Pure Manaʻo

  I am currently taking a Google AI basics course and have reached the "play with generative AI" phase. A central theme of the course is the importance of a "human in the loop" approach—emphasizing human oversight and the value of an iterative process. Questions to ask when evaluating an AI workflow Is the task generative?   Yes. I was tasked with creating a social media post using generative AI tools—Gemini for the text and Gemini's image generation tools for the photo. Can the task be iterated on to achieve the best outcome?  Yes. For the photo, the tool asked for a selfie, but I uploaded a group photo instead. The AI flagged that it wasn't a selfie, but offered to crop/isolate one person from the group. For the text, once I had the image I wanted, I asked Gemini for a caption prompt. The initial output didn't quite match the mood of the photo, so I described the image in more detail and refined the request. I then selected a concise paragraph from ...

The metaphor: Today was a salad with dressing on the side kind of day: healthy dose of affirmation, not too heavy on the sales pitches, not too saturated with bells and whistles, and a little bit of crunch to balance the dish. The facts: The highlight session for me was session #1 with Dr. Michael Fullan talking about "Stratosphere: Integrating Technology, Pedagogy, and Change Knowledge." In short: The session talked about the ineffective role of technology in change knowledge when it was not paired up with pedagogy. My takeaways: student motivation decreases the older they get (the above graph charts enthusiasm by grade level. At 9th grade, the enthusiasm rate drops to a low of 37) teacher satisfaction also decreases - "55% of new teachers leave the profession within the first five years" - Michael Fullan the necessary breakthrough to combat the downward trends  comes with new knowledge created with the partnering of technology, pedagogy and cha...