Ed/Tech must-reads

Mark Zuckerberg medical school AI battle royale

October 16, 2023

Mark Zuckerberg sits pensively in a futuristic room with looming vaguely organic medical devices surrounding over him

The Misunderstanding About Education That Cost Mark Zuckerberg $100 Million from Mathworlds

One of the reasons that I rarely read the work of certain edtech Chicken Littles is because of stories like this. For all the wailing about edupreneurs coming in and ruining learning and teaching forever, they seem to forget that ultimately Silicon Valley doesn’t get education and eventually fails. This story steps through Mark Zuckerberg’s foray into ed tech which centered around students sitting at computers working quietly on individual slide-slide-quiz content for 16 hours per week.

Interprofessional collaboration (or lack thereof) between faculty and learning technologists in the creation of digital learning from BMC Medical Education

Han, Jumat and Cleland present findings from semi-structured interviews conducted between medical educators and learning technologists in Singapore about their collaborative relationships and attitudes towards adopting new tools to support learning and teaching. Those who know me also know that this is the kind of stuff that I am current sitting in front of five or six days a week as work to complete my PhD on this broad topic. I like this paper for its concision - in a nutshell different educators have different attitudes toward tech and there isn’t a whole lot that learning techs can do about it due to power imbalances. (We should probably do something about that - they suggest changing behaviours and collaborating more effectively).

Adobe Firefly 2 vs DALL-E3 vs Midjourney - in pictures from Twitter

For everything that GenAI can do, as a middling digital artist it is the image creation possibilities that sing the most for me. (Yes I know how problematic they are). With DALL-E3 and Firefly2 dropping recently, this thread of comparison posts from @chaseleantj puts the new tools through their paces.

Grid of three images created by each of the tools, all are illustrations with flowers and butterflies and attempts to add the name Rachel. Only Dall-E3 succeeds. Text reads - Custom sticker design on an isolated white background with the words "Rachel" written in an elegant font decorated by watercolor butterflies, daisies and soft hues

While accurate text is my personal holy grail - tools are getting better - there is something wonderful about the made up words that most tools are still creating. Like a language spoken in a place that doesn’t exist but should. The remaining image comparisons are unimaginative but show the tech. It’s hard to fathom that 18 months ago nothing like this was possible.