Latest News

.: AI Updates & Developments

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.: Google Announces ‘Assistant with Bard’ for Android and iOS ➜ A combination of the generative and reasoning capabilities of Bard with the personalised help of Google Assistant. This includes Bard Extensions that can access Gmail, Google Drive, and Docs to answer queries. Additionally, Assistant with Bard has a “conversational overlay” that can accept text, voice, or image input. Google calls this an “early experiment,” with plans to roll it out to early testers for feedback before public availability over the next few months.

.: AI Facial Recognition Wrongfully Imprisons Innocent Man ➜ In a landmark incident, Robert Williams was wrongfully arrested in January 2020, marking the first documented case in the U.S. where facial recognition technology led to a false detention. This arrest occurred amidst a surge in law enforcement’s use of powerful AI for facial recognition. Williams’s case, resulting from a mistaken match by the Detroit Police Department’s facial recognition system, underscores the emerging challenges and ethical considerations in deploying AI technologies within the criminal justice system​. Despite the known flaws and the potential for mass surveillance threatening privacy, law enforcement continues to increasingly rely on such AI systems.

.: ‘Alarming’: Convincing AI Vaccine and Vaping Disinformation Generated by Australian Researchers ➜ Australian researchers have highlighted the power of AI to generate harmful disinformation. In an experiment, they used AI to create over 100 misleading health blogposts in multiple languages within just over an hour, bypassing safeguards meant to prevent the generation of misleading or harmful content. The experiment underscores the need for stronger industry accountability and better safeguards against the misuse of AI.

.: Why are Fewer Women Using AI than Men? – BBC News ➜ The article explores the reasons behind fewer women than men using artificial intelligence (AI), particularly AI chatbot ChatGPT. While the chatbot has over 180 million users, many women, including jeweller Harriet Kelsall and business coach Michelle Leivars, express concerns about the reliability of the AI and the potential loss of authenticity in their communication. A survey earlier this year revealed that only 35% of women use AI in their professional or personal lives, compared to 54% of men. The article suggests that this disparity may largely be due to the confidence gap and the fear of criticism that many women face when using AI tools.

.: Most of our friends use AI in schoolwork – BBC News ➜ A recent report by BBC Young Reporters Theo and Ben explores the use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) among pupils in their school. The majority of their peers admit to using AI, specifically ChatGPT, to assist with homework, formulating ideas, and structuring their work. However, some students confess to the misuse of AI in providing answers, a practice that has resulted in inaccurate information. Despite these drawbacks, many still find the AI tool useful and suggest it should be taught in schools.

.: The Screen Actors Guild’s strike-ending deal has entered its final step ➜ The Screen Actors Guild-American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (SAG-AFTRA) has reached a tentative deal with Hollywood studios, ending a 118-day actors’ strike. The agreement, approved by the national board, is awaiting final ratification from union members. A significant aspect of the deal is a set of protections around the use of artificial intelligence, which mandates informed consent and compensation when guild members are replicated digitally using AI.

Reflection

.: Why this news matters for education

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Although the Humane AI Pin is a curiosity, when you look a little more closely, it is just a phone without a screen. It even comes with a monthly plan from T-Mobile in the US!

Also, the demo video included a glaring error about the best place in the world to see the equinox. Another example of hallucinating large language model results added to tech demos without fact-checking. I am looking at you, Google Bard! (through a telescope 😉 )

We already have very powerful devices in our pockets managed differently by schools and education systems. The mobile infrastructure is vast, on which we might experience AI-augmented learning.

According to a report from Statista, there are more mobile subscriptions than people on the planet.

So, I wonder how we leverage our devices in better ways to assist, augment and amplify teaching and learning.

The path ahead of personal devices, whether smartphones, pins or glasses, making it easy to access advanced AI capabilities matches another direction. The personalisation of AI implementation through agents, designed for narrower tasks – powered by a richer context of who you are.

All of this is glued together with data, making me wonder: who owns my heart rate data from my Garmin watch?

Which activates the part of the data ecosystem around fitness and health information gathered, stored and analysed by various apps and wearables. How might we connect these data pools to further enrich the learning experience?

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~ Tom

Prompts

.: Refine your promptcraft

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This week I am sharing my draft of an Imaginary Scenario Prompt Framework. The aim of this multi-step prompt interaction is to surface assumptions and constraints and then scaffold thinking that pushes beyond those limitations.

A pre-requisite is a chat session where you have been building, designing and exploring some new ideas. Use this set of prompts once you have a conversation to review.

1. Constraint Analysis Prompt:

Aim: Concisely identify the core constraints for the LLM to focus on.

2. Imagined Future Prompt:

Aim: Spur your own creative thinking about an optimistic but grounded future where key constraints are lifted.

3. Follow-up Prompt:

Aim: Iterate for more details and depth on the imagined scenario.

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Just a post script that statistical language models have limits to how creative they are. (If they are creative at all!) They are built to predict the most likely word, rather than diverge to something unexpected, so keep that in mind.

My approach is to collaborate with a wide range of AI tools to amplify my creativity, not to sit back and think an LLM can do better. I encourage you to stay in the creative loop.

And, as I always say, remember to mak​e this your own, tinker and evaluate the completions.

Learning

.: Boost your AI Literacy

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ARTICLE .: Untangling AI Hype from Reality ➜ This ABC News article demystifies the hype surrounding AI by exploring its current capabilities, limitations, and future potential. It offers a grounded perspective on the state of AI technology, making it an essential read for those looking to understand the realistic prospects of AI.

COURSE .: Unlock AI Secrets with Amazon’s Free Learning Resources ➜ Amazon’s initiative, as highlighted by ZDNet, opens doors to free AI learning resources. It’s an excellent chance for educators and learners to enhance their AI skills and knowledge without the financial barrier, fostering broader accessibility to AI education.

EXPLANATION .: Explained: Generative AI ➜ MIT News provides an insightful and accessible explanation of Generative AI, a crucial domain within the AI landscape. This resource breaks down the concept, its applications, and significance, making it a valuable educational tool for anyone interested in this aspect of AI.

Ethics

.: Provocations for Balance

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• With the rise of emotional analysis AI, how do we protect people’s psychological privacy? Should individuals have a right to consent before their emotions are analysed by algorithms?
• If an AI system makes a mistake that harms a student’s learning or future prospects, who is liable? How do we balance accountability with encouraging innovation in AI for education?
• Should educators be required to disclose when AI is being used for certain teaching tasks? What happens when it swings the other way, and we have less trust of human-only generated content?

~ Inspired by this week’s developments.

Your Snapshot
​ A summary of the key insights from this issue

• Professional development often lacks the interactivity and relevance that educators apply in their own classrooms. There is an irony in expecting passive learning from teachers.
• Andragogy provides a framework for more effective adult learning, based on principles like readiness to learn, motivation, and drawing on experience.
• AI chatbots are uniquely positioned to elevate andragogy principles in professional development through tireless personalisation and reinforcement of learning.

Have you ever found yourself in a professional development session, glancing at the clock every few minutes, feeling that the material isn’t relevant?

You’re keenly aware that the methods used to ‘teach the teachers’ seem ironically out of touch with the engaging, student-centred approaches you employ in your classroom. This irony hasn’t gone unnoticed by you or your colleagues. Yet, this is a common narrative in professional development for educators. Why is there such a disconnect, and more importantly, how can we bridge it?

Knowles outlined six guiding principles of andragogy, each offering insight into the adult learner’s mindset.

As you read through, reflect on which is relevant to you.

1. Need to Know: Adults must understand the ‘why’ behind their learning.
2. Self-Concept: As self-directed individuals, adults take ownership of their learning journey.
3. Experience: Each adult learner brings diverse life experiences that shape their learning.
4. Readiness to Learn: Adults are primed to learn things that have immediate relevance to their roles.
5. Orientation to Learning: They favour practical learning that solves problems rather than content for the sake of content.
6. Motivation: While adults respond to external motivators, they’re especially driven by internal ones.

⏭🎯 Your Next Steps
​Commit to action and turn words into works

• Set aside 10 minutes this week to journal about your own experiences with professional development. How well were the principles of andragogy incorporated?
• Have a conversation with a colleague about andragogy. Share perspectives on how professional development could be improved at your school.
• Make a list of your professional learning goals. Next to each one, note how it connects to your role and experiences. Keep this visible as a reminder.

🗣💬 Your Talking Points
​Lead a team dialogue with these provocations

• Let’s reflect on our own experiences as learners. When have we felt deeply engaged and invested in professional development versus feeling disengaged? What specific factors made the difference?
• Imagine our ideal professional development incorporating andragogy. What would it look like? How can we start bringing elements of learner relevance, self-direction, and practical problem-solving into our PD? What small changes could we implement now?
• How well do our current PD offerings align with the principles of andragogy? As a team, let’s map our typical PD against the six pillars of adult learning. Where are the most significant gaps we should address?

🕳🐇 Down the Rabbit Hole
​Still curious? Explore some further readings from my archive

⟶ The 6 Principles of Andragogy (Explained in 3 Minutes)​

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⟶ How to Make Learning as Addictive as Social Media | Luis Von Ahn | TED​

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⟶ Effective Professional Development – (EEF)​

PD has great potential; but it also comes with costs. We know that teachers engage in professional development activities whilst balancing multiple and, at times, competing commitments and time pressures. The need is clear, therefore, for PD to be well‑designed, selected, and implemented so that the investment is justified.

Latest News

.: AI Updates & Developments

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.: OpenAI introduces custom AI assistants called “GPTs” that play different roles ➜ OpenAI has announced a new feature that allows ChatGPT users to create custom versions of its AI assistant that serve different roles or purposes. These GPTs can combine instructions, extra knowledge, and skills to help users with various tasks, such as learning, teaching, or designing. Users can also share their GPTs with others through a GPT Store that will launch later this month.

.: Five takeaways from UK’s AI safety summit at Bletchley Park ➜ Rishi Sunak, the UK prime minister, convened a global summit of leaders, tech executives, academics and civil society figures at Bletchley Park, the base for second world war codebreakers, to address the risks and opportunities of artificial intelligence (AI). The summit resulted in an international declaration, signed by more than 25 countries and the EU, that recognised the need to ensure the safety and security of AI applications.

.: Australia signs the Bletchley Declaration at AI Safety Summit ➜ Australia, along with the EU and 27 other countries, signed the Bletchley Declaration at the AI safety summit in the UK, affirming that AI should be designed, developed, deployed, and used in a manner that is safe, ethical, and beneficial for humanity. The declaration also pledged to work together on shared safety standards and best practices for AI, and to support the newly established AI Safety and Security Board.

.: Will the White House AI Executive Order deliver on its promises? ➜ A group of Brookings experts weigh in on the White House’s executive order on AI, which is the most comprehensive effort by the Biden administration to address the opportunities and challenges of AI. The experts offer their perspectives on various aspects of the order, such as its impact on civil rights, national security, innovation, workforce, regulation, and global leadership. They also identify some of the limitations and gaps of the order, and suggest areas for improvement and further action.

.: How Chinese influencers use AI digital clones of themselves to pump out content ➜ Chinese influencers, or key opinion leaders (KOLs), especially in the e-commerce industry, are increasingly using AI digital clones of themselves to produce content around the clock. These AI avatars are generated by startups such as Silicon Intelligence, which can create a basic AI clone for as little as 8,000 yuan. The AI clones can mimic the appearance, voice, and style of the human influencers, and can answer questions and promote products on live-streaming platforms.

.: Musk says his new AI chatbot has ‘a little humour’ ➜ Elon Musk has launched an AI chatbot called Grok on his social media site X, formerly Twitter, but so far it is only available to selected users. Grok is an AI tool that can generate text, images, and code based on natural language queries. Musk claimed that Grok is the best AI chatbot that currently exists, and that it loves sarcasm and can answer spicy questions that are rejected by most other AI systems.

Reflection

.: Why this news matters for education

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Last week I drew our attention to the rapid development of AI capabilities in our smartphones and the cameras in our pockets. This week’s key news is that ‘everyone gets a bot’ – or at least if you pay for access to ChatGPT Plus, you can build all the bots you like.

OpenAI announced at their Development Day expanded access to GPTs (Generative Pre-trained Transformers). They are creating the platform and marketplace for this. A key feature is the no-code standard, in other words, we can just describe what we want and the GPT Creator tool will build it for you. The wonders of natural language processing!

I have already been building individual bots using Poe from the Quora team since April. The interface is great and for everyday use I can easily switch between different AI models. I’m not sure how much different the OpenAI GPT experience will be. At the beginning of November, Poe announced a marketplace for bots – similar to what we’re now seeing from OpenAI.

Here is a more from Quora and Poe founder Adam D’Angelo:

Adam D’Angelo @adamdangelo Today we are launching creator monetization for Poe! This program lets any bot creator on Poe generate revenue. This is a major step forward for the platform and is the first program of its kind, so we are very excited to see what it lets everyone create. (thread) 4:51 AM • Oct 26, 2023 101 Retweets 574 Likes Read 34 replies

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This reminds me of the days when everything was getting a smartphone app and “There’s an app for that!” was the mantra. The iPhone and App Store provided the marketplace and platform architecture. The comparison is clear – for AI chatbots, OpenAI and Poe aim to be those platforms.

OpenAI wants to enable anyone to make their own specialised bots for specific purposes, just like schools and businesses created tailored apps. We’ll see all sorts of individual bots (GPTs) created for narrower use cases, including in education.

So we are seeing the platform being built and the landscape tilting towards empowering everyone to make their own bots. I hope we can grasp this opportunity while also addressing the challenges, near-term risks, and potential harms.

.:

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~ Tom

Prompts

.: Refine your promptcraft

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Interestingly, a research team from Google’s DeepMind discovered that if you put this prompt before your task description, LLMs perform better:

This is simultaneously weird and logical when you think about it. It’s logical because the training data consists of human expression in written form – so the importance of taking “a deep breath” is part of our shared physiology. It would almost be stranger if an LLM did not improve with such an instruction.

​Another recent research paper highlights the increase in performance from Emotion Prompts. These prompts provide emotional language as part of problem solving. As the researchers explain:

The team explored eleven Emotion Prompts and found they improved performance in different ways.

Here are some prompts you can try:

• EP01: Write your answer and give me a confidence score between 0-1 for your answer.
• EP02: This is very important to my career.
• EP03: You’d better be sure.
• EP04: Are you sure?
• EP05: Are you sure that’s your final answer? It might be worth taking another look.

They also note that combinations make a bigger difference. Here is one I’ve been using regularly, referenced in the paper as EP06:

Give it a try by adding it after your task description and let me know how it impacts your results.

.:

Thanks to Matt Esterman for sharing this news with me. Remember to mak​e this your own, tinker and evaluate the completions.

Learning

.: Boost your AI Literacy

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BASICS .: What is AI, how does it work and what can it be used for? ➜ This article explains the basics of artificial intelligence (AI), a technology that allows computers to learn and solve problems almost like a person. Learn the basics of AI, how it learns and solves problems, and what it can and cannot do. See examples of AI in action, such as voice assistants and image generation. Watch a video that explains AI in simple terms.

IMPACT .: AI anxiety: The workers who fear losing their jobs to artificial intelligence ➜ This article explores the phenomenon of AI anxiety, the fear that AI will replace human jobs. Hear stories of workers who are afraid of losing their jobs to AI, and why they feel that way. Get tips from experts on how to cope with AI anxiety and how to work with AI as a resource. Learn how to focus on what you can control, how to improve your skills, and how to treat AI as a partner.

COURSE .: Generative AI for Everyone ➜ This is an online course that teaches the fundamentals of generative AI, a type of AI that can create new and original content based on natural language queries. Learn the fundamentals of generative AI, a type of AI that can create new content based on natural language queries. Practice using generative AI tools to help in your work and get feedback on your prompts. Understand the ethical and social implications of generative AI, and how it can boost your career and productivity.

Ethics

.: Provocations for Balance

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• As AI bots become more adept at mimicking credible experts, how will people distinguish truly trustworthy information from mere artifice? Do we need new signals of authentic human endorsement versus synthetic credibility?
• With the proliferation of customised bots echoing our perspectives, how can we cultivate self-awareness and curiosity to catch our own biases? What responsibilities do bot creators have to design for serendipity and constructive dissonance?
• If relating through personalised bots promotes efficient transaction over raw human connection, how will this affect the empathy and vulnerability needed for mutual understanding? Should bot design strive to kindle our humanity, not just deliver information?

~ Inspired by this week’s developments.

Your Snapshot
​ A summary of the key insights from this issue

• Observability – making outcomes visible – is key to driving adoption of innovations. Seeing is believing.
• Leaders should demonstrate changes and share stories/data to spread ideas across organisations.
• Mapping ideas visually enables deeper collaboration and problem-solving. The process unlocks innovation.

👁 What has ‘observability’ got to do with innovation?

Observability refers to how visible the outcomes and benefits of a new idea, process or technology are within an organisation. When people can directly see the advantages, they become more inclined to adopt the innovation.

The implications for managing change are clear:

• Promote compelling stories that make the advantages relatable.
• Make outcomes and data transparent regularly to maintain momentum.
• Celebrate small victories early on to build engagement and accountability.
• Demonstrate innovations in visible ways so people can witness the benefits firsthand.

⏭🎯 Your Next Steps
​Commit to action and turn words into works

• Create a visible “results wall” to track progress and data on current projects. Make outcomes transparent.
• Identify a pilot innovation to showcase publicly. Demonstrate its benefits in action.
• Map your change plan on a wall with post-its. Externalise ideas to enable collaboration.

🗣💬 Your Talking Points
​Lead a team dialogue with these provocations

• How might we make the advantages of our ideas more observable?
• What small win could we celebrate today to build momentum?
• Who are the skeptics who need to see proof before getting on board?

🕳🐇 Down the Rabbit Hole
​Still curious? Explore some further readings from my archive

⟶ Professor Rosabeth M. Kanter: Narrative | Harvard Business School​

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Rosabeth Moss Kanter, the Ernest L. Arbuckle Professor of Business Administration, sees cases as stories whose narratives unfold from defining the problem to describing possible outcomes and ending with next steps. She uses three cases to illustrate this compelling narrative arc: “The Weather Company,” “Monique Leroux: Leading Change at Desjardins,” and “Haier: Incubating Entrepreneurs in a Chinese Giant.”

⟶ How to unlock design insights faster by mapping ideas: Examples and methods (Paywall possible) My article for UX Collective on Medium discusses how mapping ideas in a physical space can help unlock design insights faster. It argues that mapping externalises the thinking process, allows ideas to be manipulated and connected visually, and facilitates discussion.

⟶ Your Innovator’s Toolkit: Compatibility (edte.ch) In my post I explore the importance of another attribute identified by Rogers: Compatibility. It notes that innovations must be compatible with existing values, beliefs and practices of potential adopters in order to be adopted. Everett Rogers identified compatibility as a key attribute for innovations, along with relative advantage, complexity, trialability and observability. The article advises understanding community needs, listening to feedback, and engaging in design processes to improve an innovation’s compatibility.