Howdy,
I’m Andrew Bell, the Technology Consultant at the Faculty Hub. I’m excited to kick off a new monthly series around digital tools. I’m going to share information, links, videos, papers… some related to pedagogy and scholarship, some might not be… All of it will be related to concepts, tools, and ideas that have helped me better understand the ever changing digital landscape. I hope you find it worth your time!
10 things worth sharing this October:
1. Someone something to talk to… You can now talk with chatGPT. ChatGPT can now see, hear, and speak
2. Ben Thompson on how the emergence of generative AI is redefining the meaning of ‘virtual reality’.
3. Ezra Klein suggests the Internet both enhances and distracts the mind. In this NYTimes article, Erza speculates on the impact AI will have on the mind.
4. Will Generative AI make us more productive? This paper suggests it might (for some of us)…
5. “When the people at the New Yorker can’t concentrate long enough to listen to a song all the way through, how are books to survive?” Why can’t we read anymore?
6. Walking around campus, it’s hard not to wonder: what did we do before smartphones? Ian Bogost, a columnist for The Atlantic, explores leisure time, boredom, and what we used to do to pass time.
7. Remember, even the widely-used digital pedagogy tool, Powerpoint, hasn’t been around forever. A (brief) History of Powerpoint from the MIT Technology Review.
8. Developing concept maps as an exam review is one of my favorite learning activities for students. They also have a long history in storytelling. Walt Disney was famous for distributing corporate strategy in the form a a concept map.
9. I once gave my UR job talk using the note-taking app, Evernote 😬, so this topic resonates with me. Why note-taking apps don’t make us smarter
10. While note taking apps may not make us smarter, notebooks can be a great tool for capturing ideas… The Notebooks of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Notebooks
Thanks for reading!
Andrew
