technology (general)

Talk to Me: NVIDIA and Partners Boost People Skills and Business Smarts for AI Agents — from blogs.nvidia.com by Adel El Hallak
NVIDIA Enterprise AI Factory validated design and latest NVIDIA AI Blueprints help businesses add intelligent AI teammates that can speak, research and learn to their daily operations.

Call it the ultimate proving ground. Collaborating with teammates in the modern workplace requires fast, fluid thinking. Providing insights quickly, while juggling webcams and office messaging channels, is a startlingly good test, and enterprise AI is about to pass it — just in time to provide assistance to busy knowledge workers.

To support enterprises in boosting productivity with AI teammates, NVIDIA today introduced a new NVIDIA Enterprise AI Factory validated design at COMPUTEX. IT teams deploying and scaling AI agents can use the design to build accelerated infrastructure and easily integrate with platforms and tools from NVIDIA software partners.

NVIDIA also unveiled new NVIDIA AI Blueprints to aid developers building smart AI teammates. Using the new blueprints, developers can enhance employee productivity through adaptive avatars that understand natural communication and have direct access to enterprise data.

NVIDIA CEO Envisions AI Infrastructure Industry Worth ‘Trillions of Dollars’ — from blogs.nvidia.com by Brian Caulfield
In his COMPUTEX keynote, Huang unveiled a sweeping vision for an AI-powered future, showcasing new platforms and partnerships.

“AI is now infrastructure, and this infrastructure, just like the internet, just like electricity, needs factories,” Huang said. “These factories are essentially what we build today.”

“They’re not data centers of the past,” Huang added. “These AI data centers, if you will, are improperly described. They are, in fact, AI factories. You apply energy to it, and it produces something incredibly valuable, and these things are called tokens.”

More’s coming, Huang said, describing the growing power of AI to reason and perceive. That leads us to agentic AI — AI able to understand, think and act. Beyond that is physical AI — AI that understands the world. The phase after that, he said, is general robotics.

Everything Revealed at Nvidia’s 2025 Computex Press Conference in 19 Minutes — from mashable.com
Nvidia is creating Omniverse Digital Twins of factories including humanoid robots

Watch all the biggest announcements from Nvidia’s keynote address at Computex 2025 in Taipei, Taiwan.

Dell unveils new AI servers powered by Nvidia chips to boost enterprise adoption — from reuters.com

May 19 (Reuters) – Dell Technologies (DELL.N), opens new tab on Monday unveiled new servers powered by Nvidia’s (NVDA.O), opens new tab Blackwell Ultra chips, aiming to capitalize on the booming demand for artificial intelligence systems.

The servers, available in both air-cooled and liquid-cooled variations, support up to 192 Nvidia Blackwell Ultra chips but can be customized to include as many as 256 chips.

Nvidia announces humanoid robotics, custom AI infrastructure tech at Computex 2025 — from finance.yahoo.com by Daniel Howley

Nvidia (NVDA) rolled into this year’s Computex Taipei tech expo on Monday with several announcements, ranging from the development of humanoid robots to the opening up of its high-powered NVLink technology, which allows companies to build semi-custom AI servers with Nvidia’s infrastructure.
…
During the event on Monday, Nvidia revealed its Nvidia Isaac GR00T-Dreams, which the company says helps developers create enormous amounts of training data they can use to teach robots how to perform different behaviors and adapt to new environments.

2025 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report | Teaching and Learning Edition

On 05/12/2025, in 21st century, accessibility / UDL, adjunct faculty, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, assessment, Bias | Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DE&I), colleges, community colleges, credentialing, digital audio, disruption, economics, education technology, emerging technologies, experimentation, faculty/staff, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, higher education, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, immersion, innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, liberal arts, neurodivergent/special needs, pedagogy, privacy, skills, social learning / networks, society, student-related, teaching & learning, technology (general), trends, United States, universities, Virtual Reality (VR) / worlds / learning, workplace, XR - extended reality, by Daniel Christian

2025 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report | Teaching and Learning Edition — from library.educause.edu

Higher education is in a period of massive transformation and uncertainty. Not only are current events impacting how institutions operate, but technological advancement—particularly in AI and virtual reality—are reshaping how students engage with content, how cognition is understood, and how learning itself is documented and valued.

Our newly released 2025 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report | Teaching and Learning Edition captures the spirit of this transformation and how you can respond with confidence through the lens of emerging trends, key technologies and practices, and scenario-based foresight.

#teachingandlearning #highereducation #learningecosystems #learning #futurism #foresight #trends #emergingtechnologies #AI #VR #gamechangingenvironment #colleges #universities #communitycolleges #faculty #staff #IT

Reflections on “2025 EDUCAUSE Students and Technology Report” [Christian]

On 04/14/2025, in accessibility / UDL, adjunct faculty, Alternatives, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, Bias | Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DE&I), blended learning, career development, CMS/LMS, colleges, communications, community colleges, cost of getting a degree, dangers of the status quo, Daniel S. Christian, digital learning, education technology, emerging technologies, faculty/staff, future of higher education, game-changing environment, higher education, human-computer interaction (HCI), hybrid learning, instructional design, intelligent systems, IT in HE, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, learning preferences, neurodivergent/special needs, online learning, student-related, teaching & learning, technologies for your home, technology (general), United States, universities, workplace, by Daniel Christian

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2025 EDUCAUSE Students and Technology Report: Shaping the Future of Higher Education Through Technology, Flexibility, and Well-Being — from library.educause.edu

The student experience in higher education is continually evolving, influenced by technological advancements, shifting student needs and expectations, evolving workforce demands, and broadening sociocultural forces. In this year’s report, we examine six critical aspects of student experiences in higher education, providing insights into how institutions can adapt to meet student needs and enhance their learning experience and preparation for the workforce:

Satisfaction with Technology-Related Services and Supports
Modality Preferences
Hybrid Learning Experiences
Generative AI in the Classroom
Workforce Preparation
Accessibility and Mental Health

DSC: Shame on higher ed for not preparing students for the workplace (see below). You’re doing your students wrong…again. Not only do you continue to heap a load of debt on their backs, but you’re also continuing to not get them ready for the workplace. So don’t be surprised if eventually you’re replaced by a variety of alternatives that students will flock towards.
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DSC: And students don’t have a clue as to what awaits them in the workplace — they see AI-powered tools and technologies at an incredibly low score of only 3%. Yeh, right. You’ll find out. Here’s but one example from one discipline/field of work –> Thomson Reuters Survey: Over 95% of Legal Professionals Expect Gen AI to Become Central to Workflow Within Five Years

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Figure 15. Competency Areas Expected to Be Important for Career

The Gen X Career Meltdown [Kurutz]

On 03/31/2025, in 21st century, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, business, career development, change, changing business models, communities of practice, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate / business world, creativity, culture, design, digital photography, digital storytelling, economics, emerging technologies, future, game-changing environment, generational differences, graphics, internet, journalism, lifelong learning, love of learning, media/film, more voice more choice more control, multimedia, music, new business models, online media, photography, reinvent, skills, social learning / networks, society, sociology, staying relevant, student-related, surviving, technology (general), television, trends, United States, workplace, writing, youth, by Daniel Christian

It’s the end of work as we knew it
and I feel…

powerless to fight the technology that we pioneered
nostalgic for a world that moved on without us
after decades of paying our dues
for a payday that never came
…so yeah
not exactly fine.

The Gen X Career Meltdown — from nytimes.com by Steeven Kurutz (DSC: This is a gifted article for you)
Just when they should be at their peak, experienced workers in creative fields find that their skills are all but obsolete.

If you entered media or image-making in the ’90s — magazine publishing, newspaper journalism, photography, graphic design, advertising, music, film, TV — there’s a good chance that you are now doing something else for work. That’s because those industries have shrunk or transformed themselves radically, shutting out those whose skills were once in high demand.

“I am having conversations every day with people whose careers are sort of over,” said Chris Wilcha, a 53-year-old film and TV director in Los Angeles.

Talk with people in their late 40s and 50s who once imagined they would be able to achieve great heights — or at least a solid career while flexing their creative muscles — and you are likely to hear about the photographer whose work dried up, the designer who can’t get hired or the magazine journalist who isn’t doing much of anything.

In the wake of the influencers comes another threat, artificial intelligence, which seems likely to replace many of the remaining Gen X copywriters, photographers and designers. By 2030, ad agencies in the United States will lose 32,000 jobs, or 7.5 percent of the industry’s work force, to the technology, according to the research firm Forrester.

From DSC:
This article reminds me of how tough it is to navigate change in our lives. For me, it was often due to the fact that I was working with technologies. Being a technologist can be difficult, especially as one gets older and faces age discrimination in a variety of industries. You need to pick the right technologies and the directions that will last (for me it was email, videoconferencing, the Internet, online-based education/training, discovering/implementing instructional technologies, and becoming a futurist).

For you younger folks out there — especially students within K-16 — aim to develop a perspective and a skillset that is all about adapting to change. You will likely need to reinvent yourself and/or pick up new skills over your working years. You are most assuredly required to be a lifelong learner now. That’s why I have been pushing for school systems to be more concerned with providing more choice and control to students — so that students actually like school and enjoy learning about new things.

How can businesses stay ahead of trends and technologies that are rapidly changing their industries? [Schindler]

On 03/19/2025, in business, corporate universities / corporate training, future, pace of change, technology (general), trends, workplace, by Daniel Christian

How can businesses stay ahead of trends and technologies that are rapidly changing their industries? — from linkedin.com by Tanja Schindler; via her Dancing with Uncertainty newsletter

Companies need to develop a sense of curiosity about both the observable trends in the present and the unobserved factors that could significantly influence their futures. While current trends can drive us in certain directions, we also need to imagine possible futures that could either disrupt our industry or offer tremendous opportunities for growth.

To stay ahead of the game, companies should focus on recognising weak signals in the present – subtle hints of emerging trends – and deciding whether to encourage or discourage these signals to avoid undesirable futures and encourage desirable ones. This process is a constant dance between the push of the present (existing trends) and the pull of the future (visions of the future we want to create).

Announcements from Nvidia and their GTC Conference this week

On 03/19/2025, in 21st century, A/V -- audio/visual, Amazon, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, bots, business, change, changing business models, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, corporate / business world, creativity, data related items, design, digital audio, digital video, disruption, emerging technologies, Facebook / Meta Platforms, future, game-changing environment, generational differences, Google, graphics, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, intelligent systems, Microsoft, multimedia, Natural Language Processing (NLP), new business models, NVIDIA, pace of change, platforms, productivity / tips and tricks, society, technologies for your home, technology (general), tools, trends, United States, vendors, vision/possibilities, workplace, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
Look out Google, Amazon, and others! Nvidia is putting the pedal to the metal in terms of being innovative and visionary! They are leaving the likes of Apple in the dust.

The top talent out there is likely to go to Nvidia for a while. Engineers, programmers/software architects, network architects, product designers, data specialists, AI researchers, developers of robotics and autonomous vehicles, R&D specialists, computer vision specialists, natural language processing experts, and many more types of positions will be flocking to Nvidia to work for a company that has already changed the world and will likely continue to do so for years to come.

NVIDIA just shook the AI and Robotic world at NVIDIA GTC 2025.

CEO Jensen Huang announced jaw-dropping breakthroughs.

Here are the top 11 key highlights you can’t afford to miss: (wait till you see no 3) pic.twitter.com/domejuVdw5

— The AI Colony (@TheAIColony) March 19, 2025

NVIDIA’s AI Superbowl — from theneurondaily.com by Noah and Grant
PLUS: Prompt tips to make AI writing more natural

That’s despite a flood of new announcements (here’s a 16 min video recap), which included:

A new architecture for massive AI data centers (now called “AI factories”).
A physics engine for robot training built with Disney and DeepMind.
A partnership with GM to develop next-gen vehicles, factories and robots.
A new Blackwell chip with “Dynamo” software that makes AI reasoning 40x faster than previous generations.
A new “Rubin” chip slated for 2026 and a “Feynman” chip set for 2028.

For enterprises, NVIDIA unveiled DGX Spark and DGX Station—Jensen’s vision of AI-era computing, bringing NVIDIA’s powerful Blackwell chip directly to your desk.

Nvidia Bets Big on Synthetic Data — from wired.com by Lauren Goode
Nvidia has acquired synthetic data startup Gretel to bolster the AI training data used by the chip maker’s customers and developers.

Nvidia, xAI to Join BlackRock and Microsoft’s $30 Billion AI Infrastructure Fund — from investopedia.com by Aaron McDade
Nvidia and xAI are joining BlackRock and Microsoft in an AI infrastructure group seeking $30 billion in funding. The group was first announced in September as BlackRock and Microsoft sought to fund new data centers to power AI products.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says we’ll soon see 1 million GPU data centers visible from space — from finance.yahoo.com by Daniel Howley
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says the company is preparing for 1 million GPU data centers.

Nvidia stock stems losses as GTC leaves Wall Street analysts ‘comfortable with long term AI demand’ — from finance.yahoo.com by Laura Bratton
Nvidia stock reversed direction after a two-day slide that saw shares lose 5% as the AI chipmaker’s annual GTC event failed to excite investors amid a broader market downturn.

Microsoft, Google, and Oracle Deepen Nvidia Partnerships. This Stock Got the Biggest GTC Boost. — from barrons.com by Adam Clark and Elsa Ohlen

The 4 Big Surprises from Nvidia’s ‘Super Bowl of AI’ GTC Keynote — from barrons.com by Tae Kim; behind a paywall

AI Super Bowl. Hi everyone. This week, 20,000 engineers, scientists, industry executives, and yours truly descended upon San Jose, Calif. for Nvidia’s annual GTC developers’ conference, which has been dubbed the “Super Bowl of AI.”

The Learning & Development Global Sentiment Survey 2025 [Taylor]

On 02/20/2025, in 21st century, adult learning, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, Asia, Augmented Reality (AR), Australia, business, Canada, change, CMS/LMS, colleges, communities of practice, community colleges, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, digital learning, education technology, elearning, emerging technologies, Europe, experimentation, faculty/staff, game-changing environment, generational differences, global / globalization, higher education, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, K-12 related, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, learning preferences, lifelong learning, microlearning, personalized/customized learning, platforms, productivity / tips and tricks, skills, technology (general), training / L&D, trends, UK, United States, universities, vendors, Virtual Reality (VR) / worlds / learning, XR - extended reality, by Daniel Christian

The Learning & Development Global Sentiment Survey 2025 — from donaldhtaylor.co.uk by Don Taylor

The L&D Global Sentiment Survey, now in its 12th year, once again asked two key questions of L&D professionals worldwide:

What will be hot in workplace learning in 2025?
What are your L&D challenges in 2025?

For the obligatory question on what they considered ‘hot’ topics, respondents voted for one to three of 15 suggested options, plus a free text ‘Other’ option. Over 3,000 voters participated from nearly 100 countries. 85% shared their challenges for 2025.

The results show more interest in AI, a renewed focus on showing the value of L&D, and some signs of greater maturity around our understanding of AI in L&D.

Four objectives to guide artificial intelligence’s impact on higher education — from timeshighereducation.com by Susan C. Aldridge
How can higher education leaders manage both the challenge and the opportunity artificial intelligence presents? Here are four objectives to guide the way

That’s why, today, the question I’m asking is: How best can we proactively guide AI’s use in higher education and shape its impact on our students, faculty and institution? The answer to that broad, strategic question lies in pursuing four objectives that, I believe, are relevant for many colleges and universities.

In This Week’s Gap Letter — by Ryan Craig

Learning to use business software is different from learning to think. But if the software is sufficiently complex, how different is it really? What if AI’s primary impact on education isn’t in the classroom, but rather shifting the locus of learning to outside the classroom?

Instead of sitting in a classroom listening to a teacher, high school and college students could be assigned real work and learn from that work. Students could be matched with employers or specific projects provided by or derived from employers, then do the work on the same software used in the enterprise. As AI-powered digital adoption platforms (DAPs) become increasingly powerful, they have the potential to transform real or simulated work into educational best practice for students only a few years away from seeking full-time employment.

If DAPs take us in this direction, four implications come to mind….

The Impact of Gen AI on Human Learning: a research summary — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman
A literature review of the most recent & important peer-reviewed studies

In this week’s blog post, I share a summary of five recent studies on the impact of Gen AI on learning to bring you right up to date.
…
Implications for Educators and Developers

For Educators:

Combine ChatGPT with Structured Activities: …
Use ChatGPT as a Supplement, Not a Replacement:…
Promote Self-Reflection and Evaluation:

For Developers:

Reimagine AI for Reflection-First Design: …
Develop Tools that Foster Critical Thinking: …
Integrate Adaptive Support: …

Assessing the GenAI process, not the output — from timeshighereducation.com by Paul McDermott, Leoni Palmer, and Rosemary Norton
A framework for building AI literacy in a literature-review-type assessment

In this resource, we outline our advice for implementing an approach that opens AI use up to our students through a strategy of assessing the process rather than outputs.

To start with, we recommend identifying learning outcomes for your students that can be achieved in collaboration with AI.

What’s New: The Updated Edtech Insiders Generative AI Map — from edtechinsiders.substack.com by Sarah Morin, Alex Sarlin, and Ben Kornell
A major expansion on our previously released market map, use case database, and AI tool company directory.

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Tutorial: 4 Ways to Use LearnLM as a Professor — from automatedteach.com by Graham Clay
Create better assessments, improve instructions and feedback, and tutor your students with this fine-tuned version of Gemini.

I cover how to use LearnLM

to create sophisticated assessments that promote learning
to develop clearer and more effective assignment instructions
to provide more constructive feedback on student work, and
to support student learning through guided tutoring

Tech Trends 2025 [Deloitte Insights]

On 12/21/2024, in 21st century, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, IT in HE, society, technology (general), trends, United States, by Daniel Christian

Tech Trends 2025 — from deloitte.com by Deloitte Insights
In Deloitte’s 16th annual Tech Trends report, AI is the common thread of nearly every trend. Moving forward, it will be part of the substructure of everything we do.

We propose that the future of technology isn’t so much about more AI as it is about ubiquitous AI. We expect that, going forward, AI will become so fundamentally woven into the fabric of our lives that it’s everywhere, and so foundational that we stop noticing it.

AI will eventually follow a similar path, becoming so ubiquitous that it will be a part of the unseen substructure of everything we do, and we eventually won’t even know it’s there. It will quietly hum along in the background, optimizing traffic in our cities, personalizing our health care, and creating adaptative and accessible learning paths in education. We won’t “use” AI. We’ll just experience a world where things work smarter, faster, and more intuitively—like magic, but grounded in algorithms. We expect that it will provide a foundation for business and personal growth while also adapting and sustaining itself over time.

Nowhere is this AI-infused future more evident than in this year’s Tech Trends report, which each year explores emerging trends across the six macro forces of information technology (figure 1). Half of the trends that we’ve chronicled are elevating forces—interaction, information, and computation—that underpin innovation and growth. The other half—the grounding forces of the business of technology, cyber and trust, and core modernization—help enterprises seamlessly operate while they grow.

“What Is Agentic AI?” [Nvidia’s Pounds] + other items re: AI in general

On 12/09/2024, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, A/V -- audio/visual, Adobe, analytics, art, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, bots, business, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, communications, communities of practice, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, creativity, data related items, design, digital audio, digital learning, digital photography, digital storytelling, digital video, education technology, emerging technologies, engagement / engaging students, experimentation, Google, graphics, human-computer interaction (HCI), innovation, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, IT in HE, K-12 related, learning, learning ecosystem, legislatures / government / legal, marketing/social marketing, media/film, Microsoft, multimedia, music, Natural Language Processing (NLP), new media literacies, NVIDIA, online media, Open AI, platforms, podcasting, presentations, productivity / tips and tricks, professional development, programming, skills, social media, strategy, student-related, technologies for your home, technology (general), tools, United States, vendors, videoconferencing, workplace, by Daniel Christian

Where to start with AI agents: An introduction for COOs — from fortune.com by Ganesh Ayyar

Picture your enterprise as a living ecosystem, where surging market demand instantly informs staffing decisions, where a new vendor’s onboarding optimizes your emissions metrics, where rising customer engagement reveals product opportunities. Now imagine if your systems could see these connections too! This is the promise of AI agents — an intelligent network that thinks, learns, and works across your entire enterprise.

Today, organizations operate in artificial silos. Tomorrow, they could be fluid and responsive. The transformation has already begun. The question is: will your company lead it?

The journey to agent-enabled operations starts with clarity on business objectives. Leaders should begin by mapping their business’s critical processes. The most pressing opportunities often lie where cross-functional handoffs create friction or where high-value activities are slowed by system fragmentation. These pain points become the natural starting points for your agent deployment strategy.

Create podcasts in minutes — from elevenlabs.io by Eleven Labs
Now anyone can be a podcast producer

Top AI tools for business — from theneuron.ai

This week in AI: 3D from images, video tools, and more — from heatherbcooper.substack.com by Heather Cooper
From 3D worlds to consistent characters, explore this week’s AI trends

Another busy AI news week, so I organized it into categories:

Image to 3D
AI Video
AI Image Models & Tools
AI Assistants / LLMs
AI Creative Workflow: Luma AI Boards

Want to speak Italian? Microsoft AI can make it sound like you do. — this is a gifted article from The Washington Post;
A new AI-powered interpreter is expected to simulate speakers’ voices in different languages during Microsoft Teams meetings.

Artificial intelligence has already proved that it can sound like a human, impersonate individuals and even produce recordings of someone speaking different languages. Now, a new feature from Microsoft will allow video meeting attendees to hear speakers “talk” in a different language with help from AI.

What Is Agentic AI? — from blogs.nvidia.com by Erik Pounds
Agentic AI uses sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning to autonomously solve complex, multi-step problems.

The next frontier of artificial intelligence is agentic AI, which uses sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning to autonomously solve complex, multi-step problems. And it’s set to enhance productivity and operations across industries.

Agentic AI systems ingest vast amounts of data from multiple sources to independently analyze challenges, develop strategies and execute tasks like supply chain optimization, cybersecurity vulnerability analysis and helping doctors with time-consuming tasks.

From DSC:
Anyone who is involved in putting on conferences should at least be aware that this kind of thing is now possible!!! Check out the following posting from Adobe (with help from Tata Consultancy Services (TCS).

From impossible to POSSIBLE: Tata Consultancy Services uses Adobe Firefly generative AI and Acrobat AI Assistant to turn hours of work into minutes — from blog.adobe.com

This year, the organizers — innovative industry event company Beyond Ordinary Events — turned to Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to make the impossible “possible.” Leveraging Adobe generative AI technology across products like Adobe Premiere Pro and Acrobat, they distilled hours of video content in minutes, delivering timely dispatches to thousands of attendees throughout the conference.
…
For POSSIBLE ’24, Muche had an idea for a daily dispatch summarizing each day’s sessions so attendees wouldn’t miss a single insight. But timing would be critical. The dispatch needed to reach attendees shortly after sessions ended to fuel discussions over dinner and carry the excitement over to the next day.

The workflow started in Adobe Premiere Pro, with the writer opening a recording of each session and using the Speech to Text feature to automatically generate a transcript. They saved the transcript as a PDF file and opened it in Adobe Acrobat Pro. Then, using Adobe Acrobat AI Assistant, the writer asked for a session summary.

It was that fast and easy. In less than four minutes, one person turned a 30-minute session into an accurate, useful summary ready for review and publication.

By taking advantage of templates, the designer then added each AI-enabled summary to the newsletter in minutes. With just two people and generative AI technology, TCS accomplished the impossible — for the first time delivering an informative, polished newsletter to all 3,500 conference attendees just hours after the last session of the day.

“For college students—and for higher ed itself—AI is a required course” [Merisotis] + other items re: AI in our learning ecosystems

On 08/03/2024, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, accessibility / UDL, adjunct faculty, apprenticeships, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, Bias | Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DE&I), bots, career development, colleges, community colleges, content development, aggregation, repositories, copyright/ownership/NFTs, education, education technology, emerging technologies, faculty/staff, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, higher education, homeschooling/homeschoolers, human-computer interaction (HCI), innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, IT in HE, K-12 related, learning, learning agents, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, platforms, productivity / tips and tricks, real-world assignments, reinvent, skills, student-related, teachers, teaching & learning, teaching online, technologies for your home, technology (general), tools, trends, United States, universities, vendors, vision/possibilities, workplace, youth, by Daniel Christian

For college students—and for higher ed itself—AI is a required course — from forbes.com by Jamie Merisotis

Some of the nation’s biggest tech companies have announced efforts to reskill people to avoid job losses caused by artificial intelligence, even as they work to perfect the technology that could eliminate millions of those jobs.

It’s fair to ask, however: What should college students and prospective students, weighing their choices and possible time and financial expenses, think of this?

The news this spring was encouraging for people seeking to reinvent their careers to grab middle-class jobs and a shot at economic security.

Addressing Special Education Needs With Custom AI Solutions — from teachthought.com
AI can offer many opportunities to create more inclusive and effective learning experiences for students with diverse learning profiles.

For too long, students with learning disabilities have struggled to navigate a traditional education system that often fails to meet their unique needs. But what if technology could help bridge the gap, offering personalized support and unlocking the full potential of every learner?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a powerful ally in special education, offering many opportunities to create more inclusive and effective learning experiences for students with diverse learning profiles.

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11 Summer AI Developments Important to Educators — from stefanbauschard.substack.com by Stefan Bauschard
Equity demands that we help students prepare to thrive in an AI-World

*SearchGPT
*Smaller & on-device (phones, glasses) AI models
*AI TAs
*Access barriers decline, equity barriers grow
*Claude Artifacts and Projects
*Agents, and Agent Teams of a million+
*Humanoid robots & self-driving cars
*AI Curricular integration
*Huge video and video-segmentation gains
*Writing Detectors — The final blow
*AI Unemployment, Student AI anxiety, and forward-thinking approaches
*Alternative assessments

Academic Fracking: When Publishers Sell Scholars Work to AI — from aiedusimplified.substack.com by Lance Eaton
Further discussion of publisher practices selling scholars’ work to AI companies

Last week, I explored AI and academic publishing in response to an article that came out a few weeks ago about a deal Taylor & Francis made to sell their books to Microsoft and one other AI company (unnamed) for a boatload of money.

Since then, two more pieces have been widely shared including this piece from Inside Higher Ed by Kathryn Palmer (and to which I was interviewed and mentioned in) and this piece from Chronicle of Higher Ed by Christa Dutton. Both pieces try to cover the different sides talking to authors, scanning the commentary online, finding some experts to consult and talking to the publishers. It’s one of those things that can feel like really important and also probably only to a very small amount of folks that find themselves thinking about academic publishing, scholarly communication, and generative AI.

At the Crossroads of Innovation: Embracing AI to Foster Deep Learning in the College Classroom — from er.educause.edu by Dan Sarofian-Butin
AI is here to stay. How can we, as educators, accept this change and use it to help our students learn?

The Way Forward
So now what?

In one respect, we already have a partial answer. Over the last thirty years, there has been a dramatic shift from a teaching-centered to a learning-centered education model. High-impact practices, such as service learning, undergraduate research, and living-learning communities, are common and embraced because they help students see the real-world connections of what they are learning and make learning personal.11

Therefore, I believe we must double down on a learning-centered model in the age of AI.

The first step is to fully and enthusiastically embrace AI.
…
The second step is to find the “jagged technological frontier” of using AI in the college classroom.

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Futures Thinking in Education — from gettingsmart.com by Getting Smart Staff

Key Points

Educators should leverage these tools to prepare for rapid changes driven by technology, climate, and social dynamics.
Cultivating empathy for future generations can help educators design more impactful and forward-thinking educational practices.

we think there is room to make search much better than it is today.

we are launching a new prototype called SearchGPT: https://t.co/A28Y03X1So

we will learn from the prototype, make it better, and then integrate the tech into ChatGPT to make it real-time and maximally helpful.

— Sam Altman (@sama) July 25, 2024

Also see:

“Who to follow in AI” in 2024? [Part II] — from ai-supremacy.com by Michael Spencer [some of posting is behind a paywall]
Part II – #19-34
“Who to follow in AI” in 2024? [Part III] — from ai-supremacy.com by Michael Spencer [some of posting is behind a paywall]
Part III – #35-55

Along these lines, also see:

Lots of folks talk about AI influencer content, but these AI influencers are also just damn good humans ?@rowancheung @nonmayorpete @decisionleader @rachel_l_woods @emollick @conorgrennan @sineadbovell @DonAllenIII @ManuVision @karenxcheng

*non-exhaustive, too many to include

— Allie K. Miller (@alliekmiller) July 13, 2024

AI In Medicine: 3 Future Scenarios From Utopia To Dystopia — from medicalfuturist.com by Andrea Koncz
There’s a vast difference between baseless fantasizing and realistic forward planning. Structured methodologies help us learn how to “dream well”.

Key Takeaways

We’re often told that daydreaming and envisioning the future is a waste of time. But this notion is misguided.
We all instinctively plan for the future in small ways, like organizing a trip or preparing for a dinner party. This same principle can be applied to larger-scale issues, and smart planning does bring better results.
We show you a method that allows us to think “well” about the future on a larger scale so that it better meets our needs.

Adobe Unveils Powerful New Innovations in Illustrator and Photoshop Unlocking New Design Possibilities for Creative Pros — from news.adobe.com

Latest Illustrator and Photoshop releases accelerate creative workflows, save pros time and empower designers to realize their visions faster
New Firefly-enabled features like Generative Shape Fill in Illustrator along with the Dimension Tool, Mockup, Text to Pattern, the Contextual Taskbar and performance enhancement tools accelerate productivity and free up time so creative pros can dive deeper into the parts of their work they love
Photoshop introduces all-new Selection Brush Tool and the general availability of Generate Image, Adjustment Brush Tool and other workflow enhancements empowering creators to make complex edits and unique designs
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Nike is using AI to turn athletes’ dreams into shoes — from axios.com by Ina Fried

Zoom in: Nike used genAI for ideation, including using a variety of prompts to produce images with different textures, materials and color to kick off the design process.

What they’re saying: “It’s a new way for us to work,” Nike lead footwear designer Juliana Sagat told Axios during a media tour of the showcase on Tuesday.
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AI meets ‘Do no harm’: Healthcare grapples with tech promises — from finance.yahoo.com by Maya Benjamin

Major companies are moving at high speed to capture the promises of artificial intelligence in healthcare while doctors and experts attempt to integrate the technology safely into patient care.

“Healthcare is probably the most impactful utility of generative AI that there will be,” Kimberly Powell, vice president of healthcare at AI hardware giant Nvidia (NVDA), which has partnered with Roche’s Genentech (RHHBY) to enhance drug discovery in the pharmaceutical industry, among other investments in healthcare companies, declared at the company’s AI Summit in June.

Mistral reignites this week’s LLM rivalry with Large 2 (source) — from superhuman.ai

Today, we are announcing Mistral Large 2, the new generation of our flagship model. Compared to its predecessor, Mistral Large 2 is significantly more capable in code generation, mathematics, and reasoning. It also provides a much stronger multilingual support, and advanced function calling capabilities.

Meta releases the biggest and best open-source AI model yet — from theverge.com by Alex Heath
Llama 3.1 outperforms OpenAI and other rivals on certain benchmarks. Now, Mark Zuckerberg expects Meta’s AI assistant to surpass ChatGPT’s usage in the coming months.

Back in April, Meta teased that it was working on a first for the AI industry: an open-source model with performance that matched the best private models from companies like OpenAI.

Today, that model has arrived. Meta is releasing Llama 3.1, the largest-ever open-source AI model, which the company claims outperforms GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 Sonnet on several benchmarks. It’s also making the Llama-based Meta AI assistant available in more countries and languages while adding a feature that can generate images based on someone’s specific likeness. CEO Mark Zuckerberg now predicts that Meta AI will be the most widely used assistant by the end of this year, surpassing ChatGPT.

4 ways to boost ChatGPT — from wondertools.substack.com by Jeremy Caplan & The PyCoach
Simple tactics for getting useful responses

To help you make the most of ChatGPT, I’ve invited & edited today’s guest post from the author of a smart AI newsletter called The Artificial Corner. I appreciate how Frank Andrade pushes ChatGPT to produce better results with four simple, clever tactics. He offers practical examples to help us all use AI more effectively.
…
Frank Andrade: Most of us fail to make the most of ChatGPT.

We omit examples in our prompts.
We fail to assign roles to ChatGPT to guide its behavior.
We let ChatGPT guess instead of providing it with clear guidance.

If you rely on vague prompts, learning how to create high-quality instructions will get you better results. It’s a skill often referred to as prompt engineering. Here are several techniques to get you to the next level.

Reflections on “What to Know About Buying A Projector for School” [Edwards]

On 07/16/2024, in A/V -- audio/visual, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, colleges, community colleges, Daniel S. Christian, education, education technology, face-to-face, future, higher education, human-computer interaction (HCI), intelligent systems, interaction design, interactivity, internet, IT in HE, K-12 related, learning ecosystem, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, learning spaces, liberal arts, multimedia, Natural Language Processing (NLP), online media, platforms, presentations, productivity / tips and tricks, teachers, teaching & learning, technology (general), tools, United States, universities, usability, user experience (UX), vendors, voice recognition / voice enabled interfaces, by Daniel Christian

What to Know About Buying A Projector for School — from by Luke Edwards
Buy the right projector for school with these helpful tips and guidance.

Picking the right projector for school can be a tough decision as the types and prices range pretty widely. From affordable options to professional grade pricing, there are many choices. The problem is that the performance is also hugely varied. This guide aims to be the solution by offering all you need to know about buying the right projector for school where you are.

Luke covers a variety of topics including:

Types of projectors
Screen quality
Light type
Connectivity
Pricing

From DSC:
I posted this because Luke covered a variety of topics — and if you’re set on going with a projector, this is a solid article. But I hesitated to post this, as I’m not sure of the place that projectors will have in the future of our learning spaces. With voice-enabled apps and appliances continuing to be more prevalent — along with the presence of AI-based human-computer interactions and intelligent systems — will projectors be the way to go? Will enhanced interactive whiteboards be the way to go? Will there be new types of displays? I’m not sure. Time will tell.

Will we throw @sama in jail when self-represented litigants use @ChatGPTapp to navigate the American judicial system?

Generative #AI has great potential to help self-represented litigants trying to enforce their rights. But: when consumers use these tools for assistance, will… pic.twitter.com/aT8ooX3DZL

— Ed Walters (@EJWalters) July 8, 2024

The race against time to reinvent lawyers — from jordanfurlong.substack.com by Jordan Furlong
Our legal education and licensing systems produce one kind of lawyer. The legal market of the near future will need another kind. If we can’t close this gap fast, we’ll have a very serious problem.

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Lawyers will still need competencies like legal reasoning and analysis, statutory and contractual interpretation, and a range of basic legal knowledge. But it’s unhelpful to develop these skills through activities that lawyers won’t be performing much longer, while neglecting to provide them with other skills and prepare them for other situations that they will face. Our legal education and licensing systems are turning out lawyers whose competence profiles simply won’t match up with what people will need lawyers to do.

A good illustration of what I mean can be found in an excellent recent podcast from the Practising Law Institute, “Shaping the Law Firm Associate of the Future.” Over the course of the episode, moderator Jennifer Leonard of Creative Lawyers asked Professors Alice Armitage of UC Law San Francisco and Heidi K. Brown of New York Law School to identify some of the competencies that newly called lawyers and law firm associates are going to need in future. Here’s some of what they came up with:

Agile, nimble, extrapolative thinking
Collaborative, cross-disciplinary learning
Entrepreneurial, end-user-focused mindsets
Generative AI knowledge (“Their careers will be shaped by it”)
Identifying your optimal individual workflow
Iteration, learning by doing, and openness to failure
Leadership and interpersonal communication skills
Legal business know-how, including client standards and partner expectations
Receiving and giving feedback to enhance effectiveness

Legal Tech for Legal Departments – What In-House Lawyers Need to Know — from legal.thomsonreuters.com by Sterling Miller

Whatever the reason, you must understand the problem inside and out. Here are the key points to understanding your use case:

Identify the problem.
What is the current manual process to solve the problem?
Is there technology that will replace this manual process and solve the problem?
What will it cost and do you have (or can you get) the budget?
Will the benefits of the technology outweigh the cost? And how soon will those benefits pay off the cost? In other words, what is the return on investment?
Do you have the support of the organization to buy it (inside the legal department and elsewhere, e.g., CFO, CTO)?

2024-05-13: Of Legal AI — from emergentbehavior.co

Long discussion with a senior partner at a major Bay Area law firm:

Takeaways

A) They expect legal AI to decimate the profession…
B) Unimpressed by most specific legal AI offerings…
C) Generative AI error rates are acceptable even at 10–20%…
D) The future of corporate law is in-house…
E) The future of law in general?…
F) Of one large legal AI player…

2024 Legal Technology Survey Results — from lexology.com

Additional findings of the annual survey include:

77 percent of firms have a formal technology strategy in place
Interest and intentions regarding generative A.I. remain high, with almost 80 percent of participating firms expecting to leverage it within the next five years. Many have either already begun or are planning to undertake data hygiene projects as a precursor to using generative A.I. and other automation solutions. Although legal market analysts have hypothesized that proprietary building of generative A.I. solutions remain out of reach for mid-sized firms, several Meritas survey respondents are making traction. Many other firms are also licensing third-party generative A.I. solutions.
The survey showed strong technology progression among several Meritas member firms, with most adopting a tech stack of core, foundational systems of infrastructure technology and adding cloud-based practice management, document management, time, billing, and document drafting applications.
Most firms reported increased adoption and utilization of options already available within their current core systems, such as Microsoft Office 365 Teams, SharePoint, document automation, and other native functionalities for increasing efficiencies; these functions were used more often in place of dedicated purpose-built solutions such as comparison and proofreading tools.
The legal technology market serving Meritas’ member firms continues to be fractured, with very few providers emerging as market leaders.

AI Set to Save Professionals 12 Hours Per Week by 2029 — from legalitprofessionals.com

Thomson Reuters, a global content and technology company, today released its 2024 Future of Professionals report, an annual survey of more than 2,200 professionals working across legal, tax, and risk & compliance fields globally. Respondents predicted that artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to save them 12 hours per week in the next five years, or four hours per week over the upcoming year – equating to 200 hours annually.

This timesaving potential is the equivalent productivity boost of adding an extra colleague for every 10 team members on staff. Harnessing the power of AI across various professions opens immense economic opportunities. For a U.S. lawyer, this could translate to an estimated $100,000 in additional billable hours.*

Learning Ecosystems

How can businesses stay ahead of trends and technologies that are rapidly changing their industries? [Schindler]

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