Amusing Pieces Made with Shadows — from fubiz.net by Vincent Bal
On 01/25/2023,
in art, creativity,
by Daniel Christian
On 01/09/2023,
in 24x7x365 access, A/V -- audio/visual, Adobe, adult learning, animation, art, career development, collaboration, content development, aggregation, repositories, creativity, design, digital audio, digital photography, digital storytelling, digital video, education technology, Emotion, engagement / engaging students, experimentation, homeschooling/homeschoolers, interaction design, photography, platforms, presentations, productivity / tips and tricks, professional development, project-based learning, remote teaching and learning, simulations, skills, social learning / networks, social media, story, storytelling, student-related, tools, training / L&D, United States, vendors, web-based collaboration, webinars, youth,
by Daniel Christian
behance.net/live/ <— Check out our revamped schedule!
Join us in the morning for Adobe Express streams — If you are an aspiring creative, small business owner, or looking to kickstart a side hustle – these live streams are for you!
Then level up your skills with Creative Challenges, Bootcamps, and Pro-Tips. Get inspired by artists from all over the world during our live learning events. Tune in to connect directly with your instructors and other creatives just like you.
In the afternoon, join creatives in their own Community Streams! Laugh and create along side other Adobe Live Community members on Behance, Youtube and Twitch!
For weekly updates on the Adobe Live schedule + insight into upcoming guests and content, join our discord communities!
On 12/28/2022,
in adjunct faculty, Alternatives, art, business, business side of he, career development, changing business models, colleges, communities of practice, community colleges, creativity, credentialing, curriculum, dangers of the status quo, Daniel S. Christian, Design Thinking, drama/theater, faculty, higher education, ideas, innovation, instructional design, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, media/film, student-related, United States, vendors, videoconferencing, Virtual Reality (VR) / worlds / learning,
by Daniel Christian
From DSC:
Our son recently took a 3-day intensive course on the Business of Acting. It was offered by the folks at “My College Audition” — and importantly, the course was not offered by the university where he is currently working on a BFA in Acting. By the way, aspiring performing arts students may find this site very beneficial/helpful as well. (Example blog posting here.)
The course was actually three hours of learning on a Sunday night, a Monday night, and a Tuesday night from 6-9pm.
He learned things that he mentioned have not been taught in his undergrad program (at least not so far). When I asked him what he liked most about the course, he said:
- These people are out there doing this (DSC insert: To me, this sounds like the use of adjunct faculty in higher ed)
- There were 9 speakers in the 9 hours of classtime
- They relayed plenty of resources that were very helpful and practical. He’s looking forward to pursuing these leads further.
He didn’t like that there were no discussion avenues/forums available. And as a paying parent, I didn’t like that we had to pay for yet another course and content that he wasn’t getting at his university. It may be that the university that he’s studying at will offer such a course later in the curriculum. But after two years of college experience, he hasn’t come across anything this practical and he is eagerly seeking out this type of practical/future-focused information. In fact, it’s critical to him staying with acting…or not. He needs this information sooner in his program.
It made me reflect on the place of adjunct faculty within higher education — folks who are out there “doing” what they are teaching about. They tend to be more up-to-date in their real-world knowledge. Sabbaticals are helpful in this regard for full-time faculty, but they don’t come around nearly enough to keep one’s practical, career-oriented knowledgebase up-to-date.
Again, this dilemma is to be expected, given our current higher education learning ecosystem. Faculties’ plates are full. They don’t have time to pursue this kind of endeavor in addition to their daily responsibilities. Staff aren’t able to be out there “doing” these things either.
This brings me back to design thinking. We’ve got to come up with better ways of offering student-centered education, programming, and content/resources.
My son walked away shaking his head a bit regarding his current university. At a time when students and families are questioning the return on their investments in traditional institutions of higher education, this issue needs to be taken very seriously.
Also potentially relevant for some of the performing arts students out there:
- Voice Acting & Character Voices for Video Games & Animations — from udemy.com
Develop New Character Voices and Discover the Voice Acting Secrets of 10 Successful Voice Actors from Around The World!
Master of Lettering — from theawesomer.com by Tomasz Biernat
Also fun/see:
Everyday Situations Take an Amusing Turn in Toon Joosen’s Clever Collages — from thisiscolossal.com by Grace Ebert and Toon Joosen
On 12/22/2022,
in art, blogs / blogging / vlogging, career development, creativity, digital audio, digital photography, digital storytelling, digital video, education, Google, K-12 related, languages and translation, mathematics, multimedia, music, online media, passions, photography, special needs, teachers, teaching & learning, writing,
by Daniel Christian
Inspiring Goals: Educators Share Their Vision for the Classroom in 2023 — from blog.edmentum.com
Excerpt:
We asked educators on Facebook and Twitter to share with us what their goals for the classroom are for 2023. Here are a few of our favorite responses that we think will inspire you as you set your own goals for 2023:
MAKING THE BENEFITS OF PRE-K EDUCATION LAST — from thetechedvocate.org by Matthew Lynch
Excerpt:
Pre-K education has come to the forefront recently. Earlier, a kid’s first five years of education were essentially the family’s responsibility. However, research has revealed that these first five years establish the foundation for their further development.
…
It’s worth investing your time and effort in early education programs as they offer several benefits. Pre-K learning gets the children ready for academic success and empowers them for adulthood. Children who have attended early education programs are more likely to pursue higher education and receive higher salaries when they join the workforce, thus securing a better life for themselves.
9 Tech-Friendly Hobby Ideas for High School Students That Will Help Their Career Prospects — from emergingedtech.com by Lucy Manole
Excerpt:
Hobbies and interests are great additions to your resume. They provide potential employers with a fair idea about your personality and help them understand whether you’re the right fit for the position you are applying for.
Hobbies increase your chances of employability by demonstrating your passion and dedication. They help you become more adaptable and reduce stress thereby influencing your performance at school.
Finding a new hobby can be challenging as there are so many hobbies to choose from. A hobby is something that keeps you engaged and happy in your free time. Hence, you must choose a hobby that helps you relax your mind while, ideally, complementing your existing skills. This will give you a competitive edge over others when searching for a new job.
Here’s a list of top hobbies that will boost your resume and make you more employable.
9 Hobby Ideas You Can Add to Your Resume
#1. Blogging
The School That Calls the Police on Students Every Other Day — from propublica.org by Jennifer Smith Richards, Chicago Tribune, and Jodi S. Cohen, ProPublica
Excerpt:
On the last street before leaving Jacksonville, there’s a dark brick one-story building that the locals know as the school for “bad” kids. It’s actually a tiny public school for children with disabilities. It sits across the street from farmland and is 2 miles from the Illinois city’s police department, which makes for a short trip when the school calls 911.
Administrators at the Garrison School call the police to report student misbehavior every other school day, on average. And because staff members regularly press charges against the children — some as young as 9 — officers have arrested students more than 100 times in the last five school years, an investigation by the Chicago Tribune and ProPublica found. That is an astounding number given that Garrison, the only school that is part of the Four Rivers Special Education District, has fewer than 65 students in most years.
This year, the Tribune and ProPublica have been exposing the consequences for students when their schools use police as disciplinarians. The investigation “The Price Kids Pay” uncovered the practice of Illinois schools working with local law enforcement to ticket students for minor misbehavior. Reporters documented nearly 12,000 tickets in dozens of school districts, and state officials moved quickly to denounce the practice.
Best YouTube Math Channels — from educatorstechnology.com by Med Kharbach, PhD
Excerpt:
The list below features some of the best Math YouTube channels to help your students and kids learn math in engaging ways. I was so picky in my selection and I handpicked only those math channels that I believe would provide real educational value to students.
.
There’s not a lot of research on dysgraphia yet—but here are a few signs to look out for, plus some strategies to help affected kids express themselves. pic.twitter.com/rlb9p9D8Yu
— edutopia (@edutopia) December 17, 2022
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How Inflation Is Squeezing Early Childhood Educators — from edsurge.com by Emily Tate Sullivan
Rationing heat, taking on extra jobs, dipping into savings, raising wages for staff — child care providers are using a mishmash of methods to manage rising prices and keep their doors open.
On 12/10/2022,
in Adobe, art, Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning / Deep Learning / Algorithms, copyright/ownership/NFTs, emerging technologies,
by Daniel Christian
On 12/01/2022,
in art, creativity, digital photography, maker movement, photography,
by Daniel Christian
Animals of Translucent Botanics Center in Molly Devlin’s Ethereal Portraits — from thisiscolossal.com by Grace Ebert and Molly Devlin
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Top of the Stack: Colossal’s Favorite Art Books of 2022 — from thisiscolossal.com
Excerpt:
As we near the end of 2022, we’re taking a look back at the year, starting with the books we found most compelling, impressive, and inspirational. We’ve published dozens of articles on artist monographs and compendiums of broader topics across art and design and science and history over the last 12 months, and these are the 10 titles that impacted us most.
.
Vital Impacts Launches a Winter Print Sale with Photos from Jane Goodall, David Doubilet, and Beth Moon to Raise Money for Conservation — from thisiscolossal.com by Grace Ebert and Vital Impacts
Artist Spotlight: Shuyang Zhou — from booooooom.com
On 11/29/2022,
in art, Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning / Deep Learning / Algorithms, Asia, assistive technologies, career development, change, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, communications, computer science, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, creativity, curriculum, disruption, education technology, educational games / serious games, emerging technologies, entrepreneurship, experimentation, future, game-changing environment, ideas, innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, languages and translation, Legal operations, legal technologies, tools, training / L&D, vendors, workplace,
by Daniel Christian
A bot that watched 70,000 hours of Minecraft could unlock AI’s next big thing — from technologyreview.com by Will Douglas Heaven
Online videos are a vast and untapped source of training data—and OpenAI says it has a new way to use it.
Excerpt:
OpenAI has built the best Minecraft-playing bot yet by making it watch 70,000 hours of video of people playing the popular computer game. It showcases a powerful new technique that could be used to train machines to carry out a wide range of tasks by binging on sites like YouTube, a vast and untapped source of training data.
The Minecraft AI learned to perform complicated sequences of keyboard and mouse clicks to complete tasks in the game, such as chopping down trees and crafting tools. It’s the first bot that can craft so-called diamond tools, a task that typically takes good human players 20 minutes of high-speed clicking—or around 24,000 actions.
The result is a breakthrough for a technique known as imitation learning, in which neural networks are trained to perform tasks by watching humans do them.
…
The team’s approach, called Video Pre-Training (VPT), gets around the bottleneck in imitation learning by training another neural network to label videos automatically.
Speak lands investment from OpenAI to expand its language learning platform — from techcrunch.com by Kyle Wiggers
Excerpts:
“Most language learning software can help with the beginning part of learning basic vocabulary and grammar, but gaining any degree of fluency requires speaking out loud in an interactive environment,” Zwick told TechCrunch in an email interview. “To date, the only way people can get that sort of practice is through human tutors, which can also be expensive, difficult and intimidating.”
Speak’s solution is a collection of interactive speaking experiences that allow learners to practice conversing in English. Through the platform, users can hold open-ended conversations with an “AI tutor” on a range of topics while receiving feedback on their pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary.
It’s one of the top education apps in Korea on the iOS App Store, with over 15 million lessons started annually, 100,000 active subscribers and “double-digit million” annual recurring revenue.
If you last checked in on AI image makers a month ago & thought “that is a fun toy, but is far from useful…” Well, in just the last week or so two of the major AI systems updated.
You can now generate a solid image in one try. For example, “otter on a plane using wifi” 1st try: pic.twitter.com/DhiYeVMEEV
— Ethan Mollick (@emollick) November 26, 2022
Is AI Generated Art Really Coming for Your Job? — from edugeekjournal.com by Matt Crosslin
Excerpt:
So, is this a cool development that will become a fun tool for many of us to play around with in the future? Sure. Will people use this in their work? Possibly. Will it disrupt artists across the board? Unlikely. There might be a few places where really generic artwork is the norm and the people that were paid very little to crank them out will be paid very little to input prompts. Look, PhotoShop and asset libraries made creating company logos very, very easy a long time ago. But people still don’t want to take the 30 minutes it takes to put one together, because thinking through all the options is not their thing. You still have to think through those options to enter an AI prompt. And people just want to leave that part to the artists. The same thing was true about the printing press. Hundreds of years of innovation has taught us that the hard part of the creation of art is the human coming up with the ideas, not the tools that create the art.
A quick comment from DSC:
Possibly, at least in some cases. But I’ve seen enough home-grown, poorly-designed graphics and logos to make me wonder if that will be the case.
How to Teach With Deep Fake Technology — from techlearning.com by Erik Ofgang
Despite the scary headlines, deep fake technology can be a powerful teaching tool
Excerpt:
The very concept of teaching with deep fake technology may be unsettling to some. After all, deep fake technology, which utilizes AI and machine learning and can alter videos and animate photographs in a manner that appears realistic, has frequently been covered in a negative light. The technology can be used to violate privacy and create fake videos of real people.
However, while these potential abuses of the technology are real and concerning that doesn’t mean we should turn a blind eye to the technology’s potential when using it responsibly, says Jaime Donally, a well-known immersive learning expert.
From DSC:
I’m still not sure about this one…but I’ll try to be open to the possibilities here.
Educators Are Taking Action in AI Education to Make Future-Ready Communities — from edsurge.com by Annie Ning
Excerpt:
AI Explorations and Their Practical Use in School Environments is an ISTE initiative funded by General Motors. The program provides professional learning opportunities for educators, with the goal of preparing all students for careers with AI.
Recently, we spoke with three more participants of the AI Explorations program to learn about its ongoing impact in K-12 classrooms. Here, they share how the program is helping their districts implement AI curriculum with an eye toward equity in the classroom.
Stealth Legal AI Startup Harvey Raises $5M in Round Led By OpenAI — from lawnext.com by Bob Ambrogi
Excerpt (emphasis DSC):
A hitherto stealth legal AI startup emerged from the shadows today with news via TechCrunch that it has raised $5 million in funding led by the startup fund of OpenAI, the company that developed advanced neural network AI systems such as GPT-3 and DALL-E 2.
The startup, called Harvey, will build on the GPT-3 technology to enable lawyers to create legal documents or perform legal research by providing simple instructions using natural language.
The company was founded by Winston Weinberg, formerly an associate at law firm O’Melveny & Myers, and Gabriel Pereyra, formerly a research scientist at DeepMind and most recently a machine learning engineer at Meta AI.
On 11/25/2022,
in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, art, Artificial Intelligence / Machine Learning / Deep Learning / Algorithms, computer science, content development, aggregation, repositories, creativity, future, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, law schools, legislatures / government / legal, platforms, programming, tools, trends, United States,
by Daniel Christian
This Copyright Lawsuit Could Shape the Future of Generative AI — from wired.com by Will Knight
Algorithms that create art, text, and code are spreading fast—but legal challenges could throw a wrench in the works.
Excerpts:
A class-action lawsuit filed in a federal court in California this month takes aim at GitHub Copilot, a powerful tool that automatically writes working code when a programmer starts typing. The coder behind the suit argues that GitHub is infringing copyright because it does not provide attribution when Copilot reproduces open-source code covered by a license requiring it.
…
Programmers have, of course, always studied, learned from, and copied each other’s code. But not everyone is sure it is fair for AI to do the same, especially if AI can then churn out tons of valuable code itself, without respecting the source material’s license requirements. “As a technologist, I’m a huge fan of AI ,” Butterick says. “I’m looking forward to all the possibilities of these tools. But they have to be fair to everybody.”
Whatever the outcome of the Copilot case, Villa says it could shape the destiny of other areas of generative AI. If the outcome of the Copilot case hinges on how similar AI-generated code is to its training material, there could be implications for systems that reproduce images or music that matches the style of material in their training data.
Also legal-related, see:
- Columbia, Georgetown and Stanford Law Schools Quit ‘U.S. News’ — from insidehighered.com by Scott Jaschik
Also related to AI and art/creativity from Wired.com, see:
- Picture Limitless Creativity at Your Fingertips — by Kevin Kelly
Artificial intelligence can now make better art than most humans. Soon, these engines of wow will transform how we design just about everything. - This Uncensored AI Art Tool Can Generate Fantasies—and Nightmares — by Will Knight
Open source project Stable Diffusion allows anyone to conjure images with algorithms, but some fear it will be used to create unethical horrors. - Who Will Own the Art of the Future? — by Jessica Rizzo
OpenAI has announced that it’s granting Dall-E users the right to commercialize their art. For now.
On 11/17/2022,
in animation, art, design, drama/theater, funding / grants, graphics, legislatures / government / legal, multimedia, music, United States, vision/possibilities, writing,
by Daniel Christian
Californians approve big funding boost for arts education — from apnews.com by Julie Watson; with thanks to Goldie Blumenstyk for this resource
Excerpt:
SAN DIEGO (AP) — California voters on Tuesday approved a ballot measure backed by a celebrity lineup that included Barbra Streisand and Los Angeles-born rappers will.i.am and Dr. Dre that could pump as much as $1 billion a year from the state’s general fund into arts education.
Supporters said it would benefit public school programs that go beyond the traditional art, theater, dance and music classes to include graphic design, computer coding, animation, music composition and script writing.
Also from Goldie Blumenstyk:
@CeciliaOrphan and I have a new article out in @ChangeHigher on expanding our understanding of "value" in higher education to better capture the full contributions of regional public universities as broadly accessible anchor institutions. https://t.co/iY5eIP5uzb
— Kevin R. McClure (@kevinrmcclure) November 15, 2022
On 11/11/2022,
in art, creativity,
by Daniel Christian
Artist Spotlight: Shingo Yamazaki — from booooooom.com
Artist Spotlight: Alberto Ortega — from booooooom.com
