Group items tagged

Important and well written

"Elon Musk is concerned about the future of humanity. The tech entrepreneur shared a link with his 21 million Twitter followers Friday morning, urging them to watch Chris Paine's latest movie Do You Trust This Computer?. Musk wrote that "nothing will affect the future of humanity more than digital super-intelligence," while paying homage to the late Stephen Hawking that shared the same concerns. Paine's movie, available for free streaming until Sunday night, looks at how machine intelligence has become a pervasive part of everyday lives. It also explores how users trust smartphones and social networking with their data, an issue that's seen newfound attention in recent weeks as it emerged that Cambridge Analytica may have harvested 87 million Facebook users' data. Paine shared a trailer for the movie on its Facebook page - unlike Musk, it seems Paine has yet to fully sign up to the #DeleteFacebook movement spurred by the Cambridge Analytica scandal:"

I'm going to keep gushing about Glitch some more, and not only because it allows me to finallyt play in the band with Jim and Brian and others. First, try this drum machine, then, have a look at the code, and then, realize that you could clone it and make your own in about as long as it took me to type these words. Upload it to GitHub and share with your friends. Making apps is becoming as simple as making websites was in the 1990s. It took a bit for the idea to catch on, but when it did... (p.s. remember the 'blink' tag and Geocities websites? This home page might be the 21st century equivalent.) Text copied from Stephen Downes OLDaily

This was a very interesting article. How can we use technology to augment critical thinking and ask students the right sort of questions to get them motivated to think? That's the sort of thing educational technology should be about, not just "answer the test question". Thank you for sharing!

"Drawing on your phone or computer can be slow and difficult-so we created AutoDraw, a new web-based tool that pairs machine learning with drawings created by talented artists to help you draw. It works on your phone, computer, or tablet (and it's free!). So the next time you want to make a birthday card, party invite or just doodle on your phone, it'll be as easy and fast as everything else on the web."

"If you've looked into 3D printing, you know there are a lot of options - some good and some not so much. Since the technology is just beginning to enter classrooms and is new for most schools, choosing a good partner and printer is important when diving head first into this new world. There are plenty of schools which have experienced problems from purchasing machines that are no longer serviced or weren't made well, and avoiding these missteps can save everybody a lot of time, money and headache."

"To ban or not to ban, that is always the question when it comes to personal devices in the classroom. But rather than fight this uphill battle (Generation Alpha is forecasted to be more technological than any previous), let's figure out how to leverage these little machines. If used intentionally, mobile devices can be an express pass to exploring beyond the walls of our schools. While pushing students to learn outside our classrooms is a step in the right direction, how do we ensure that these experiences lead to deeper learning? Here are 5 ways to get to curate that practice by making your class a BYOD zone."

"Worldwide, just 14% of engineers are women. Stanford-educated engineer Debbie Sterling is on a mission to increase that percentage by encouraging girls as young as four years old to start tinkering with toys and building simple machines. Since 2012, her company GoldieBlox (No. 59 on the BI 100: The Creators) has sold more than 1 million sets of narrative-driven construction toys. Getting girls interested in engineering at an early age was an easy sell, Sterling told Business Insider in an interview. Changing attitudes about girls' capabilities in STEM, however, proved much harder."

"Work based skills are changing as more and more jobs are displaced by digital technologies.  Software, apps and online technology such as Uber, Airbnb, Legal Zoom and TurboTax to name a few has already had an impact on many professions.  Online shopping has eliminated tens of thousands of retail store positions. And with self-driving vehicles on the way, how many taxi, trucking, express delivery-and even aviation jobs-will go the way of the telephone switchboard operator? If history is a reliable guide, the technologies that are eliminating one set of jobs will create others: jobs that require twenty-first century-mainly digital-skills.  The explosion in industrial robotics, for example, is eliminating thousands of assembly line jobs but it is creating a demand for people who can design, manufacture, program and maintain those machines.  The questions are -  what will the net impact on jobs be and how well are our schools preparing young people for those new, higher skilled jobs as we head toward the fourth industrial revolution?"

"How Google used artificial intelligence to transform Google Translate, one of its more popular services - and how machine learning is poised to reinvent computing itself."

"You've heard so many great things about 3D printers and what you can do with them. There are so many wonderful machines which can make your builder's dreams come true. But if you want to buy a 3D printer, what model should you choose? How much should you spend? And where's the best place to buy a 3D printer? Here's a guide to the most pressing questions when buying a 3D printer."

"A few weeks ago, at the Bay Area Discovery Museum (BADM) near San Francisco, 5-year-old Jack Stabenow climbed a step stool to peer into a machine that cuts cardboard with a high-powered laser. The red beam precisely followed a squiggly building design that Jack had just finger-drawn on a tablet computer. Jack's goal was to make a building that could stand up to the wind of a nearby table fan. With his cardboard cut, Jack hurried to the assembly area where about two dozen other kids his age labored over teetering, but well-taped, creations. If these first attempts toppled in the breeze, that was to be expected. In fact, back-to-the-drawing-board was kind of the point. The kids were learning the cycle of design, prototype, test, and redesign that's a hallmark of engineering."