ABA’s Profile of the Legal Profession for 2022 — from americanbar.org

Here’s What the Legal Profession Looks Like in 2022 — from legaltechmonitor.com by Laura Bagby

Excerpt:

White, male attorneys continue to make up the majority of lawyers in the U.S., according to the ABA’s Profile of the Legal Profession, an annual report on diversity in the legal profession that was released last month.

However, the number of female attorneys and those from underrepresented ethnic and racial communities is growing, especially among law students and associates.

California Takes Up Law Firm Ownership Fight After ABA Sidesteps — from news.bloomberglaw.com by Sam Skolnik

Excerpt:

The fight to overhaul law firm ownership limits is moving to California after the American Bar Association sided against major changes.

State lawmakers are set to vote before the end of the month on legislation that would allow the California bar to test new legal service models to make them more affordable. An amended version of the bill would still prevent non-lawyer companies from co-owning firms, however, and ban the sharing of legal fees with non-lawyers.

Founded Just Eight Months Ago, Redgrave Data Reports ‘Enormous’ Growth in its E-Discovery and Data Services Company — from lawnext.com by Bob Ambrogi

Excerpt:

Now, eight months after its launch, Redgrave Data is reporting that it has seen enormous growth, bringing on multiple anchor clients that include some of the world’s largest tech companies — although it is not naming names — and says it plans to establish a “significant presence” in Germany by the end of the year to serve clients there and globally.

 

Yale Study: Vast Majority of High Schoolers Unhappy at School — from fee.org by Kerry McDonald
The Yale findings echo previous conclusions about young people’s attitudes toward school.

Excerpt:

Most high school students are not happy at school. A new study by Yale researchers finds that nearly three-quarters of high schoolers report negative feelings toward school. The study surveyed more than 20,000 high school students in all 50 US states and found widespread dissatisfaction at school across all demographic groups, with girls reporting slightly more negative emotions than boys. According to Yale co-author Zorana Ivcevic,

It was higher than we expected. We know from talking to students that they are feeling tired, stressed, and bored, but were surprised by how overwhelming it was.

From DSC:
If you were to have polled him during his ninth through eleventh-grade years, our son would have been one of the very disgruntled students going through high school. His senior year was spent doing exactly what he wanted to be doing — and he was much happier, more engaged, and more motivated to learn the material. He was also around an entirely different student body his senior year — where students were there because they wanted to be there and they were all pursuing their craft.

Fast forward a couple of years, and he actually enjoyed a good deal of his learning experiences this summer and he’s really looking forward to his film and acting classes this fall. It’s amazing the amount of energy and determination/interest that gets unleashed when the motivation is intrinsic.
.

Learners need: More voice. More choice. More control. -- this image was created by Daniel Christian

Also from fee.org by Kerry McDonald:

.
9 Digital Etiquette Tips — from techlearning.com by Lisa Nielsen
Teaching proper digital etiquette to students starts with modeling it

Excerpt:

It’s undeniable that the pandemic changed the way we teach, learn, work, and live, but when some people returned to in-person learning and their schools, it seemed they could use some advice on digital etiquette for the new, and extremely connected, world in which we are now operating. This is a world where at any time you may be meeting or teaching in-person, via video, phone, or a combination thereof at the same time.

While adapting was easier for some, others could use a bit of help. For those people, you may want to share or discuss these tips with them.

A Guide To Design Thinking For Kids — from edtechreview.in by Saniya Khan

Excerpt:

The concept is active and inclusive. What’s more, children embrace design thinking with enthusiasm. Across the globe, schools are embracing design thinking as a new way to learn and increase student participation. It should be on our education agenda. Of course, this is more complicated than standard repackaged evaluations. However, conceptual thinking gives children golden opportunities for commitment and creativity, two prerequisites for true learning.
.

 

How Accredible Makes Learning Credible — from gettingsmart.com by Tom Vander Ark

Key Points

  • To increase the value of credentials, Accredible launched Spotlight Directory.
  • This allows issuers to provide a home base for people that hold their credentials.

Excerpts:

Learners store credentials in their Accredible wallet and can incorporate them into their LinkedIn profile.

To increase the value of credentials, Accredible launched Spotlight Directory which allows issuers to provide a home base for people that hold their credentials. For example, the Hootsuite Certified Professionals Directory showcases everyone that has earned a Hootsuite credential.

The faster the world of work changes, the more the transcripts lose signal value and the more we need finer grained and more dynamic ways of communicating capabilities.

Tom Vander Ark


Addendum on 8/22/22:

What parents should say to teachers (according to teachers) — from washingtonpost.com by Elizabeth Chang

Excerpt:

“Parents are often surprised by stories of other parents’ treatment of teachers,” wrote Margaret Flaherty, 42, a high school English teacher at a public school in Byfield, Mass. “When I share some of the things parents have said or written to me, mouths go agape. They can be mean. Very mean. And we are so tired. Start with assuming good intentions and take it from there.”


 

What a New Strategy at 2U Means for the Future of Online Higher Education — from edsurge.com by Phil Hill

Excerpt:

The acceleration is that 2U is going all in on the education platform strategy that started with the company’s acquisition of edX last year. The idea at the time was to rely on a flywheel effect, where edX can upsell to its tens of millions of registered learners taking free or low-cost online courses known as MOOCs, thus driving down the marketing costs required for the OPM business, while offering a spectrum of options—from free MOOCs to stackable certificates, to bootcamps and short courses, all the way to full degrees. The flywheel aspect is that the more the strategy succeeds, the more revenue is made by institutional partners and by the company, leading to more free courses and registered learners. It’s a self-reinforcing strategy that is the same one followed by Coursera.
.

 

Dive Into AI, Avatars and the Metaverse With NVIDIA at SIGGRAPH — from blogs.nvidia.com

Excerpt:

Innovative technologies in AI, virtual worlds and digital humans are shaping the future of design and content creation across every industry. Experience the latest advances from NVIDIA in all these areas at SIGGRAPH, the world’s largest gathering of computer graphics experts, [which ran from Aug. 8-11].

At SIGGRAPH, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang Illuminates Three Forces Sparking Graphics Revolution — from blogs.nvidia.com by Rick Merritt
NVIDIA unveils new products and research to transform industries with AI, the metaverse and digital humans.

NVIDIA AI Makes Performance Capture Possible With Any Camera — from blogs.nvidia.com by Isha Salian
Derivative, Notch, Pixotope and others use NVIDIA Vid2Vid Cameo and 3D body-pose estimation tools to drive performances in real time.

How to Start a Career in AI — from blogs.nvidia.com by Brian Caulfield
Four most important steps to starting a career in AI, seven big questions answered.

As Far as the AI Can See: ILM Uses Omniverse DeepSearch to Create the Perfect Sky — from blogs.nvidia.com by Richard Kerris
Omniverse AI-enabled search tool lets legendary studio sift through massive database of 3D scenes.

Future of Creativity on Display ‘In the NVIDIA Studio’ During SIGGRAPH Special Address — from blogs.nvidia.com by Gerardo Degaldo
Major NVIDIA Omniverse updates power 3D virtual worlds, digital twins and avatars, reliably boosted by August NVIDIA Studio Driver; #MadeInMachinima contest winner revealed.

What Is Direct and Indirect Lighting? — from blogs.nvidia.com by JJ Kim
In computer graphics, the right balance between direct and indirect lighting elevates the photorealism of a scene.

NVIDIA Studio Laptops Offer Students AI, Creative Capabilities That Are Best in… Class — from blogs.nvidia.com by Gerardo Degaldo
Designed for creativity and speed, Studio laptops are the ultimate creative tool for aspiring 3D artists, video editors, designers and photographers.

Design in the Age of Digital Twins: A Conversation With Graphics Pioneer Donald Greenberg — from blogs.nvidia.com by Rick Merritt
From his Cornell office, home to a career of 54 years and counting, he shares with SIGGRAPH attendees his latest works in progress.

 

Here Are Some Dos And Don’ts Of Disability Language — from forbes.com by Andrew Pulrang

Excerpt:

Is there a way for anyone to navigate disability language clearly, safely, and respectfully?

Obviously, it’s impossible to satisfy everyone. But that doesn’t mean there are no useful guidelines. Here are a few tips to sort through the competing schools of thought on disability language, and ride the various waves of popularity and revision that disability language goes through.

1. Recognize obviously insulting terms and stop using or tolerating them.
2. Aim to be factual, descriptive, and simple, not condescending, sentimental, or awkward.
3. Respect disabled people’s actual language preferences.

Disability Language Style Guide — from National Center on Disaplity and Journalism (ncdj.org)

Disability and Health Overview  — from cdc.gov

Research Center | ALICE in focus studies:
Financial Hardship Among People With Disabilities

Excerpt:

According to the outdated Federal Poverty Level, 18% of people with disabilities in the U.S. lived in poverty in 2019. Yet United For ALICE data shows that another 34% were also struggling, in households that earned above the FPL but less than what it costs to afford the basics. These households are ALICE: Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed.

Disability & Socioeconomic Status — from the American Psychological Association (apa.org)

Excerpt:

Socioeconomic status (SES) encompasses not just income but also educational attainment, financial security, and subjective perceptions of social status and social class. Socioeconomic status can encompass quality of life attributes as well as the opportunities and privileges afforded to people within society. Poverty, specifically, is not a single factor but rather is characterized by multiple physical and psychosocial stressors. Further, SES is a consistent and reliable predictor of a vast array of outcomes across the life span, including physical and psychological health. Thus, SES is relevant to all realms of behavioral and social science, including research, practice, education and advocacy.

Those with Disabilities Earn 37% Less on Average; Gap is Even Wider in Some States — air.org

Subminimum Wage and Sheltered Workshops — from United Way of South Central Michigan

Congress enacted the Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938 as part of the New Deal; one of the Act’s provisions, Section 14 (c), grants special certificates allowing for the employment of workers with disabilities below the federal minimum wage.

Many employers operating under 14(c) have historically employed people with disabilities in segregated work centers commonly referred to as sheltered workshops. This creates a situation where the employer profits from paying sub-minimum wages to their employees with disabilities. Some states have prohibited the practice of subminimum wages and sheltered workshops altogether; however as of 2020, 46 states and the District of Columbia continue to allow 14(c) certificates. The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights revealed that in 2017 and 2018, the average wage of a person with a disability working under a 14(c) certificate was $3.34 per hour and the average number of hours worked was 16 hours per week, making the average wage just $53.44 per week.

Employment First is a state and national movement to help individuals with disabilities realize their fullest employment potential through the achievement of individual, competitive, and integrated employment outcomes. Employment First in Michigan has established guidelines to help move the state to community-based and integrated employment by using executive orders and passing legislation.

 

Nvidia launches new metaverse efforts at SIGGRAPH — from inside.com

Excerpt:

There is an increasing overlap between computer graphics, the metaverse and AI and that overlap is exactly what is on display this week at the SIGGRAPH 2022 conference, where Nvidia is revealing its latest set of software innovations for computer graphics.

[On 8/11/22] at the conference, Nvidia announced a series of technology innovations that bring the metaverse and AI closer together than ever before. Among the announcements is the Nvidia Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine, which is a set of tools and services designed to create AI-powered virtual assistants.

Also relevant/see:

Nvidia Sees a Metaverse Populated With Lifelike Chatbot Avatars
— from cnet.com by Stephen Shankland

Excerpt:

What’s happening
Nvidia announced technology to let metaverse developers create lifelike avatars that can give an animated human face to the computers that people will interact with online.

Why it matters
The metaverse needs new computing tools if it’s to live up to its potential of new 3D realms for working, learning, socializing and goofing off, and Nvidia’s technology could also eventually give humans a new look online, not just bots.

 

Learning Management Systems Are Getting Smarter — from campustechnology.com by Mary Grush and John Baker

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

Grush: Why do you at D2L present a ‘common learning platform’?

Baker: The common learning platform is a critical part of our strategy for educators and learners alike. We decided years ago that we did not want to build multiple different platforms for K12, higher education, or the workplace — we found it better to focus on one platform that met different use cases.

One great example of how this single platform across markets helps is what we’re doing with D2L Wave — where we match employees in the workforce to our academic clients. This takes the friction out of all the steps required to enroll in micro-credentials and other programs, and it helps an employee with career progression. D2L Wave makes it easy to connect learners with the right education to help them take the next step in their career or to support them to get better at their craft — this is key for upskilling the workforce.

 

Augmented Books Are On The Way According To Researchers — from vrscout.com by Kyle Melnick

Excerpt:

Imagine this. You’re several chapters into a captivating novel when a character from an earlier book makes a surprise appearance. You swipe your finger across their name on the page at which point their entire backstory is displayed on a nearby smartphone, allowing you to refresh your memory before moving forward.

This may sound like science fiction, but researchers at the University of Surrey in England say that the technology described above is already here in the form of “a-books” (augmented reality books).

The potential use-cases for such a technology are virtually endless. As previously mentioned, a-books could be used to deliver character details and plot points for a variety of fictional works. The same technology could also be applied to textbooks, allowing students to display helpful information on their smartphones, tablets, and smart TVs with the swipe of a finger.

From DSC:

  • How might instructional designers use this capability?
  • How about those in theatre/drama?
  • Educational gaming?
  • Digital storytelling?
  • Interaction design?
  • Interface design?
  • User experience design?

Also see:


 
 

A Best-Selling Textbook Is Now Free — from insidehighered.com by Liam Knox
A popular chemistry book’s jump from a publishing titan to an OER pioneer could be pivotal for the open access movement. For the author, it’s also a fitting tribute to his late son.

Excerpt:

John McMurry’s textbook Organic Chemistry has helped millions of students across the globe pass the infamous gauntlet of its namesake class — also known among stressed-out pre-med students as “orgo” — since the book was first printed in 1984.

For his bestseller’s 10th edition, McMurry has decided to part ways with his longtime publisher, the industry giant Cengage, which has published the book since the beginning. He recently sold the rights to OpenStax, a nonprofit based at Rice University that is dedicated to developing open education resources (OER), learning and research materials created and licensed to be free for the user.

From DSC:
From someone paying for a young adult to get through college, I hope this kind of thing happens more often! 🙂 But seriously, there are too many instances when students have been treated as cash cows, when we should have been bending over backward to help them get their educations.

For example, if I pay an invoice from our son’s university by credit card, I get a 3% charge — of the total invoice/$$ amount!!! — added to the bill. Are you kidding me? I have to pay several hundred dollars just for an electronic transaction?!

Can you imagine if the same thing happened to the rest of us at restaurants, hotels, grocery stores, etc. out there? Consumers would throw a fit! And I’d be right there with them.


Also related, see:

Millennials have money problems — from linkedin.com by Taylor Borden

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

The average millennial is $117,000 in debt, but don’t blame avocado toast. According to new research, more than 70% of millennials have some form of non-mortgage debt, typically linked to student loans and credit cards.

Too Broke to Finish a Ph.D. Program? Tell Us About It — from the chronicle.com by Fernanda Zamudio-Suarez

Excerpt:

Doctoral programs can be long, trying, and expensive — even cost-prohibitive, depending on your circumstances.


 

The future of learning: Co-creating skills development strategies with employee preferences — from chieflearningofficer.com by Stacey Young Rivers
The limitations of developing just-in-time learning strategies perpetuate a paradigm where learning and development can appear ineffective for teams that have to move quickly and fail fast.

Excerpt:

I believe the future of learning will be a system where employees and learning teams co-create experiences. No longer will skills development programs be created in silos for employees to consume. Gone will be the days of conducting exhaustive needs analysis that can add layers of complexity for program delivery.

The limitations of developing just-in-time learning strategies perpetuate a paradigm where learning and development can appear ineffective for teams that have to move quickly and fail fast. Thinking about how to overcome these challenges conjures a solution similar to a metaverse, a persistent virtual world that is always open. One value proposition of a metaverse is that everyone can create their own adventure in an ecosystem supporting curiosity and experimentation, two areas undergirding skills development.

With this lens, understanding employee preferences for learning is the beginning of co-creating experiences, and one approach for how L&D leaders can begin to structure skills development programs. While conducting a study to engage employees in training, we uncovered new insights into where corporate L&D is headed in the future.

Also relevant here, see:

Workplace Learning: Still a Mess — from eliterate.us by Michael Feldstein

Excerpt:

There’s a mantra these days that higher education needs to get better at listening to industry so they can better prepare students for work. And while there is definitely some truth to that, it assumes that “industry” knows what it needs its workers to know. Former HP CEO Lew Platt once famously said, “If only Hewlett Packard knew what Hewlett Packard knows, we’d be three times more productive.”

In other words, a lot of vital know-how is locked up in pockets within the organization. It doesn’t reach either the training folks or the HR folks. So how are either universities or EdTech professional development companies supposed to serve an invisible need?

It’s not that they don’t know how to learn or they don’t like to learn online. It’s because their experience tells them that their valuable time spent “learning” might not equate to actual skills development.


Addendum on 8/15/22:


 

Radar Trends to Watch: August 2022 — from oreilly.com by Mike Loukides
Developments in Security, Quantum Computing, Energy, and More

Excerpt:

The large model train keeps rolling on. This month, we’ve seen the release of Bloom, an open, large language model developed by the BigScience collaboration, the first public access to DALL-E (along with a guide to prompt engineering), a Copilot-like model for generating regular expressions from English-language prompts, and Simon Willison’s experiments using GPT-3 to explain JavaScript code.

On other fronts, NIST has released the first proposed standard for post-quantum cryptography (i.e., cryptography that can’t be broken by quantum computers). CRISPR has been used in human trials to re-engineer a patient’s DNA to reduce cholesterol. And a surprising number of cities are paying high tech remote workers to move there.

 

The Metaverse Is Not a Place — from oreilly.com by Tim O’Reilly
It’s a communications medium.

Excerpt:

Foundations of the metaverse
You can continue this exercise by thinking about the metaverse as the combination of multiple technology trend vectors progressing at different speeds and coming from different directions, and pushing the overall vector forward (or backward) accordingly. No new technology is the product of a single vector.

So rather than settling on just “the metaverse is a communications medium,” think about the various technology vectors besides real-time communications that are coming together in the current moment. What news from the future might we be looking for?

  • Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality
  • Social media
  • Gaming
  • AI
  • Cryptocurrencies and “Web3”
  • Identity

#metaverse #AI #communications #gaming #socialmedia #cryptocurrencies #Web3 #identity #bots #XR #VR #emergingtechnologies

 

one hundred best workplaces for innovators -- from fastcompany dot com

one hundred best workplaces for innovators — from fastcompany.com

Excerpt:

In this era of distributed workforces and mass attrition (the so-called Great Resignation), our fourth annual Best Workplaces for Innovators list highlights more than 100 companies that energize employees by rewarding creativity wherever it arises. The venerable toy giant Mattel operates a “virtual garage platform” that allows workers at any level to pitch new concepts, while Maverick Quantum, a Texas-based artificial intelligence platform, goes one step further, soliciting ideas not only from employees but also from their family members. “These innovative organizations have cultures that offer meaningful employee engagement, and a chance to change the world,” says Paul Daugherty, group chief executive of Technology and CTO at Accenture, Fast Company’s research partner on Best Workplaces for Innovators.

One of the articles in this series is at:

Best Workplaces for Innovators 2022: Innovation Team of the Year — from fastcompany.com by Jay Woodruff
A group of Alaska Airlines employees take top honors.

Excerpt:

Whether focused on microscopic computer chips or cement trucks full of concrete, these six teams stood out to Fast Company judges for devising innovative solutions to global problems.

 

The edtech top 50 — emerging companies for higher education — from medium.com by Nic Newman (back from June 27, 2022)

 
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