Serendipity35

You are still going to hear more and more this summer and fall about the "new normal" or the "next normal" as we hopefully move out of the pandemic and return to something similar to but not the same as what we called normal in 2019.

Isn't normal always changing? What is normal anyway?

Normality for an individual is when your behavior is consistent with the most common behavior for that person. But normal is also used to describe individual behavior that conforms to the most common behavior in a society. Normal is also at times only recognized in contrast to abnormality.

In schools, we talk about individual student behaviors that are not normal because they contrast with the majority of students. We can talk about an entire college as not following the normal behavior of other colleges.

In March 2021, Rutgers University was the first university I heard announce that all students would be required to be vaccinated in order to be back on campus in September. I am a Rutgers College alum and I was happy to hear the announcement, but it was met with agreement and disagreement immediately. I thought back to when I attended Rutgers in the last century, and to when my sons went off to college in this century. Some vaccinations were required for me and for my sons. The meningitis vaccine was required and is typically given to preteens and teens at 11 to 12 years old with a booster dose at 16 years old. I don't recall any protests about vaccinations for students in K-12 and college being public events before. Typically, vaccinations are recommended for college for measles, mumps, and rubella, meningococcal, human papillomavirus, and influenza.

Talk about "vaccination passports" is a discussion well beyond school campuses.

I read something online (I'm not linking to it) connecting the post-pandemic normal to the New World Order (NWO), which is a conspiracy theory that hypothesizes a secretly emerging totalitarian world government. It's not a new conspiracy. Believers will point to "evidence" such as the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States having the Latin phrase "novus ordo seclorum", since 1782 and on the back of the U.S. one-dollar bill since 1935. That translates to "New Order of the Ages." It is generally considered to allude to the beginning of the era where the United States of America became an independent nation-state. Conspiracy theorists claim this is an allusion to the "New World Order."

I also read online that PEW research feels that "A plurality of experts think sweeping societal change will make life worse for most people as greater inequality, rising authoritarianism and rampant misinformation take hold in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak." That is a harsh prediction. They do add that "a portion believe life will be better in a ‘tele-everything’ world where workplaces, health care and social activity improve."

Their research found that the next normal may "worsen economic inequality as those who are highly connected and the tech-savvy pull further ahead of those who have less access to digital tools and less training or aptitude for exploiting them." They also feel that the changes that may occur will include the elimination of some jobs and enhance the power of big technology firms. Some of that power was growing pre-pandemic through market advantages and using artificial intelligence (AI) in ways that seem likely to further erode the privacy and autonomy of their users.

Likewise, the spread of misinformation online was happening well before the pandemic, so I don't view this as a pandemic-caused issue. Some of the PEW respondents saw the manipulation of public perception, emotion and action via online disinformation as the greatest threat.

The WHO (World Health Organization) is talking about moving from the "new normal" to a "new future" in a "sustainable response to COVID-19." Some of their recommendations about global health could easily be recommendations for global education.

Recognizing that the virus will be with us for a long time, governments should also use this opportunity to invest in health systems, which can benefit all populations beyond COVID-19, as well as prepare for future public health emergencies. These investments may include: 1) capitalizing on COVID-19 enhancements to surveillance, lab, risk communications and other core capacities, 2) back casting to identify gaps and steer resources to future health needs like genetic sequencing and contact tracing with Information Technology, 3) building on COVID-19 innovations to accelerate recovery and address other pressing health problems, and 4) strengthening multi-sector collaboration to improve health services and reduce health inequity.

EDUCAUSE suggests that part of that next normal in education will be improved student engagement through lessons learned during the pandemic. For example, during COVID-19 teaching, breakout rooms emerged as one way to offer environments for collaborative learning. Their use both emerged from perceived "Zoom fatigue" and also contributed to that fatigue depending on how it was implemented.

Globally, writing on the World Economic Forum website suggests that this idea of a New Normal "must not be the lens through which we examine our changed world." Why? One reason is that what we call "normal" has not worked for a majority of the world's population. "So why would it start working now?" Then what should we do? The writer suggests that we "should use our discomfort to forge a new paradigm instead."

Large scale change - a new paradigm - is a lofty goal and what that new paradigm would be is still far from clear. Stay tuned.

I read that the American rock band Kings of Leon is getting in on NFTs (non-fungible tokens). They are not the first. I looked into this term which I was not familiar with and found that the artist Grimes sold a bunch of NFTs for nearly $6 million and an NFT of LeBron James making a historic dunk for the Lakers garnered more than $200,000. The auction house Christie's got bids in the millions for the artist Beeple. 

NFT (sometimes pronounced niff-tees)stands for "non-fungible token" meaning a token that you can't exchange for another thing of equal value. Fungibility is the ability of a good or asset to be interchanged with other individual goods or assets of the same type. Fungible assets simplify the exchange and trade processes, as fungibility implies equal value between the assets.One comparison I found said to consider that you can exchange a $20 bill for two $10 bills. They are fungible. But an NFT is one of a kind.

These NFTs are used to create verifiable digital scarcity. They also give digital ownership. They seem to be used with things that require unique digital items like crypto art, digital collectibles, and online gaming.

This goes back to blockchain which has become an established way to provide proof of authenticity. Blockchain gets most of its attention because of its use with cryptocurrencies, like Bitcoin. Ownership is recorded on a blockchain which is a digital ledger.

NFTs use Ethereum, a decentralized, open-source blockchain featuring smart contract functionality. Ether is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. It is the second-largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization, after Bitcoin.

We heard recently that Elon Musk bought a lot of Bitcoin and will accept it as payment for his Tesla vehicles, and other vendors accept cryptocurrencies as payment. But NFTs are unlike cryptocurrencies because you can't exchange one NFT for another in the same way that you would with dollars. Its appeal is that each is unique and acts as a collector’s item that can’t be duplicated. They are rare by design, like limited editions and prints. 

And now, with music, proponents say that NFTs could help artists struggling with digital piracy, low streaming royalty rates and a lack of touring revenue from the last year of Covid-19 pandemic restrictions.

Ask several people to define artificial intelligence (AI) and you'll get several different definitions. If some of them are tech people and the others are just regular folks, the definitions will vary even more. Some might say that it means human-like robots. You might get the answer that it is the digital assistant on their countertop or inside their mobile device.

One way of differentiating AI that I don't often hear is by the two categories of weak AI and strong AI.

Weak AI (also known as “Narrow AI”) simulates intelligence. These technologies use algorithms and programmed responses and generally are made for a specific task. When you ask a device to turn on a light or what time it is or to find a channel on your TV, you're using weak AI. The device or software isn't doing any kind of "thinking" though the response might seem to be smart (as in many tasks on a smartphone). You are much more likely to encounter weak AI in your daily life.

Strong AI is closer to mimicking the human brain. At this point, we could say that strong AI is “thinking” and "learning" but I would keep those terms in quotation marks. Those definitions of strong AI might also include some discussion of technology that learns and grows over time which brings us to machine learning (ML), which I would consider a subset of AI.

ML algorithms are becoming more sophisticated and it might excite or frighten you as a user that they are getting to the point where they are learning and executing based on the data around them. This is called "unsupervised ML." That means that the AI does not need to be explicitly programmed. In the sci-fi nightmare scenario, the AI no longer needs humans. Of course that is not even close to true today as the AI requires humans to set up the programming, supply the hardware and its power. I don't fear the AI takeover in the near future.

But strong AI and ML can go through huge amounts of data that it is connected to and find useful patterns. Some of those are patterns and connections that itis unlikely that a human would find. Recently, you may have heard of the attempts to use AI to find a coronavirus vaccine. AI can do very tedious, data-heavy and time-intensive tasks in a much faster timeframe.

If you consider what your new smarter car is doing when it analyzes the road ahead, the lane lines, objects, your speed, the distance to the car ahead and hundreds or thousands of other factors, you see AI at work. Some of that is simpler weak AI, but more and more it is becoming stronger. Consider all the work being done on autonomous vehicles over the past two decades, much of which has found its way into vehicles that still have drivers.

Of course, cybersecurity and privacy become key issues when data is shared. You may feel more comfortable in allowing your thermostat to learn your habits or your car to learn about how you drive and where you drive than you are about letting the government know that same data. Discover the level of data we share online dong financial operations or even just our visiting sites, making purchases and our search history, and you'll find the level of paranoia rising. I may not know who you are reading this article, but I suspect someone else knows and is more interested in knowing than me.

A few recent banned apps in the news should be of interest to educational institutions where students may very well be using them - and even some schools themselves may be using them. Here are two summaries from The Newsworthy podcast:

The U.S.. Navy banned TikTok from government-issued smartphones. They say the video-sharing app could be a cybersecurity threat. The Navy didn't expand on the reason, but we do know the U.S. has opened a national security review into TikTok’s China-based parent company ByteDance. TikTok hasn’t commented but has said before it uses U.S. rules.
Read more: Reuters

And then I read that ToTok (not to be confused with TikTok) has been banned from Google and Apple’s app stores. The messaging app appears to have millions of downloads, but the government of the United Arab Emirates allegedly uses it to track locations and conversations. If you have it, experts say you should uninstall it.
Read more: NYT, Wired