Habit #2: Engage students in a brain dump or two things as an entry ticket or exit ticket. Spend one minute or less having students write down everything (or just two things) they remember from class. The key: Don’t grade it! Keep retrieval practice no-stakes to emphasize it’s a learning strategy, not an assessment strategy.
Teaching from the heart in 13 steps — from timeshighereducation.com by Beiting He Engaging your students through empathy requires teachers to share their own stories and vulnerabilities and foster a safe space for learning. Here, Beiting He offers 13 ways to create a caring classroom
In summary, “I wish” is about proposing positive changes and improvements, while “I wonder” is about asking thoughtful questions to gain insight and foster meaningful conversations within the team.
Sometimes people and vendors write about AI’s capabilities in such a glowingly positive way. It seems like AI can do everything in the world. And while I appreciate the growing capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) and the like, there are some things I don’t want AI-driven apps to do.
For example, I get why AI can be helpful in correcting my misspellings, my grammatical errors, and the like. That said, I don’t want AI to write my emails for me. I want to write my own emails.I want to communicate what I want to communicate. I don’t want to outsource my communication.
And what if an AI tool summarizes an email series in a way that I miss some key pieces of information? Hmmm…not good.
Ok, enough soapboxing. I’ll continue with some resources.
ChatGPT Enterprise
Introducing ChatGPT Enterprise — from openai.com Get enterprise-grade security & privacy and the most powerful version of ChatGPT yet.
We’re launching ChatGPT Enterprise, which offers enterprise-grade security and privacy, unlimited higher-speed GPT-4 access, longer context windows for processing longer inputs, advanced data analysis capabilities, customization options, and much more. We believe AI can assist and elevate every aspect of our working lives and make teams more creative and productive. Today marks another step towards an AI assistant for work that helps with any task, is customized for your organization, and that protects your company data.
Nvidia Quarterly Earnings Report Q2 Smashes Expectations At $13.5B — from techbusinessnews.com.au Nvidia’s quarterly earnings report (Q2) smashed expectations coming in at $13.5B more than doubling prior earnings of $6.7B. The chipmaker also projected October’s total revenue would peak at $16B
MISC
DC: And many business people in the early/mid-90’s thought electronic mail was only good for arranging a business lunch but it was never going to take off.
ChatGPT: Few Americans think it will impact their job in a major way| Pew Research Center https://t.co/dsUfoNOeVO
— Daniel Christian (he/him/his) (@dchristian5) August 30, 2023
OpenAI is currently on pace to generate more than $1 billion in revenue over the next 12 months from the sale of artificial intelligence software and the computing capacity that powers it. That’s far ahead of revenue projections the company previously shared with its shareholders, according to a person with direct knowledge of the situation.
OpenAI’s GPTBot blocked by major websites and publishers — from the-decoder.com by Matthias Bastian An emerging chatbot ecosystem builds on existing web content and could displace traditional websites. At the same time, licensing and financing are largely unresolved.
OpenAI offers publishers and website operators an opt-out if they prefer not to make their content available to chatbots and AI models for free. This can be done by blocking OpenAI’s web crawler “GPTBot” via the robots.txt file. The bot collects content to improve future AI models, according to OpenAI.
Major media companies including the New York Times, CNN, Reuters, Chicago Tribune, ABC, and Australian Community Media (ACM) are now blocking GPTBot. Other web-based content providers such as Amazon, Wikihow, and Quora are also blocking the OpenAI crawler.
Is a state-of-the-art LLM capable of generating code, and natural language about code, from both code and natural language prompts.
Is free for research and commercial use.
Is built on top of Llama 2 and is available in three models…
In our own benchmark testing, Code Llama outperformed state-of-the-art publicly available LLMs on code tasks
Key Highlights of Google Cloud Next ‘23— from analyticsindiamag.com by Shritama Saha Meta’s Llama 2, Anthropic’s Claude 2, and TII’s Falcon join Model Garden, expanding model variety.
From DSC: This is scary — not at all comforting to me. Militaries around the world continue their jockeying to be the most dominant, powerful, and effective killers of humankind. That definitely includes the United States and China. But certainly others as well. And below is another alarming item, also pointing out the downsides of how we use technologies.
The debut of ChatGPT in November created angst for college admission officers and professors worried they would be flooded by student essays written with the undisclosed assistance of artificial intelligence. But the explosion of interest in AI has benefits for higher education, including a new generation of students interested in studying and working in the field. In response, universities are revising their curriculums to educate AI engineers.
During this special keynote presentation, Western Michigan University (WMU) professor Sue Ellen Christian speaks about the importance of media literacy for all ages and how we can help educate our friends and families about media literacy principles. Hosted by the Grand Rapids Public Library and GRTV, a program of the Grand Rapids Community Media Center. Special thanks to the Grand Rapids Public Library Foundation for their support of this program.
What if you could have a conversation with your notes?That question has consumed a corner of the internet recently, as companies like Dropbox, Box, Notion, and others have built generative AI tools that let you interact with and create new things from the data you already have in their systems.
Google’s version of this is called NotebookLM. It’s an AI-powered research tool that is meant to help you organize and interact with your own notes.
… Right now, it’s really just a prototype, but a small team inside the company has been trying to figure out what an AI notebook might look like.
According to ElevenLabs, the new Multilingual v2 model promises it can produce “emotionally rich” audio in a total of 30 languages. The company offers two AI voice tools, one is a text-to-speech model and the other is the “VoiceLab” that lets paying users clone a voice by inputting fragments of theirs (or others) speech into the model to create a kind of voice cone. With the v2 model, users can get these generated voices to start speaking in Greek, Malay, or Turkish.
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Since then, ElevenLabs claims its integrated new measures to ensure users can only clone their own voice. Users need to verify their speech with a text captcha prompt which is then compared to the original voice sample.
From DSC: I don’t care what they say regarding safeguards/proof of identity/etc. This technology has been abused and will be abused in the future. We can count on it. The question now is, how do we deal with it?
Introducing SeamlessM4T, the first all-in-one, multilingual multimodal translation model.
This single model can perform tasks across speech-to-text, speech-to-speech, text-to-text translation & speech recognition for up to 100 languages depending on the task.
But Hugging Face produces a platform where AI developers can share code, models, data sets, and use the company’s developer tools to get open-source artificial intelligence models running more easily. In particular, Hugging Face often hosts weights, or large files with lists of numbers, which are the heart of most modern AI models.
While Hugging Face has developed some models, like BLOOM, its primary product is its website platform, where users can upload models and their weights. It also develops a series of software tools called libraries that allow users to get models working quickly, to clean up large datasets, or to evaluate their performance. It also hosts some AI models in a web interface so end users can experiment with them.
Numerous skills are required to grow the semiconductor ecosystem over the next decade. Globally, we will need tens of thousands of skilled tradespeople to build new plants to increase and localize manufacturing capacity: electricians, pipefitters, welders; thousands more graduate electrical engineers to design chips and the tools that make the chips; more engineers of various kinds in the fabs themselves, but also operators and technicians. And if we grow the back end in Europe and the Americas, that equates to even more jobs.
Each of these job groups has distinct training and educational needs; however, the number of students in semiconductor-focused programs (for example, undergraduates in semiconductor design and fabrication) has dwindled. Skills are also evolving within these job groups, in part due to automation and increased digitization. Digital skills, such as cloud, AI, and analytics, are needed in design and manufacturing more than ever.
The chip industry has long partnered with universities and engineering schools. Going forward, they also need to work more with local tech schools, vocational schools, and community colleges; and other organizations, such as the National Science Foundation in the United States.
Principle #1: AI is here, and we will embrace it responsibly together with our music partners.
Principle #2: AI is ushering in a new age of creative expression, but it must include appropriate protections and unlock opportunities for music partners who decide to participate.
Principle #3: We’ve built an industry-leading trust and safety organization and content policies. We will scale those to meet the challenges of AI.
Brett Bauman, the developer of PlayListAI (previously LinupSupply), launched a new app called Songburst on the App Store this week. The app doesn’t have a steep learning curve. You just have to type in a prompt like “Calming piano music to listen to while studying” or “Funky beats for a podcast intro” to let the app generate a music clip.
If you can’t think of a prompt the app has prompts in different categories, including video, lo-fi, podcast, gaming, meditation and sample.
A Generative AI Primer— from er.educause.edu by Brian Basgen Understanding the current state of technology requires understanding its origins. This reading list provides sources relevant to the form of generative AI that led to natural language processing (NLP) models such as ChatGPT.
Three big questions about AI and the future of work and learning — from workshift.opencampusmedia.org by Alex Swartsel AI is set to transform education and work today and well into the future. We need to start asking tough questions right now, writes Alex Swartsel of JFF.
How will AI reshape jobs, and how can we prepare all workers and learners with the skills they’ll need?
How can education and workforce leaders equitably adopt AI platforms to accelerate their impact?
How might we catalyze sustainable policy, practice, and investments in solutions that drive economic opportunity?
“As AI reshapes both the economy and society, we must collectively call for better data, increased accountability, and more flexible support for workers,” Swartsel writes.
With the new school year just around the corner, now’s the perfect time to put yourself in the shoes of an adult learner starting college for the first time this fall.
Maybe you’re going after the degree you set aside after high school. Maybe you’re searching for a fresh start and a new career. Or maybe you want to show your kids and your family that you can do it, helping to build a better life for them all. Whether you’re 25 or 55, attending classes on campus or online, one thing is certain: You’re nervous. Excited at the future you see at the end of the journey, yes, but apprehensive too. Will you fit in? Can you hack it — the papers and projects and exams? And how will you juggle all the things, including job, family and everyday life?
While the fundamentals of college — lectures, reading, research, writing papers — are the same for anyone attending college, the overall experience and the types of support services needed can be vastly different between a 19-year-old traditional student and a 32-year-old adult learner. With that in mind, here are nine tips you can share with your adult learners — tips for helping them start their new term off right.
10 Ways Artificial Intelligence Is Transforming Instructional Design — from er.educause.edu by Robert Gibson Artificial intelligence (AI) is providing instructors and course designers with an incredible array of new tools and techniques to improve the course design and development process. However, the intersection of AI and content creation is not new.
What does this mean for the field of instructional and course design? I have been telling my graduate instructional design students that AI technology is not likely to replace them any time soon because learning and instruction are still highly personalized and humanistic experiences. However, as these students embark on their careers, they will need to understand how to appropriately identify, select, and utilize AI when developing course content.
Here are a few interesting examples of how AI is shaping and influencing instructional design. Some of the tools and resources can be used to satisfy a variety of course design activities, while others are very specific.
GenAI Chatbot Prompt Library for Educators — from aiforeducation.io We have a variety of prompts to help you lesson plan and do adminstrative tasks with GenAI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, Bard, and Perplexity.
Also relevant/see:
AI for Education — from linkedin.com Helping teachers and schools unlock their full potential through AI
Check out https://t.co/sfWeOiOzP5, “Helping teachers bring AI to the classroom critically, ethically, & responsibly.”
You can submit assignments to their curated collection. From the amazing @SarahWNewman at @metalabharvard. (She also did the Data Nutrition Project).
— Anna Mills, amills@mastodon.oeru.org, she/her (@EnglishOER) August 18, 2023
Google’s AI-powered Search Generative Experience (SGE) is getting a major new feature: it will be able to summarize articles you’re reading on the web, according to a Google blog post. SGE can already summarize search results for you so that you don’t have to scroll forever to find what you’re looking for, and this new feature is designed to take that further by helping you out after you’ve actually clicked a link.
Weeks after The New York Times updated its terms of service (TOS) to prohibit AI companies from scraping its articles and images to train AI models, it appears that the Times may be preparing to sue OpenAI. The result, experts speculate, could be devastating to OpenAI, including the destruction of ChatGPT’s dataset and fines up to $150,000 per infringing piece of content.
NPR spoke to two people “with direct knowledge” who confirmed that the Times’ lawyers were mulling whether a lawsuit might be necessary “to protect the intellectual property rights” of the Times’ reporting.
Digital accessibility is the practice of making digital content and applications accessible to all users, including those with disabilities. This means ensuring that websites, mobile applications, and digital platforms are designed and developed in such a way that people with various types of impairments—visual, auditory, physical, speech, cognitive, or neurological—can use them without hindrance. It’s about removing barriers in the digital world, enabling equal access and opportunity to everyone, similar to how physical accessibility considerations in building design ensure everyone can navigate through them. Digital accessibility is not just a legal necessity but also a socially responsible practice, ensuring inclusivity in the increasingly digital landscape of our society.
Improving the digital accessibility of existing text ensures that you can reuse your learning support assets. In this article, I’m going to give you a list of ideas to achieve that objective, using a set of ideas presented in a previous article. In general, the content here will improve accessibility and readability for all learners.
So, as educators, mentors, and guides to our future generations, we must ask ourselves three pivotal questions:
What value do we offer to our students?
What value will they need to offer to the world?
How are we preparing them to offer that value?
The answers to these questions are crucial, and they will redefine the trajectory of our education system.
We need to create an environment that encourages curiosity, embraces failure as a learning opportunity, and celebrates diversity. We need to teach our students how to learn, how to ask the right questions, and how to think for themselves.
Leveraging ChatGPT for learning is the most meaningful skill this year for lifelong learners. But it’s too hard to find resources to master it.
As a learning science nerd, I’ve explored hundreds of prompts over the past months. Most of the advice doesn’t go beyond text summaries and multiple-choice testing.
That’s why I’ve created this article — it merges learning science with prompt writing to help you learn anything faster.
Midjourney AI Art for Teachers (for any kind of teacher, not just Art Teachers) — from The AI Educator on YouTube by Dan Fitzpatrick
From DSC: This is a very nice, clearly illustrated, free video to get started with the Midjourney (text-to-image) app. Nice work Dan!
In the new-normal of generative AI, how does one articulate the value of academic integrity? This blog presents my current response in about 2,500 words; a complete answer could fill a sizable book.
Massive amounts of misinformation are disseminated about generative AI, so the first part of my discussion clarifies what large language models (Chat-GPT and its counterparts) can currently do and what they cannot accomplish at this point in time. The second part describes ways in which generative AI can be misused as a means of learning; unfortunately, many people are now advocating for these mistaken applications to education. The third part describes ways in which large language models (LLM), used well, may substantially improve learning and education. I close with a plea for a robust, informed public discussion about these topics and issues.
Many of the more than a dozen teachers TIME interviewed for this story argue that the way to get kids to care is to proactively use ChatGPT in the classroom.
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Some of those creative ideas are already in effect at Peninsula High School in Gig Harbor, about an hour from Seattle. In Erin Rossing’s precalculus class, a student got ChatGPT to generate a rap about vectors and trigonometry in the style of Kanye West, while geometry students used the program to write mathematical proofs in the style of raps, which they performed in a classroom competition. In Kara Beloate’s English-Language Arts class, she allowed students reading Shakespeare’s Othello to use ChatGPT to translate lines into modern English to help them understand the text, so that they could spend class time discussing the plot and themes.
I found that other developed countries share concerns about students cheating but are moving quickly to use AI to personalize education, enhance language lessons and help teachers with mundane tasks, such as grading. Some of these countries are in the early stages of training teachers to use AI and developing curriculum standards for what students should know and be able to do with the technology.
Several countries began positioning themselves several years ago to invest in AI in education in order to compete in the fourth industrial revolution.
AI in Education— from educationnext.org by John Bailey The leap into a new era of machine intelligence carries risks and challenges, but also plenty of promise
In the realm of education, this technology will influence how students learn, how teachers work, and ultimately how we structure our education system. Some educators and leaders look forward to these changes with great enthusiasm. Sal Kahn, founder of Khan Academy, went so far as to say in a TED talk that AI has the potential to effect “probably the biggest positive transformation that education has ever seen.” But others warn that AI will enable the spread of misinformation, facilitate cheating in school and college, kill whatever vestiges of individual privacy remain, and cause massive job loss. The challenge is to harness the positive potential while avoiding or mitigating the harm.
Generative AI and education futures — from ucl.ac.uk Video highlights from Professor Mike Sharples’ keynote address at the 2023 UCL Education Conference, which explored opportunities to prosper with AI as a part of education.
Bringing AI Literacy to High Schools— from by Nikki Goth Itoi Stanford education researchers collaborated with teachers to develop classroom-ready AI resources for high school instructors across subject areas.
To address these two imperatives, all high schools need access to basic AI tools and training. Yet the reality is that many underserved schools in low-income areas lack the bandwidth, skills, and confidence to guide their students through an AI-powered world. And if the pattern continues, AI will only worsen existing inequities. With this concern top of mind plus initial funding from the McCoy Ethics Center, Lee began recruiting some graduate students and high school teachers to explore how to give more people equal footing in the AI space.
If we want students to remember – to lock new information or ideas into long-term memory – getting meaningful repetitions still is key. And the science of learning still backs that up.
So … if we want students to get repetitions to make new learning permanent, how can they do it? Here are 10 ways to help students get repetitions for practice – and how classroom technology can help.
In this episode, I share ten engaging activities that combine education, technology, and plenty of fun to make the first week of class super memorable. From digital scavenger hunts to virtual field trips, hear about a few of my favorite ways to create an interactive start to your school year.
Tips for First Week of School Activity Ideas
Establish routines in a fun way.
Provide opportunities for collaboration.
Introduce tech tools that will be used all year.
From DSC: Dr. Burns has a great list of tools/tips/resources in this posting.
Four directions for assessment redesign in the age of generative AI— from timeshighereducation.com by Julia Chen The rise of generative AI has led universities to rethink how learning is quantified. Julia Chen offers four options for assessment redesign that can be applied across disciplines
Direction 1: From written description to multimodal explanation and application
Direction 2: From literature review alone to referencing lectures
Direction 3: From presentation of ideas to defence of views
Direction 4: From working alone to student-staff partnership
With the latest national test results showing a dispiriting lack of progress in catching students up academically in the wake of the pandemic, one potential explanation stands out: stubbornly high rates of student absenteeism. Vast numbers of students haven’t returned to class regularly since schools reopened.
We’re rolling out a bunch of small updates to improve the ChatGPT experience. Shipping over the next week:
1. Prompt examples: A blank page can be intimidating. At the beginning of a new chat, you’ll now see examples to help you get started.
2. Suggested replies: Go deeper with…
The movie trailer for “Genesis,” created with AI, is so convincing it caused a stir on Twitter [on July 27]. That’s how I found out about it. Created by Nicolas Neubert, a senior product designer who works for Elli by Volkswagen in Germany, the “Genesis” trailer promotes a dystopian sci-fi epic reminiscent of the Terminator. There is no movie, of course, only the trailer exists, but this is neither a gag nor a parody. It’s in a class of its own. Eerily made by man, but not.
? Trailer: Genesis (Midjourney + Runway)
We gave them everything.
Trusted them with our world.
To become enslaved – become hunted.
We have no choice.
Humanity must rise again to reclaim.
Google just published its 2023 environmental report, and one thing is for certain: The company’s water use is soaring.
The internet giant said it consumed 5.6 billion gallons of water in 2022, the equivalent of 37 golf courses. Most of that — 5.2 billion gallons — was used for the company’s data centers, a 20% increase on the amount Google reported the year prior.
We think prompt engineering (learning to converse with an AI) is overrated. Yup, we said it. We think the future of chat interfaces will be a combination of preloading context and then allowing AI to guide you to the information you seek.
From DSC: Agreed. I think we’ll see a lot more interface updates and changes to make things easier to use, find, develop.
Artificial Intelligence continues to dominate the news. In the past month, we’ve seen a number of major updates to language models: Claude 2, with its 100,000 token context limit; LLaMA 2, with (relatively) liberal restrictions on use; and Stable Diffusion XL, a significantly more capable version of Stable Diffusion. Does Claude 2’s huge context really change what the model can do? And what role will open access and open source language models have as commercial applications develop?
Google Lab Sessions are collaborations between “visionaries from all realms of human endeavor” and the company’s latest AI technology. [On 8/2/23], Google released TextFX as an “experiment to demonstrate how generative language technologies can empower the creativity and workflows of artists and creators” with Lupe Fiasco.
Google’s TextFX includes 10 tools and is powered by the PaLM 2 large language model via the PALM API. Meant to aid in the creative process of rappers, writers, and other wordsmiths, it is part of Google Labs.
Inspired by my recent Review: Shure MV7 dynamic hybrid studio microphone – near, far and beyond, Beaker Films of Fairfield, Connecticut, US has developed and deployed a first batch of 10 kits to capture remote conversations from different locations worldwide. Beaker Films is frequently contracted to record remote interviews or testimonials from medical professionals. For this project, Beaker Films’ clients wanted consistent, high quality audio and video, but with 3 additional challenges: they preferred to have no visible microphone in the shot, they needed a teleprompter function and the whole kit needed to be as simple as possible for non-technical guests.
West Suffolk College in the UK has opened its Extended Reality Lab (XR Lab), the facilities comprise of four distinct areas: an Immersion Lab, a Collaboration Theatre, a Green Room, and a Conference Room. The project was designed by architects WindsorPatania for Eastern Colleges Group.
Systems integrator CJP Broadcast Service Solutions, has won a tender to build a virtual production environment for Solent University in the UK.
The new facilities, converted from an existing studio space, will provide students on the film production courses with outstanding opportunities to develop their creative output.
It is kind of weird. So many sites that list Q&A’s – mine included, look at it from the reader’s standpoint – what I refer to as consumers, even though they may have an audience consisting of PEs (Private Equity), outside their industry (C-Level and similar), vendors in the specific industry (e-learning) and sub-segments OR just a variety of folks who are not on the consumer side of the house, instead on the vendor or investment side.
And yet, I receive a lot of inquiries from vendors, including PE and investment firms. They all have questions. They all seek answers. I will hold back from the investment and PE side; let’s take a peek at the vendor side.
Partnership with American Journalism Project to support local news — from openai.com; via The Rundown AI A new $5+ million partnership aims to explore ways the development of artificial intelligence (AI) can support a thriving, innovative local news field, and ensure local news organizations shape the future of this emerging technology.
SEC’s Gensler Warns AI Risks Financial Stability— from bloomberg.com by Lydia Beyoud; via The Brainyacts SEC on lookout for fraud, conflicts of interest, chair says | Gensler cautions companies touting AI in corporate docs
The recent petition from Kenyan workers who engage in content moderation for OpenAI’s ChatGPT, via the intermediary company Sama, has opened a new discussion in the global legal market. This dialogue surrounds the concept of “harmful and dangerous technology work” and its implications for laws and regulations within the expansive field of AI development and deployment.
The petition, asking for investigations into the working conditions and operations of big tech companies outsourcing services in Kenya, is notable not just for its immediate context but also for the broader legal issues it raises. Central among these is the notion of “harmful and dangerous technology work,” a term that encapsulates the uniquely modern form of labor involved in developing and ensuring the safety of AI systems.
The most junior data labelers, or agents, earned a basic salary of 21,000 Kenyan shillings ($170) per month, with monthly bonuses and commissions for meeting performance targets that could elevate their hourly rate to just $1.44 – a far cry from the $12.50 hourly rate that OpenAI paid Sama for their work. This discrepancy raises crucial questions about the fair distribution of economic benefits in the AI value chain.
It’s become so difficult to track AI tools as they are revealed. I’ve decided to create a running list of tools as I find out about them. The list is in alphabetical order even though there are classification systems that I’ve seen others use. Although it’s not good in blogging land to update posts, I’ll change the date every time that I update this list. Please feel free to respond to me with your comments about any of these as well as AI tools that you use that I do not have on the list. I’ll post your comments next to a tool when appropriate. Thanks.
Claude has surprising capabilities, including a couple you won’t find in the free version of ChatGPT.
Since this new AI bot launched on July 11, I’ve found Claude useful for summarizing long transcripts, clarifying complex writings, and generating lists of ideas and questions. It also helps me put unstructured notes into orderly tables. For some things, I prefer Claude to ChatGPT. Read on for Claude’s strengths and limitations, and ideas for using it creatively.
Claude’s free version allows you to attach documents for analysis. ChatGPT’s doesn’t.
Large language models like GPT-4 have taken the world by storm thanks to their astonishing command of natural language. Yet the most significant long-term opportunity for LLMs will entail an entirely different type of language: the language of biology.
In the near term, the most compelling opportunity to apply large language models in the life sciences is to design novel proteins.
