complaints that include little more than the name of the creditor, an account number and the balance due.
And both debt lawsuits and garnishment are more common for people living in primarily Black neighborhoods, regardless of their income.
Members of the Commission say Michigan’s rules around debt collection lawsuits don’t do enough to protect regular people, who sometimes don’t find out they’ve been sued until they see money coming out of their paychecks.
An early participant in the Law Society of BC’s Innovation Sandbox, the Clinic offers the in-person and virtual help of 25 articling students located in 15 different BC communities —from Tofino to Cranbrook— with the support of 15 supervising lawyers, four staff and dozens of local mentors. Together, they provide fixed-fee services in a wide range of areas covering everyday legal problems.
Associate Professor Constantinos Coursaris, Associate Professor Camille Grange, Pierre-Majorique Léger, Dr. Annemarie Lesage, and Professor Sylvain Sénécal, UX Design and Evaluation, HEC Montréal
Is GoodCourse the future of corporate learning? — from businesscloud.co.uk by Jonathan Symcox Micro-learning platform’s short-form content and TikTok-style explainer videos have the potential to transform development in the workplace
“The reason TikTok is so popular is because it’s short-form and engaging; the opposite to the usual two-hour training course.
“Spacing out micro-learning chunks across the course of a year gives you a much better chance of retaining it and actually acting on it. That’s why GoodCourse is built to engage a Gen Z workforce.”
The key to making this happen, I think, is to reorganize local schooling to take advantage of online (and increasingly, AI-generated) learning services, allowing in-person educators to adopt this coaching function.
As learning becomes more personalized, learning opportunities expanded and unbounded, and learning science research more robust, an updated and revised advisory role is more important than ever.
Redefining the coaching/mentor/advisor role as the educational landscape shifts is critical to ensure success for every learner.
Yale Law School — long ranked No. 1 by U.S. News & World Report — is quitting the magazine’s rankings, it announced Wednesday. Hours after that announcement, which was first reported by The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Law School said it would do the same.
“U.S. News stands in the way of progress for legal education and the profession,” said Heather Gerken, Yale Law School’s dean. “It’s made it harder for law schools to admit and support low-income students, and it’s undermining efforts to launch a generation to serve. Now is the time to take a step.”
IAALS, the Institute for the Advancement of the American Legal System at the University of Denver, announced today that it released its new Allied Legal Professionals landscape report, along with an accompanying online Knowledge Center. With generous support from the Sturm Family Foundation, this project seeks to help standardize a new tier of legal professionals nationally, with the goal of increasing the options for accessible and affordable legal help for the public.
“Today, the majority of Americans are faced with a very serious access to justice problem—not only low-income populations, as many people believe. And the pandemic has only made matters worse in recent years,” says Jim Sandman, chair of IAALS’ board of advisors and President Emeritus of the Legal Services Corporation. “For example, studies show that around 40–60% of the middle class have legal needs that remain unmet. Simply put: people want legal help, and they are not getting the help they need.”
The premise of this post is that individual capabilities and excellence (either legal or technical) standing alone are not enough to ensure long-term, sustainable success. No superstar technologist or lawyer is equipped to do it all, as there are too many specialties and functional roles which need to be filled. Rather, a better approach is to construct team-based, cross-functional units that offer greater operational efficiency while building in layers of redundancy that reduce the potential for surprises, errors, or disruption. Cf Post 323 (Patrick McKenna’s “rules of engagement” for high-performing legal teams).
While the future of legal innovation remains unclear, it is apparent that law schools must evolve to meet students’ technological needs. At the very least, lawyers and legal professionals must have more collaborative conversations on the broader educational need for legal technology.
Legal operations professionals have a unique opportunity to emphasize the importance of designing and implementing a business solution ecosystem to guide greater efficiency and decision-making. If data and trends tell us anything, law firms and corporate law departments must adapt to achieve better business outcomes, while law schools have to change the way they teach in our modern digital economy.
This report focuses on the workforce, cultural, and technological shifts for ten macro trends emerging in higher education in 2023. Across these three areas of shift, we report the major impacts and steps that institutions are taking in response to each trend. Some trends overlap with the 2022 Higher Education Trend Watch report. However, while some topics and issues remain consistent, significant shifts have occurred across many of the trends for 2023.
But where in the conversation are the people implementing those tools: the teachers? And how much say do they—or should they—have in edtech decisions?
For both questions, as it turns out, it depends on who you ask.
In a survey released earlier this year, the edtech company Clever found that 85 percent of administrators say teachers are involved in choosing tools. When the company asked teachers, more than 60 percent said they were hardly ever—or never—involved in those choices.
As we started asking educators, administrators and experts about the issue as part of an investigation into how teachers inform the development of edtech products, everyone agreed: teacher voice should be part of edtech decisions.
The primary point, of course, is this: unused features in exercise technologies and educational technologies can improve neither fitness nor learning. From this perspective, one might argue:
The most important feature in educational technology products is the nudge – the feature that persuades you to actually use the features that will improve learning.
Duolingo is a great example here. On its surface, the language learning app may appear rather straightforward. But there are some pretty sophisticated things happening behind the scenes that make your language learning more effective.
In this article, we will examine several key ways in which COVID-19 has changed trial proceedings, strategy and preparation and how mentoring programs can make a difference.
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COVID-19 has shaken up the jury trial experience for both new and experienced attorneys. For those whose only trials have been conducted during COVID-19 restrictions and for everyone easing back into the in-person trials, these are key elements to keep in mind practicing forward. Firm mentoring programs should be considered to prepare the future generation of trial lawyers for both live and virtual trials.
From DSC: I think law firms will need to expand the number of disciplines coming to their strategic tables. That is, as more disciplines are required to successfully practice law in the 21st century, more folks with technical backgrounds and/or abilities will be needed. Web front and back end developers, User Experience Designers, Instructional Designers, Audio/Visual Specialists, and others come to my mind. Such people can help develop the necessary spaces, skills, training, and mentoring programs mentioned in this article. As within our learning ecosystems, the efficient and powerful use of teams of specialists will deliver the best products and services.
You’ve likely been reading for the last few minutes my arguments for why AI is going to change education. You may agree with some points, disagree with others…
Only, those were not my words.
An AI has written every single word in this essay up until here.
The only thing I wrote myself was the first sentence: Artificial Intelligence is going to revolutionize education. The images too, everything was generated by AI.
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