“Has your district implemented any AI literacy materials for staff and/or students?” It’s a reasonable question. I was in a virtual meeting with about 60 other educators earlier this week. We were talking about artificial intelligence, and how schools are working to embrace it, manage it, leverage it, govern it. It’s a working group. We’re trying to figure things out. There are no right answers. … Continue reading AI Literacy
Last month, the Beatles won a Grammy award for best rock performance for their song, “Now and Then.” They had also been nominated for record of the year for the same song. The Beatles last performed together on August 29, 1966, and last recorded together on August 20, 1969. This “new” song is built on a demo recorded by John Lennon in 1977, with some … Continue reading Complacent Innovation
Technology makes us stupid. I’ve written about this before. The availability of amazing tools that provide knowlege and organization allows us to stay on the ball without remembering anything. My car knows where I’m going and how to get there. My calendar will tell me what I’m doing this weekend. My phone knows how to contact everyone I care about, so I don’t need to … Continue reading Artificial Words
I was playing with Notebook LM a few weeks ago. This is an AI tool, developed by Google, that is supposed to help people interact with documents and resources. You can give it a bunch of content, and then summarize that content and ask questions about it. It has a cool feature that creates AI-generated audio overviews in a conversational, podcast-like format. So I fed … Continue reading What’s Next?
I think I’m doing it wrong. Lately, I’ve been using both Google’s Gemini and ChatGPT for my generative AI needs. I recently posed this question to both: Gemini told me I would land in Los Angeles at 6:25 PM local time on July 30. ChatGPT told me I would land in Los Angeles at 6:25 AM on July 31. This is a real scenario, and … Continue reading Not So Fast
Twenty years ago, I was in the market for a new car. I wanted a mid-size sedan that was safe, reliable, and had good fuel economy. I gathered data from NHTSA and the EPA and combined it with reviews and reliability assessments from Edmunds, Car & Driver, and other resources. I had a lovely spreadsheet with all of the characteristics I cared about for every … Continue reading Shifting Bias
On Monday, March 9, 2020, Governor Mike DeWine announced that three cases of COVID-19 had been confirmed in Ohio. Two days later, he reported that Ohio had four cases. I was confused. Does that mean Ohio now had seven cases, or does the second announcement include the three previously reported? When I figured out that seven was the total, I knew we had a problem. … Continue reading Detecting AI
Artificial Intelligence is here. It’s embedded in the tools we use every day. There’s no practical way to block it in schools, and there’s no reliable method for detecting its use. We know our students are going to use it whether we want them to or not, and we know that there are lots of issues around privacy, safety, ethics, and security that we should … Continue reading What Should We Do About AI?
There are not many transformative technologies. In my role, I’ve become desensitized to the hype of new technologies. Yes, I know. This new shiny thing is going to revolutionize the way we live our lives. It’s going to redefine public education. It will fundamentally change the way humans interact with each other. Sure. But next year, there will be a new shiny thing and we’ll … Continue reading The Fundamental Realities of AI
Last week, I attended an Artificial Intelligence forum sponsored by OhioX and InnovateOhio. The event included a couple demonstrations, including one on how AI can be used for marketing, and one on Microsoft’s approach to AI. But the primary focus of the event was two panel discussions: healthcare and education. The healthcare discussion consisted of representatives from Cleveland Clinic, University Hospital, and Pandata, a company … Continue reading If Only
When I was in school, we weren’t allowed to use calculators. We did our calculations by hand. That included long division, and deriving square roots, and looking up logarithms and trig functions in computation tables. It wasn’t until my senior year of high school that my physics teacher said, “you know, you could just use a calculator and save yourself a lot of time.” By … Continue reading Don’t Criticize What You Can’t Understand
A few years ago, MSN fired all of their reporters and replaced them with artificial intelligence. “Reporters” might be the wrong word. MSN didn’t report their own news. They used other news sources, and curated their own news site based on the content that they gathered from other places. They found that this could be done just as easily by software as it can by … Continue reading Did I Really Write This?
Taste of Tech 