Serendipity35

 

Recently, Twitter owner Elon Musk officially changed the company’s famous bird logo to an “X” as part of a rebranding.

Musk acquired the platform for $44 billion late last year, He posted that the company would soon “bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.”
The following day his domain X.com sent people the same Twitter homepage which remains live with no other changes apparent other than the logo.

Musk's vision is for the transition from Twitter to X to turn the platform into what he calls an “everything app.” Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino posted that X will be “centered in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking" and that it will be powered by artificial intelligence.

This transition began in April when court filings changed the name of Twitter Inc. to X Corp.

Musk wants tweets to be called “x’s,” though I predict that will take some time to take hold - if ever. Musk was asked what retweets would be called. He wrote that the “concept should be rethought" - meaning the word or the ability to repost something?

X.com is not a new domain. It was an online bank co-founded by Elon way back in 1999. X.com merged with competitor Confinity Inc. the following year to create an easy payment system. The merged company changed its name to PayPal, and then eBay bought PayPal for $1.5 billion in 2002, and in 2015, PayPal was spun off and became an independent company.

 

He shared a photo of the X logo projected onto the company’s headquarters Monday.

Our headquarters tonight pic.twitter.com/GO6yY8R7fO

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 24, 2023

 

Artificial Intelligence has gained very widespread attention in the past six months even among people who consider themselves to be not very tech-savvy. chatGPT and its clones have received much of the attention but the AI floodgate opened wide. So wide that people became fearful and the government became interested in possibly restricting its growth in the U.S. and other countries.

Google introduced a tool to help you write. Grammarly, the writing assistenat that checks your writing, now has a feature to help you write too. Before we put a pause on AI growth, I want to consider how it is already being used in building websites.

You may know that AI can write or revise the code behind websites and applications. I won't comment on that because it's not my strongest area. One of the problems I always encounter when starting on a new website with a client is content readiness. Writing website copy should be something that a client is intimately involved in doing. I'm okay with editing content but prefer clients to write their own initial copy as much as possible. Generative AI technology can draft surprisingly high-quality marketing copy.

I build and maintain some sites using Squarespace and they have integrated generative AI technology into the platform. It is used in their rich text editor, which powers all website text, providing you with predictive text. As with other chat tools, you write a prompt and the AI will generate a draft of copy that you can insert into the text block with a single click.

AI isn't building an actual website quite yet, but no doubt it will one day. And you still need humans feeding the content to it, checking it over and placing it in a design frame. Platforms like Squarespace, WordPress, WIX, et al, have made building a site much easier, but all those platforms will get more intelligent in the next year. Artificial combined with human intelligence will hopefully still provide the best designs.

In my years developing online courses starting at the turn of the century, we discovered quickly that students had no interest in recorded 90-minute lectures on tapes, CDs, DVDs, and eventually online. They hit the fast-forward button frequently.

I had learned in my secondary teaching years before my higher ed years that chunking material was essential.  Chunking is the process of breaking down instructional materials into smaller, "bite-sized" pieces and then arranging them in a sequence that makes it easier for your learners to learn the material. Think of how we write phone numbers: 800-289-9246 rather than 8002899246. We do it for dates, we make categories, chapters, heading, subheadings, menus.

The more current term for this seems to be "microlearning" which is used in education and professional development. These short, focused bursts of learning, are often delivered in the form of videos. Proponents will say that this is also effective for time-poor and attention-deficient learners, though that is arguable. 

We know that video accounts for the vast majority of Internet traffic. Of course, it's not all learning. In fact, much of it is entertainment, but educators can learn from how entertainment uses video and media. All those short clips from late-night talk shows or Saturday Night Live get far more views than would a full version of the show.

The effectiveness of microlearning depends on a range of factors: the quality of the materials being delivered, the context in which they are being consumed, and the learning objectives of the individual.

Microlearning in education, especially online, can include:
Text (in phrases, short paragraphs)
Images (photos, illustrations)
Videos (of the short variety)
Audio (also short)
Tests and Quizzes (yes, shorter is better)
Games (such as simple single-screen challenges)

MORE
https://www.umass.edu/ctl/resources/how-do-i/how-do-i-chunk-content-increase-learning

https://thepeakperformancecenter.com/educational-learning/thinking/chunking/chunking-as-a-learning-strategy/

https://elearningindustry.com/what-is-microlearning-benefits-best-practices

I ask "Are You Tired of Hearing About AI Yet?" but the question is rhetorical because whether you answer Yes or No, AI is still going to be big news for the foreseeable future.

This month some tech big shots were summoned to the principal's office - well, the White House -  and told they must protect the public from the dangers of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Sundar Pichai of Google, Satya Nadella of Microsoft, and OpenAI's Sam Altmann were told they had a "moral" duty to safeguard society and that the administration may decide to regulate the sector further.

AI products like ChatGPT and Bard have gone mainstream and interacting with "generative AI", which was once the domain of computer scientists, is now something kids are doing. It is writing student assignments by summarizing information from multiple sources, debugging computer code, writing presentations, and even taking a shot at poetry. Some of it reads believably human-generated. Some does not. But it does it in seconds.

Altman of OpenAI commented that in terms of regulation, executives were "surprisingly on the same page on what needs to happen."

I'm sure it came up in the conversations that earlier that week, the "godfather" of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, quit his job at Google - saying he now regretted his work. Then again, he is 75, so "quit" might also be called "retired."

This seems like something innovative and yet part of me thinks why aren't we already doing things like this.

Solar panels are being rolled out “like carpet” on railway tracks in Switzerland.

Swiss start-up Sun-Ways is installing panels near Buttes train station in the west of the country in May, pending sign-off from the Federal Office of Transport.

As the climate crisis demands that we speed up Europe’s energy transition, developers have been seeing new potential in unusual surfaces.

https://www.euronews.com/green/2023/03/17/solar-panels-could-be-installed-in-the-spaces-between-railway-tracks-in-world-first

Google recently introduced a new feature to their Workplace suite that they call "Help Me Write." This generative AI will first appear in Gmail and Google Docs. At the moment, it's available to a select audience of invited testers.

Like other generative AI, you will be able to enter a prompt and have a first draft created. for you.,An example Google shared is not having it write a paper for your English class, though it will probably be able to do that. They show the example of having it create a job description for a regional sales representative/

It's another AI tool that might frighten teachers because it seems to help students unfairly but I think this may be a misperception. As with other AI tools, such as the much-discussed chat GPT, I think the best thing educators can do is to introduce this to students and guide them in the ways that it can be best used and best used legitimately.

The evolution of digital literacy in classrooms will never end. Yes, these kinds of AI- assisted-writing tools present boyj opportunities and challenges for educators. But ignoring them or trying to ban them from student use is certainly not the solution. This tool and others like it are an opportunity to improve student writing skills and critical thinking. 

Google Announcements
https://blog.google/technology/ai/ai-developers-google-cloud-workspace/
https://workspace.google.com/blog/product-announcements/generative-ai