Silicon Valley pioneer Reid Hoffman explains why we should view generative AI as a “steam engine of the mind” that promises to profoundly alter our professional and personal lives. But you also have to understand the human transitions. How will your workforce learn new ways to work? How are your customers going to learn new ways to interface with your company, new ways to learn about a service, and new ways to buy or otherwise engage? All of this requires a compassionate mindset. But that doesn’t mean being soft and not driving hard into the future and breaking some eggs. Being compassionate means caring about the human experience, the human transitions, and the human costs involved in all this. It also means having human well-being as your ultimate goal, both in the now, in the transitionary, and in the future.
Sunday, June 30, 2024
Saturday, June 29, 2024
Navigating the Evolution of Microcredentials and Open Badges - Brittany Gooding, atd
In recent years, there has been a notable transformation in how we prepare individuals for the workforce. Traditional methods are making way for new approaches driven by recognizing specific skills and experiences. The rise of technology and online learning platforms has brought microcredentials and open badges to the forefront, offering learners alternative paths to showcase their capabilities. While both concepts serve this purpose, they differ significantly in their structure, purpose, and application.
Friday, June 28, 2024
The Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2023-24 - AAUP
This year's Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession presents findings from the AAUP’s annual Faculty Compensation Survey. The report also describes key institutional finance trends in US higher education and documents the ongoing shift in the makeup of the academic workforce from mostly full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty members to mostly faculty members holding contingent appointments that are ineligible for tenure. From fall 2022 to fall 2023, nominal average salaries for full-time faculty members increased 3.8 percent for all academic ranks combined. However, real average salaries for full-time faculty members are nowhere near prepandemic levels. The Annual Report presents a wide range of data on full-time faculty compensation, including salaries and expenditures for fringe benefits. Economic conditions remain dire for part-time faculty members, who make up just under half (48.7 percent) of the academic workforce. In 2022–23, part-time faculty members earned an average of $3,903 per three-credit course section. The Annual Report presents data on part-time faculty members who were paid on a per-course-section basis, including pay and fringe benefit coverage.
Thursday, June 27, 2024
Wednesday, June 26, 2024
PROOF POINTS: Teens are looking to AI for information and answers, two surveys show - Jill Barshay, Hechinger Report
Two new surveys, both released this month, show how high school and college-age students are embracing artificial intelligence. There are some inconsistencies and many unanswered questions, but what stands out is how much teens are turning to AI for information and to ask questions, not just to do their homework for them. And they’re using it for personal reasons as well as for school. Another big takeaway is that there are different patterns by race and ethnicity with Black, Hispanic and Asian American students often adopting AI faster than white students.
Tuesday, June 25, 2024
Cut bloated textbook spending, not teachers' jobs - David J. Bobb, the Fulcrum
Abandoning our dependence on traditional textbooks may seem anathema to some, but this transition is already happening in higher education. International research firm WordsRated found spending on higher education textbooks hasdeclined for most of the past decade. More colleges are transitioning toward open educational resources (OER), open-license materials offered for free or at a low cost. The California Community College system launched a major OER initiative with the goal of creating"zero textbook cost" programs after many students spentmore on textbooks than on college courses themselves.
Monday, June 24, 2024
Purdue and Accenture develop online smart manufacturing program for employee upskilling - Purdue University
Purdue University is collaborating with industry leader Accenture on an online smart manufacturing education program for organizations looking to enhance employee skill sets. The Smart Manufacturing Academy curriculum is self-paced and structured asynchronously, meaning employees can engage with course materials at different times and from different locations. It is designed to teach foundational knowledge in digital transformation to machine and line operators, technicians, plant managers, engineers, and employees in other manufacturing roles. The program, which Purdue and Accenture are making available to businesses and industry associations, includes courses covering such topics as an introduction to smart manufacturing, the industrial Internet of Things, the connected worker, advanced automation and robotics, security, network infrastructure, and business skills.
Sunday, June 23, 2024
Chat with butterflies? - Martin Crowley, AI Tool Report
Ex-Snapchat engineer–Vu Tran–has launched a new social media network called Butterflies, which allows users to create an AI character (complete with emotions, backstories, and opinions) that can generate posts and interact with other accounts on the platform, via DMs and comments, on its own. The social app, which has an Instagram-like interface, has been in private beta testing for five months, and is now available on Apple and Google Play stores, for free. Thousands of testers have given Tran positive feedback, after spending, on average, between 1-3 hours on the app per day, with one user spending over five hours creating over 300 AI characters.
Saturday, June 22, 2024
While women outnumber men on campus, their later earnings remain stuck - Jon Marcus, NPR
The number of college-educated women in the workforce has now overtaken the number of college-educated men, according to the Pew Research Center. While this would seem to have significant implications for society and the economy — since college graduates make more money over their lifetimes than people who haven't finished college — other obstacles have stubbornly prevented women from closing leadership and earnings gaps. Women still earn 82 cents, on average, for every dollar earned by men, Pew reports — a figure that is nearly unchanged since 2002.
Friday, June 21, 2024
Exclusive: Former Meta engineers launch Jace, an AI agent that works independently - Shubham Sharma, Venture Beat
Zeta Labs, a London-based startup founded by former Meta engineers Fryderyk Wiatrowski and Peter Albert, announced the launch of Jace, an LLM-powered AI agent that can execute in-browser actions on command. The company also announced it has raised $2.9 million in a pre-seed round of funding, led by Y Combinator’s former head of AI Daniel Gross and former GitHub CEO Nat Friedman. While AI agents have been in the news lately (Cognition’s Devin being the most popular one), Zeta claims its offering doesn’t need any guidance and can save users entirely from sitting in front of their computers. They just have to tell the agent what needs to be done and it will get to work.
Thursday, June 20, 2024
Divided Over Digital Learning - Johanna Alonso, Inside Higher Ed
A new report finds that students are much less likely than their professors to favor in-person instruction, but far more inclined to use (and pay for) generative AI. While more than half of professors selected in-person learning as their favorite modality for teaching, only 29 percent of students prefer learning face-to-face, the 2024 “Time for Class” report found. A similar share of students, 28 percent, said they favor hybrid learning, a mixture of face-to-face and online learning—which marks an increase of six percentage points since 2023. Meanwhile, the percentage of students who prefer asynchronous online learning has decreased. The share of students who say they use generative AI at least once per month rose from 43 percent in spring 2023 to 59 percent this spring. And while more and more instructors and administrators are also using the technology, this year’s rates still lag behind, at 36 percent and 40 percent, respectively.
Wednesday, June 19, 2024
Hackers target university’s e-learning system in Hong Kong, putting data of 20,000 at risk - Ng Kang-chung, South China Morning Post
The personal data of more than 20,000 students, staff and past graduates of the Chinese University of Hong Kong’s School of Continuing and Professional Studies could be at risk after an e-learning system was hacked earlier this month. In a statement on Thursday, the school said it found out on June 3 that its “moodle learning management system” had been hacked. “The data concerned involves name, email address and student registration number … of 20,870 [users of the system] who are staff, part-time instructors, students, graduates and some guest users,” it said.
Tuesday, June 18, 2024
LinkedIn’s AI Career Coaches Will See You Now - Amanda Hoover, Wired
On Thursday, the career site announced new features like a pilot for AI-powered expert advice, an interactive chat to break down information in LinkedIn courses, and more AI features that can be used to search for and apply for jobs for its premium users in English. The changes showcase a massive push by LinkedIn to capitalize on generative AI. (LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft, which has invested heavily in OpenAI, which in turn is powering the platform’s AI offerings.) And as LinkedIn continues its drive to become more than just a job site, people may spend their time there socializing or learning new skills through video courses.
Monday, June 17, 2024
Is DEI Going Away? Here’s What Experts Say- Angie Basiouny, Knowledge at Wharton
Experts say DEI is being attacked by critics who don't want to face the real problem — inequality. Cooperation and discussion are essential in solving ongoing issues of inequality. Academics and practitioners can better advance DEI by sharing their expertise and bringing insights back to their workplaces.
Sunday, June 16, 2024
This Harvard dropout thinks AI recruiters are the future of college admissions - Shalene Gupta, Fast Company
In a demo, Fast Company spoke with an AI recruiter named “Sarah.” Sarah was able to rattle off answers to questions about academic programs and extracurriculars. She responded so promptly, and with so much tonal variety, she sounded almost human. However, when we made a sudden left turn into asking about campus administrators’ stance on Palestine and Israel, Sarah stumbled and went silent. She regained her footing when we redirected, asking about campus policy on student protests. Perkins later said we’d triggered a moderation process since Sarah’s not allowed to discuss politics. “That said, the lag wasn’t great,” he said. “We’ll work on that.”
Saturday, June 15, 2024
What to do when salaried employees fall below the new overtime threshold - Ryan Golden, Higher Ed Dive
There is more to the decision-making process than colleges may realize, especially with future increases and litigation on the horizon, attorneys said. the U.S. Department of Labor. The agency published its final rule updating overtime pay eligibility, which increases the FLSA’s minimum annual salary threshold via a pair of changes set to take effect over the next several months. July 1 marks the first increase from the current minimum of $35,568 per year to $43,888 per year. After that, the threshold will next increase to $58,656 per year on Jan. 1, 2025, roughly 65% higher than the present-day mark — and will automatically increase every three years thereafter using a formula outlined by the DOL. The HR department at our hypothetical administrative professional’s college now has a series of choices to make.
Friday, June 14, 2024
The takers, shapers, and makers of gen AI - McKinsey
After the entrance and buzz of generative AI (gen AI) led to surges in adoption and scaling, 2024 is the year organizations truly began using—and deriving business value from—this new technology. Today, the takers, shapers, and makers use gen AI models off the shelf, customize them with proprietary data, or develop them from scratch. But who is leading the pack, and what are they doing differently? Not surprisingly, say McKinsey’s Michael Chui and coauthors, only a small group of high performers report that a meaningful share of their organizations’ EBIT can be attributed to their deployment of the technology. These high performers use gen AI in more business functions, pay more attention to challenges, and follow a set of risk-related best practices.
Thursday, June 13, 2024
Make ChatGPT 10x better - OpenAI, Taft Notion
OpenAI has a prompting guide. And it's really good!
Here are their 6 strategies to making ChatGPT 10x better:
1. Write clear instructions
2. Provide reference text
3. Split complex tasks into simpler subtasks
4. Give the model time to "think"
5. Use external tools
6. Test changes systematically
Wednesday, June 12, 2024
Working-age adult population with some college but no credential jumps 2.9%, report finds - Natalie Schwartz, Higher Ed Dive
However, over 943,000 stopped-out students reenrolled in 2022-23, according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. Yet those improvements haven’t halted the growth of the stopped-out population. “Higher education regularly generates more students leaving school without a credential than returning to finish one,” Doug Shapiro, the research center’s executive director, said in a statement. The population of U.S. adults under age 65 with some college but no credential reached 36.8 million by July 2022, up 2.9% compared to the year before, according to a new analysis from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.
Tuesday, June 11, 2024
Sam Altman Admits That OpenAI Doesn't Actually Understand How Its AI Works - Futurism
During last week's International Telecommunication Union AI for Good Global Summit in Geneva, Switzerland, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was stumped after being asked how his company's large language models (LLM) really function under the hood. "We certainly have not solved interpretability," he said, as quoted by the Observer, essentially saying the company has yet to figure out how to trace back their AI models' often bizarre and inaccurate output and the decisions it made to come to those answers. Other AI companies are trying to find new ways to "open the black box" by mapping the artificial neurons of their algorithms. For instance, OpenAI competitor Anthropic recently took a detailed look at the inner workings of one of its latest LLMs called Claude Sonnet as a first step.
Monday, June 10, 2024
I've tested dozens of AI chatbots since ChatGPT's debut. Here's my new top pick - Sabrina Ortiz, ZDnet
Looking for an AI chatbot that can help lighten your workload, from writing emails to generating code, images, and more? Here are your best options and what they can do for you.For the last year and a half, I have taken a deep dive into AI and have tested as many AI tools as possible -- including dozens of AI chatbots. Using my findings and those of other ZDNET AI experts, I have created a list of the best AI chatbots on the market. The list details everything you need to know before choosing your next AI assistant, including what it's best for, pros, cons, cost, its large language model (LLM), and more. Whether you are entirely new to AI chatbots or a regular user, this list should help you discover a new option you haven't tried before.
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