Back to school | Issue 7

Welcome to Issue 7 of unfolding ai. A last minute burst of summer weather, and if like me you have to encourage a teenager back to school, there is all that last minute ‘lifemin’ (life admin) which just sucks up time.

In this issue, lets tame the to-do list (with even more tips on this in premium), where does AI fit into education, and the usual round up of AI of interest for business professionals, embarking on this great re-skill journey.

Please share this to basically everyone!

Best regards,

Paul, Co-founder (and newsletter editor)

Taming the to-do list

To do lists, pretty much everyone uses them in one way or another. There are a few proven methods for helping to tame the overwhelming feeling that can occur when that list becomes chaos. Let’s put the Eisenhower Matrix to use.

As an experienced executive assistant, you are going to organise my to do list using the eisenhower matrix method.  Urgent tasks have deadlines or target dates, Important includes working with other people, producing product, or sales activity.

Step 1. Review the to do list delimitted by ---
Step 2. Respond using a clear format, number each to do item, append an estimate of the time to do the task to each task.

---

AI in education

Some data for perspective first

Seismic change? Or just another ?

Its of no doubt, just as google was an impact on education, as were calculators and the home PC, education needs to adjust. It adjusted to educate remote students, this is still very much work in progress and AI will compound the fears of ‘cheating’. Education is being disrupted.

I expect the lecturers will figure out how to spot this, the likelihood of a systemic solution is small. Fakes always get produced faster than Detect in software, openAI cancelled its detection software. It proved unreliable, and bad at detecting AI.

What is needed is to move away from ‘doom’ and trying to stop the use of AI, towards how to harness it.

I have read of one institute that has added ‘dont use AI to study on to its charter’ as its solution to this challenge. I am pretty sure that’s going to fail, mission statements and cultural values rarely control tool use.

Our view is that AI is the largest ‘re-skill’ in 20 years, as significant as the launch of ‘word and excel’ in the 80’s, and the internet, and google. As professional educators and change professionals, we are moving and mobilising.

Some educators are doing the same, AI at its strongest provokes new productivity, and abilities to explore wide ranges of topics, at pace, and also at the pace of the student.

Wouldn’t it be good if,

• personalised learning plan for every student, helping them to master topics at their pace before moving onwards.

• learning good question asking, critical thinking, creative problem solving.

• leveraging relationships by innovative working methods, more time with students collaborating face to face, less time marking.

If this all became common place in education, and then into the workforce it would be profound. We have a real duty of care here to help to do the right things, as employers and educators.

As a closing footnote, AI is really good at process automation, doing the dull. How much educator time is spent on valueless paperwork and process. Let’s take a step left up the process chain, and remove that.

Let teachers - teach, not administrate.

A few quick links on education, if this is your field of interest.

If you are in education and are interested in this topic, let us know. We are interested in helping where we can.

On the tools

We have had quite a few conversations around the mental fatigue caused by trying to keep up to date with all the changes in Artificial Intelligence, especially tools being announced.

Good news, let us do the heavy lifting. We filter out the vast majority, when we place a tool in our quick links, we have had hands on with them. We think they are worth the time. When we have used a tool enough, we will deep dive and share with you.

Here are our ‘go-to’ tools, these are worth sticking with and mastering rather than leaping into the wider tools right now.

For chat,

General usage - chatGPT https://chat.openai.com/auth/login

Alternative (which we use for larger starting data sets) Claude - Https://claude.ai

For Images

Higher grade, less complex interface Leonardo - https://leonardo.ai

For people images, or more the ‘AI’ look, MidJourney- https://midjourney.com

Quick things to check out

On a podcast, if you fancy a listen on your commute one day.

Taming the slide panic

This is a link to a new tool we are experimenting with. So far it’s really interesting, if it stays in our toolkit expect a deep dive on it in a later episode.

Here is an example finished output ‘Going from chaos to organised using the Eisenhower grid’. Generated using a very short description, and a little tweaking. I let the tool choose all the aesthetics and images.

A prompt to try in chatGPT (and other LLMs)

Possibly the shortest chatGPT prompt ever?

TLDR this

{{paste the thing to summarise here}}

Midjourney for a little fun

In the various online forums, and groups I constantly see a stream of ‘how do i make MidJourney do more things like photoshop’. Why not let photoshop be like photoshop, its great at things like re-colouring, transfers, warping designs to shapes. My tip is go-wild with imagination on Midjourney, let it be the starting block, not the finish line Have some fun!

a reusable water bottle, brutalist design, made of granite, on fire, background of abstract patterns

or the one used for the newsletter banner.

an abstract art work of chaos butterflies, spanning a universe of nebula, cubism, modern art, strong graphic lines, graffiti style --ar 16:9 --style raw

Did you miss these articles on our blog?

Our Events

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