Serendipity35

You can find numerous articles online about how artificial intelligence (AI) tools and activities can create the "AI-augmented professor." I have seen fewer opinions on how non-teaching staff members who support the learning process at most universities will be affected.

Certainly, AI augmentation will also affect those who support faculty and students, such as instructional designers, researchers, administrators, and other nonteaching professionals.

I read a piece on insidehighered.com about this group and keyed in on instructional designers since that was my area. The article uses an awkward term - BYOAI Bring Your Own AI - for his group because of the hybrid nature of home and office work for this group. Of  course, many faculty are also hybrid now, teaching in a campus classroom as well as from their home or office online.

Instructional designers are already using generative AI tools to create graphics, images and audio segments for classes. New tools, such as OpenAI’s Sora can generate full-motion videos from prompts. Chatbots can write or revise content. It can produce a rough draft syllabus for a new course.

This is also something that should concern those people coming into higher ed (and secondary education too, though perhaps to a lesser degree currently). Citing a survey by Microsoft and LinkedIn, ZDNet reported that “AI skills are so much of a priority that the report suggests 66 percent of business leaders wouldn’t hire someone without AI skills, and 71 percent of leaders would prefer to hire a less experienced candidate with AI skills than a more experienced candidate without them.”

Cross-posted from my blog at https://ronkowitzllc.com

 

Artificial intelligence scares some people. When AI takes over human roles and takes the form of a human, that is quite scary. AI writing essays scares teachers and pleases students. It also scares people whose income comes from writing. None of us want to be replaced by a machine.

I have found that AI used to create images seems to be less scary. Oh sure, if I were a graphic designer, artist, or photographer, I would be frightened that my career could be replaced by AI. And you have heard the horror stories about "deep fakes" of photos and videos. But I have been playing with a few simple programs for generating images using AI. These are all free - for now. I do some drawing, painting, and photography myself with my hands, but I would not rate them as professional and this AI method is just so easy. 

One of the first things I tried was Microsoft Bing  bing.com/images/create/  These programs are very easy to use. You input text - a prompt - describing what you want to see created. The more detailed the prompt, the more likely it is that you will get a result that matches the one in your imagination. Beyond that, you don't have a lot of control. You can't choose colors for small parts of the image but you can describe a style (like a Renaissance painting, or anime, etc.) and add details.

For example, you could ask for an illustration of a woman. That is very broad. Let's try again - an Asian woman on a computer monitor. How about a man creating an image of an Asian woman using his phone and Bing and projecting it on a monitor. Okay, just as a test of its capabilities, let's add a small teddy bear.

Here is the result:

Search and you'll find lots of these programs. www.craiyon.com is another one. I also liked experimenting with deepai.org/machine-learning-model/text2img. I went down a similar path asking variations on a woman standing by a wall, sitting by a lake, etc. 

I'll keep posting things I create on this site and I will be using them for a lot of my posts online.

I would like to see more control over these simple tools - such as being able to start with a photo of my own - and they are not perfect in following prompts. Did you notice that in the image at the top, Bing misspelled Bing?

 

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.

 

 

When I was working full-time as an instructional designer, I became very concerned with making courses (especially online courses) accessible. In the early days of this century, very often the college I worked at was quite focused on making accommodations for students with special needs. That was a quick fix but not a sustainable approach.

Retrofitting online courses became part of my department's purview. Our instructional design thinking believed that access(ible) are more than making accommodations. We knew that courses that were accessible for students who had particular needs were also courses that ate probably more accessible for all the other students too. There were so many small examples of things we did. It turned out to be useful to all the students in the course.

One semester now 20 years ago, I decided to provide audio files of my short online lectures and of explanatory talk about some of the more complicated assignments. Some students told me that they would listen to them while driving in the car, or commuting on the train, or on their walks with their dogs. Most of these audio files were taken from videos that I had made often with accompanying PowerPoint slides. So the visual was lost but we all know that a good number of PowerPoint slides used for lecture or text, so not all of the visual content was needed.

The fact that students use them this way, not only convinced me to continue the practice but made me rethink what I was putting in those slides. Perhaps the truly visual presentations needed to be truly visual and not offered as audio files so that students would have to sit down and view the video version. I was rethinking my use of visuals overall.