Ed/Tech must-reads

First Impressions with GPT-4V(ision) from Roboflow

Roboflow is a company that appears to have something to do with “computer vision” - which I take to be processing and using images. To be honest, even after perusing the website for a good ten mins I’m not entirely sure exactly what they do. But this article about the new image processing capabilities in GPT4 seems insightful so I’m happy to go with that. In a nutshell, GPT4 users can now upload images and ask the machine questions. Gallagher and Skalski put this to the test, asking it to explain memes, identify coins, movies and cities, get tips for looking after a plant, retrieve text from an image and try to solve a Captcha. Most of these are successful - but ChattyG is still going to need to keep outsourcing Captcha beating to TaskRabbit, fortunately. Uploading images of maths questions for a solution is probably one of the most interesting educational applications and presumably something causing anxiety at “study support sites” like Chegg and co.

Google kills Jamboard or The next phase of digital whiteboarding for Google Workspace from Google Workspace Updates

If there is one thing Google loves doing it is suddenly announcing the end of popular (if imperfect) tools. There is even a website dedicated to the Google product graveyard. I actually don’t mind a company having a go and deciding that things didn’t work out, but there are so so many gos and so many irritations in the main Google suite of tools that I have to wonder if they wouldn’t be better sticking to search. Anyway, Jamboard is their virtual collaborative whiteboard space that promised a lot and which has been a valuable tool for many educators. They appear to have realised that 3rd party tools like Miro, Lucidspark and Figjam do things better so are pivoting to better support them instead. Vale weird whiteboard. (You still have it until Dec 2024).

The language of quality: four metaphors for Quality Assurance from The Educationalist

Maybe it is just my weird nerdy corner of the eduverse but lately there seems to have been an ongoing conversation about Quality Assurance in Higher Education. This guest post from Matthijs Krooi (Zuyd University of Applied Sciences) makes a strong case that imagination lies at the heart of positive change. While QA often feels like something that is done to us, it is possible for this process to have meaningful benefits for all, moving from the bureaucratic beast to the bridge.