Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
Today I added all the posts on my Daily-Ink blog, from the time I started blogging daily in July 2019 up to yesterday, into Google NotebookLM. The first thing I did was to ask it ‘What does David Truss write about on his Daily-Ink Blog?’ I’ll share the response below, but what I really wanted to do was to create an Audio Overview, a ‘Deep dive conversation’ that is basically two AI ‘personalities’ discussing the content I shared.
I am blown away by both the conversational aspect of this AI dialogue as well as the way it stuck to a single theme of habits while covering a fair bit of the things I wrote about.
I’m going to be playing with this tool a lot more in the future… and this is just the beginning of the use of AI to summarize and help us learn from large amounts of information. Think of the possibilities to come!
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As I mentioned above, the first question I asked on Google NotebookLM was, ‘What does David Truss write about on his Daily-Ink Blog?’ and this was the response:
David Truss writes about a variety of topics in his blog Daily-Ink, but common themes include:
● Education: This is a frequent topic for Truss, who is an educator. He has blogged about topics like inquiry-based learning and teaching, blended learning and distributed learning, leadership and innovation in education, and student voice and choice. For instance, in one post, he discusses his visit to Inquiry Hub Secondary, a school where “students design the school” themselves.
● Technology: Truss often discusses technology in his blog posts. Specific topics of interest include blended learning, distributed learning, and artificial intelligence. He also used his blog to document his experiences using new technologies. For example, he has written about Dall-E, an AI image generation software and Bing Copilot, an AI assistant.
● Personal Reflections: Beyond his professional interests, Truss also writes about his personal life, sharing reflections on topics such as relationships, personal growth, mindfulness, and daily routines. For example, he writes about the challenges of maintaining routines during the pandemic and reflects on the value of taking walks. He also frequently documents his journey with archery and maintaining an active lifestyle.
● The Blogging Process: Truss seems to view blogging as a personal practice and frequently shares his thoughts on the writing process itself. He sees writing as an art form and his blog as his canvas. He discusses his commitment to writing daily, the challenges he faces, and the satisfaction he derives from it.
In addition to these recurring themes, Truss also uses his blog to:
● Share Links and Resources: Truss frequently shares links to articles, videos, and other resources that he finds interesting or valuable. He often provides context for these links, explaining why he finds them noteworthy and encouraging his readers to explore them further.
● Engage in Conversations: Truss uses his blog as a platform for engaging in conversations with his readers. He actively responds to comments, asking for feedback and acknowledging different perspectives.
Overall, David Truss uses his Daily-Ink blog as a space for reflecting on his experiences, exploring his interests, and connecting with others. He is open about his process, his struggles, and his growth, offering a glimpse into his life and his thoughts.
There is worldwide concern over false news and the possibility that it can influence political, economic, and social well-being. To understand how false news spreads, Vosoughi et al. used a data set of rumor cascades on Twitter from 2006 to 2017. About 126,000 rumors were spread by ∼3 million people. False news reached more people than the truth; the top 1% of false news cascades diffused to between 1000 and 100,000 people, whereas the truth rarely diffused to more than 1000 people. Falsehood also diffused faster than the truth. The degree of novelty and the emotional reactions of recipients may be responsible for the differences observed.
Media, and even more-so social media, can’t be trusted. And in fact, if it is eye-catching and click-bait worthy it will be sensationalized and potentially untrue. We live in an era of unlimited information and much of it is not factual, and not easily verifiable.
What can we do? I’ve said before that ‘Web Domains Matter’, and they do, but we still need to recognize that even new sites considered reputable have biases.
So we are required to take new information in as skeptics. Meanwhile we have to balance our scepticism with a dose of common sense or we could easily fall down the conspiracy rabbit hole. This is the new normal, this is being information savvy. This does not mean we will get to the Truth. Because it’s not just the information coming in that has bias, we have our own biases too.
We all have work to do, to understand some sort of relevant small ‘t’ truth that is in fact closely related to the capital ’T’ Truth. To find our way amidst an endless stream of information that favours misinformation, fake news, and half-truths. The rabbit hole runs deep, and we are all on a journey down it… with Artificial Intelligence creating a whole new level of generating convincing fakes that are easily believed, and algorithmically shared way more than anything truthful.
Start with the source, where is the information coming from? Apply a sliding scale of scepticism depending on the reliability of the source. Then be savvy in deciding what to believe and what to dismiss.
Source, scepticism, and savviness… the new path to information literacy.
I use AI images to accompany roughly 18 to 19 out of 20 Daily-Ink posts. My general rule is that I’ll try one or two requests and pick from those. I don’t want to spend 10 or 15 minutes of my precious morning schedule to search for images, they are the side quest, my writing is the adventure.
However, it being the weekend, yesterday I had time to play… and yet I failed.
When that didn’t work, I got more and more detailed, even pausing the requests to ask Copilot (which uses DALL•E 3 to create images) if it knew what a waterpolo cap looked like. It described it perfectly… then I got it to reiterate my request before continuing. This is what I got:
But the caps still came out with helmet masks and at no point was the shooter facing the net. I finally gave up and cropped an image. Here is what I used, and then the full image:
Below are many of the fails. I recognize these are not common requests, and the images have some redeeming qualities, but there is still a way to go when it comes to AI text-to-image requests. So, when you see a less-than-perfect image added to my Daily-Ink posts, please recognize that I’m trying, but I’m not wasting time trying to get everything just right… I’d rather use that time to write, meditate, or exercise.
No matter how I look at it, this feels creepy and dystopian. Even when I think of positive things, like perhaps helping someone with special needs, or emotional support for someone with anorexia, the idea of this all-seeing AI friend seems off putting.
Even this advertising doesn’t resonate well with me. In the scene with the guys playing video games, the boy wants to check in with his digital friend rather than pay attention to his friends in the room. And in the final scene with the girl and boy on the roof, I thought at first the girl was candidly trying to take a photo of the boy, but then realized she was just fighting the urge to converse with the AI friend. Either of those scenarios feels like she has replaced a phone distraction with a more present and more engaging distraction… from life.
There are a lot of new artificial intelligence tools that are on their way, and I’m excited about the possibilities, but this one has a high creep factor that doesn’t seem to me like it’s adding the value I think it intends to.
#AI image generation, the destruction of our shared perception of reality, and the inevitable collapse of democracy. Inspired by posts on the same topic from @Paige | AI Ethicist
After discussing the fact that people stuck in an echo chamber of like-minded people start to call a real photograph an AI generated fake… he says,
“Here’s what keeps me up at night: We’re converging on a point where it is easier to claim that real images are fake than it is to prove that images are generated using AI, or manipulated using AI. And that means we have no reasonable expectation of any image or any video or any audio being real. And we don’t have the tools or the media literacy to really do this analysis.
…and we are in the situation we’re in now where people can choose their own reality and live in a reality dysfunction. And AI provides the tools and capabilities to make that reality disfunction into our lived reality.”
Indeed, our shared reality has collapsed. AI generated fakes spread like wildfire through echo chambers of like-minded groups, and even when discovered to be fake, there is no effort to make corrections if the fake fits the group’s narrative… and any real media that doesn’t fit that same reality is easily dismissed as a fake.
Maya Angelou said, “We are more alike, my friends, than we unalike.” I would agree with that when we had a common shared reality, but I question it now in a world filled with AI generated fakes, and a lack of media savviness to determine what really is real. The collapse of a shared reality is a threat to our world, whether the split is socioeconomic, political, or religious. We are increasingly growing unalike.
The future is here. In this quick video Nvideo CEO Breaks Down Omniverse, Jensen Huang discusses a virtual space where robots and Artificial Intelligence (AI) practice and rehearse their actions in a virtual space before trying things out in the real world. Specifically, he discusses car manufacturing and trying out designs of both machines and factories before physically building them, reducing rebuilding and redesigning time.
This is a game changer in the design of not just systems but in building physical things. The design phase of new products just got a steroids boost, and the world we know is no longer the world we live in.
We are now in an era of AI assisted design and manufacturing that is going to explode with amazing new products. Robots using AI in a virtual omniverse, trying out new creative ways to build new items faster, and more efficiently. Robots building robots that are tested in a virtual world, tweaked by AI, and retested virtually, tweaking the design of the very robots that will be building the new robots. Let that last sentence sink in… robots and AI redesigning other robots and AI… machines building and designing machines.
But that in itself isn’t the steroid boost. The real power comes from practicing everything first in this virtual omniverse world. Trying out the physics and dynamics of the new tools in an environment where they can be tested thousands and even millions of times before actually being built. This is where the learning is accelerated, and where things will move so much faster than we’ve ever seen before.
Products used to takes years of development to be built, but now a lot of that time is going to happen virtually… and with iterations not happening sequentially but simultaneously. So years of development and production design happen in moments rather than years. With the omniverse we are going to see an acceleration of design and production that will make the next few years unrecognizable.
It makes me wonder what amazing new products await us in the next 5-10 years?
William (Bill) Ferriter shared a post on LinkedIn about the struggles his daughter is having at school. While I will share a key quote from his post, I encourage you to read the full post here. Bill said,
Should we be failing students who pass unit tests and quizzes but don’t turn in practice tasks? Were those practice tasks essential as a vehicle for preparing students or assessing learning if a student can demonstrate mastery on the unit test without them? How many assignments do we really need to determine if a student is working at or above grade level? Could we use something other than zeros — think codes like INC or placeholder grades like 50s — to report on missing work? Does every student have to do every assignment?
On a more philosophical level, are we cheapening our professional credibility when we report that a student who passes most/all of our quizzes and tests has failed our class? Are grading policies with rigid consequences for missing work effective for encouraging learning? For changing behavior? Is the purpose of grades to report on student mastery of essential outcomes or to report on the ability (or lack thereof) to keep up with schoolwork?
In my first year teaching a colleague (also in his first year) was experimenting with grading and asked a simple question that has stuck with me: “Are we counting marks or marking what counts.” (See the first half of this old post – if you go past the first half, sorry that the image links seem to be broken.)
My daughter was training 24-26 hours a week in Synchronized Swimming and missed some gym classes going to Provincials and Nationals. Despite consistently being the second fastest girl doing their weekly runs (behind a Provincial level soccer player), she was told at the end of the year she would only get a ‘B’ unless she made up a run and did a volleyball rules quiz she missed.
I share this because it exemplifies the idea of just counting marks.
To me this undermines the professionalism of teaching. It says, ‘We only care about the numbers’, and that my friend is exactly what AI can do better than us. I hope to see educators around the world thinking more deeply about what really matters to students in school. We need to stop building schools and courses like boxes students need to fit into and more like boxes made to fit students!
I just watched a video where the new Chat GPT-4o seamlessly translated a conversation between an Italian and English speaker. I know this isn’t the first tool to do this, but it’s the first time I’ve seen an example where I thought about how useful this is. It gave me the realization that instant language translation will revitalize diversity of language
In my travels, I’ve noticed that English is a language that is becoming more and more widespread. Not everyone knows English, but recently in both France and Spain I had far less challenges communicating compared to my travels to France 12 years earlier. I think this stems from a move towards everyone desiring to speak a common language. Want to be able to talk to people in most parts of the world? Learn English.
But maybe that desire will diminish now. If I get to speak in my mother tongue and someone who speaks English can hear a seamless translation, do I really need to learn English? Maybe in the future people will be less likely to pick up a new language? Will we see a slowdown in the acquisition of the English language?
While I think we’ll see this shift, it won’t be drastic. Yet I can see both positives and benefits to this. A positive is that people will be more likely to hold on to the language of their heritage. A negative could be that in countries with high immigration the effort to learn the country’s home language might be less desirable. While this won’t necessarily cause an issue communicating since these AI tools can help, it can potentially undermine the social fabric of the country.
And maybe that’s not as big a concern as I’m making it out to be?
Still, I’m excited about the ease with which I’ll be able to travel to countries where the primary language isn’t English. I look forward to having conversations I could not have previously had. Tools like this make almost every person in the entire world a possible acquaintance, colleague, and friend. That’s a pretty exciting thing to think about.
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As an aside, a lot of AI image creators still have issues with text, as the image accompanying this post demonstrates. This was my prompt: An English, Spanish, and French person sitting at a table, each saying “Good Morning” in their own language, in a speech bubble.
This is NOT something I plan on doing. I was just interested in seeing what Chat GPT (on the Bing interface) could write in my style. The first blog topic it suggested wasn’t great. It suggested: The Rise of Micro-Entrepreneurship: Empowering Individuals in a Digital Age”
The article was just that, an article, not a Daily-Ink, a ‘let me tell you about this topic’ essay. So then my next prompt was: ‘try a lighter topic please’. (I tend to use ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ in my prompts.) This was what Chat GPT came up with:
The Art of Finding Joy in the Little Things
In a world that’s always racing to the next big thing, it’s easy to overlook the small moments that make life truly special. But what if I told you that the secret to happiness might just be hiding in those tiny details we often take for granted?
Take a moment and think about the last time you paused to watch a sunset, or how you felt when you caught the scent of fresh rain on pavement. Remember the warmth of a cozy blanket on a chilly evening, or the infectious laughter of a child. These instances may seem insignificant, but they hold the essence of joy.
It’s in these moments that we find a connection to the world around us. A beautiful melody, a kind word from a stranger, or the perfect cup of coffee can uplift our spirits and remind us that joy doesn’t require grand gestures; it’s all around us, waiting to be noticed.
So, let’s celebrate the little victories, like finding a forgotten bill in your pocket or hitting all green lights on your way home. Let’s find joy in the everyday – in the quiet morning hours before the world wakes up, in the pages of a good book, or in the comfort of our favorite shoes.
Life is a collection of moments, and the happiest people aren’t those who chase after extraordinary experiences, but those who find delight in the ordinary. So here’s to the little things – may they continue to inspire us and bring a touch of magic to our everyday lives.
Embrace the little joys, and watch as they transform your perspective on life!
There are a couple parts that feel like my voice, but not enough of it that I’d mistake this as my own writing. Still, this is much better than ‘The Rise of Micro-Entrepreneurship’… and more in line with a few topics I’ve written about.
I find myself using AI a lot more, but I won’t be using it to write my Daily-Inks. I want this space to be one where I express my thinking, my learning, my voice. For me, the art of finding joy is in a little process called writing, not prompting.
It’s interesting how the idea that ‘learning can be fun’ has been translated into the gamification of education, which in turn has devolved into making games that are essentially about practice pages that are ‘fun and interactive’.
I think AI has the ability to change this. Learning can be less about practice questions and more about deeper learning. Instead of playing a game with progressively harder, very predictable levels, the learning could authentically go where a student is interested. Two students could start the same, entertaining journey but end up learning and achieving vastly different outcomes. Not just higher math skills, but rather practical learning. A puzzle trying to determine the wiring of some gadget could lead to teaching basic electronics and it could lead to learning about electrical engineering.
The more used approach in machine assisted learning is to have specific goals and be responsive to the learner’s ability. The more advanced approach is to have general objectives and to be responsive to the learner’s interests.
It’s not just the outcomes of these that are drastically different, it’s also the entire approach to what it means to say, ‘Learning can be fun’.
I didn’t know what to expect, and this is the Deep Dive Conversation into Daily-Ink that was generated.
