When I was teaching in a high school, I used to tell students (and faculty) that we were not preparing them for jobs. I was sure many of our students would end up in jobs with titles that did not exist then. There is a song by The Byrds from the 1960s titled "So You Wanna Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star." In 2024, it could be "So You Want To Be An AI Prompt Engineer."
The role of AI prompt engineer attracted attention for its high-six-figure salaries when it emerged in early 2023. What does this job entail? The principal aim is to help a company integrate AI into its operations. Some people describe the job as more prompter than engineer.
There are already tools that work with apps like OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform that can automate the writing process using sets of built-in prompts. Does that mean that AI will replace AI prompt engineers already? For now, the prompter works to ensure that users get the desired results. They might also be the instructors for other employees on how to use generative AI tools. They become the AI support team. AI can automate "trivial" tasks and make more time for work that requires creative thinking.
What kind of training leads to getting this job? You might think a background in computer science, but probably a strong language and writing ability is more important. People who write in the corporate world might justifiably fear AI will take their jobs away. Being a prompter might be an alternative.
Still, I suspect that there is a good possibility that a prompter/engineer's job might be vulnerable as software becomes better at understanding users’ prompts.
If you are interested in being an AI prompt engineer, I posted last week about some free online courses offered by universities and tech companies that included three courses that relate to creating prompts for AI.
AI Applications and Prompt Engineering is an edX introductory course on prompt engineering that starts with the basics and ends with creating your applications.
Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT is a specific 6-module course from Vanderbilt University (through Coursera) that offers beginners a starting point for writing better prompts.
Another course on ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developersis offered by OpenAI in collab with DeepLearning and it is taught by Isa Fulford and Andrew Ng. It covers best practices and includes hands-on practice.
If you are interested in taking some free AI courses offered by Google, Harvard, and others, here are 8 you might consider on a variety of approaches. For Coursera courses without the trial, go to the course you want to take and click 'Enroll for free', then 'Audit the course'. You'll need to create an account to take courses, but won't need to pay anything.
Introduction to AI with Python from Harvard University (edX) is a full 7-week course to explore the concepts and algorithms of AI. It starts with the technologies behind AI and ends with knowledge of AI principles and machine learning libraries. https://lnkd.in/g4Sbb3nQ
LLMOps are Large Language Model Ops offered by Google Cloud in collaboration with DeepLearning. Taught by Erwin Huizenga, it goes through the LLMOps pipeline of pre-processing training data and adapt a supervised tuning pipeline to train and deploy a custom LLM.
Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Ethics is a 4-module course offered by Coursera from the University of California - Davis that covers big data and introduces IBM's Watson as well as learning about big data opportunities and knowing the limitations of AI. I think the inclusion of ethics is an important element.
AI Applications and Prompt Engineering is an edX introductory course on prompt engineering that starts with the basics and ends with creating your applications.
Prompt Engineering for ChatGPT is a specific 6-module course from Vanderbilt University (through Coursera) that offers beginners a starting point for writing better prompts.
Another course on ChatGPT Prompt Engineering for Developersis offered by OpenAI in collab with DeepLearning and it is taught by Isa Fulford and Andrew Ng. It covers best practices and includes hands-on practice.
On March 5, 1975, the Homebrew Computer Club first met in a garage near Menlo Park in Silicon Valley, California.
On that day, I was across the country in my last semester at Rutgers. I had taken one course in computer programming, using Fortran, which had been around in some earlier forms since the late 1950s. We used a box of punch cards to create a program. I had looked into the class as an auditor, for no credit and not on my transcript, because I had talked to the professor after an information session he gave, and he was curious to see what an English major would do in his class.
My afterschool and vacation job in high school was doing printing for a liquor distributor. They had a room with huge computers using tape drives and cards, and I would sometimes wander in there and talk to the operator. Of course, I understood nothing about what he was doing. He was in a unique place in that position because no one in the company understood what he was doing except him and his one assistant. And yet those computers, printed all the invoices which I would later have to box up and file in the warehouse. Though they were using the computer to print them all, no one could access that data from their desktop, so if someone wanted a copy of an invoice, they had to dig through a file cabinet.
That 1970 computer was certainly not for personal use, and no one had a personal computer because they did not exist. Most of my fellow students didn't imagine we would ever have a computer in our home. They were gigantic — a computer easily took up an entire room. And they were very, very expensive, costing about a million dollars each. Not even computer engineers or programmers who made a living working on computers had access to a personal computer.
So this California club served a real need for tech-minded people But many of these tech-minded people wanted to build personal computers for fun. And they decided to start a hobbyist club to trade circuit boards and information and share their enthusiasm. Among the early members were high school friends Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak. Eventually, they would design and build what tey called the Apple I and II computers and brought them to the club to show them off. Lee Felsentein and Adam Osborne were also members and would create the first mass-produced portable computer, the Osborne 1.
Wozniak would write "The theme of the club was 'Give to help others.' Each session began with a 'mapping period,' when people would get up one-by-one and speak about some item of interest, or a rumor, and have a discussion. Somebody would say, 'I've got a new part,' or somebody else would say he had some new data or ask if anybody had a certain kind of teletype."
I started teaching in a junior high school, in the fall of 1975, and shortly thereafter, the school got a terminal that was connected to a mainframe at some university in New Jersey. It was first used by one of the math teachers for a kind of computer club. I did go to his classroom a few times just to see how it worked but I saw no connection to what I had learned about programming in college.
It would be a few years before the first personal computers appeared in the school We had a lab that was used for the first actual computer class. It was a classroom full of standalone TRS 80s. TRS stands for Tandy RadioShack, though later they were nicknamed Trash 80s. I took a professional development class using those computers where we learned to program in BASIC. I created a vocabulary flashcard program that I was able to use with a few of my English classes during periods when the lab was not being used by the math teacher. The program was crude. The graphics were basically nonexistent, but the kids and I found it very interesting.
I remember one teacher who was in the professional development class, saying we will all have to learn to program in the future. I was sure she was wrong. I had no doubt that computers would play a role in our teaching future, but I was also sure that other people would be writing the programs and we would only be users.
The first computer I had in my classroom was an Apple IIe. Since I had some computer background and more so because I had some interest in learning more, I became the computer coordinator for the building. That meant my computer had two disc drives so that I could copy software that we had purchased and were allowed to copy. MECC was a big source of classroom software back then.
The first computer I bought for home use was the same as what I had in my classroom which made sense because then I could use the software home too. This hardware was expensive. I paid more for the Apple dot matrix printer than I paid for my laptop last year.
We remained an aApple school, and an apple family for a few years until a new person moved into the position of district computer coordinator. He swapped out all the Apple computers for what we would call IBM clones, but we're the early Windows95-equipped computers. When I bought my next computer, it was one using Windows 95.
When I left teaching secondary school in 2000 and went to work at NJIT, all the computers used Windows except for the school of architecture, which was an Apple Mac building. They were their own little tech world. And so I lost contact with the Apple world in those days when even TV commercials and print ads would argue about whether you were a Windows or Mac kind of person. I remember one professor saying to me that he was surprised I was not using a Mac because I seemed like "a creative type."
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)
When I was teaching in a high school, I used to tell students (and faculty) that we were not preparing them for jobs. I was sure many of our students would end up in jobs with titles that did not exist then. There is a song by The Byrds from the 1960s titled "So You Wanna Be a Rock 'n' Roll Star." In 2024, it could be "So You Want To Be An AI Prompt Engineer."
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.