Daniel S. Christian

‘Robots’ Are Not ‘Coming for Your Job’—Management Is — from gizmodo.com by Brian Merchant; with a special thanks going out to Keesa Johnson for her posting this out on LinkedIn

A robot is not ‘coming for’, or ‘stealing’ or ‘killing’ or ‘threatening’ to take away your job. Management is.

Excerpt (emphasis DSC):

At first glance, this might like a nitpicky semantic complaint, but I assure you it’s not—this phrasing helps, and has historically helped, mask the agency behind the *decision* to automate jobs. And this decision is not made by ‘robots,’ but management. It is a decision most often made with the intention of saving a company or institution money by reducing human labor costs (though it is also made in the interests of bolstering efficiency and improving operations and safety). It is a human decision that ultimately eliminates the job.

From DSC:
I’ve often said that if all the C-Suite cares about is maximizing profits — instead of thinking about their fellow humankind and society as a whole — we’re in big trouble.

If the thinking goes, “Heh — it’s just business!” <– Again, then we’re in big trouble here.

Just because we can, should we? Many people should be reflecting upon this question…and not just members of the C-Suite.

Revelation 21:2-4

On 06/01/2019, in Daniel S. Christian, faith, future, hearts -- matters of the heart, religion, vision/possibilities, by Daniel Christian

Revelation 21:2-4 New International Version (NIV) — from biblegateway.com

²I saw the Holy City, the new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God,prepared as a bride beautifully dressed for her husband. ³And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Look! God’s dwelling place is now among the people, and he will dwell with them. They will be his people, and God himself will be with them and be their God. ⁴‘He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death’ or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”

From DSC:
My dad used to sign a song that had the highlighted scripture in it. It represents a wonderful, desirable, powerful vision…especially after listening to NPR for a while (which I do several times a week).

From DSC:
I’m wondering to what extent artificial intelligence will be used to write code in the future…and/or to review/tweak/correct code…? Along these lines, see: “Introducing AI-Assisted Development to Elevate Low-Code Platforms to the Next Level.”

Excerpt:

Mendix was founded on the belief that software development could only be significantly improved if we introduced a paradigm shift. And that’s what we did. We fundamentally changed how software is created. With the current generation of the Mendix Platform, business applications can be created 10 times faster in close collaboration or even owned by the business, with IT being in control. Today we announce the next innovation, the introduction of AI-assisted development, which gives everyone the equivalent of a world-class coach looking over their shoulder.

Law’s Looming Skills Crisis [Cohen]

On 05/24/2019, in business, collaboration, corporate / business world, Daniel S. Christian, data related items, law schools, legislatures / government / legal, pace of change, society, technology (general), by Daniel Christian

Law’s Looming Skills Crisis — from forbes.com by Mark Cohen

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

The good news is that legal professionals have more career paths, lifestyle options, and geographic nimbleness than ever before. The bad news is that relatively few in the industry are prepared to fill the new roles.

A growing list of clients demand transformed legal services. What does that mean? Legal professionals must meld law, technology, and business and apply principles of digital transformation to the legal function. They must be proactive, data-driven, client-centric, and collaborative*. They must appreciate that clients want solutions to business challenges, not legal tomes.
…
Legal culture responds to the warp speed change—when it does at all– with buzzwords, denial, and self-congratulation. The packed calendar of industry award dinners celebrating pioneers, innovation, diversity, and other self-declared advances belies data exposing law’s dreadful scorecard on diversity, gender pay equality, advancement opportunities for non-white males, and other legal guild cultural holdovers. Then there’s the disconnect between the lawyer and client view of industry performance. Law’s net promoter score lags other professions and almost all industries. Legal culture needs a jolt; client-centricity, the ability to respond rapidly and effectively to new risk factors and challenges, data-driven judgments, and agile workforces are among law’s transformational musts.
…
Legal culture is slow to embrace data, technology, new delivery models, multidisciplinary practice, regulatory reform, collaboration, diversity, gender pay equality, the distinction between the practice of law and the delivery of legal services, client-centricity, and digital transformation. Law is rooted in precedent; it looks to the past to prepare for the future. That is no longer the world we live in.

From DSC:
*And I would add the ability to look into the future, develop some potential scenarios and some responses to those potential scenarios…in other words, practice some methods used in futurism.

I would encourage my colleagues within the legal education world — which includes the American Bar Association (ABA) — but also judges, lawyers, legislators, attorney generals, public defenders, and many others to realize that we need to massively pick up the pace if we are to help tame the wild west of emerging technologies these days!

Has Technology Made State Regional Universities Obsolete? — from campustechnology.com by Richard Rose
While SRUs do some things well, the current model is not sustainable, with students taking on enormous debt and receiving relatively little income benefit in return. Here’s how technology can help change the equation.

Excerpts (emphasis DSC):

What if the State Board of Higher Education assembled a team to create one exceptionally fine Official Texas Version of the sophomore Western Civilization course? The team would include brilliant subject-matter experts, the best graphic artists, senior instructional designers, professional film editors and sharp-eyed text editors, who could produce a 48-clock-hour video course of previously unimaginable quality.
…
When technology is fully embraced because the need for a better and cheaper product finally trumps the political protection of the status quo, the state regional university will be replaced as part of new state university systems in which local institutions will play a very different role. These new local institutions could be called Learning Satellite Centers (LSCs).
…
Much content will take the form of high-budget, high-quality multimedia productions with delivery available to all popular devices, from desktop computers to cell phones. Access to learning materials, from course movies and podcasts to reading materials, will be through an expanded electronic distribution system that will eliminate the need for paper-based academic libraries.
…
The goal of the University Center plus Learning Satellite Center model is to transfer agency back into the hands of the students, where it belongs. No longer will a self-appointed privileged group of professional academics with their arcane degrees and funny ceremonial robes be dictating to the rest of society what we all need to learn and how we need to learn it. Technology will be the great leveler and the marketplace will help individual students decide what choices are best.

Of course, a brief sketch like this one will raise many questions that cannot be explored in a single article, but the conversation must begin. The current State Regional University is not sustainable and can only be propped up by politics and sentiment for so long. Too many students are piling up huge debt to earn dubious degrees that don’t lead to marketable skills or significant economic benefits. Technology has made more effective models of higher education attainable and at a lower price. We need to fearlessly explore such models before our charming old regional campuses drift into irrelevance.

From DSC:
While the article has a bit of a bite to it (which I suppose readers of this blog would say they might see in my writings/comments as well from time to time), THIS is the kind of innovative, creative thinking that will get us somewhere. I really appreciate Richard’s article and the deep thought he was put into this topic.

In fact, as readers of this blog will know, I have long been a supporter of a TEAM-BASED approach. And listed below are some graphics that prove it — as well as this article I wrote for evolllution.com (where the “lll” stands for lifelong learning) back from 2016.

This page* lists those graphics plus the list of team members that I thought of in December 2008:

Subject Matter Experts
Instructional Designers
Project Managers
Recruiters
Legal Counsel
Researchers / Mind Experts
Digital Audio Specialists
Digital Video Specialists
Streaming Media Experts
Mobile Learning Consultants
Writers and Editors
Programmers and Database Specialists
Web Design and Production Specialists
Interactivity Designers
Multimedia Specialists including Multi-Touch Experts/Programmers
3D / 2D Graphic Designers and/or Animators
MindMappers / Visual Learning Experts
Personalized Learning Consultants
Security Experts
The students themselves
Other

*BTW, I renamed this idea from the Forthcoming Walmart of Education
to the Forthcoming Amazon.com of Higher Education

.

While I’m at it…below are a couple of ideas that I documented back in 2009 that Richard might like…

.

As of today…I would simplify that last graphic to
include a subscription model to streams of content.

Ok…one more graphic from 5/21/09 that describes what I thought would happen if institutions of traditional higher education maintained the status quo through the years. I feel pretty good about how these predictions turned out, but I wish that we would have made even more progress along these lines than we have (since the time I created this graphic).

Watch Salvador Dalí Return to Life Through AI — from interestingengineering.com by
The Dalí Museum has created a deepfake of surrealist artist Salvador Dalí that brings him back to life.

Excerpt:

The Dalí Museum has created a deepfake of surrealist artist Salvador Dalí that brings him back to life. This life-size deepfake is set up to have interactive discussions with visitors.

The deepfake can produce 45 minutes of content and 190,512 possible combinations of phrases and decisions taken by the fake but realistic Dalí. The exhibition was created by Goodby, Silverstein & Partners using 6,000 frames of Dalí taken from historic footage and 1,000 hours of machine learning.

From DSC:
While on one hand, incredible work! Fantastic job! On the other hand, if this type of deepfake can be done, how can any video be trusted from here on out? What technology/app will be able to confirm that a video is actually that person, actually saying those words?

Will we get to a point that says, this is so and so, and I approved this video. Or will we have an electronic signature? Will a blockchain-based tech be used? I don’t know…there always seems to be pros and cons to any given technology. It’s how we use it. It can be a dream, or it can be a nightmare.

Wouldn’t this be cool if we could do this? Perhaps this is a piece of our future learning ecosystems. [Christian]

On 05/13/2019, in assessment, colleges, community colleges, Daniel S. Christian, digital learning, disruption, education technology, emerging technologies, experimentation, higher education, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, law schools, learning agents, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, legislatures / government / legal, lifelong learning, marketplaces, memory, Michigan, Natural Language Processing (NLP), new business models, online learning, platforms, productivity / tips and tricks, second screen apps, smart classrooms, society, streams of content, student-related, teaching & learning, technologies for your home, tools, TVs, United States, voice recognition / voice enabled interfaces, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
Re: the Learning from the Living [Class] Room vision of a next gen learning platform…

…wouldn’t it be cool if you could use your voice to ask your smart/connected “TV” type of device:

“Show me the test questions for Torts I from WMU-Cooley Law School. Cooley could then charge $0.99 for these questions.”

Then, the system knows how you did on answering those questions. The ones you got right, you don’t get asked to review as often as the ones you got wrong. As you get a question right more often, the less you are asked to answer it.

You sign up for such streams of content — and the system assesses you periodically. This helps a person keep certain topics/information fresh in their memory. This type of learning method would be incredibly helpful for students trying to pass the Bar or other types of large/summative tests — especially when a student has to be able to recall information that they learned over the last 3-5 years.

Come to think of it…this method could help all of us in learning new disciplines/topics throughout our lifetimes. Sign up for the streams of content that you want to learn more about…and drop the (no-longer relevant) subscriptions as needed..

We need to tap into streams of content in our next gen learning platform

Pastors, what do you think of these ideas? [Christian]

On 05/12/2019, in assessment, assistive technologies, Daniel S. Christian, digital learning, experimentation, faith, ideas, learning theories, memory, pedagogy, society, teaching & learning, tools, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
Pastors, what do you think of these ideas?

Summarize your key points and put them up on slides at the end of your sermons (and/or at discussion groups after service)
Summarize your key points and post them to the churches’ websites — including links to resources that you referenced in your sermons (books, devotions, other)
Have an app that folks in your congregation could complete during the sermon (like “fill in the blanks” / missing words or phrases). Or, if you’d prefer that your congregation not have their smartphones out, perhaps you could provide “quizzes” mid-week to assist in information recall (i.e., spaced repetition). That is, people would need to try to fill in the missing phrases and/or words mid-week. Answers would be immediately available if someone asked for them.

Along these lines…should there be more classes in seminary on learning theories and on pedagogy? Hmmm….an interesting thought.

With flip of a giant ceremonial switch, CMU starts effort to energize ‘learning engineering’ — from edsurge.com by Jeff Young

Excerpt:

Pittsburgh, PA—For a moment this week, the provost of Carnegie Mellon University looked a bit like a game show host as he grabbed the lever of an oversized switch and called on an audience to join him in a countdown—“5, 4, 3, 2, 1.” Then, he toggled the cardboard lever and declared open a new website, one that gave away software that took more than $100 million in grant funding to develop.

It was an unusually theatrical moment for a gathering to announce the release of software tools to help professors improve their teaching. But the organizers were playfully acknowledging the size of their project’s ambition—which they hope will spark a more data-driven and experimental approach to teaching at colleges around the country. And the flair was fitting, since success will end up being based not so much on how well the software works, but on how well its creators can attract momentum to their cause—and change the culture of the academic profession to make teaching an area professors are excited to make discoveries around.
…
Plenty of others have tried in the past to bring the principles of engineering to college teaching, though with limited success. In fact, the effort at Carnegie Mellon is named for Herbert Simon, a longtime professor at Carnegie Mellon who won a Nobel Prize in economics and devoted his energy and academic capital to trying to spread his ideas about turning teaching from a solo sport to a team effort. But it didn’t catch on widely in his lifetime.

From DSC:

…and devoted his energy and academic capital to trying to spread his ideas about turning teaching from a solo sport to a team effort. But it didn’t catch on widely in his lifetime.

Why do you supposed getting faculty members to use a team-based approach is so difficult? We really need to look at that, especially if institutions of higher education are going to keep increasing how much it costs to take courses at their schools — and all the while placing the emphasis on research…not teaching.

Like using an indexing fund in investing — vs. a hand-picked set of stocks — a team-based approach will be more effective the majority of the time. How can it not? There are simply too many skillsets/interests needed, especially as teaching and learning continues to move more online.

“Learning by doing appears to have a 6x better [outcome] than learning by watching or reading,” Koedinger said. He and his colleagues published an academic paper with the finding called “Learning is Not a Spectator Sport.”

Also see:

From DSC:
Here’s a ~4 minute piece from CBS News re: student loan debt.

Here are two excerpts from that video:

From DSC to potential college students:
You need to know that the ramifications of this type of debt can last for decades! Do everything you possibly can to either not borrow anything or to minimize these types of loan amounts.

This is another reason why the United States desperately needs a ***next generation learning platform*** — one that’s convenient, very inexpensive, and one that can also help people quickly reinvent themselves! One that is highly social, features human Subject Matter Experts (SME’s), and is backed up by #AI – based apps/features as well.

Along these lines…no longer are we running sprints (i.e., get a 4-year degree and you’re done). We’re now all running marathons (i.e., we’re now into lifelong learning in order to stay relevant and employed).

Also, the following item was announced today:

Cengage and McGraw-Hill to Merge, Providing Students with More Affordable Access to Superior Course Materials and Platforms — from businesswire.com
Excerpt:
NEW YORK & BOSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–McGraw-Hill and Cengage today announced that they have entered into a definitive agreement to combine in an all-stock merger on equal terms. The transaction, which has been unanimously approved by the Boards of Directors of both companies, will bring together two premier learning companies that will deliver significant benefits for students, educators, professionals and institutions worldwide.“The new company will offer a broad range of best-in-class content – delivered through digital platforms at an affordable price,” said Michael E. Hansen, CEO of Cengage. “Together, we will usher in an era in which all students can afford the quality learning materials needed to succeed – regardless of their socioeconomic status or the institution they attend. Additionally, the combined company will have robust financial strength to invest in next-generation products, technology and services that create superior experiences and value for millions of students.”

Also see:

From DSC:
Along these lines, I don’t think Cengage/McGraw-Hill will be the largest company on the Internet by 2030 as predicted by Thomas Frey (a prediction I think he’s right on with…by the way). They were on watch when the prices of learning-related materials soared through the years. As such, they’ve likely burned through a great deal of good will…but we’ll see. They might be able to persuade myself and others that they’re the platform of choice for the future. Time will tell I guess.

My mom, music, memory, and…Alzheimer’s Disease [Christian]

On 05/01/2019, in Daniel S. Christian, memory, metacognition / metacognitive skills, music, society, by Daniel Christian

From DSC:
Through the years, my mom was an incredible person — in a variety of ways. She was a wonderful mother to us, as well as a spouse to my dad. But she was also a wonderful daughter, aunt, grandma, friend, teacher, counselor, investor, and more. She was a philosophical, deep thinker and a person of action — often doing several things at a time (from the moment that she woke up until the time that she finally called it quits at the end of a long day). Amongst other things, she was an incredible musician. After graduating from college, my mom taught classical piano (to kindergarten through 12th graders) decade after decade…well into her 70’s.

But then, like her mom, she developed Alzheimer’s Disease and as things go with Alzheimer’s, things got progressively worse. Fast forward to today, and her short-term memory is now completely gone and the person who she once was continues to increasingly leave us. She lives with my dad in a memory care unit. (My dad has also experienced physical and cognitive decline…though not nearly as much as my mom.) My mom will ask you the same question many times over, as she can’t remember asking you the question before and she can’t recall your answer (for but a moment). She still recognizes us — though for how much longer that will be the case, we’re not sure. She doesn’t use our names nearly as much as she used to.

Below is a picture of my mom at her memory care unit…and, by the way, she didn’t recall that the piano that she was playing on was actually the exact same piano that she used for years to teach kids how to play classical piano.

Mom at the piano - 1

All that said — and as you can tell from watching the video below — she can STILL:

Sight read music (i.e., recognize notes, rhythms, dynamics, etc.)
Play songs she remembers from long ago
Sing along to songs/hymns from years ago
Recognize and/or recall many of the lyrics from songs that she once knew

Wow!

The human mind is absolutely incredible to me! Scary and tragic when it stops working as it once did — but incredible nevertheless.

Glory to GOD in the highest!

Also see:

Changing ‘the tragedy narrative’: Why a growing camp is promoting a more joyful approach to Alzheimer’s — from washingtonpost.com by Tara Bahrampour

I hope this tech doesn’t make it…

On 04/29/2019, in 21st century, A/V -- audio/visual, Daniel S. Christian, digital video, ethics, Europe, ideas, law schools, legislatures / government / legal, morals/values, society, the downsides of how people use tech, tools, by Daniel Christian

DARPA is reportedly eyeing a high-tech contact lens straight out of ‘Mission: Impossible’ — from taskandpurpose.com by Jared Keller

Excerpt:

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is reportedly interested in a new wirelessly-connected contact lens recently unveiled in France, the latest in the agency’s ongoing search for small-scale technology to augment U.S. service members’ visual capabilities in the field.

From DSC:
We may not be there yet (and in my mind, that’s a good thing). But when this tech gets further developed and gets its foot in the door — military style — it may then expand its reach and scope. Then it gets integrated into other areas of society. If many people were very uncomfortable having someone walk in a public place wearing/using a pair of Google Glasses, how will they/we feel about this one? Speaking for myself, I don’t like it.

From LinkedIn.com today:

Also see:

First drone delivery company gains approval in the U.S. — from futuretimeline.net
A Google/Alphabet offshoot company, Wing Aviation, has become the first drone delivery service to receive Air Carrier Certification from the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA).

From DSC:
I don’t like this at all. If this foot gets in the door, vendor after vendor will launch their own hordes of drones. In the future, where will we go if we want some piece and quiet? Will the air be filled with swarms of noisy drones? Will we be able to clearly see the sun? An exaggeration..? Maybe…maybe not.

But, now what? What recourse do citizens have? Readers of this blog know that I’m generally pro-technology. But the folks — especially the youth — working within the FAANG companies (and the like) need to do a far better job asking, “Just because we can do something, should we do it?”

As I’ve said before, we’ve turned over the keys to the $137,000 Maserati to drivers who are just getting out of driving school. Then we wonder….”How did we get to this place?”

If you owned this $137,000+ car, would you turn the keys of it over to your 16-25 year old?!

As another example, just because we can…

…doesn’t mean we should.

Minerva’s Innovative Platform Makes Quality Higher Ed Personal and Affordable [Vander Ark]

On 04/22/2019, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, A/V -- audio/visual, active learning, adult learning, business side of he, career development, change, changing business models, cloud-based computing / apps / other cloud-related, collaboration, colleges, communications, communities of practice, community colleges, corporate universities / corporate training, cost of getting a degree, Daniel S. Christian, distance education, education technology, engagement / engaging students, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, global / globalization, higher education, ideas, innovation, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, learning hubs & pods & microschooling, learning spaces, lifelong learning, MOOCs -- Massive Open Online Courses, more voice more choice more control, online learning, online tutoring, platforms, second screen apps, society, student-related, teaching & learning, teaching online, technologies for your home, television, tools, training / L&D, United States, universities, user experience (UX), using teams, vendors, videoconferencing, vision/possibilities, webinars, by Daniel Christian

Minerva’s Innovative Platform Makes Quality Higher Ed Personal and Affordable — from linkedin.com by Tom Vander Ark

Excerpt:

The first external partner, the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST), loved the course design and platform but told Nelson they couldn’t afford to teach 15 students at a time. The Minerva team realized that to be applicable at major universities, active learning needed to be scalable.

Starting this summer, a new version of Forum will be available for classes of up to 400 at a time. For students, it will still feel like a small seminar. They’ll see the professor, themselves, and a dozen other students. Forum will manage the movement of students from screen to screen. “Everybody thinks they are in the main room,” said Nelson.
…
Forum enables real-time polling and helps professors create and manage breakout groups.
…
Big Implications
With Forum, “For the first time you can deliver better than Ivy League education at absurdly low cost,” said Nelson.

Online courses and MOOCs just repackaged the same format and just offered it with less interaction. As new Forum partners will demonstrate, “It’s possible to deliver a year of undergraduate education that is vastly superior for under $5,000 per student,” added Nelson.

He’s excited to offer a turnkey university solution that, for partners like Oxford Teachers Academy, will allow new degree pathways for paraprofessionals that can work, learn, and earn a degree and certification.

Perhaps another piece of the puzzle is falling into place…

We Built an ‘Unbelievable’ (but Legal) Facial Recognition Machine — from nytimes.com by Sahil Chinoy

“The future of human flourishing depends upon facial recognition technology being banned,” wrote Woodrow Hartzog, a professor of law and computer science at Northeastern, and Evan Selinger, a professor of philosophy at the Rochester Institute of Technology, last year. ‘Otherwise, people won’t know what it’s like to be in public without being automatically identified, profiled, and potentially exploited.’ Facial recognition is categorically different from other forms of surveillance, Mr. Hartzog said, and uniquely dangerous. Faces are hard to hide and can be observed from far away, unlike a fingerprint. Name and face databases of law-abiding citizens, like driver’s license records, already exist. And for the most part, facial recognition surveillance can be set up using cameras already on the streets.” — Sahil Chinoy; per a weekly e-newsletter from Sam DeBrule at Machine Learnings in Berkeley, CA

Excerpt:

Most people pass through some type of public space in their daily routine — sidewalks, roads, train stations. Thousands walk through Bryant Park every day. But we generally think that a detailed log of our location, and a list of the people we’re with, is private. Facial recognition, applied to the web of cameras that already exists in most cities, is a threat to that privacy.

To demonstrate how easy it is to track people without their knowledge, we collected public images of people who worked near Bryant Park (available on their employers’ websites, for the most part) and ran one day of footage through Amazon’s commercial facial recognition service. Our system detected 2,750 faces from a nine-hour period (not necessarily unique people, since a person could be captured in multiple frames). It returned several possible identifications, including one frame matched to a head shot of Richard Madonna, a professor at the SUNY College of Optometry, with an 89 percent similarity score. The total cost: about $60.

From DSC:
What do you think about this emerging technology and its potential impact on our society — and on other societies like China? Again I ask…what kind of future do we want?

As for me, my face is against the use of facial recognition technology in the United States — as I don’t trust where this could lead.

This wild, wild, west situation continues to develop. For example, note how AI and facial recognition get their foot in the door via techs installed years ago:

The cameras in Bryant Park were installed more than a decade ago so that people could see whether the lawn was open for sunbathing, for example, or check how busy the ice skating rink was in the winter. They are not intended to be a security device, according to the corporation that runs the park.

So Amazon’s use of facial recognition is but another foot in the door.

This needs to be stopped. Now.

Facial recognition technology is a menace disguised as a gift. It’s an irresistible tool for oppression that’s perfectly suited for governments to display unprecedented authoritarian control and an all-out privacy-eviscerating machine.

We should keep this Trojan horse outside of the city. (source)

Learning Ecosystems

Revelation 21:2-4

Pastors, what do you think of these ideas? [Christian]

With flip of a giant ceremonial switch, CMU starts effort to energize ‘learning engineering’ [Young]

My mom, music, memory, and…Alzheimer’s Disease [Christian]

I hope this tech doesn’t make it…

Categories

Tags