My AI Breakthrough
This was a really interesting set of pie graphs from a SectionSchool webinar featuring Greg Shove I attended this week. It’s based on a survey from April, 2024 of 1300+ knowledge workers in the US, UK, and Canada. Special thanks to my boss for suggesting it.
AI Usage
This first one refers to AI usage:
The AI Class
And this one to key findings from “The AI Proficiency Report:”
- Only 7% of professionals are in the “AI class” - those who have integrated AI into their personal workflows
- Nearly 60% are “AI Newcomers” who have only used ChatGPT a few times
- Members of the AI class save up to 12 hours of working time per week using AI
- Most companies won’t see efficiency gains with just a small AI task force - they need to provide more employees with AI guidelines, approved tools, and training
| Category | Percentage | Description |
|---|---|---|
| AI Newcomers | 57% | Using AI once in a while, limited access at work, mostly free tools for personal use |
| AI Class | 7% | Integrating AI into daily workflows, 10%+ productivity gains, expert users |
| AI Skeptics | 11% | Nervous or resistant to AI, limited understanding of safe AI usage |
| AI Experimenters | 25% | Uses AI once a week, small productivity gains, understand basics |
A third of the AI class saves more than 30% of their time at work each week using AI. 95% of the AI Class are in companies who openly approve of the use of AI. The most productive AI users have access to company or team-wide LLMs. The AI Class use AI for everything, saving as much as 12 hours a week by using AI. Their favorite tools are ChatGPT-4, Perplexity, and Claude. These people have more time to make more impact that can drive more revenue and company goals–because they’re strategically automating what they don’t need to spend valuable time on. They also have strong buy-in from their employers, are in the top 8% in terms of prompting skills, and use AI for 3 or more use cases. (Source: The AI Proficiency Report)
Reflection
I have integrated AI into my personal workflows, so I can self-identify as a 7% of professionals. But one of the questions I’ve been struggling with is, “How can I maximize AI usage in my workflows MORE?” I crossed the threshold two weeks ago, when I had that “Eureka!” moment.
The moment when I realized I needed to stop and watch myself doing a work task, then rethink it with AI in mind and using the tools to capture efficiency. One task took two hours of work to refine the bulk of the work. Over the subsequent weeks, I’ve made other adjustments, but that first one was the one I asked myself:
- What are you doing?
- Why are you doing it that way?
- How could you change that workflow with AI?
- Applying the AI to the workflow, then asking, “Is this what I was aiming for? How can I improve the prompt to get closer?”
- Documenting what worked (or didn’t). Re-doing the work with AI to see what happened, and asking again, “Did this work?”
So, something that took me WEEKS of hard work, and in some cases I found impossible, was made easy. Like, instead of weeks, it takes 10 minutes. The hard part? Building the prompt to do what I want, fine-tuning it to get the result. But that doesn’t take as long now.
THAT was my breakthrough. From weeks to 10 minutes.
The problem? I’ll have to do this again with every workflow I use now. But I am confident of the process. Now I need to document that process of reinventing what I do with AI. It’s a lot of fun!
Passive Oppression
The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum.
That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate. ~Noam Chomsky
Fences, Not Ambulances
From Dr. Pamela Snow:
Fences at the top of the cliff, not ambulances at the bottom. Every. Time.
Student Use of AI
…when students rely on a generative A.I. tool like ChatGPT to outsource brainstorming and writing, they may be losing the ability to think critically and to overcome frustration with tasks that don’t come easily to them.
…what troubles Martin more than some students’ shrewd academic dishonesty is “that there’s just no grit that’s instilled in them. There’s no sense of ‘Yes, you’re going to struggle, but you’re going to feel good at the end of it.’”
via Sophia Foster-Dimino, What Teachers Told Me About A.I. in School, The New York Times, 8/14/24
3-2-1-: Cell Phone Bans in Texas Schools
This is sure to be a hot topic for many of us in ed tech spaces. This online publication frames the issue as one between teachers vs parents. For the teachers, it’s about eliminating distractions. For the parents, it’s about staying in contact with their children in an environment rife with active shooters (e.g. Uvalde ISD’s massacre is fresh in our minds).
Read The Texas Score Card
The publication, The Texas Score Card, states:
Some Texas school districts are implementing policies to restrict students’ cell phone use on campus. Generally, the policies require the phones to be turned off and placed in lockers or locked pouches that can only be opened by a school official. A state lawmaker plans to file legislation to address the issue statewide. Advocates say the move removes a major source of distraction in the classroom. Opponents say it interferes with parents’ right to monitor their children. (source)
Curious about the latest on this, I queried Perplexity.ai: for a 3-2-1 and the scientific consensus on the topic. What it revealed appears below. What are YOUR thoughts, your opinion?
My Prompt
Here’s the prompt I submitted to Perplexity.ai:
What do recently published studies say about banning smartphones in K-12 classrooms? Give me a 3-2-1 (3 facts, 2 quotes, 1 question) about the subject. Also, include the response, “What is the scientific consensus on smartphone use in the classroom to distract students from learning and/or its effectiveness compared to traditional paper-n-pencil methods?”
The results are split up into two components:
- 3-2-1 Summary
- Scientific consensus
Ok, take a moment to look at the results.
3-2-1 Summary
Here’s a 3-2-1 summary on banning smartphones in K-12 classrooms based on recent studies:
3 Facts:
-
A 2024 UNESCO study recommends banning smartphones in schools for students of all ages, citing improved academic performance and reduced bullying in countries that enforce restrictions[1].
-
As of 2020, 77% of U.S. schools had moved to prohibit cellphones for nonacademic purposes[3].
-
Studies show that it can take up to 20 minutes for a student’s brain to refocus on learning after using a smartphone in class[2].
2 Quotes:
-
“High school teachers are especially likely to see cellphones as problematic. About seven in 10 (72 percent) say that students being distracted by cellphones is a major problem in their classroom”[1].
-
“The human brain is incapable of thinking more than one thing at a time. And so what we think of as multitasking is actually rapid-switch-tasking. And the problem with that is that switch-tasking may cover a lot of ground in terms of different subjects, but it doesn’t go deeply into any of them”[3].
1 Question:
How can schools balance the potential safety benefits of allowing students to have phones (e.g., during emergencies) with the academic benefits of banning them?
What’s the Scientific Consensus on Smartphones in the Classroom?
The scientific consensus generally supports the idea that smartphones can be significant distractions in the classroom, potentially hindering learning. Multiple studies have shown that smartphone use during class is associated with lower academic performance and reduced attention[1][2][3].
However, the effectiveness of smartphones compared to traditional paper-and-pencil methods is more nuanced. Some research suggests that when used purposefully for educational activities, smartphones can enhance learning experiences[4]. For instance, they can provide quick access to information, facilitate collaborative learning, and offer interactive educational apps.
That said, the majority of evidence points to smartphones being more of a hindrance than a help when it comes to classroom learning. The ability of smartphones to distract students from the lesson at hand, through notifications, social media, or other non-academic uses, often outweighs their potential benefits[1][2].
It’s worth noting that the effectiveness can vary depending on how smartphones are integrated into the curriculum and how their use is managed in the classroom. Some experts advocate for teaching students how to use smartphones responsibly rather than implementing outright bans[3].
In summary, while smartphones can have some educational benefits when used intentionally, the scientific consensus leans towards limiting their use in classrooms due to their significant potential for distraction and negative impact on learning outcomes.
Citations:
[1] www.aljazeera.com/news/2024… [2] www.bu.edu/articles/… [3] news.harvard.edu/gazette/s… [4] www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/artic… [5] www.sciencedirect.com/science/a… [6] www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/artic…
Handwriting And Paraphrasing
support students in generating high quality notes and help them to engage in paraphrasing, for example, by supplying them with graphical organizers or pre-questions in advance of the lecture to help students organize their thoughts and focus their attention
Free AI Survey course Available
Announced a few days ago…
A free survey course on LLMs, taught by practitioners…[on] Mastering LLMs, a set of workshops and talks from practitioners on topics like evals, retrieval-augmented-generation (RAG), fine-tuning and more.
Learn more
MyNotes: Strategies To Apply Post-PD
Summary by Perplexity.ai
The article “Just Did Some Professional Development – Now What?” by Rick Wormeli, hosted on the AMLE website, outlines several strategies educators can use to effectively process and apply the content and skills acquired during professional development (PD) sessions. Here are the key strategies mentioned:
-
Personal Reflection:
- Take time to reflect individually on the new information and how it can be integrated into current teaching practices.
- Consider journaling or note-taking to document thoughts and insights.
-
Application:
- Implement the new strategies or techniques in the classroom as soon as possible.
- Start with small, manageable changes to avoid feeling overwhelmed.
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Connection:
- Relate the new knowledge to existing practices and curriculum.
- Identify areas where the new information can enhance or complement current methods.
-
Conversation:
- Engage in discussions with colleagues about the PD experience.
- Share insights and strategies, and seek feedback from peers to refine implementation.
By following these steps, educators can ensure that the professional development they participate in translates into meaningful and effective changes in their teaching practices.
Sources [1] https://www.amle.org/just-did-some-professional-development-now-what/ [2] RESOURCES - AMLE www.amle.org/resources… [3] Rick Wormeli on X: “Just released today - @amle: Sit-and-get … twitter.com/rickworme…
How to Write with Style: Kurt Vonnegut’s 8 Keys to the Power of the Written Word – The Marginalian
The most damning revelation you can make about yourself is that you do not know what is interesting and what is not.
Not that anyone cares except myself and a few friends, but I added to, and updated, my list of Windows programs, iOS smartphone apps, and browser extensions.
Find it online.
MU geoscience camp uplifts girls in STEM
Middle school girls from the Columbia area attended Geoscience Summer Camp for Girls on July 10-11. The camp focused on natural disasters and how geoscientists are able to provide data and aid during these events.
The camp is the brainchild of Aída Guhlincozzi, who started it during her grad school years with a colleague and friend.
Deciding to Learn in spite of #AI #education
“…the correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting” (Plutarch).
Assessment in the face of AI continues to be such a huge concern. This article suggests assessment has been flawed from the beginning and relying on the most convenient approach. That approach is now obsolete as the result of AI.
Instead, put effort into finding evidence that learning has occurred….
instead of trying to find evidence to prove that cheating has occurred in the production of an artifact, teachers can now turn their energies towards finding evidence that learning has occurred or, more importantly, that it hasn’t.
This article by Professor Cath Ellis leaves me asking, “How exactly are you suggesting that evidence be found?”
A commenter (Francois Stalder) has a similar problem, writing:
These are valuable insights on looking for evidence of learning, however we need to move beyond discussions about the topic and propose concrete solutions.
For example, in world languages, focusing on practical methods like oral proficiency interviews and peer review sessions can significantly enhance learning.
Additionally, using conversation clubs, storytelling sessions, writing journals, and collaborative writing projects ensures continuous, practical application of the language.
Those points are a bit more practical. They suggest that the way forward with assessing student learning isn’t about tests and work student can in digital formats. Rather it is in just in time conversations, handwritten notes and scribbles in dialogue with an educator.
That is a fundamental disruption of how assessment has been conducted. With AI, anyone can fake the artifacts, the essays, the researched expressions. More difficult, the just in time conversation and dialogue in handwritten work. But the work of teaching becomes infinitely harder, time-consuming.
As a person who crafts adult learning, my emphasis is on curating content and offering exercises that offers a choice to adult learners. That choice?
If you want to learn, do the work. If you want the badge or certificate, view the content but skip the work. The choice to learn is always yours.
With K-16 learners, the choice is taken away by adults who don’t trust young people will make the right decision. But mandatory schooling does not ensure learning…humans have to make their choices, and one of them is to decide to learn.
Somehow, children have to decide to learn in spite of AI. For me, the kindling of a fire, offering a choice to students is where it’s at. Less so finding the evidence. Less at AI detection.
Maybe, I have another think coming.
Anyone know how to post Micro.blog Bookmarks via RSS or get an RSS feed for Bookmarks?
Time Saved, An AI Illusion
Will AI really save time overall or just push us to complete tasks more quickly so we can do more tasks without saving time? If you have eight hours, you finish 20 tasks instead of the usual ten, but you still work your full eight hours or more.
No time is saved unless you hold to the same total number of ten tasks…but then do you do them at a deeper level of complexity and quality, so they take longer to do with an AI’s help?
An Old Pitch, Still Untrue
Mandy Brown at A Working Library shares:
…she suspected that there was something wrong with a social system in which time-saving devices didn’t save time for anybody but the owners.” Saval, Cubed, page 40
“The present-day fiction of so-called AI is the same story, second verse. The people urging AI on us won’t save labor; they will try to degrade that labor, to further alienate us from it, to demand that we work as long and hard and hopelessly as ever. Unless we refuse.”
Unless we refuse? Not sure that is an option, is it? It never has been.
Assessment in the Age of AI
This piece in Forbes by Dan Fitzpatrick makes some interesting points about assessment, quoting several educators. I admit that I have not given assessment as much thought as I should when considering AI. A simplistic perspective is that we write to learn and think through ideas. If you take a shortcut with AI, skipping the brain work, you are self-sabotaging for short-term gain and setting yourself up for long-term failure.
My view has been that if a student uses AI to skip the learning, then they have hurt themselves. As an educator, I set up opportunities for people to struggle and work through ideas, not to my benefit, but for their’s. Learning is always a choice. Mandatory learning is a failure to engage learners, as well as a failure of students to engage in learning.
The goal of the Forbes article is not only to offer alternative assessments, but also to ensure credentialing remains securely in the hands of a school or university:
The university’s aim is to assure students, accreditation bodies and future employers that the grades awarded are a true reflection of students' knowledge and abilities.
A part of me says, “So what?” The graduate will know the work or not. If not, they will eventually fail in their work. Then they will come to the horrified conclusion they wasted their time at university…and learn in earnest or do something else. Policing learning is such a futile effort.
Replacing the Essay
Tim Mousel, a kinesiology professor at Lone Star College in Texas, suggests a range of alternatives to traditional essays:
“Some of the following approaches could replace a written essay: project-based assessments, problem-solving scenarios, oral presentations or debates, collaborative group projects, reflective journals or portfolios, experiential learning assignments, peer teaching or tutoring, creation of original content, interactive simulations or role-playing, and open-ended research projects.”
Use Process Writing for Learning, Not Assessment of Learning
“We don’t have students write to show us what they’ve already learned, but we have them write so that they can learn through a scaffolded process with meaningful feedback." (Trey Conatser, director of CELT at the University of Kentucky)
This view underscores the importance of the learning process itself, not just the end product.
Portfolios as Continuous Assessment
“Assessment needs to be reframed as collecting evidence of student learning—a continuous process and measured against a set of qualitative criteria.” (Dr. Jennifer Chang Wathall, a part-time instructor at the University of Hong Kong)
Project 2025: Guidebook for Christian Nationalism
This is concerning:
Project 2025 operationalizes the tenets of white Christian nationalism on such issues as climate change, education, immigration, systemic racism, and abortion. To stand silent on the sidelines is to contribute to the harm that will come to democracy and to religion should Project 2025 be implemented by a new Republican administration. Silence is not a morally defensible option.
Yikes, AI is Coming for Your Data
We may use the information we collect and publicly available information to help train our machine learning or artificial intelligence models for the purposes outlined in this policy.
Via When the Terms of Service Change to Make Way for A.I. Training - The New York Times
Claude.ai Lets You Organize Chats into Projects
Woohoo, as you can see above, Claude now lets you organize your chat support documents, or whatever you want to call them, into “Projects.” Here’s an explainer video from Claude.ai on the subject.
An explanation from Claude:
Projects help organize your work and leverage knowledge across multiple conversations. Upload docs, code, and files to create themed collections that Claude can reference again and again. View website overview on ‘What Are Projects?'
Claude Pro and Team users can now organize chats into Projects. Projects bring together internal knowledge and chat activity in one place so Claude can help you generate ideas, make strategic decisions, and deliver exceptional results.
With Projects, you can: Upload docs and code—like style guides, codebases, or user feedback—so that every response you get from Claude is grounded in expertise about your Project. Generate new content like code snippets or diagrams with Claude and see a preview of your Artifacts in a dedicated panel. Share your most insightful Claude chats and the Artifacts you create on the Project activity feed, allowing your teammates to learn, explore, and build on shared content. Projects are available now in the Pro and Team plans. Upgrade to the Team plan to collaborate with teammates across your organization. You can upload relevant documents, text, code, or other files to a project’s knowledge base, which Claude will use to better understand the context and background for your individual chats within that project. Each project includes a 200K context window, the equivalent of a 500-page book, so users can add all of the insights needed to enhance Claude’s effectiveness. via email 6/25/2024
This is amazing stuff, and it reminds me a bit of a custom GPT. :-)
AI in Schools Project
For fun, I uploaded a few documents about AI in Schools. Claude made it easy to interrogate the content and seek more insights, such as what appears below. No doubt, a long prompt would work well for a Claude.ai Project, and I am looking forward to transferring my long prompts and documents in ChatGPT Plus custom GPTs into Claude Projects and see how that works.
In the meantime, here’s a response to a query:
Based on the documents provided, here are some key insights about how AI is being used in schools and related trends:
- Widespread adoption:
- AI usage, particularly ChatGPT, has become significantly more common in schools over the past year.
- Around 50% of teachers, K-12 students, undergraduates, and parents report using ChatGPT at least weekly for school-related purposes.
- Usage patterns:
- Teachers primarily use AI for creative ideas, lesson planning, and creating exercises/quizzes/tests.
- K-12 students mostly use AI for help with assignments and writing essays.
- Undergraduates use AI heavily for studying and test preparation.
- Positive perceptions:
- Majorities across all groups (teachers, students, parents) view AI chatbots favorably and believe they have potential to enhance learning.
- Many see AI as a valuable tool for helping students learn more efficiently.
- Lack of formal policies:
- Most teachers, students, and parents report that their schools do not have formal policies on AI use.
- There’s a gap between current unofficial usage and desired guidance.
- Teacher perspectives:
- Teachers see AI’s most positive impact as improving student efficiency and productivity.
- Many teachers want more training on how to effectively use AI in the classroom.
- Student career interests:
- K-12 students are unsure about pursuing AI-related careers, while undergraduates show more interest, especially among men and AAPI students.
- Concerns and challenges:
- There are worries about cheating, data privacy, and the broader societal impacts of AI.
- Older teachers and those less familiar with AI tend to have more concerns.
- Future outlook:
- Majorities across groups expect AI usage in education to increase over the next 5 years.
- There’s a general desire for more integration of AI into education, but in a thoughtful, guided manner.
These insights highlight that AI is becoming an integral part of education, with generally positive perceptions, but there’s a need for more formal guidance and training to maximize its benefits while addressing potential concerns.