Generative Courses, AI Video, AI as a Creative Mirror, and More

🧱 On Generative Courses

What does a future 'course' look like?

This question rattled around my brain all week:

Everywhere I looked, I saw potential, from Khan Academy's tutor to Unschooler. Especially promising (and mind-blowing) is a force-directed knowledge graph interface. I didn't know what that was either, but watch:

Imagine students easily clicking into related questions and topics, creating new connections and sparking curiosity. In this future, courses will be generative, meaning they are created based on the student's actions. Generative courses take adaptive learning one step further. They are not pre-programmed, but rather tailored both to the student's skill and the student's curiosity.

The takeaway from this exploration is learning designed for AI technology will differ from learning today.

Previous technological developments have shown that we usually start in a skeuomorphic way - a fancy way of saying we design the new digital thing look like the old physical thing. Early movies looked like recorded plays. Early cell phones looked like landlines. Early websites looked like newspapers.

Online classes today look like in-person classes with linear lessons, assignments, deadlines, and exams. Online classes tomorrow might look more like a conversation (or a Wikipedia deep-dive) - What's that? Why does it matter? What else should I think about? How does it relate? Can you also help me with this other subject?

In this week's Ed3: Unplugged, Serj and I had a chance to discuss the future of classes, how to design learning experiences, and the launch of his start-up, City as a School. Listen or watch:

🎥 On AI Video

We have seen text-to-image tools unlock artistic creativity. The next frontier is video, and as Shopify founder Tobi notes, it's here.

👉 To help you learn how to use new AI video tools, I'm co-hosting an AI Video workshop with the founder of Minimum Viable Video, Cam Houser.

Join us Tuesday to learn how to generate videos from text and quickly improve videos with AI. It will be a ton of fun. Sign up to join and receive the recording.

📼 On AI Use Cases

🪞 You don't have to recreate courses to leverage AI for learning. Sarah Dillard shares a great way to integrate ChatGPT into design thinking and brainstorming to provide feedback and further ideation for students.

🧑‍🏫 AI detection tools are hitting the education market, but they're probably too late. New research shows AI beats detectors.

🎵 Education isn't the only industry forever changed. Music has moved from sampling beats to re-creating voices. Roberto Nickson demonstrates how he wrote a song that Kanye performed, without Kanye being involved:

🏔 On the Curious and Fascinating

Geography shapes human development. Nowhere is this more apparent than in California:

📱On Creating Change - Text of the Week

Each week, I text a question to someone thinking about the future of learning.

This week, I talked to Brad White. He founded Brad White Consulting (clever name), previously founded Link Public Schools, and was the director at DSST Public Schools.

I asked the same question as last week: how do schools create change?

His response: