April 9, 2019
Christian Hubbs, Mises Institute
Artificial Intelligence is widely seen as a strategic technology and has thus engendered national development plans from countries across the globe to promote its progress. For quite some time, the United States has been conspicuously on the sideline. Yes, AI has been hailed as a transformative family of technologies that will bring about a radically improved standard of living for people around the globe. On the other hand, there are numerous potential uses of this technology to inflict incredible harm on individuals, and the risk of abuse becomes greater the more AI research is funded or directed by government agencies. Malinvestment (or “malscience,” in this case) is encouraged by political funding of R&D, and the Pentagon has explicitly stated they seek to use this technology in military applications. Rather than not going far enough, Trump’s Executive Order has already gone too far by explicitly bringing this technology into the political realm because the state is simply too dangerous to grant a leading role in AI development.
https://mises.org/wire/dangers-government-funded-artificial-intelligence
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Will Willitts, Financial Review Australia
Job-search site Seek has splashed out $142 million in stakes in two online education providers as part of its quest to invest in fast-growing ventures in lieu of returning dollars to shareholders. It paid $92 million for a 50 per cent stake in FutureLearn, an online education platform, and $50 million for a minority interest in Coursera, the world’s largest online learning platform for higher education, the company said in a statement to the Australian Securities Exchange on Monday.
https://www.afr.com/technology/technology-companies/seek-takes-equity-stakes-in-futurelearn-and-coursera-20190429-p51i4k
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Harvard Business Review
To become a true AI-fueled organization, a company may need to fundamentally rethink the way humans and machines interact within working environments. Executives must consider how to deploy machine learning and other cognitive tools systematically across every core business process and enterprise operation to support data-driven decision-making. In the end, the whole company must be open to AI driving new offerings and business models. These are not minor steps, but as AI technologies standardize rapidly across industries, becoming an AI-fueled organization will likely be more than a strategy for success—it could be table stakes for survival.
https://hbr.org/sponsored/2019/03/is-your-organization-ready-to-harness-the-potential-of-ai
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By Dave Gershgorn, Quartz
Tech giants are starting to create mechanisms for outside experts to help them with AI ethics—but not always in the ways ethicists want. Google, for instance, announced the members of its new AI ethics council this week—such boards promise to be a rare opportunity for underrepresented groups to be heard. It faced criticism, however, for selecting Kay Coles James, the president of the conservative Heritage Foundation. James has made statements against the Equality Act, which would protect sexual orientation and gender identity as federally protected classes in the US. Those and other comments would seem to put her at odds with Google’s pitch as being a progressive and inclusive company. (Google declined Quartz’s request for comment.)
https://qz.com/1583989/as-tech-giants-seek-help-on-ai-ethics-where-they-seek-it-matters/
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April 8, 2019
Emily Alford, ClickZ
Gartner predicts that by 2020, voice search will account for 30% of all web-browsing. Preparing your brand for this unprecedented rise in voice search. So why are so many consumers clamoring to adopt voice search? For starters, it’s much simpler to talk to a device than to tap keys or screens. Voice search also makes it much easier for consumers to to find the goods and services they need when they’re driving or otherwise occupied. Easy-to-use voice search is also incredibly appealing to the elderly, people with impaired mobility or sight, and even just younger audiences, who are often quicker to adopt new technologies than their parents.
https://www.clickz.com/creating-voice-search-experience-brand/228146/
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Forbes
Unfortunately, there’s no industry-standard, best-practices handbook on AI ethics for companies to follow—at least not yet. Some large companies, including Microsoft and Google, are developing their own internal ethical frameworks. A number of think tanks, research organizations, and advocacy groups, meanwhile, have been developing a wide variety of ethical frameworks and guidelines for AI. Below is a brief roundup of some of the more influential models to emerge—from the Asilomar Principles to best-practice recommendations from the AI Now Institute.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/insights-intelai/2019/03/27/the-growing-marketplace-for-ai-ethics/#429648c44c4b
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BY DENNIS PIERCE, eCampus News
At Central New Mexico Community College (CNM), empowering students is an important goal, says Tobe Phelps, senior director of online college. Giving students a permanent, secure digital record of their accomplishments that they can take with them when they graduate aligns perfectly with this objective. “When we issue a diploma to a student, that diploma still belongs to the college, and the student must get a certified copy from us,” Phelps says. “If they try to get a job or move on to another college, all of those (entities) have to come back to us for validation of the student’s credentials.” By using a technology called blockchain, “we’re able to take that certification and give it to the student as an official record they own themselves,” he says. “We can be completely out of the circle.”
https://www.ecampusnews.com/2019/03/29/how-will-blockchain-transform-higher-ed-start-with-credentials/
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April 7, 2019
BEN YU, Venture Beat
If AI and 5G had a baby, its name would be “AV.” Autonomous vehicles are essentially data centers on wheels. If you look at them closely, you’ll notice they are loaded with multiple 4G LTE modems, because, with “brains in the device,” they require intelligence at the edge. That requires the rich and rapid movement of data that 5G is uniquely positioned to offer.
But the other thing that excites me about 5G is that it will not only be the protocol that launches a thousand new high-throughput applications and use cases like AVs, it will also drive important new low-bandwidth applications. Put another way, because of the new frequencies opened up by 5G, there will be new opportunities for innovation up and down the spectrum.
https://venturebeat.com/2019/03/31/the-convergence-of-5g-and-ai-a-venture-capitalists-view/
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IANS | New Delhi
Google, for example has now established an external advisory council to help the tech giant develop AI technology in an ethical and responsible way. E-commerce giant Amazon this month announced that it was working with the National Science Foundation (NSF) to commit up to $10 million each in research grants over the next three years focused on fairness in AI. “We believe we must work closely with academic researchers to develop innovative solutions that address issues of fairness, transparency, and accountability and to ensure that biases in data don’t get embedded in the systems we create,” Prem Natarajan, Vice President of Natural Understanding in the Alexa AI group at Amazon, wrote in a blog post.
https://www.business-standard.com/article/news-ians/tech-firms-scramble-to-make-ai-unbiased-119033100113_1.html
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Elad Walach, the Next Web
We are drowning in data that’s supposed to help us. The big data revolution has come from inexpensive data storage and automated data collection, giving organizations exponentially more data than they had in the past. From business logic data like computer log files to detailed weather patterns, purchasing data to TV viewing, we have access to so much data on how the world works and about the lives and habits of individuals. A lot of this data is just sitting in warehouses, either real or virtual, being ignored or occasionally examined for trends. It’s just too much for people to handle. When it comes to healthcare, advanced new diagnostic techniques mean that more information is collected about patients than ever before. That’s where AI comes in.
https://thenextweb.com/podium/2019/03/31/how-ai-will-save-us-from-the-mess-of-big-data/
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April 6, 2019
Smart Brief
American employees are under stress. An estimated 1 million American workers are absent every day due to stress, according to The American Institute of Stress. It’s become a chronic issue for employers as they see increasingly poor health, reduced productivity, and low employee morale in their workplaces. So what can we do? The answer might be easier than we think: Learning. It turns out that exerting the effort to learn new skills at work can help reduce workplace stress. That’s according to research done by Professor David Mayer of The University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, along with co-authors Chen Zhang and Christopher Myers. They discovered that one of the best ways that professionals can relieve stress is to funnel their efforts into education.
https://www.smartbrief.com/original/2019/03/how-workplace-learning-can-reduce-employee-stress
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By Natalie Schwartz, Education Dive
This year is already shaping up to be a momentous one for higher education. In Congress, both parties have indicated reauthorization of the Higher Education Act is a priority. The U.S. Department of Education is underway with regulatory overhauls on how colleges are accredited and how they must handle sexual harassment. And President Donald Trump has made headlines with his recent executive order linking research funding for universities to free speech. Change may also be coming through the third branch of government, the courts. Decisions on several current cases could have far-reaching implications for colleges across the U.S., including whether they can consider race in admissions or penalize students for joining single-gender clubs.
https://www.educationdive.com/news/5-lawsuits-that-could-bring-major-change-to-higher-ed/551238/
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- Online learning means increased access to higher education, which is an indisputable social good.
- Now that online education is “a thing,” institutions with teaching at the heart of their missions are indispensable parties in the conversation. We are now at the online table in larger and larger numbers.
https://www.chronicle.com/article/4-Lessons-From-Moving-a/245926
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April 5, 2019
Jim Ver Steeg, University of Rochester
From smartphones and social media to augmented spaces and virtual reality, digital technologies are changing the ways we connect with each other and interact with our world. Higher education is no exception. Students on today’s college campuses are digital natives and bring with them expectations when it comes to learning and interacting on electronic platforms. But is a “full steam ahead” approach to the digital future a reality for most college campuses? The Chronicle of Higher Education recently published a story about the challenges faced by the University of Texas at Austin when they attempted to redesign their curricula and produce more live online classes. In the end, support and funding for the digital initiatives faltered and backing for the bold move forward all but disappeared.
https://www.rochester.edu/newscenter/should-higher-education-go-digital-368302/
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LumenLearning
The OER Adoption Impact Calculator helps you understand many of the potential impacts of adopting OER instead of traditionally copyrighted learning materials. The values in the Settings on the left are set to defaults based on the published research referenced below. Change the Settings on the left so that they match the situation at your institution in order to see how replacing traditionally copyrighted materials with OER might benefit your students and institution. The information below will update in real time as you make changes.
https://analytics.lumenlearning.com/impact/
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Kim Scalzo, Evolllution
The higher education industry is evolving rapidly, requiring colleges and universities to adopt new approaches to serve a shifting audience. The traditional market of 18-year-old high school graduates isn’t disappearing. But this market alone will not sustain the majority of colleges and universities operating in this space. In this interview, Kim Scalzo reflects on the changing postsecondary landscape and shares her thoughts on how continuing and professional education (CE) divisions can take the reins to drive this transformation on their campuses.
https://evolllution.com/managing-institution/higher_ed_business/mapping-the-transforming-role-of-continuing-ed-on-university-campuses/
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April 4, 2019
Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed
Information wants to be free — even more so in 2019 than 35 years ago when the phrase was first publicized. Students are on board. Recent studies have begun uncovering the link between OER and engagement, learning outcomes and student success.
In sum, reasons to consider moving to open educational resources:
- Success in student recruitment and marketing because of lower costs
- Improved student retention due to more students accessing the required materials
- Improved student learning outcomes as indicated in recent studies
- Implicitly finer faculty control and familiarity with resources they produce
https://www.insidehighered.com/digital-learning/blogs/online-trending-now/information-learning-material-wants-be-free
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Jon Younger, Forbes
The Coursera Global Skills Index benchmarks 60 countries and 10 industries for Business, Technology, and Data Science skills. As Coursera explained, “Functionally, our competencies and skills come from Coursera’s Skills Graph, which is a set of skills assembled through both open-source taxonomies like Wikipedia as well as crowdsourcing from Coursera educators and learners on what they are teaching/learning on the Coursera platform.” Coursera found the U.S. and Canada to be middle of the pack of the global rankings and not cutting-edge in any of the three domains. Canada ranked ahead of the U.S. in most areas. As Coursera notes, “Although the current technological boom started in North America, it prompted a wave of innovation around the world to the point where the United States and Canada no longer lead in Technology.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonyounger/2019/03/23/courseras-global-skills-index-how-does-your-nation-and-industry-compare/#44ada72e62b6
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By Dian Schaffhauser, Campus Technology
“Open” has become a definite thing. According to the latest public accounting, there were nearly 1.5 billion Creative Commons-licensed works in the world available for use in teaching and learning, including whole courses, textbooks, images, videos, quizzes, syllabi, lectures, homework assignments, labs, games and simulations. Given that abundance of materials, it would be no surprise if you were to feel overwhelmed and unsure about where to start your search for free curriculum to use in the courses under your care. To help out, Campus Technology has developed this list of the best sites for obtaining free (and low-cost) digital textbooks.
https://campustechnology.com/articles/2019/03/25/best-sources-for-free-digital-textbooks-and-more.aspx
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April 3, 2019
by John O’Brien, EDUCAUSE
The technologies that enable Dx (e.g., analytics, artificial intelligence, the cloud, mobile, consumerization, social networks, and storage capacities) constitute only one of the levers involved. True Dx goes far beyond tools to include cultural and workforce changes in how we teach, learn, enroll, and engage in scholarship and research. At EDUCAUSE, we think that what makes digital transformation, well, transformational is a commitment—made by campus leadership far beyond the IT organization—to the belief that the future of the campus will be an unapologetically digital future.
https://er.educause.edu/articles/2019/3/digital-transformation-a-caterpillar-or-a-butterfly
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By Jeff Bell, Columbus CEO
WGU’s competency-based courses focus on measuring student learning rather than class time. Students study and learn on their own schedules and advance to the next class as soon as they demonstrate mastery of course materials. That means there is no waiting for slower-to-learn classmates to catch up, as tradition holds. As a result, WGU says students can complete a degree faster than in a conventional program, often less than three years for a bachelor’s degree. All WGU’s courses are online and on-demand, Watts says, and they are designed with input and feedback from industry employers.
https://www.columbusceo.com/business/20190422/heres-how-western-governors-university-ohio-is-disrupting-higher-education
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