From DSC: How long before recommendation engines like this can be filtered/focused down to just display apps, channels, etc. that are educational and/or training related (i.e., a recommendation engine to suggest personalized/customized playlists for learning)?
That is, in the future, will we have personalized/customized playlists for learning on our Apple TVs — as well as on our mobile devices — with the assessment results of our taking the module(s) or course(s) being sent in to:
A credentials database on LinkedIn (via blockchain) and/or
A credentials database at the college(s) or university(ies) that we’re signed up with for lifelong learning (via blockchain)
and/or
To update our cloud-based learning profiles — which can then feed a variety of HR-related systems used to find talent? (via blockchain)
Will participants in MOOCs, virtual K-12 schools, homeschoolers, and more take advantage of learning from home?
Will solid ROI’s from having thousands of participants paying a smaller amount (to take your course virtually) enable higher production values?
Will bots and/or human tutors be instantly accessible from our couches?
Most obviously, the speech-recognition functions on our smartphones work much better than they used to. When we use a voice command to call our spouses, we reach them now. We aren’t connected to Amtrak or an angry ex.
In fact, we are increasingly interacting with our computers by just talking to them, whether it’s Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana, or the many voice-responsive features of Google. Chinese search giant Baidu says customers have tripled their use of its speech interfaces in the past 18 months.
Machine translation and other forms of language processing have also become far more convincing, with Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Baidu unveiling new tricks every month. Google Translate now renders spoken sentences in one language into spoken sentences in another for 32 pairs of languages, while offering text translations for 103 tongues, including Cebuano, Igbo, and Zulu. Google’s Inbox app offers three ready-made replies for many incoming emails.
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But what most people don’t realize is that all these breakthroughs are, in essence, the same breakthrough. They’ve all been made possible by a family of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques popularly known as deep learning, though most scientists still prefer to call them by their original academic designation: deep neural networks.
Even the Internet metaphor doesn’t do justice to what AI with deep learning will mean, in Ng’s view. “AI is the new electricity,” he says. “Just as 100 years ago electricity transformed industry after industry, AI will now do the same.”
Graphically speaking:
“Our sales teams are using neural nets to recommend which prospects to contact next or what kinds of product offerings to recommend.”
One way to think of what deep learning does is as “A to B mappings,” says Baidu’s Ng. “You can input an audio clip and output the transcript. That’s speech recognition.” As long as you have data to train the software, the possibilities are endless, he maintains. “You can input email, and the output could be: Is this spam or not?” Input loan applications, he says, and the output might be the likelihood a customer will repay it. Input usage patterns on a fleet of cars, and the output could advise where to send a car next.
Introducing the new Surface family— from microsoft.com To do great things, you need powerful tools that deliver an ideal balance of craftsmanship, performance, and versatility. Every Surface device is engineered with these things in mind, and you at the center. And that’s how the Surface family does more. Just like you.
Microsoft (MSFT) this morning held an event in downtown Manhattan that included both an update to Windows, the “Creators” edition, and also new versions of the company’s Surface tablet computer, including a revamp of the “Surface Book” laptop and tablet combo device, and a new desktop machine called the “Surface Studio” that has the thinnest display ever made, the company claims.
Perhaps the most intriguing thing at the event was something called “Dial,” a rotating puck device that can function like a wireless mouse with the Studio, but can also be placed right on top of the display itself to bring up a context-specific menu of functions, or to perform actions like cut and paste.
Microsoft on Wednesday announced its first desktop PC, the Surface Studio.
It’s an all-in-one computer, designed to compete with Apple’s iMac. The PC is geared toward professionals, and it has high-end specs designed for tasks like video or photo editing.
… But the real surprises are the adjustable display and a new accessory called the Surface Dial. The display can lie nearly flat on the table, giving graphics artists the ability to draw and work. The Surface Dial can be placed on the screen to bring up color palettes and other options. The Surface Dial will work with other Surface products — the Surface Pro and Surface Book — but you won’t be able to use it on the screens.
Microsoft wants to bring machine learning into the mainstream — from networkworld.com by Steven Max Patterson Microsoft released the beta of the Cognitive Toolkit with machine learning models, infrastructure and development tools, enabling customers to start building
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
Microsoft just released the open-source licensed beta release of the Microsoft Cognitive Toolkit on Github. This announcement represents a shift in Microsoft’s customer focus from research to implementation. It is an update to the Computational Network Toolkit (CNTK). The toolkit is a supervised machine learning system in the same category of other open-source projects such as Tensorflow, Caffe and Torch.
Microsoft is one of the leading investors in and contributors to the open machine learning software and research community. A glance at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference reveals that there are just four major technology companies committed to moving the field of neural networks forward: Microsoft, Google, Facebook and IBM.
This announcement signals Microsoft interest to bring machine learning into the mainstream. The open source license reveals Microsoft’s continued collaboration with the machine learning community.
Microsoft on Wednesday morning said PC OEMs will soon be shipping VR headsets that enable virtual reality and mixed reality starting at $299.
Details of the hardware and how it works were sparse, but Microsoft said HP, Dell, Lenovo, Asus, and Acer will be shipping the headsets timed with its upcoming Windows 10 Creators Update, due in spring 2017.
Despite the relatively low price, the upcoming headsets may have a big advantage over HTC and Valve’s Vive and Facebook’s Oculus Rift: no need for separate calibration hardware to function. Both Vive and Oculus require multiple emitters on stands to be placed around a room for the positioning to function.
Microsoft is gearing up for a Windows refresh. The Windows 10 Creators Update will arrive on all Windows 10 devices for free in the spring of 2017. Today, Microsoft showed off all the new features coming to the multi-mode OS. Here’s the best of what will be coming to your Windows PC or Surface device.
LAS VEGAS, Oct. 25, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — IBM (NYSE: IBM) and Pearson (FTSE: PSON) the world’s learning company, today announced a new global education alliance intended to make Watson’s cognitive capabilities available to millions of college students and professors.
Combining IBM’s cognitive capabilities with Pearson’s digital learning products will give students a more immersive learning experience with their college courses, an easy way to get help and insights when they need it, all through asking questions in natural language just like they would with another student or professor. Importantly, it provides instructors with insights about how well students are learning, allowing them to better manage the entire course and flag students who need additional help.
For example, a student experiencing difficulty while studying for a biology course can query Watson, which is embedded in the Pearson courseware. Watson has already read the Pearson courseware content and is ready to spot patterns and generate insights. Serving as a digital resource, Watson will assess the student’s responses to guide them with hints, feedback, explanations and help identify common misconceptions, working with the student at their pace to help them master the topic.
Online education platform Udacity has partnered with IBM Watson to launch a new artificial intelligence (AI) Nanodegree program.
Costing $1,600 for the full two-term, 26-week course, the AI Nanodegree covers a myriad of topics including logic and planning, probabilistic inference, game-playing / search, computer vision, cognitive systems, and natural language processing (NLP). It’s worth noting here that Udacity already offers an Intro to Artificial Intelligence (free) course and the Machine Learning Engineer Nanodegree, but with the A.I. Nanodegree program IBM Watson is seeking to help give developers a “foundational understanding of artificial intelligence,” while also helping graduates identify job opportunities in the space.
As artificial intelligence (AI) begins to power more technology across industries, it’s been truly exciting to see what our community of developers can create with Watson. Developers are inspiring us to advance the technology that is transforming society, and they are the reason why such a wide variety of businesses are bringing cognitive solutions to market.
With AI becoming more ubiquitous in the technology we use every day, developers need to continue to sharpen their cognitive computing skills. They are seeking ways to gain a competitive edge in a workforce that increasingly needs professionals who understand how to build AI solutions.
It is for this reason that today at World of Watson in Las Vegas we announced with Udacity the introduction of a Nanodegree program that incorporates expertise from IBM Watson and covers the basics of artificial intelligence. The “AI Nanodegree” program will be helpful for those looking to establish a foundational understanding of artificial intelligence. IBM will also help aid graduates of this program with identifying job opportunities.
Announced today at World of Watson, and as Rob High outlined in the first post in this series, IBM has partnered with Udacity to develop a nanodegree in artificial intelligence. Rob discussed IBM’s commitment to empowering developers to learn more about cognitive computing and equipping them with the educational resources they need to build their careers in AI.
To continue on this commitment, I’m excited to announce another new program today geared at college students that we’ve launched with Kivuto Solutions, an academic software distributor. Via Kivuto’s popular digital resource management platform, students and academics around the world will now gain free access to the complete IBM Bluemix Portfolio — and specifically, Watson. This offers students and faculty at any accredited university – as well as community colleges and high schools with STEM programs – an easy way to tap into Watson services. Through this access, teachers will also gain a better means to create curriculum around subjects like AI.
LAS VEGAS, Oct. 25, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — IBM (NYSE:IBM) today unveiled a series of new cognitive solutions intended for professionals in marketing, commerce, supply chain and human resources. With these new offerings, IBM is enabling organizations across all industries and of all sizes to integrate new cognitive capabilities into their businesses.
Watson solutions learn in an expert way, which is critical for professionals that want to uncover insights hidden in their massive amounts of data to understand, reason and learn about their customers and important business processes. Helping professionals augment their existing knowledge and experience without needing to engage a data analyst empowers them to make more informed business decisions, spot opportunities and take action with confidence.
“IBM is bringing Watson cognitive capabilities to millions of professionals around the world, putting a trusted advisor and personal analyst at their fingertips,” said Harriet Green, general manager Watson IoT, Cognitive Engagement & Education. “Similar to the value that Watson has brought to the world of healthcare, cognitive capabilities will be extended to professionals in new areas, helping them harness the value of the data being generated in their industries and use it in new ways.”
IBM says new Watson Data Platform will ‘bring machine learning to the masses’ — from techrepublic.com by Hope Reese On Tuesday, IBM unveiled a cloud-based AI engine to help businesses harness machine learning. It aims to give everyone, from CEOs to developers, a simple platform to interpret and collaborate on data.
Excerpt:
“Insight is the new currency for success,” said Bob Picciano, senior vice president at IBM Analytics. “And Watson is the supercharger for the insight economy.”
Picciano, speaking at the World of Watson conference in Las Vegas on Tuesday, unveiled IBM’s Watson Data Platform, touted as the “world’s fastest data ingestion engine and machine learning as a service.”
The cloud-based Watson Data Platform, will “illuminate dark data,” said Picciano, and will “change everything—absolutely everything—for everyone.”
See the #IBMWoW hashtagon Twitter for more news/announcements coming from IBM this week:
Previous postings from earlier this month:
IBM Watson’s latest gig: Improving cancer treatment with genomic sequencing — from techrepublic.com by Alison DeNisco A new partnership between IBM Watson Health and Quest Diagnostics will combine Watson’s cognitive computing with genetic tumor sequencing for more precise, individualized cancer care.
IBM launches industry first Cognitive-IoT ‘Collaboratory’ for clients and partners Excerpt:
IBM have unveiled an €180 million investment in a new global headquarters to house its Watson Internet of Things business. Located in Munich, the facility will promote new IoT capabilities around Blockchain and security as well as supporting the array of clients that are driving real outcomes by using Watson IoT technologies, drawing insights from billions of sensors embedded in machines, cars, drones, ball bearings, pieces of equipment and even hospitals. As part of a global investment designed to bring Watson cognitive computing to IoT, IBM has allocated more than $200 million USD to its global Watson IoT headquarters in Munich. The investment, one of the company’s largest ever in Europe, is in response to escalating demand from customers who are looking to transform their operations using a combination of IoT and Artificial Intelligence technologies. Currently IBM has 6,000 clients globally who are tapping Watson IoT solutions and services, up from 4,000 just 8 months ago.
These affordances are just now starting to be uncovered as machines are increasingly able to ascertain patterns, things, objects…even people (which calls for a separate posting at some point).
But mainly, for today, I wanted to highlight an excellent comment/reply from Nikos Andriotis @ Talent LMS who gave me permission to highlight hissolid reflections and ideas:
From DSC: Excellent reflection/idea Nikos — that would represent some serious personalized, customized learning!
Nikos’ innovative reflections also made me think about his ideas in light of their interaction or impact with web-based learner profiles, credentialing, badging, and lifelong learning. What’s especially noteworthy here is that the innovations (that impact learning) continue to occur mainly in the online and blended learning spaces.
How might the ramifications of these innovations impact institutions who are pretty much doing face-to-face only (in terms of their course delivery mechanisms and pedagogies)?
Given:
That Microsoft purchased LinkedIn and can amass a database of skills and open jobs (playing a cloud-based matchmaker)
Everyday microlearning is key to staying relevant (RSS feeds and tapping into “streams of content” are important here, and so is the use of Twitter)
Teachers at Coppell Independent School District have become the first to use a new IBM and Apple technology platform built to aid personalized learning.
IBM Watson Element for Educators pairs IBM analytics and data tools such as cognitive computing with Apple design. It integrates student grades, interests, participation, and trends to help educators determine how a student learns best, the company says.
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It also recommends learning content personalized to each student. The platform might suggest a reading assignment on astronomy for a young student who has shown an interest in space.
From DSC: Technologies involved with systems like IBM’s Watson will likely bring some serious impact to the worlds of education and training & development. Such systems — and the affordances that they should be able to offer us — should not be underestimated. The potential for powerful, customized, personalized learning could easily become a reality in K-20 as well as in the corporate training space. This is an area to keep an eye on for sure, especially with the growing influence of cognitive computing and artificial intelligence.
These kinds of technology should prove helpful in suggesting modules and courses (i.e., digital learning playlists), but I think the more powerful systems will be able to drill down far more minutely than that. I think these types of systems will be able to assist with all kinds of math problems and equations as well as analyze writing examples, correct language mispronunciations, and more (perhaps this is already here…apologies if so). In other words, the systems will “learn” where students can go wrong doing a certain kind of math equation…and then suggest steps to correct things when the system spots a mistake (or provide hints at how to correct mistakes).
This road takes us down to places where we have:
Web-based learner profiles — including learner’s preferences, passions, interests, skills
Microlearning/badging/credentialing — likely using blockchain
Learning agents/bots to “contact” for assistance
Guidance for lifelong learning
More choice, more control
Also see:
First IBM Watson Education App for iPad Delivers Personalized Learning for K-12 Teachers and Students — from prnewswire.com Educators at Coppell Independent School District in Texas first to use new iPad app to tailor learning experiences to student’s interests and aptitudes
Excerpts: With increasing demands on educators, teachers need tools that will enable them to better identify the individual needs of all students while designing learning experiences that engage and hold the students’ interest as they master the content. This is especially critical given that approximately one third of American students require remedial education when they enter college today, and current college attainment rates are not keeping pace with the country’s projected workforce needs1. A view of academic and day-to-day updates in real time can help teachers provide personalized support when students need it.
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IBM Watson Element provides teachers with a holistic view of each student through a fun, easy-to-use and intuitive mobile experience that is a natural extension of their work. Teachers can get to know their students beyond their academic performance, including information about personal interests and important milestones students choose to share. For example, teachers can input notes when a student’s highly anticipated soccer match is scheduled, when another has just been named president for the school’s World Affairs club, and when another has recently excelled following a science project that sparked a renewed interest in chemistry.The unique “spotlight” feature in Watson Element provides advanced analytics that enables deeper levels of communication between teachers about their students’ accomplishments and progress. For example, if a student is excelling academically, teachers can spotlight that student, praising their accomplishments across the school district. Or, if a student received a top award in the district art show, a teacher can spotlight the student so their other teachers know about it.
From DSC: Here’s an idea that came to my mind the other day as I was walking by a person who was trying to put some books back onto the shelves within our library.
From DSC: Perhaps this idea is not very timely…as many collections of books will likely continue to be digitized and made available electronically. But preservation is still a goal for many libraries out there.
Today, the IoT sits at the peak of Gartner’s Hype Cycle. It’s probably not surprising that industry is abuzz with the promise of streaming sensor data. The oft quoted “50 billion connected devices by 2020!” has become a rallying cry for technology analysts, chip vendors, network providers, and other proponents of a deeply connected, communicating world. What is surprising is that academia has been relatively slow to join the parade, particularly when the potential impacts are so exciting. Like most organizations that manage significant facilities, universities stand to benefit by adopting the IoT as part of their management strategy. The IoT also affords new opportunities to improve the customer experience. For universities, this means the ability to provide new student services and improve on those already offered. Perhaps most surprisingly, the IoT represents an opportunity to better engage a diverse student base in computer science and engineering, and to amplify these programs through meaningful interdisciplinary collaboration.
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The potential benefits of the IoT to the academic community extend beyond facilities management to improving our students’ experience. The lowest hanging fruit can be harvested by adapting some of the smart city applications that have emerged. What student hasn’t shown up late to class after circling the parking lot looking for a space? Ask any student at a major university if it would improve their campus experience to be able to check on their smart phones which parking spots were available. The answer will be a resounding “yes!” and there’s nothing futuristic about it. IoT parking management systems are commercially available through a number of vendors. This same type of technology can be adapted to enable students to find open meeting rooms, computer facilities, or café seating. What might be really exciting for students living in campus dormitories: A guarantee that they’ll never walk down three flights of stairs balancing two loads of dirty laundry to find that none of the washing machines are available. On many campuses, the washing machines are already network-connected to support electronic payment; availability reporting is a straightforward extension.
Also see:
2016 Innovators Awards | A Location-Aware App for Exploring the Library — from campustechnology.com by Meg Lloyd To help users access rich information resources on campus, the University of Oklahoma Libraries created a mobile app with location-based navigation and “hyperlocal” content.
Category: Education Futurists
Institution: University of Oklahoma
Project: OU Libraries NavApp
Project lead: Matt Cook, emerging technologies librarian
And yet it is this spot – a corner of the sprawling city of Naples that never quite recovered after a major food-packing factory shut its doors in the 1980s – where the Apple chief executive, Tim Cook, and the Italian prime minister, Matteo Renzi, hope the best and brightest young minds in the world will come to develop into leaders in the new app economy.
This week, Apple, the biggest technology company in the world, will open a new academy here – the first of its kind – that will teach 200 mostly southern Italian students how to write code and launch apps on Apple technology by the end of the year.
Apple moves UK HQ to Battersea power station boiler room in London
Read more
Each student at the iOS Developer Academy will be handed the latest iPhone, iPad and Macbook at the start of the nine-month course, which is being offered free of charge following a joint investment of about €10m by Apple and University of Naples Federico II, one of the oldest universities in the world, which is hosting the tuition.
2016 has been promoted as the year of virtual reality. In the space of a few months, we have seen brands like Facebook, Samsung and Sony have all come out with VR products of their own. But another closely related industry has been making a growing presence in the tech industry. Augmented reality, or simply AR, is gaining ground among tech companies and even consumers. Google was the first contender for coolest AR product with its Google Glass. Too bad that did not work out; it felt like a product too ahead of its time. Companies like Microsoft, Magic Leap and even Apple are hoping to pick up from where Google left off. They are creating their own smart glasses that will, hopefully, do better than Google Glass. In our article, we look at some of the coolest Augmented Reality smart glasses around.
Some of them are already out while others are in development.
It’s no secret that we here at Labster are pretty excited about VR. However, if we are to successfully introduce VR into education and training we need to know how to create VR simulations that unlock these new great ways of learning.
Christian Jacob and Markus Santoso are trying to re-create the experience of the aforementioned agents in Fantastic Voyage. Working with 3D modelling company Zygote, they and recent MSc graduate Douglas Yuen have created HoloCell, an educational software. Using Microsoft’s revolutionary HoloLens AR glasses, HoloCell provides a mixed reality experience allowing users to explore a 3D simulation of the inner workings, organelles, and molecules of a healthy human cell.
Upload is teaming up with Udacity, Google and HTC to build an industry-recognized VR certification program.
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According to Udacity representatives, the organization will now be adding a VR track to its “nanodegree”program. Udacity’s nanodegrees are certification routes that can be completed completely online at a student’s own pace. These courses typically take between 6-12 months and cost $199 per month. Students will also receive half of their tuition back if they complete a course within six months. The new VR course will follow this pattern as well.
The VR nanodegree program was curated by Udacity after the organization interviewed dozens of VR savvy companies about the type of skills they look for in a potential new hire. This information was then built into a curriculum through a joint effort between Google, HTC and Upload.
Virtual reality helps Germany catch last Nazi war criminals — from theguardian.com by Agence France-Presse Lack of knowledge no longer an excuse as precise 3D model of Auschwitz, showing gas chambers and crematoria, helps address atrocities
Excerpt:
German prosecutors and police have developed 3D technology to help them catch the last living Nazi war criminals with a highly precise model of Auschwitz.
German prosecutors and police have begun using virtual reality headsets in their quest to bring the last remaining Auschwitz war criminals to justice, AFP reported Sunday.
Using the blueprints of the death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland, Bavarian state crime office digital imaging expert Ralf Breker has created a virtual reality model of Auschwitz which allows judges and prosecutors to mimic moving around the camp as it stood during the Holocaust.
Technology is hoping to turn empathy into action. Or at least, the United Nations is hoping to do so. The intergovernmental organization is more than seven decades old at this point, but it’s constantly finding new ways to better the world’s citizenry. And the latest tool in its arsenal? Virtual reality.
Last year, the UN debuted its United Nations Virtual Reality, which uses the technology to advocate for communities the world over. And more recently, the organization launched an app made specifically for virtual reality films. First debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival, this app encourages folks to not only watch the UN’s VR films, but to then take action by way of donations or volunteer work.
If you’re an Apple user and want an untethered virtual reality system, you’re currently stuck with Google Cardboard, which doesn’t hold a candle to the room scale VR provided by the HTC Vive (a headset not compatible with Macs, by the way). But spatial computing company Occipital just figured out how to use their Structure Core 3D Sensor to provide room scale VR to any smartphone headset—whether it’s for an iPhone or Android.
The Body VR is a great example of how the Oculus Rift and Gear VR can be used to educate as well as entertain. Starting today, it’s also a great example of how the HTC Vive can do the same.
The developers previously released this VR biology lesson for free back at the launch of the Gear VR and, in turn, the Oculus Rift. Now an upgraded version is available on Valve and HTC’s Steam VR headset. You’ll still get the original experience in which you explore the human body, travelling through the bloodstream to learn about blood cells and looking at how organelles work. The piece is narrated as you go.
For a moment, students were taken into another world without leaving the great halls of Harvard. Some students had a great time exploring the ocean floor and saw unique underwater animals, others tried their hand in hockey, while others screamed as they got into a racecar and sped on a virtual speedway. All of them, getting a taste of what virtual and augmented reality looks like.
All of these, of course, were not just about fun but on how especially augmented and virtual reality can transform every kind of industry. This will be discussed and demonstrated at the i-lab in the coming weeks with Rony Abovitz, CEO of Magic Leap Inc., as the keynote speaker.
Abovitz was responsible for developing the “Mixed Reality Lightfield,” a technology that combines augmented and virtual reality. According to Abovitz, it will help those who are struggling to “transfer two-dimensional information or text into “spatial learning.”
“I think it will make life easier for a lot of people and open doors for a lot of people because we are making technology fit how our brains evolved into the physics of the universe rather than forcing our brains to adapt to a more limited technology,” he added.
From DSC: I have attended theNext Generation Learning Spaces Conferencefor the past two years. Both conferences were very solid and they made a significant impact on our campus, as they provided the knowledge, research, data, ideas, contacts, and the catalyst for us to move forward with building a Sandbox Classroom on campus. This new, collaborative space allows us to experiment with different pedagogies as well as technologies. As such, we’ve been able to experiment much more with active learning-based methods of teaching and learning. We’re still in Phase I of this new space, and we’re learning new things all of the time.
For the upcoming conference in February, I will be moderating a New Directions in Learning panel on the use of augmented reality (AR), virtual reality (VR), and mixed reality (MR). Time permitting, I hope that we can also address other promising, emerging technologies that are heading our way such as chatbots, personal assistants, artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, tvOS, blockchain and more.
The goal of this quickly-moving, engaging session will be to provide a smorgasbord of ideas to generate creative, innovative, and big thinking. We need to think about how these topics, trends, and technologies relate to what our next generation learning environments might look like in the near future — and put these things on our radars if they aren’t already there.
Key takeaways for the panel discussion:
Reflections regarding the affordances that new developments in Human Computer Interaction (HCI) — such as AR, VR, and MR — might offer for our learning and our learning spaces (or is our concept of what constitutes a learning space about to significantly expand?)
An update on the state of the approaching ed tech landscape
Creative, new thinking: What might our next generation learning environments look like in 5-10 years?
I’m looking forward to catching up with friends, meeting new people, and to the solid learning that I know will happen at this conference. I encourage you to check outthe conferenceandregister soon to take advantage of the early bird discounts.
ARMONK, N.Y., Sept. 28, 2016 /PRNewswire/ — Teachers will have access to a new, first-of-its-kind, free tool using IBM’s innovative Watson cognitive technology that has been trained by teachers and designed to strengthen teachers’ instruction and improve student achievement, the IBM Foundation and the American Federation of Teachers announced today.
Hundreds of elementary school teachers across the United States are piloting Teacher Advisor with Watson – an innovative tool by the IBM Foundation that provides teachers with a complete, personalized online resource. Teacher Advisor enables teachers to deepen their knowledge of key math concepts, access high-quality vetted math lessons and acclaimed teaching strategies and gives teachers the unique ability to tailor those lessons to meet their individual classroom needs.
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Litow said there are plans to make Teacher Advisor available to all elementary school teachers across the U.S. before the end of the year.
In this first phase, Teacher Advisor offers hundreds of high-quality vetted lesson plans, instructional resources, and teaching techniques, which are customized to meet the needs of individual teachers and the particular needs of their students.
Also see:
Educators can also access high-quality videos on teaching techniques to master key skills and bring a lesson or teaching strategy to life into their classroom.
From DSC: Today’s announcement involved personalization and giving customized directions, and it caused my mind to go in a slightly different direction. (IBM, Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and others like Smart Sparrow are likely also thinking about this type of direction as well. Perhaps they’re already there…I’m not sure.)
But given the advancements in machine learning/cognitive computing (where example applications include optical character recognition (OCR) and computer vision), how much longer will it be before software is able to remotely or locally “see” what a third grader wrote down for a given math problem (via character and symbol recognition) and “see” what the student’s answer was while checking over the student’s work…if the answer was incorrect, the algorithms will likely know where the student went wrong. The software will be able to ascertain what the student did wrong and then show them how the problem should be solved (either via hints or by showing the entire problem to the student — per the teacher’s instructions/admin settings). Perhaps, via natural language processing, this process could be verbalized as well.
Further questions/thoughts/reflections then came to my mind:
Will we have bots that teachers can use to teach different subjects? (“Watson may even ask the teacher additional questions to refine its response, honing in on what the teacher needs to address certain challenges.)
Will we have bots that students can use to get the basics of a given subject/topic/equation?
Will instructional designers — and/or trainers in the corporate world — need to modify their skillsets to develop these types of bots?
Will teachers — as well as schools of education in universities and colleges — need to modify their toolboxes and their knowledgebases to take advantage of these sorts of developments?
How might the corporate world take advantage of these trends and technologies?
Will MOOCs begin to incorporate these sorts of technologies to aid in personalized learning?
What sorts of delivery mechanisms could be involved? Will we be tapping into learning-related bots from our living rooms or via our smartphones?
IBM Watson will help educators improve teaching skills — from zdnet.com by Natalie Gagliordi The IBM Foundation has teamed with teachers and the American Federation of Teachers union to create an AI-based lesson plan tool called Teacher Advisor.
Burger, a computer chip researcher who had joined the company four years earlier, was pitching a new idea to the execs. He called it Project Catapult.
The tech world, Burger explained, was moving into a new orbit. In the future, a few giant Internet companies would operate a few giant Internet services so complex and so different from what came before that these companies would have to build a whole new architecture to run them. They would create not just the software driving these services, but the hardware, including servers and networking gear. Project Catapult would equip all of Microsoft’s servers—millions of them—with specialized chips that the company could reprogram for particular tasks.
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Today, the programmable chips that Burger and Lu believed would transform the world—called field programmable gate arrays—are here. FPGAs already underpin Bing, and in the coming weeks, they will drive new search algorithms based on deep neural networks—artificial intelligence modeled on the structure of the human brain—executing this AI several orders of magnitude faster than ordinary chips could. As in, 23 milliseconds instead of four seconds of nothing on your screen. FPGAs also drive Azure, the company’s cloud computing service. And in the coming years, almost every new Microsoft server will include an FPGA. That’s millions of machines across the globe. “This gives us massive capacity and enormous flexibility, and the economics work,” Burger says. “This is now Microsoft’s standard, worldwide architecture.”
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It’s a typical tangle of tech acronyms. CPUs. GPUs. TPUs. FPGAs. But it’s the subtext that matters. With cloud computing, companies like Microsoft and Google and Amazon are driving so much of the world’s technology that those alternative chips will drive the wider universe of apps and online services. Lee says that Project Catapult will allow Microsoft to continue expanding the powers of its global supercomputer until the year 2030. After that, he says, the company can move toward quantum computing.
Today, we are thrilled to announce the launch of LinkedIn Learning, an online learning platform enabling individuals and organizations to achieve their objectives and aspirations. Our goal is to help people discover and develop the skills they need through a personalized, data-driven learning experience.
LinkedIn Learning combines the industry-leading content from Lynda.com with LinkedIn’s professional data and network. With more than 450 million member profiles and billions of engagements, we have a unique view of how jobs, industries, organizations and skills evolve over time. From this, we can identify the skills you need and deliver expert-led courses to help you obtain those skills. We’re taking the guesswork out of learning.
The pressure on individuals and organizations to adapt to change has never been greater. The skills that got you to where you are today are not the skills to prepare you for tomorrow. In fact, the shelf-life of skills is less than five years, and many of today’s fastest growing job categories didn’t even exist five years ago.
To tackle these challenges, LinkedIn Learning is built on three core pillars:
… Data-driven personalization: We get the right course in front of you at the right time.Using the intelligence that comes with our network, LinkedIn Learning creates personalized recommendations, so learners can efficiently discover which courses are most relevant to their goals or job function. Organizations can use LinkedIn insights to customize multi-course Learning Paths to meet their specific needs. We also provide robust analytics and reporting to help you measure learning effectiveness.
Today, LinkedIn has launched LinkedIn Learning — its first major product launch since the news last June that Microsoft would be snapping up the social network for $26.2 billion in a deal that has yet to close.
Companies will also be able to create their own “learning paths”—bundles of courses around a particular topic—to train employees. A chief learning officer, for instance, might compile a package of courses in product management and ask 10 employees to complete the assignments over the course of a few months.
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LinkedIn is also targeting higher-education institutions with the new offering. It is marketing the solution as a professional development tool that can help faculty learn how to use classroom tools such as Moodle, Adobe Captivate and learning management systems.
“Increasingly predictions of tech displacing workers are coming to fruition,” he added. “The idea that you can study a skill once and have a job for the rest of your life—those days are over.”
LinkedIn is also adding more personalized features to its news feed, where members can see articles and announcements posted by their professional contacts. A new “Interest Feed” will offer a collection of articles, posts and opinion pieces on major news events or current issues.
From DSC:
The articles listed inthis PDF documentdemonstrate the exponential pace of technological change that many nations across the globe are currently experiencing and will likely be experiencing for the foreseeable future. As we are no longer on a linear trajectory, we need to consider what this new trajectory means for how we:
Educate and prepare our youth in K-12
Educate and prepare our young men and women studying within higher education
One thought that comes to mind…when we’re moving this fast, we need to be looking upwards and outwards into the horizons — constantly pulse-checking the landscapes. We can’t be looking down or be so buried in our current positions/tasks that we aren’t noticing the changes that are happening around us.
![The Living [Class] Room -- by Daniel Christian -- July 2012 -- a second device used in conjunction with a Smart/Connected TV](http://danielschristian.com/learning-ecosystems/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/The-Living-Class-Room-Daniel-S-Christian-July-2012.jpg)
