EdTech News, Notes, And Resources May 6, 2024
Greetings! I plan on posting EdTech News, Notes, and Resources weekly or bi-weekly. Enjoy!
👨🏻🏫 See Me Present About AI For Free
Register for the Week of AI virtual conference to see me present The Harms Of AI on Thursday, May 16 at 8 PM Eastern.
I am honored to be a Shake Up Learning Summer Learning Series featured speaker. Register for my AI Vocabulary for Teachers session on July 9.
Please note this registration link is an affiliate link. I receive a commission if you use it to register for an all-access pass upgrade.
💻 Multimedia EdTech Resources
Join the Figma for Education team for Jamboard to FigJam: Everything you need to know on Tuesday, May 14 at 4 PM Eastern. Alex Fagundez and David Curran from Figma will tell you everything you need to know to transition (I say upgrade) from Jamboard to FigJam. Please note I have had paid collaborations with Figma. This is not one of them.
Watch Katie Fielding’s Be An A11y Ally: Creating Accessible Classrooms session from the ISTE Community Leaders Global Impact 2024 conference. Learn her powerful story of life with Cystic Fibrosis. She also shares ideas and practices for creating accessible digital materials for students.
Subscribe to Katie’s Fielding Notes Substack.
Dan Meyer’s Talk at the recent AIR Show is informative. I appreciate that he said students and teachers are screaming what they want and need. Instead of getting it, they get chatbots.
Subscribe to Dan’s Mathworlds Substack.
Fonz Mendoza’s My EdTech Life podcast is a favorite of mine. His recent guest, Michelle L., said some insightful things about AI and education. My favorite was this nugget of wisdom: “Move slow and fix things.”
🤖📰 AI News
Inside the secret list of websites that make AI like ChatGPT sound smart by Kevin Schaul, Szu Yu Chen, and Nitasha Tiku for the Washington Post. This deep dive into Google’s C4 data is concerning. Hate sites, sites with personal information, copyrighted work, and sites that are anti-women, anti-Black, or anti-Muslim are in the dataset.
OpenAI’s response to a lawsuit is that it cannot prevent ChatGPT from generating inaccurate text. OpenAI sued for false info but says the problem can’t be fixed by Eugene van der Watt for Daily AI.
If you use ChatGPT to generate letters of recommendation, do not include names. It has a sexist bias when generating letters of recommendation. What’s in a Name? Experimental Evidence of Gender Bias in Recommendation Letters Generated by ChatGPT in the Journal of Medical Internet Research.
The AI Revolution Is Crushing Thousands of Languages by Matteo Wong for The Atlantic. Large Language Models serve 8 to 10 of the 7,000 languages spoken on Earth. As AI becomes more crucial for navigating the web, thousands of languages that lack sufficient web text to train models could be in peril.
Why FT may be wrong to license its content for AI training by Dominic Young of The Press Gazette. “Nobody owes AI companies a right to exist, certainly not the owners of the content they have appropriated and mined for their own benefit.”
Another lawsuit against AI companies: The Denver Post sues OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging tech giants illegally harvested copyrighted articles by Ethan Baron of The Denver Post.
AI literacy is not the same as "AI literacy" by Benjamin Riley. This post discusses how how AI literacy means understanding its limitations and not confusing what it does for “democratizing expertise.”
Check out this post by Melanie Mitchell debunking the idea that AI is beating humans at basic tasks. As Mitchell wrote, “AI surpassing humans on a benchmark that is named after a general ability is not the same as AI surpassing humans on that general ability.”
Something I learned this week: Procreate has “…No plans to introduce AI image generation or other AI-based generative tools, as current data collection and usage practices common in AI engines aren't in-line with our values.”
🤖📈 AI Hype
The keynote speaker at an upcoming edtech conference has this language in their bio, “…Humanity can ensure a symbiotic coexistence with AI when it inevitably becomes a billion times smarter than we are.”
When you see claims like this, please scrutinize them. I have some questions:
What makes this inevitable”?
What is the definition of “smarter”?
Are calculators smarter than humans because they never miscalculate?
What is “a billion times smarter” based on?
Why not twice as smart? Why not a million times smarter? Why not shoot for two billion or ten billion times smarter?
“Reply guy” is a derisive term Urban Dictionary defines as, “A man who behaves in an overly familiar way and is always replying to the social media messages of a woman he doesn't know or is barely acquainted with.”
Despite this, a company selling a service that replies to posts on Twitter and Reddit with spammy AI-generated text that mentions clients’ names calls themselves, “Reply Guy.” Please remember Reply Guy the next time Sam Altman proclaims that developing AI is “an unequivocally great thing to do.”
Continuing The Conversation
Thank you for reading. Does your school or conference need a tech-forward educator who critically examines AI and pedagogy? Reach out on Twitter or email mistermullaney@gmail.com.
Post Image: Photo by Bank Phrom on Unsplash.
AI Disclosure:
I wrote this post without the use of any generative AI. That means:
I developed the idea for the post without using generative AI.
I wrote an outline for this post without the assistance of generative AI.
I wrote the post from the outline without the use of generative AI.
I edited this post without the assistance of any generative AI. I used Grammarly to assist in editing the post. I have Grammarly GO turned off.