When it comes to AI assistants, a battle has been waged between different companies, with assistants like Siri, Cortana, and Alexa at the forefront of the battle. And now a new potential competitor enters the arena.
During a 20 minute onstage demo at Disrupt NYC, creators of Siri Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer revealed Viv – a new AI assistant that makes Siri look like a children’s toy.
“Viv is an artificial intelligence platform that enables developers to distribute their products through an intelligent, conversational interface. It’s the simplest way for the world to interact with devices, services and things everywhere. Viv is taught by the world, knows more than it is taught, and learns every day.”
From DSC: I saw a posting at TechCrunch.com the other day — The Information Age is over; welcome to the Experience Age. In terms of why I’m mentioning that article here, the content of that article is not what’s as relevant here as the title of the article. An interesting concept…and probably spot on; with ramifications for numerous types of positions, skillsets, and industries from all over the globe.
Also see:
Addendum on 5/12/16:
New Siri sibling Viv may be next step in A.I. evolution — from computerworld.com by Sharon Gaudin Excerpt: With the creators of Siri offering up a new personal assistant that won’t just tell you what pizza is but can order one for you, artificial intelligence is showing a huge leap forward. Viv is an artificial intelligence (AI) platform built by Dag Kittlaus and Adam Cheyer, the creators of the AI behind Apple’s Siri, the most well-known digital assistant in the world. Siri is known for answering questions, like how old Harrison Ford is, and reminding you to buy milk on the way home. Viv, though, promises to go well past that.
Per Jack Du Mez at Calvin College, use this app to randomly call on your students — while instilling a game-like environment into your active learning classroom (ALC)!
Description:
Randomly is an app made specifically for teachers and professors. It allows educators to enter their students into individual classes. They can then use the Random Name Selector feature to randomly call on a student to answer a question by one of two ways: Truly random, where repeated names are allowed, or a one pass – where all students are called once before they are called again. The device you’re using will even call out (vocally) the student’s name for you!
This app can also be used to randomly generate groups for you. You can split your class into groups by number of groups or by number of students per group. It intelligently knows what to do with any remaining students too!
This app supports Apple Watch, so you can call on your students with the use of your Apple Watch!
From DSC: In the future, given facial and voice recognition software, I could see an Augmented Reality (AR)-based application whereby a faculty member or a teacher could see icons hovering over the students — letting the faculty member/teacher know who has been called upon recently and who hasn’t been called upon recently (with settings to change the length of time for this type of tracking — i.e., this student has been called upon in this class session, or in the last week, or in the last month, etc.).
Note that such an ecosystem involves people, tools, processes and more — and is constantly changing. As Jane comments:
But the point to make very clear is that a PES is not a prescribed entity – so everyone’s PES will be different. It is also not a fixed entity – organisational elements will change as the individual changes jobs, and personal elements will change as the individual adds (or removes) external people, content and tools in order to maintain an ecosystem that best fits their needs.
Jane also mentions the concept of flows of new ideas and resources. I call these streams of content, and we need to both contribute items to these streams as well as take things from them.
So while Jane and I are on the same page on the vast majority of these concepts (and I would add Harold Jarche to this picture as well, whom Jane mentions with his Personal Knowledge Mastery (PKM) process), Jane broadens the scope of what I normally refer to as a learning ecosystem when she mentions, “it isn’t just about learning, but just as much about doing a job.”
Cookie Monster, Elmo and friends are about to hit a new digital learning curve.
Sesame Workshop, the not-for-profit org that produces “Sesame Street,” and tech giant IBM have entered into a partnership to develop new personalized educational products and platforms for preschool-age kids — with the goal of transforming the ways children learn and teachers teach.
Under the three-year agreement, Sesame Workshop and Big Blue will design interactive educational experiences for use in homes and schools that adapt to the learning preferences and aptitude levels of individual preschoolers.
For now, the organizations are treating the project as an R&D investment. IBM and Sesame Street will deploy engineers, educators and researchers to work side-by-side in classrooms and in their own labs and learning facilities. Later this year, they plan to test and share prototypes with leading teachers, academics, researchers, technologists, gamers, performers and media execs to solicit feedback and brainstorm ways in which cognitive computing can best help preschoolers learn.
From DSC: This will be an important experiment to watch. If it shows promise, it could help parents, pre-school teachers, and the pre-schoolers themselves. Then, the trajectory could make its way to helping early elementary students, to middle school students, to high school students and beyond.
If successful, this is exactly the sort of thing that I could see as one of the key ingredients in the Learning from the [Class] Room vision. Teachers, parents, coaches, etc. will still be critical. But these type of tools and technologies could be running in the background within a blended learning environment — one that can operate at a distance if need be.
The proverb goes hindsight is 20/20, which essentially means you can make better decisions later on when you have become more knowledgeable about the world. But wouldn’t it be nice to be able to make good decisions from the outset when you’re still young? The following tips were compiled for young engineers and interestingly, most of these suggestions revolve around lifelong learning. Experienced engineers weighed in and added their voice to help create this top 15 list of the best tips for young engineers.
It is not a secret that science and engineering professions are occupied mainly by men with only about 20% taken by females. The number of women on executive boards is also extremely low. In order to succeed, both female and male minds are needed for any kind of jobs, especially in science-related industries. Let’s see what initiatives already exist in order to bring more girls and women into STEM!
MakerBot is excited to inspire the next generation of astronauts and Starfleet cadets by supporting the Star Trek Replicator Challenge, a 3D printing challenge developed by Future Engineers for the ASME Foundation, NASA and Star Trek. Participants in the challenge must create a digital model of a non-edible, food-related item for astronauts to 3D print in the year 2050. The Star Trek Replicator Challenge is the third in a series of ‘Future Engineers’ challenges aimed to educate students K-12 about 3D printing and engineering design.
Staring at a blank page can be daunting. Add a reluctant writer to the mix, and what should be a great opportunity for personal expression becomes a personal nightmare. These 4 apps will strengthen students’ writing skills and turn written composition from a chore into an engaging learning activity.
Below is a collection of some very good iPad apps to use with your kids and young learners to help them develop their reading fluency. The apps provide a wide variety of reading materials that include interactive stories, engaging activities and games, quizzes and many more. And because reading is a composite skill, using these apps will also enable kids to practice a number of key subskills related to reading including: pronunciation, vocabulary, phonics, word recognition, and spelling. Check them out and share with us your feedback. Enjoy.
Microsoft has announced beta testing of Minecraft: Education Edition, which is the company’s education-focused suite for Minecraft that integrates tools for teachers and students to help them use the game more effectively in the classroom.
The education-centered offshoot of was first revealed in January of this year. This May, a closed beta of the game will involve more than 100 schools in 30 countries, reports Pradeep of MS Power User. By June, any school will be able to access the Education Edition for free as long as teachers have a fully updated operating system and an Office 365 Education account. Eventually, Microsoft plans to charge $5 per user each year.
Minecraft: Education Edition is specifically tailored to teach the skills that Minecraft cultivates – namely collaboration, navigation, social skills, and empathy.
High school students take note: here’s a cool tool in the form of an app. The free app runs on iOS and Android and just got launched last month pulling almost 5 out of 5 stars after several thousand reviews. For the 20 million college-bound students and 30 million parents, we know you’re drowning in a sea of data scattered all over for the more than 4,000 U.S. colleges and universities. So, Schoold is like Zillow for college hunting – or perhaps match.com for students and universities. It’s a one-stop-shop for everything you need to know, want to know, and have to line up.
Reading comprehension is a matter of decoding, reading speed, and critical thinking about the text, all of which can improve with tiered practice. (See 50 apps for struggling readers.)
So below, in an order of general complexity, are 15 apps for improved reading comprehension, ranging from word and sentence fluency, to recall, to critical thinking skills, to reading speed.
By the nature of reading and literacy progress, most are indeed for K-5 and SLP, but the latter apps, especially Reading Trainer, Compare Twist, and Enchanted Dictionary, can be used through high school in the right context. Let us know on our facebook page what we missed.
The 5 best new 3D tools for April— from creativebloq.com by Rob Redman
We select the best new tools for 3D and VFX artists this month.
Excerpt:
This time of year can often be a quiet one for those of us working in 3D art and visual effects, with developers gearing up for the events season and new releases being a bit thin on the ground.
However there are a few notable updates and newcomers, so have a read below to see what could help you improve your work or help you be more efficient.
We first launched support for 360-degree videos back in March 2015. From musicians to athletes to brands, creators have done some incredible things with this technology. Now, they’ll be able to do even more to bring fans directly into their world, with 360-degree live streaming. And after years of live streaming Coachella for fans around the world who can’t attend the festival, this year we’re bringing you the festival like never before by live streaming select artist performances in 360 degrees this weekend. Starting today, we’re also launching spatial audio for on-demand YouTube videos. Just as watching a concert in 360 degrees can give you an unmatched immersive experience, spatial audio allows you to listen along as you do in real life, where depth, distance and intensity all play a role. Try out this playlist on your Android device.
CWRU was among the first in higher education to begin working with HoloLens, back in 2014. They’ve since discovered new ways the tech could help transform education. One of their current focuses is changing how students experience medical-science courses.
“This is a curriculum that hasn’t drastically changed in more than 100 years, because there simply hasn’t been another way,” says Mark Griswold, the faculty director for HoloLens at CWRU. “The mixed-reality of the HoloLens has the potential to revolutionize this education by bringing 3D content into the real world.”
“Imagine a physics class where you’re able to show how friction works. Imagine being able to experience gravity on Mars — by moving around virtually,” he says. “VR can make science, technology and art come alive.”
VR will soon become an open canvas for educators to create learning experiences. Eventually, fitting VR into the curriculum will be limited only by an instructor’s imagination and budget, says Christopher Sessums, the program director of research and evaluation at Johns Hopkins School of Education.
Burleson and and co-author Armanda Lewis imagine such technology in a year 2041 Holodeck, which Burleson’s NYU-X Lab is currently developing in prototype form, in collaboration with colleagues at NYU Courant, Tandon, Steinhardt, and Tisch.
“The “Holodeck” will support a broad range of transdisciplinary collaborations, integrated education, research, and innovation by providing a networked software/hardware infrastructure that can synthesize visual, audio, physical, social, and societal components,” said Burleson.
It’s intended as a model for the future of cyberlearning experience, integrating visual, audio, and physical (haptics, objects, real-time fabrication) components, with shared computation, integrated distributed data, immersive visualization, and social interaction to make possible large-scale synthesis of learning, research, and innovation.
…British television presenter Diane-Louise Jordan will guide students on a tour through Shakespeare’s hometown of Stratford-upon-Avon, including his childhood home and school; and the bard’s view of London, including the famous Globe Theatre where his plays were performed. (Shakespeare actually died April 23, which this year falls on a Saturday.)
Also see:
You can register to see the recording on that page as well.
Film Students To Compete in Virtual Reality Production Contest — from campustechnology.com by Michael Hart One of the first ever competitions involving virtual reality production will challenge college film students to create their own 360-degree films.
HBO and Discovery Communications announced today that they are partnering with 3D-graphics startup OTOY — both companies taking equity stakes. The partnership marks an effort by the two networks to evolve entertainment experiences beyond two dimensional television. Virtual reality, augmented reality, and even holograms were all highlighted as areas OTOY would help its traditional media partners explore.
TV knows it must push toward virtual and augmented reality
Apple was granted a patent today for a type of live interactive augmented reality (AR) video to be used in future iOS devices, indicating the company may soon enter the AR/VR game. The patent does not appear to be directly related to an AR/VR headset, but is certainly a step in that direction.
The patent describes Apple’s planned augmented reality technology as layered, live AR video that users can interact with via touchscreen. In the live video, objects can be identified and an information layer can be generated for them.
“In some implementations,” the patent text notes, “the information layer can include annotations made by a user through the touch sensitive surface.”
Virtual & Augmented Reality: Blooloop’s Guide to VR and AR — from blooloop.com Visitor attractions are racing to embrace Virtual and Augmented Reality technologies. But what are the potential opportunities and possible pitfalls of VR and AR?
A New Morning — by Magic Leap; posted on 4/19/16
Welcome to a new way to start your day. Shot directly through Magic Leap technology on April 8, 2016 without use of special effects or compositing.
Hyper Vision — from wired.com by Peter Yang
The world’s hottest startup isn’t located in Silicon Valley—it’s in suburban Florida. KEVIN KELLY explores what Magic Leap’s mind-bending technology tells us about the future of virtual reality.
LinkedIn has already cemented its position as the go-to social network for working professionals. Now, it’s aiming at a younger audience with its new app for students that slated to launch on Monday.
Coming to Android and iOS, LinkedIn Students offers college folks a look at the career paths their degrees will afford them once they graduate.
Graduation is quickly approaching. Your job search is all consuming. What do you search for? What job options are best for you? Today, LinkedIn unveils the first-of-its-kind LinkedIn Students app available for iOS and Android, tailored specifically for soon-to-be college graduates looking to answer these very questions. Using insights from LinkedIn’s database of over 400 million professionals, the brand new app helps you discover jobs that are a best fit for graduates with your major, companies that tend to hire from your school and the careers paths of recent alumni with similar degrees.
86% of students choose to go to college to get better jobs, but 44% of graduates are underemployed.* Let LinkedIn Students help you navigate these uncharted waters of finding your first job out of school; something you, yourselves have told us is the paramount challenge you’re facing:
As a student close to graduating, finding a job is the most important aspect of my life right now.
I am graduating with $35,000 of debt so landing a good first job out of college is extremely important to me.
I don’t understand how my major translates into a job I’m qualified for.
These are just a few quotes from San Jose State and University of Central Florida students who recently participated in our pilot test of the app, but it’s no mystery these types of concerns are shared by students across the country. An understandable trend given the uncertainties that come with an economy mired in $1.2 trillion of student loan debt and an unemployment rate among college graduates of 7.2 percent (compared with only 5.5 percent in 2007).**
So how can the new app help you tackle your college to career transition? Think of it as your personal job exploration guide, providing tailored jobs related recommendations based on real data from the career paths of hundreds of millions of successful professionals. You can use these insights to discover and explore career opportunities you hadn’t considered or even known were possible!
Here’s a quick overview:
You can chip away at your job search checklist in any of your in-between moments – walking between classes, waiting in line at the coffee shop or taking a study break. What initially felt like an insurmountable undertaking will morph into a manageable daily to-do list and, before you know it, you’ll no longer be asking “How do I find a job that’s a fit for me?,” but “Which of these jobs is the best fit for me?”
The new LinkedIn Students app is available for iOS and Android in the US only for now. We look forward to hearing your feedback and continuing to improve this experience to help you discover and land a first job you’ll love.
Two days of Facebook’s F8 Conference have come and gone, so here’s a look back at all the things you may have missed from the event. To learn more about each topic, click the links below for full stories.
In a wide-ranging keynote April 12, CEO Mark Zuckerberg laid out the company’s 10-year plan to “Give everyone the power to share anything with anyone.” To do so, Facebook plans to move far beyond its original role as a social network. The firm aims to launch new virtual reality projects, beam Internet across the world using drones and unleash complex artificial-intelligence bots that can fulfill our every digital need.
Before all that can happen, Facebook has to deal with the here and now of improving its current products. On that front, the company made several announcements that will reshape the way people and brands use Facebook and its constellation of apps this year.
Here’s a breakdown of Facebook’s biggest F8 announcements.
When Facebook bought Oculus VR in 2014 for $2 billion, many observers wondered what the world’s largest social networking company wanted with a virtual reality company whose then-unreleased system was pretty much all about single-user experiences. Today at F8, Facebook’s annual developers conference in San Francisco, the company showed off some of the most fleshed-out examples of how it sees VR as a rich social tool. During his F8 keynote address, CTO Mike Schroepfer talked at length about what Facebook explicitly calls “social VR.”
One of the key knocks on virtual reality, the gamer-heavy industry Facebook is betting big on, is that wearing a headset intended to block out the real world in favor of a virtual one isn’t a very social activity. Facebook, an inherently social company, thinks it can change that.
At its F8 developer conference on Wednesday Facebook demoed what it calls “social VR,” which is exactly what it sounds like: Connecting two or more real people in a virtual world.
During the second day keynote of Facebook’s F8 Developer Conference, Oculus showed off an entirely new way to get social in VR.
On stage, Facebook’s CTO Mike Schroepfer showed how 360-degree photos can instantly be shared with a friend in VR, with 360 photos appearing as handheld spheres. You can virtually grab the floating sphere and smash it against your face, you will then be instantly teleported into the content of the spherical photo.
[On 4/12/16], Facebook opened up Instant Articles to all publishers. If you don’t know, Instant Articles are Facebook’s new way to natively load articles within the app using an adapted RSS feed. These native articles, which have a lightning bolt in the top right corner, load in half a second?—?10x faster than if user was to click out to a website. From what I’ve seen so far, they really do load instantaneously and have a great layout and user experience. And if you’re paying attention, you’ll understand that this is their third push for native media consumption: first photos, then videos, and now written content.
…
However, as of [4/13/16], Instant Articles become available to anybody with a Facebook page and a blog. This is a key opportunity for small blogs and publications to get ahead of the game and really understand how best to use the new product.
… Has Facebook been able to achieve what AOL could have a generation ago? By that I mean: Has Facebook become a layer on top of the Internet itself?
Is the Internet of Things the world’s most confusing tech trend? On the one hand, we’re told it’s going to be epic, and soon – all predictions are either in tens of billions (of connected devices) and trillions (of dollars of economic value to be created). On the other hand, the dominant feeling expressed by end users (including at this year’s CES show, arguably the bellwether of the industry) is essentially “meh” – right now the IoT feels like an avalanche of new connected products, many of which seem to solve trivial, “first world” problems: expensive gadgets that resolutely fall in the “nice to have” category, rather than “must have”. And, for all the talk about a mega tech trend, things seem to be moving at the speed of molasses, with little discernible progress year on year.
…
Just as for the Big Data world, the annual update to our Internet of Things Landscape (scroll below for the 2016 version) is a great opportunity to check in on the industry. In 2013, we were trying to make sense of the Internet of Things; in late 2014, it seemed that the IoT had reached escape velocity. In 2016, the IoT space continues to hold considerable promise, but equally, and unsurprisingly, there’s no shortage of obstacles – there is a long road ahead and this trend will unfold over many years, possibly decades.
Imagine if you could snap on a DNA-matching wristband that connects you with long lost cousins, or pick up a personalised VR headset game that could immerse you in the lives of your ancestors? “It’s simply a matter of time before we could see this sort of technology,” says genealogy expert Thomas MacEntee.
Known in the industry as ‘The Tech Guy’, MacEntee runs an online community of 3,000 family history bloggers called GeneaBloggers. He also heads up Hack Genealogy, a blog about “repurposing today’s technology for tomorrow’s genealogy”, as well as the consulting site High-Definition Genealogy. MacEntee is renowned in the industry for spotting emerging family history trends and innovations.
Wearable technology for genealogy research and exploration is currently in its very early days. Ancestry.com, the world’s leading genealogy website, has made the industry’s first foray with its Ancestry app for Apple Watch, which launched last April. The app offers speedy access to Ancestry.com’s 14 billion records and images, allows the user to edit their family tree in an instant and delivers regular family history-related notifications.
That’s pretty much it for the moment – but MacEntee, who has envisaged a number of exciting potential uses, believes that this is just the beginning.
I’m often asked about the set up I use to film my videos. Here’s a 360 spherical photo that I’ve annotated. Feel free to scroll and zoom around to check out my setup.
We have now been Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) for three years, and boy, do the students bring it. They bring it all! We have iPads, Surface, iPhones, Droids, Chromebooks, Macs, and PC laptops. Here’s my current thinking.
Music is for everyone. So this year for Music In Our Schools month, we wanted to make learning music a bit more accessible to everyone by using technology that’s open to everyone: the web. Chrome Music Lab is a collection of experiments that let anyone, at any age, explore how music works. They’re collaborations between musicians and coders, all built with the freely available Web Audio API. These experiments are just a start. Check out each experiment to find open-source code you can use to build your own.
I love the School Report scheme that the BBC run via Newsround. We all remember the Newsrounds of our youth. For me it was John Craven who made me watch it whenever it was on. It was this report I saw recently on eight things teachers should learn, which got me thinking about eight things I thought teachers should learn about edtech.
My work sees me regularly helping teachers learn different things related to the use of technology and so in this post, I’m going to talk about the eight things I think teachers should learn with #edtech to help support their use of technology to enhance learning in the classroom.
As we move toward interacting more with students who have an individualized education program (IEP) indicating that they need additional time on tests and quizzes or just need to deal with life issues, it is imperative that the learning management system (LMS) depended upon by an instructor and student alike be properly configured for such accommodations. Canvas and Moodle are currently two of the most popular learning management systems, and both offer the ability to make adjustments to quiz functions within the course without compromising the overall structure of the course. In this article, we will examine how to do so and offer some tips on situations where they are relevant.
[The] Chrome web store is packed full of all kinds of educational apps and extensions some of which are also integrated with Google Drive. For those of you looking for a handy resource of Chrome apps to use with students in class, check out this comprehensive chart. In today’s post we are sharing with you a collection of some practical Chrome extensions to unleash learners creativity. Using these resources, students will be able to engage in a number of creative literacy activities that will allow them to multimodally communicate their thoughts, share their ideas and develop new learning skills.
How do you work technology into the pedagogy, instead of just using something cool? That task can be especially daunting in language arts literacy classrooms where reading and writing skill development is the crux of daily lessons. However, as 1:1 technology initiatives roll out, integrating technology into the classroom is our reality.
With hundreds of sites, apps, Chrome extensions, and platforms available, choosing the right ones can seem overwhelming. As an eighth-grade language arts teacher, I’ve experienced this myself. Following are four tools that can help provide immediate formative assessment data as well as top-of-the-rotation feedback to help students develop personal learning goals.
If, like my school, you’re in a “Chromebook District,” these suggested tools will work well because all integrate perfectly when you sign in with your Google ID, limiting the need for multiple passwords. This saves a lot of student confusion, too.
This giggly play session actually was a serious math lesson about big and small and non-standard measurements. Dreamed up by Richardson and kindergarten teacher Carol Hunt, it aims to get the children to think of animal steps as units of measurement, using them to mark how many it takes each animal to get from a starting line to the target.
Teachers call such melding of art and traditional subjects “art integration,” and it’s a new and increasingly popular way of bringing the arts into the classroom. Instead of art as a stand-alone subject, teachers are using dance, drama and the visual arts to teach a variety of academic subjects in a more engaging way.
Paul Pattison and Luke Minaker knew they were onto something when they got an email from the mother of a nine-year-old who read the first instalment of their interactive story, Weirdwood Manor.
“She wrote that she couldn’t get her son to pick up a book,” said Pattison, technical director of All Play No Work, producer of the iPad app. “She got the app for her son and he went through it in two nights. He finished both books.
“And then because we don’t have book 3 out yet, unprompted by her he went over to the bookshelf and pulled off a paperback and started reading chapter books again.”
Every year, Microsoft holds a developer event called “Build.” And recently, those events have gone from snoozers to exciting showcases. Microsoft has a winner with Windows 10 (as long as you ignore the phones), a robust personal assistant in Cortana (that works just fine on a laptop), and a wild holographic future to plan with HoloLens. It’s a lot to take in, and at this year’s Build Microsoft we got updates on all of it. And a few surprises.
Going in, we weren’t totally sure what would be coming next for Windows 10, but it turns out there’s a lot that Microsoft has planned. It’s not just that there are new apps, there are also new bots, which will help people handle all sorts of small tasks. In fact, those bots and Microsoft’s vision of how they should work stole the entire show. Windows, Xbox: you’re cool, but the future is bots.
To that end, Microsoft has published a new Bot Framework, which makes it easier to build chatbots using either C# or Node.js. Working with the tools isn’t so easy that anyone could do it, but they can help reduce some of the difficulties of conversing with a computer.
It was one of the main announcements from Nadella’s keynote address at Microsoft’s Build developer conference Wednesday.
Also see:
Microsoft’s Build 2016 message: ‘we love Cortana’ (but should users?) — from thenextweb.com by Nate Swanner Excerpt:
Build 2016 has one clear takeaway: Cortana is what matters, at least for now. At almost every product or service announcement at this morning’s keynote, Microsoft made a point to mention that it would also work with Cortana. At a deep dive event for press later in the day, Microsoft further highlighted its commitment to the digital assistant. .
From DSC: Questions/relevance for those working higher ed:
Are Computer Science programs able to keep up with the pace of these Human Computer Interaction (HCI)-related changes? The changes in AI/cognitive computing? Are courses being created to address these new skills? These developments also impact those teaching about user experience design, application/product design, and more. .
How will such personal assistants be used by the students? By faculty members?
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