I polled my students and the ONLY AI they used was ChatGPT. It felt like the iPhone phenomenon, but even worse. They were unaware of any others. I am set to remedy that in the next couple of weeks with a 3-week intro to “Using AI for Language Learning”, the final module of three of my classes.
It seems that AI researchers use different AIs for different purposes. The new favorite in Silicon Valley is Anthropic’s Claude AI. Here is Kevin Roose from the NYTimes on this. (Gift article)
I’m curious about what you use for yourself and for students. I’ve been playing around with TalkPal to improve my Japanese. It seems to work. I do get a flavor of how nervous my students are using AI for learning. I hope to teach them to feel more in control. I’m beta testing IDoRecall where you can add spaced repetition learning to almost anything you encounter, and link back to it if you don’t remember the flash cards. I’ve signed up for a similar site at YouLearn. Still looking into both.
Advances in technology are, for me, heartwarming. I am at heart a progressive. As a world, we must always be improving, or we are decaying. Sometimes both happen at the same time. But these are in the plus column.
Khanmigo gets better. This looks like something we may even use for language learning. Especially the writing part. Watch this 13-minute section from the TV documentary 60 minutes.
I get a firehose of new tools with daily newsletter/posts from There’s an AI for That (TAAFT) and TLDR. It’s nice to focus on one thing once in a while. I like the first better because I can customize what it sends to me more easily.
Three more from Google this week. One for right now, one for a year or two down the road, and a third farther out.
Gemini Version 2. I find Google’s AI just so much more useful when connected to things like Docs and Forms and their whole infrastructure. Looking forward to the improvements.
XR Glasses: eXtended Reality includes AR and VR and is the fashionable term (Microsoft has been using it for years). The Glasses are a definite upgrade from Google Glasses of a few years ago. Lots of progress. Looking forward to seeing a real product soon.
Quantum Computing. I’ve been spending way too much time learning what a big breakthrough this new chip called Willow is. Great explanation at NYTimes podcast Hard Fork (see the second story).
Here is one for teachers and other spreadsheet users. Kevin Stratvert has wonderful how-to videos. He used to do pretty much excusively Microsoft software. This is new for him and for me. AI in a spreadsheet. It does a couple of things like matching up names and grades on two different sheets that take me a long time to do. I’ve signed up and plan to use it this weekend.
That’s all for now. Lots more stuff coming down the pike, though. Teachers, check out Russel Stannard‘s channel for lots of good hands-on tools. Check out his latest on Magic School.
Noom is spooky sometimes. Great, but spooky. Noom is an app for your phone, one that introduces a healthier lifestyle. Not a diet app, definitely. It is specifically designed as a mobile app. You carry it with you. It never nags, but does put thoughts into your head. Good thoughts. It uses psychology. A lot of psychology. To come at you from every angle. But never too much (well, maybe once or twice in the last month). You get set up to recognize three categories of food. You log your weight and food intake each day, but it is a lot less onerous than other apps. They ballpark some, but it comes out close to reality.
Each day, they have 3-5 short lessons, broken into a half dozen screenfuls, with a light approach to ideas like attitudes toward food in general, then to attitudes to missing your targets, and how to reign in your id without strangling it. On top of all this, you they pick out a couple dozen people from around the world in a similar situation, or a complementary situation, and let you help each other out. And then you get a coach, someone to organize all the psychobabble, so that it just turns into good advice that is pretty easy to follow.
The scary part is like the time I skipped breakfast. The next day, I get a lesson on how getting 3 squares is a good option to follow unless you are a forager type. See how they get you there? They know I am not a forager by my logging of food. But set that way, I am motivated to get my 3 squares and limit it to that. Healthy without being too constrictive. Last night, I came in under my calorie ceiling, so I had a nice chunk of dark chocolate. Today, I get that as an example, saying great to have rewards, but make them intermittent, better reinforcement. Touche. I have been too regular there.
On their website you can see they are a young company, with lots of female input. Offices in Manhattan, Tokyo, and Seoul. Versions of the app in those languages and more. My daughter works in tech in Tokyo, and she instantly recognized the name when I mentioned it. She is guessing the format will get applied to other areas besides health and lifestyle once they have the blueprint down. Looks pretty well done from here.
This has given me some ideas for language teaching, but that is for another post.
We’ve all been amazed by the proliferation of MOOCs in the last year. We were all wondering how these large universities were going to monitize the courses to cover expenses. Now the other shoe has dropped. Testing. They provide certificates if the students can go to a testing center (Pearson, for example) and take the test, after the MOOC. This solves a number of problems besides profit. Making the tests with a third party allows for a second tier branding without affecting the F2F product they currently have.
Thanks to Stephen Downes at the OLDaily for the pointer.
Before any good discussion begins, everyone needs to be on the same page, using the same meanings for the same terms, or at least understand the differences. In the lead-up to the start of mobi.mooc and #potcert (Program for Online Teaching Certificate), spreading thoughts on differences between elearning and mlearning.
Clark Quinn’s Learnlets showed up in my RSS feed this morning with a pointer to RJ Jaquez and discussion of this topic. Quinn talks briefly about learning augmentation, and gets to the crux of the matter,
If your mobile solution isn’t doing something unique because of where (or when) you are, if it’s not doing something unique to the context, it’s not mlearning.
Which is all well and good. He goes on to say that most people don’t use tablets when running to catch a plane (I do), and even though interface is a bit tangential
it’s mostly about performance support, or contextualized learning augmentation, it’s not about just info access in convenience.
So there IS the form factor, but it is not central to this issue of mlearning. Mlearning is in what the software does, not what the hardware looks like.
Jaquez writes a list of requirements for mlearning, and he is specific about touch screens, screen orientation, content as navigation, sensors, and of course, location.
All this is interesting, but shouldn’t a good elearning program these days be able to add in features of mlearning when needed or when the learner is capable of using them? OK, there are pragmatic concerns, and just adding mobile features to an elearning program is not making it mlearning, but can’t there be a way to segue from one to another seamlessly? And does it matter?
