Andrew Savikas

Academic publishing tip 66: How to structure the Table of Contents? It’s a road map for your reader. Avoid long titles as readers loose the overview. Create chapters with equal scope, short titles, and a simple logical structure to help your reader navigate your argument

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“Student perceptions of generative AI” new report from JISC. Fascinating to see how rapidly generative AI tools are changing aspects of teaching and learning.

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Three roads to knowledge: in my latest history of education post, I explore the origins of grammar, rhetoric and dialectic, the liberal arts known collectively as the Trivium... https://lnkd.in/eZhK5Q6P #historyofeducation #grammar #rhetoric #dialectic #liberaleducation #education

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If you are an educator or aspire to be a good ancestor to someone as a parent or grandparent, I highly recommend this conversation. The first part of this conversation is a tough go, but at the 47-minute mark the value really gets going. I've worked in countries, where the difference in education in each generation is so vast, that generations have a hard time relating to each other. This is going to accelerate in countries that haven't yet experienced this as much. Imagine a future though where the students relate more to the machines than they do to their elders, because a machine could know them better than their mom ever could. Listen: #ArtificalIntelligence #Education #MentalHealth #Humanity #FutureOfHumanity #Metacrisis #HumanMachineInteraction #GeneticEngineering

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Here's my most recent Substack post -- a brief listing of blogs on book indexing. 📚 ✨ https://lnkd.in/egaVhxdc #indexingbooks #bookindexing #books #substack

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This post by Charity Majors is the best articulation I’ve seen of why it’s important—arguably more important than ever—to hire early-career developers. https://lnkd.in/gwrj_CUr I used to run The Collab Lab, a nonprofit dedicated to helping early-career devs break into tech. I also started (with Scott Williams) a program at Zapier for hiring and integrating early-career folks, so I’ve made these arguments myself 100s of times. It never doesn’t feel like swimming upstream. It seemed to get better there for a while. Turns out that was an illusion caused by a scarcity of engineers. As soon as budgets got tight, the old prejudices resurfaced and “juniors” were the first to go. Today, from every discussion I’ve had lately, landing your first software job seems harder than ever. In her article, Charity asked “Where would you be, if you hadn’t gotten into tech when you did?” I certainly would not have spent 25 years doing web development. Maybe I’d have eventually been lucky enough to do product or design? Maybe I’d still be doing desktop publishing? 😅 I wish I knew how to overcome the biases in this industry. In a field with so many strongly-held misconceptions, this one is right there at the top as one of the misconceptionyist. Sometimes it feels like hazing. It’s always borne of fear.

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What is the relationship between writing and resilience? A few weeks ago, I joined RJ Redden of Black Belt™️ Bots on a Quest for Epic Engagement. In this short clip about the vulnerability of visibility, I talk about how writing helps us interrogate our ideas, examining them from every angle, and how that interrogation makes us more resilient in the face of criticism or disagreement. You can listen to the full episode here: https://lnkd.in/ebsPZnh9. In the meantime, what areas of your expertise open you up to criticism? Where do others disagree with you? How confident are you in your perspective? Which ideas do you need to interrogate further? Are you actively trying to become more visible, or does increased visibility make you nervous?

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Using generative AI to write an email may give you a slight productivity boost. But using it to identify college students likely to drop out (and then provide resources to support them), or build a chatbot to help entering freshmen ask pressing financial aid questions (and then provide solutions to overcome common challenges) ... those are truly useful use cases that make a real difference. Great piece here on how campus CIOs are using tech to make difference.

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Improving the quality of discourse on ChatGPT Many of us have tried ChatGPT either out of curiosity or out of a desire to harness its potential for work. The following article provides access to a free course offered by Sage Campus of Sage Publishing on the effective use of ChatGPT. The course will offer guidance on using the AI prompt ethically and responsibly. Users will be trained to leverage the AI platform to generate reflective and well-researched responses to their prompts. The course will inform users on how to provide clear and logical prompts to yield relevant information. The two-hour course aims to educate and train users in ChatGPT with the aid of the CLEAR (Concise, Logical, Explicit, Adaptive, and Reflective) framework developed by the designer of the course, Dr. Leo S. Lo.

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Our friend Julio Mario Ottino recently published a thought-provoking essay called "Amazing Possibilities Ahead: But beware the hidden dangers of prediction without understanding." We interviewed Julio on the podcast about his book, The Nexus, in June 2022 and that has led to a continuing friendship. Julio has started publishing on his own site and we're enjoying reading more of his work. A brief quote from this essay: "It used to be that predictions depended on understanding. For the last two centuries or so, that has been the unstated foundation of most advances in technology. But we should recall, as well, that for hundreds of years, we were designing systems that worked well without having the scientific bases to understand their functioning. But the advent of A.I. represents a seismic shift in enabling prediction without understanding. A.I. can make accurate predictions and achieve remarkable results without necessarily grasping the underlying reasons or mechanisms. On one hand, this could be a boon. An age of prediction free from understanding. On the other, our lack of understanding could mean we lose control of the outputs altogether." #ai #artificialintelligence #generativeai #airesearch #complexity #chatgpt #complexchange #changemanagement #futureofwork #artificiality #mindforourminds

Smart authors know how to pitch their expertise to a meeting planner. Get via #KindleUnlimited How to Create a Million Dollar Speech @JudithBriles https://lnkd.in/gahX3EY7 #IARTG #amwriting #selfpublished #authorsuccess #publicspeaking #SmartAuthors #PitchExpertise #MeetingPlanner #MillionDollarSpeech #AuthorTips #BookMarketing #BookPublishing #Monday #Readers #BookLovers

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The announcement below just appeared on Publishers Lunch. This is just my personal opinion: I'm all in favor of technical innovation...but Authors, I beg you, please don't do this! I don't care how accurate the "virtual voice" might be or what the ratings say. The human voice matters and it's not that expensive to professionally produce your audiobook!!! From Publishers Lunch: KDP Virtual Voice Beta Has Produced Over 40,000 Audible Titles A recent report from Bloomberg noted that Amazon's beta program allowing invited KDP authors to produce audiobooks using synthetic machine narration has resulted in over 40,000 "virtual voice" audiobooks available through Audible so far. All of the titles are clearly labelled and introduced as having been created by "computer-generated narration for audiobooks." At least some customers have asked Audible to provide a search filter that would omit the virtual voice titles. An Audible spokesperson writes to Bloomberg, "During the beta we are learning more about what our customers want as we continue to innovate on their behalf." That person reports that the machine-generated audios have an "average overall rating of 4+."

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Thoughtful interview on the topic of AI and human relationships. Today we are already quite accustomed to interacting with technology rather than a person for simple transactions, e.g. asking a chat bot for certain information. The technological progression from transactions to relationships is a slippery slope. We were created for relationships, with each other.

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Sharing my keynote slides + transcript from "Orchestrating the critical: Library instruction programs and our labor," for BTAA on 4-18-24. Key focus areas: +The what/how of critical information literacy + critical pedagogy +Struggles of instruction programs and impact of labor conditions (teacher working conditions are student learning conditions) +A specific examination of the one-shot model and how it limits our programs, our teaching, and student learning +A spotlight on Teach the Teacher as one example of a way forward https://lnkd.in/gJdxcgRr

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"It is high time, then, to contemplate systematically what it means for humanity to exist in an #AI-driven world. Such an accounting must do more than merely tally up the pros and cons of these new technologies. It should offer a road map for how we can maximize their positive aspects and minimize the negative ones for the benefit of humankind. To my mind, there is one societal institution that is ideally positioned to provide this kind of accounting: the university." Joseph E. Aoun Northeastern University

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