Serendipity35

 

When I was studying to be a secondary school teacher, Bloom’s Taxonomy often came up in my classes as a way to do lesson planning and a way to assess learners. Recently, there have been several revisions to its pyramid stack. An article on www.gettingsmart.com suggests a spiral might be better, particularly if you want to use it as a lens to view AI.

The author, Vriti Saraf, opines that the most important potential of AI isn’t to enhance human productivity, it’s to enhance and support human thinking, and that looking at AI’s capabilities through the lens of Bloom’s Taxonomy showcases the possible interplay of humans and machines.

It is an interesting idea. Take a look.

 

 

As someone who has used Google Podcasts both as a listener and as one platform for my little poetry podcast, I was disappointed to find that Google is scrapping their podcasts. Why? No explanation but I assume that other platforms (Spotify, Apple et al) have beaten them at that game.

Google has many programs in its cemetery, from big ones like Hangouts, Plus, Picasa, TV and Answers, to ones you probably didn't know existed - Deskbar, Dodgeball, Base, Gears, et al. They are sending Google Podcasts to the cemetery at the end of February. You would think a big player like Google could make this work, but as with social media, they failed.

This means one less place to listen to my WRITING THE DAY podcast, though most of my traffic comes from (in order) from Spotify, Amazon Music , Apple Podcasts and iHeart Radio.

Here is what Google told me:

Recently, we announced that Google Podcasts is going away in 2024. In order to ease this transition, you now have access to a tool that allows you to easily migrate your show subscriptions to YouTube Music or to download a file of your show subscriptions, which you can upload to an app that supports their import. Just like Google Podcasts, with YouTube Music you can listen to podcasts on the go using background play, download podcasts, and more – with no paid membership required. After March 2024, users in the US will no longer be able to listen to podcasts in Google Podcasts.

Huang's Law  and Moore's Law are technology "laws." Maybe it is more accurate to say they are observations, but "law" has become attached to these observations since they appear to remain true.

Moore's law is the observation that the number of transistors in an integrated circuit (IC) doubles about every two years. Moore's law is an observation and projection of a historical trend. Rather than a law of physics, it is an empirical relationship linked to gains from experience in production.

Gordon Moore, the co-founder of Fairchild Semiconductor and Intel (and former CEO of the latter), posited in 1965 posited the idea and projected this rate of growth would continue for at least another decade. In 1975, looking forward to the next decade, he revised the forecast to doubling every two years. His prediction has held since 1975 and has since become known as a "law".

Moore's prediction has been used in the semiconductor industry to guide long-term planning and to set targets for research and development, thus functioning to some extent as a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Huang’s Law has been called the new Moore’s Law. It seems that the law that the same dollar buys twice the computing power every 18 months is no longer true.

Huang's law is an observation in computer science and engineering that advancements in graphics processing units (GPUs) are growing at a rate much faster than with traditional central processing units (CPUs). The observation is in contrast to Moore's law as Huang's law states that the performance of GPUs will more than double every two years.

Jensen Huang was then CEO of Nvidia and at the 2018 GPU Technology Conference and observed that Nvidia’s GPUs were "25 times faster than five years ago" whereas Moore's law would have expected only a ten-fold increase. As microchip components became smaller, it became harder for chip advancement to meet the speed of Moore's law.

Huang's Law and Moore's Law are concepts primarily associated with the semiconductor industry and technology advancements. However, their principles can be extended and applied to various domains beyond technology.

You can extend Huang's Law to other fields where exponential growth or improvement is observed. For example, consider advancements in renewable energy efficiency, healthcare outcomes, or educational achievements. The idea is to identify areas where progress follows an exponential curve and apply the principles accordingly.

Both laws highlight the concept of scaling - either in computational power (Moore's Law) or AI efficiency (Huang's Law). You could apply this principle to other systems and processes where scaling can lead to significant improvements.

I am imagining a discussion (probably in a classroom setting) about ethical considerations, such as the impact of rapid advancements on society, and focus on responsible and ethical development in various fields. That certainly is true currently in discussions of AI.

I wrote here about the open-source software called Elgg almost two decades ago. (Not to be confused with elgg.net which was a social networking site for educators back around 2006 and no longer exists.)  Elgg is open-source social networking software that provides individuals and organizations with the components needed to create an online social environment. It offers blogging, microblogging, file sharing, networking, groups, and a number of other features. It was also the first platform to bring ideas from commercial social networking platforms to educational software. It was founded in 2004 by Ben Werdmuller and Dave Tosh

I view those older posts and many of the ones on this site that dates back almost 20 years as historical documents of a sort. I'm tempted at times to update them, and I do sometimes fix a broken image of proofreading mistake, but they may have some value as the documentation of another time in edtech history.

How many of the alternatives to commercial course management systems from my 2006 list still exist? I looked up Elgg to see if it was still in use. The Wikipedia entry shows that an impressive list of sites are using Elgg. The list includes Oxfam, the Australian, Dutch, Canadian and British Governments, New Zealand Ministry of Education, State of Ohio, USA, The World Bank, UNESCO, and the United Nations Development Programme.

Here is one of those old posts - expect broken links.

Elgg is software for building a personal learning landscape.” OK, and what is that? The software is from the Unired Kingdom. I first saw it mentioned on the Moodle site and thought it was a kind of plug-in to Moodle. It uses blogs, e-portfolios, shared files, RSS feeds and other "social networking" tools. I thought it had been designed for educational use, but looking through the users, it has a good number of general users.

Their site has a demo community set up and their resources/links are set up using an embedded wiki. You can create a free user account and will get space for a blog, RSS feeds, aggregator to read other peoples content, space to store your own resources (files). As a guest, you can still view items made public in user profiles - here's mine

Since their new release is version 0.601, this is obviously new beta software. So does this replace a Moodle or Blackboard, or supplement it, or serve a different purpose?

I'm hoping that my collaborator here, Tim Kellers, will have more to add in a follow-up posting. He has installed Elgg and worked with it for a while.

http://webapps.saugus.k12.ca.us/community - California's Saugus Unified School District uses it and as you can see, it is a secure environment with user id and password access. However, take a look at their user introduction pdf document. It's a nice 9 page intro with screenshots. Another K12 district getting ahead of the colleges!

Elgg = software and elgg.net is a site that uses that software.

Ready for the test? Elgg is to Elgg.net as ____ is to Wikipedia. (Answer: Mediawiki)

Well, to deal with that confusion (or further confuse you), elgg.net will now be edufilter.org.

Here's an email that went out to users from the Elgg folks:

Changes are afoot at Elgg.net!
Actually, you've been accustomed to change throughout the existence of the site since we started it in 2004. New features pop up all the time, and we think you'll be pleased to hear that this isn't going to stop soon.
However, we're going to change the name. Next Wednesday, Elgg.net will become Edufilter.org.
This is because, for a lot of people, Elgg.net is Elgg. Granted, it's a confusing name. But Elgg is a free, open source, white label social networking framework that anyone can install on their own servers. Want it running at your institution? Point your elearning folks at http://elgg.org.
Elgg.net, meanwhile, is a social network for education - and therefore, we think Edufilter is probably a better name.
You've probably got concerns, so let's deal with the most important:
#1: We're not going to break any of your links. While the front page of Elgg.net will forward to the main Elgg software homepage, anyone visiting elgg.net/your-username will still get to your page. We have no plans to end this, so if your address is printed on materials, don't worry. Everything's fine.
#2: The site will not be discontinued. It continues to be our flagship installation.
Furthermore, making the site overtly educational means we can give you more directed content and features. Sponsorship opportunities are available; if you'd like to promote your product or service available to some of the world's leading lights in elearning, let us know.
Best regards,
The Curverider team

Tim Kellers installed Elgg software here at NJIT, so drop by and register if you want to try it out. I also suggest you go to the elgg.net site and create an account so you can become part of that educator community. I have made some interesting contacts outside the United States from there. Right now I am just having this blog's content mirrored to my elgg blog account by using an RSS feed (yeah, there are some formatting & image issues doing that).

A Few Other Posts

https://serendipity35.net/index.php?/archives/489-Putting-All-Your-Educational-Eggs-In-One-Basket.html

https://serendipity35.net/index.php?/archives/83-More-of-the-Competition-in-the-CMS-Market.html

https://serendipity35.net/index.php?/archives/265-A-directory-to-Web-2.0-Companies.html