Tag Archives: learning

AI Deep Dive

I’ve been working with Joe Truss on a project called ‘Book of Codes’, where we are examining the building blocks of the universe. The main premise is that we live in a Tetraverse, a universe where the smallest possible length in the universe (the Planck length) must be the edge length of a tetrahedron.

We put our ‘We Live in a Tetraverse‘ video into Google’s NotebookLM and had it create this Deep Dive Conversation.

I think this is quite insightful. I’ve been thinking about how to use this tool since I shared it by putting my blog posts into it and having it do a Deep Dive on the content. Since then, I’ve read a few things that have questioned just how useful this kind of podcast really is?

Alan Levine says in ‘Wow Us with your AI Generated Podcast…, “In one sample listen, you might be wowed. But over a series, Biff and Buffy sound like a bunch of gushing sycophants, those office butt kissers you want to kick in the pants.”

And in a comment response Aaron Davis mentions my blog’s Deep Dive, “I agree with you Alan about the initial amazement about what is possible, I am not sure how purposeful it is. I listened to David Truss’ podcast he posted and was left thinking about my experience with David Truss’ writing. I imagine that such tools may provide a possible entry way into new content, but I am not sure what is really gained by putting this into an audio format?”

It’s true, I’ve done this a few times and while it can be impressive, I do see that this can get a bit old pretty fast. Except for one thing… I think that if you are asking it for a general summary of light content, you are going to get a light and fluffy Deep Dive response. However, if you want to understand something really challenging or different or dense, this could be a really good way to get a general understanding of tough to understand content. The Deep Dive into the Tetraverse video actually did a really good job of describing new content in a clear way. I found the kaleidoscope metaphor it mentioned an insightful analogy and I think that listening to the audio first would help someone appreciate the video even more.

Like any new and shiny tool, this Deep Dive podcast on Google’s Notebook LM will get a lot of play and then dwindle in use… but that doesn’t make it useless. I think it will find it’s rightful place as a way to take dense material and make it digestible. It will be a great content introduction, an insightful entry into new learning. It won’t become something you go to listen to where you also listen to your favourite podcast episodes. Still, it will have a purpose and you might find yourself going to it, or to a similar tool, when you have too much content to summarize, or if the content is significantly challenging to parse.

Information abundance requires pattern recognition

What a fantastic quote by Adam Grant,

“The hallmark of expertise is no longer how much you know. It’s how well you synthesize.

Information scarcity rewarded knowledge acquisition. Information abundance requires pattern recognition.

It’s not enough to collect facts. The future belongs to those who connect dots.”

Pattern recognition and synthesis are the path to innovation, ingenuity, and invention. The collection of knowledge is not enough. Wisdom comes from recognizing how to make connections across different fields, how to make meaning out of relationships that not everyone sees.

Artificial Intelligence can give us the knowledge we seek. It can dumb down the ideas to our level of understanding, and even teach us with relevant examples when we are stuck. More information won’t be what we seek. Instead we will seek new connections, patterns, and relationships.

The desired experts of tomorrow are probably not the siloed experts we once sought. Instead they will be information generalists who understand how to take information from different fields, identify relationships others don’t see, and synthesize information such that they can tell a story others won’t know to tell.

How are we preparing the next generation of learners for this new future? How will schools need to change to help students prepare for the future in a world of abundant and easily accessible information? It certainly won’t be by feeding them content. Instead, the future of education lies in creating challenges where students need to synthesize information and recognize connections and patterns across different fields of study.

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Related: My ‘Transforming Our Learning Metaphors’ Ignite Presentation from almost a decade ago.

The best questions

There is a cliche saying that, ‘There is no such thing as a dumb question.” Tell that to a teacher who has just started an engaging discussion in a class and a kid undermines the flow of the conversation with a dumb, often unrelated question. The reality is that questions have innate and even measurable value and there is depth and quality to good question asking.

Think about how important good questioning is in the new world of AI. We need not look far on social media these days to find a post about how to generate intelligent prompts… intelligent questions, well posed, and designed to give you back optimum responses. Design the right question and you increase the chances of an ideal answer.

What’s the best way to promote good questioning in schools? How do we teach ‘Asking good questions?’

At Inquiry Hub we have students design their own inquiries. They take a course developed around the students figuring out what their inquiry question is, then answering it. And they don’t do this once, they do this several times over the year for their first two years, then in Grade 11 they design a full year course.

All the while, students are asking questions, then seeking answers. It’s the practice of asking the questions and not just seeking the answers that makes this process special. They aren’t just asking questions Google or AI can produce answers to. They are not answering a question the teacher asked. They are forming the questions and thus the direction of the learning.

You don’t start asking better and better questions just by answering other people’s questions. You don’t ask better and better questions without practicing forming the questions yourself. Students need to be designing the questions. Because if they are only in charge of answering them, there will be tools and upcoming technologies that will find the same or better answers, faster. The future innovators of the world will be better at writing the best questions, not just answering them.

How good, how soon?

I am still a little freaked out by how good the Google NotebookLM’s AI ‘Deep dive conversations’ are. The conversations are so convincing. The little touches it adds, like extended pauses after words like ‘and’ are an excellent example of this.

In the one created for my blog, the male voice asked, “It actually reminds me, you ever read Atomic Habits by James Clear?” And the female voice’s response is, “I haven’t. No.”

Think about what’s happening here in order to continue the conversation in a genuine way. The male voice can now make a point and provide the female voice ‘new’, previously unknown information. But this whole conversation is actually developed by a single AI.

How soon before you have an entire conversation with a customer service representative oblivious to the fact that you are actually talking to an AI? Watch a newscast or a movie unaware that the people you are watching are not really people?

I shared close to 2,000 blog posts I’ve written into the notebook, if I shared my podcasts too and it replicated my voice, I wonder how long it will be before a digital me could be set to write my posts then simultaneously do live readings of them on my blog? Writing and sounding just like me… without me having to do it!

As a scary extension of this, could I learn something from the new content that it produces? Could I gain insights from the digital me that I would struggle to come up with myself?

This is just the beginning. How much of the internet is going to end up being AI generated and filled with AI reactions and responses to other AI’s? And how much longer after that before we notice?

Playing with Google NotebookLM

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 didn’t know what to expect, and this is the Deep Dive Conversation into Daily-Ink that was generated.

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.

 

 

Building Community

It takes thought and intentional action to build community in a classroom or a school. The chances of it happening organically are small, and even if it does build this way, it is likely to be uneven. Community building takes effort, it takes vision or at least cooperation in a focused direction… And even then it isn’t guaranteed.

It’s easy for students to form small groups and these groups can be open and accepting or they can be closed and cold. The art of community building is creating scenarios or activities where students must work together outside of these naturally forming groups. But that’s just the first step. The next step is to ensure that these scenarios or activities are ones where these organized groups can and will find success working together.

The next step is around expectations. It’s about explicitly showing and helping groups work together through conflict. Whether students or adults, there are times when we need to work with people who are a bit challenging to work with. They can be bossy, lazy, distracted, distracting, and even annoying. Not everyone is easy to work with. How is conflict handled? Are groups left alone to sort it out for themselves? Or is problem solving both provided and explicitly taught?

In teacher organized groups, are roles clearly defined? This can be done by the group, not just the teacher, but division of roles in a group help to provide the group with guide rails. This increases individual accountability and reduces the opportunity for conflict. And when groups of people can find mutual success in a project, that helps to build community.

Common goals, common practices, high expectations about how we treat each other, and planned opportunities to share common positive experiences all contribute to fostering and building good community. It doesn’t happen on its own. And if there’s one more thing that can help build community it’s food. Opportunities to eat together and celebrate together enrich the community’s familiarity and collegiality. Expecting community to build without consciously working to develop it will usually end in a disappointing way. And while the effort to build community may not always be rewarding, it is much more likely that the effort is rewarded far more than just expecting community to build organically.

Atomic Habits Lesson 10 – Moving From 2 Minutes to Mastery

“You do no rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.”

Goals require motivation, systems keep your habits on track… pushing you towards your goals, while relying on less motivation.

Atomic Habits Lesson 10 – Moving From 2 Minutes to Mastery

Well that concludes my 10 Lessons based on James Clear’s Atomic Habits. I highly encourage you to read the book. There are details I had to edit, like the importance of being 1% better, that James demonstrates clearly and entertainingly in the book.

I’m so glad to finally finish this for our students. I started talking about it a couple school years ago when I listened to Atomic Habits for the second time, taking notes on my whiteboard… Planning these 10 lessons along the way.

Then last year I spent about a 10 hour day laying out the updated whiteboard and recording myself sharing the 10 lessons. And I’ve spent much of my spare time over the past 2 and a half weeks doing video editing.

Our students in our school have more free time than most high schools get. And, from Grade 9 to Grade 12, we really see a progression in our students abilities to get (good) work done quickly and effectively. We see them heading to university and we know they won’t be dropping out because they couldn’t manage the workload.

I hope that my 10 lessons will help at least one of them take a smoother and more effective journey down that path.

Atomic Habits Lesson 9 – Find Your Tribe

A Shared identity is your identity, and your tribe can work together to build good habits.

Atomic Habits Lesson 9 – Find Your Tribe

“You are the average of the 5 people you associate with most.” Quote via Tim Ferriss.

Atomic Habits Lesson 7 – Rewards and Mistakes

Lesson 7, ‘Rewards and Mistakes’, examines two ideas. First, what are  positive versus negative rewards? And then, what do you do when you make a mistake?

Atomic Habits Lesson 7 – Rewards and Mistakes

Most people fall out of good habits after a mistake because they don’t have a plan…

If ‘oops’, then what?