#8 Leapfrogging...

Every day's a learning day. I'm writing this newsletter because I've always been fascinated by tech, and the confluence of the explosion in AI and my love of education means that I'm reading a LOT of stuff about this space every day.

And yesterday was another such day - where another step was added to the upward staircase that is the development of AI tools. Bing got a slew of new capabilities (more on these below), as Microsoft continue to further integrate AI into their various offerings - and there's a lot more coming with Copilot in beta and soon to appear as part of MS Office. I switched away from Windows to the Mac years ago but at this moment, Microsoft is leading the pack in the AI space, and their tools are currently the ones that are best integrating AI and making it really usable for most people.

Don't trust AI (yet)

But before we jump into that, did you take a good look at Socrates in my AI generated image in yesterday's newsletter? On first glance it is a pretty good image, but take a look at his hands. Not so good on the fingers is it - currently a known issue with many of the image generators. So a little warning that whatever flavour of AI tool you are using, they are definitely not perfect yet, and you do need to check details and scan for errors and inaccuracies - especially when integrating Ai generated content into your learning materials.

We simply cannot hide our heads in the sand on this stuff. Institutional fear from colleges and schools is a visceral, knee-jerk reaction to a scary "new" that is not understood and threatens to overturn the "safe" status quo. The horse is well and truly out of the stable - in fact she's leapt the fence and is galloping across the fields towards town! We need to inform ourselves on the new stuff and be in a position to guide our students and colleagues through this strange new world.

Bing's new features

I have been paying for Plus access to ChatGPT for a few months, but I'm reconsidering this subscription given the new capabilities of Bing. It's even made me install Microsoft Edge and start using it rather than Chrome - I didn't see that coming a few months ago!

As of yesterday (May 4th 2023) Bing AI is now available to all, no longer do you have to join a waitlist. Try it - you'll be amazed at the capabilities if you haven't tried it before. A lot of this plays catch-up with ChatGPT but the integrations with Bing make it far more accessible for more people. The official Microsoft announcement with some videos showing how the new features work is here.

They're adding in history so you'll be able to get back to your earlier chats.

A big new feature is the ability to include images into prompts, so multi-modal discourse is now available, and as I showed yesterday, you can generate text and images on demand very quickly and easily.

For educators, referencing is of prime importance - showing where we sourced information is a cornerstone of academic writing, and this is now coming to Bing's searches. Ask Bing to summarise an academic paper in the Edge sidebar on the open page. The summary will show footnotes of where it got that information, or you can send a follow up prompt asking where it got a specific detail of the paper and it will highlight that part of the text.?This is going to help educators out a lot in checking sources, and I'm finding that in almost all cases, when Bing gives source links they actually exist and link to real papers and websites, unlike ChatGPT up to now...

Tool for the day - WALDO

This looks like an interesting way to amplify the search results from any browser. Install the browser extension (it's free) and you get a lot of new capabilities to extract specific data from pages, papers etc. Looks like it might get a place in my toolset ...

Joe Houghton?is an Assistant Professor at UCD Smurfit Graduate School of Business where he directs the MSc programmes in Project Management. After a career in IT in multinationals, Joe switched into a portfolio career of University teaching, management coaching and training.

He has authored 5 books to date including "Innovative teaching with AI: Creative approaches to enhancing learning in education", and "Project Management made easy...: the ECCSR approach".

Contact Joe on email at?[email protected]?for any requests for training, workshops or keynote speaking.