Not infrequently I am asked about my thoughts on AI and the future of technology more generally. Here are some thoughts.

In 1927, Charles Lindbergh was 25 years old when he flew solo across the Atlantic. It took him 33.5 hours to fly The Spirit of St. Louis from New York City to Paris. When he returned to the United States, he spent a year travelling the country promoting the wonders of flight. He said that he could envision a time when as many as 15 people could fly on a plane. In 1968 and at the age of 66, he met with the Apollo 8 crew the night before they flew to the moon. A few weeks later, the first Boeing 747 took to the air. In January 1970, the first 747 commercial flight (PanAm) took off with 335 passengers and 20 crew members. Lindbergh was 67 years old. Fifteen people, indeed.

If Lindbergh—a huge advocate for commercial flight—could not envision in his lifetime no more than 15 people on a plane, there is no hope for me in predicting the future of technology. But we can look backwards for any lessons that may help us as technology moves forward.

Calculators. I’m certain that math instructors who were in the classroom in the 1970s are laughing pretty heartily as we struggle to sort out AI’s impact on writing. “While the general public debated whether or not calculators should be allowed at school, educators were forced to grapple with how the devises (sic) would change math instruction” (Watters, 2015).

1975: National Advisory Committee on Mathematical Education recommended that starting in eighth grade, students should be able to use calculators in class, including on exams.

1980: National Council of Teachers recommended that calculators be used by all students regardless of grade level.

1983: The College Board okayed the use of calculators on the AP Calculus exam.

1984: The College Board changed their mind. Calculators were now banned, because it wasn’t fair to students who did not have a calculator.

1986: Connecticut required the use of calculators on state-mandated tests.

1992: New York followed Connecticut’s lead.

1994: The College Board mandated the use of calculators on the AP Calculus exam and allowed calculators for the SAT.

1997: California allowed the use of calculators on its state-mandated tests.

“In some ways, it’s difficult to separate debates about the usage of calculators in the classroom from debates about math education writ large. Much of the ‘Math Wars’ of the late 1980s (and onward… still) involved how much technology was appropriate, what technology would mean for the acquisition of basic math skills, and what – thanks to new technologies – math education should or could look like (what math curriculum should or could like at the K-12 level, as well as what it should or could like in college.)” (Watters, 2015).

With apologies to the author of that paragraph, we can seamlessly replace calculators and math with AI and writing.

“In some ways, it’s difficult to separate debates about the usage of calculators [AI] in the classroom from debates about math [writing] education writ large. Much of the ‘Math [AI] Wars’ of the late 1980s [mid 2020s] (and onward… still) involved how much technology was appropriate, what technology would mean for the acquisition of basic math [writing] skills, and what – thanks to new technologies – math [writing] education should or could look like (what math [writing] curriculum should or could like at the K-12 level, as well as what it should or could like in college.)” (Watters, 2015).

Unfortunately, the math educators never did completely get it sorted. “You can read the comments on almost any story today about math education and see these same, long-running debates: fears that students’ computational abilities will be ruined by calculators/computers/cellphones, that students will become too reliant upon machines, that they won’t be able to learn from their errors and teachers won’t be able to help them, that they won’t learn basic skills” (Watters, 2015). And so appears to be our future with AI.

We have managed to learn to live with technology, such as calculators, GPS, word processors (now called apps), and the Internet. What they all have in common, including calculators, is that we cannot turn off our brains.

We cannot blindly follow what our calculators (okay, calculator apps) or our spreadsheets or our statistical tools tell us. We have to have some idea of what the output will look like. If my calculations tell me that I owe the IRS $15 or $15,000,000, something has gone horribly wrong.

Stories abound of people who blindly followed their GPS down boat ramps and into water (such as these two incidents in Hawaii, and this one in British Columbia) or took GPS-suggested alternate routes when interstate highways were closed due to snow (such as these). And then, as an example of garbage in/garbage out, drivers can end up in the wrong city if they enter the wrong city name in their GPS (such as these tourists). We have to keep our brains engaged: does this route make sense? If I see water directly in front of me, does it make sense to drive into it? If the major highways are closed because of snow, does it make sense that a rural road would be clear of snow? If I’m in Chicago and want to drive to Portland, Maine, does it make sense that my GPS map tells me to drive west? Could it be that I inadvertently told my map app that I wanted to go to Portland, Oregon?

Every instructor who gives writing assignments has examples of students who blindly accepted whatever their word processing program told them to do. My favorite was the student who was trying to write a paper about “concentration” but however they misspelled it, their app told them to use “constipation.” It took me a couple pages to figure out what was going on. It may or may not be surprising how well those words can work in the same sentence. Of course, we have the same problem with autocorrect in our text messages. Again, we have to keep our brains engaged: do these sentences make sense?

In my final example, we have the Internet. When it first appeared, there was much gnashing of teeth about students not learning to do research using library sources. They could just Google it. Google and library databases are both useful tools, but, again, we cannot turn off our brains. Ultimately the question is “can I trust what this source is telling me?” In education, we still hammer into students the need to evaluate their sources. Just because someone says it on TikTok does not make it true (such as these examples of bad financial advice and these example of bad medical advice). And just because someone does it on TikTok does not make it a good idea (such as these TikTok challenges).

I imagine this will be our future with AI and writing. We cannot turn off our brains. We have to have the skills to evaluate what AI tells us—and the motivation to do so.

Reference

Watters, A. (2015, March 12). A brief history of calculators in the classroom. Hack Education. http://hackeducation.com/2015/03/12/calculators

I was saddened to receive this email yesterday (Nov 26, 2023).

Dear Nudgers

We are sad to say that despite the support we’ve received from you over the years, Nudgemail is losing money to operate. As much as the love we’ve had for this product has never stopped (we ourselves still use it to this day), we unfortunately cannot afford to support the efforts.

Nudgemail will be shutting down in December – but with any luck this could be temporary. If you would like to remain notified if we have the capacity to resume in the future, please let us know here.

In the meantime, if you have open Nudges, we recommend you take immediate action and send an email to status@nudgemail.com to get all of them sent your way.

This is a difficult moment for us, as it has truly been one of our favorite inventions. Thank you for all the support!

Team Nudgemail

Nudgemail has been my go-to email management tool since 2010. After a brief moment of panic, I realized that Gmail, Outlook, and Mailbird (my current email app) all have improved their “snooze” game. When you snooze an email message, it gets pulled out of your inbox and then reappears at the time you designated at the very top of your inbox.

While this built-in snooze doesn’t have all of the features of Nudgemail—such as the ability to set up recurring messages—it’s not a bad alternative.

The tool most similar to Nudgemail and at the most affordable price of the tools in this category is FollowUpThen. In the free plan, you get 50 reminders a month. Although, this really isn’t any different than snoozing messages. If you want the power-user tools that include recurring followups and features that Nudgemail didn’t have, e.g. followups with attachments, a calendar subscription (see your followups on your calendar), and SMS texting of your reminders, it’s $48/year. Take advantage of their 14-day free trial to explore these advanced features.

Everyone who writes needs a solid pdf and reference manager. I’m a big fan of Zotero. Zotero is free, and you can back up 300 MB worth of stuff on their servers for free. If you want more space (and I do), it’s $20/year for two GB, $60/year for six GB, or $120/year for unlimited back up space.

While I could go on and on about Zotero’s features (and I have in workshops), in this blog post, I want to focus on how Zotero handles article titles. When we import article data into Zotero—through a doi search or by dragging a pdf into Zotero—the title we get is whatever the publisher entered. For example, the title may come as “title case.” If you use MLA style, this format works fine for you. For those of us who use APA style, however, we need to use “sentence case.”

Fortunately, Zotero makes this easy to change. Mouse over the title (do not click on the title, just mouse over it), and then right click. Select “Sentence case.”

Done! The only capital letter is now the first one. But wait! In APA style, the first letter after the colon needs to be capitalized, too.

Zotero knows that. Even though it doesn’t capitalize the “a” after the colon in this view, when we tell Zotero to generate a bibliography in APA style, it capitalizes it.

Pratkanis, A. R., & Turner, M. E. (2013). Methods for counteracting groupthink risk: A critical appraisal. International Journal of Risk and Contingency Management, 2(4), 18–38. https://doi.org/10.4018/ijrcm.2013100102

One quick word of caution about title capitalization. Zotero does not know what other words in the title may need to be capitalized, such as proper nouns. After switching to “sentence case,” we will need to manually fix any other words that need capitalization.

If you are still typing out references, please try out Zotero. There are many other things you can be doing with your time.

Windows users have a built-in screenshot app: Snipping Tool.

The Snipping Tool got an upgrade. You can now use it to extract text from an image. After taking your screenshot (shout out to LearningScientists.org), look for the text extraction icon.

Clicking the text extraction icon causes Snipping Tool to identify and spotlight everything that looks like text. When it finishes, it will give you two new options: Copy all text and Quick redact. Clicking the down arrow next to Quick redact allows you to choose auto redaction for phone numbers and email addresses.

After clicking “Copy all text,” I pasted it here:

Cientista

LEARN TO STUDY USING …

Retrieval Practice

PRACTICE BRINGING INFORMATION TO MIND

LEARNINGSCIENTISTS.ORG

HOW TO DO IT

Put away your class materials, and

write or sketch everything you

know. Be as thorough as possible.

Then, check your class materials for

accuracy and important points you

missed.

WRITE

OR

SKETCH

CHECK

Not bad!

If you use infographics, the Snipping Tool might be a fine way to create a text-only version for students who use screen readers.

To determine whether you can use something without violating copyright, you need to answer four questions. Keep in mind that all four answers are on a continuum. It all comes down to the strength of your argument. Please see the
U.S. Copyright Office’s page on fair use for more information.

The PANE Test

Nature
of work. What kind of content are you using? Is it more creative or more factual? Copying from a creative work—such as a novel—is more likely to be viewed as a violation of copyright than, say, copying from a factual work—such as a business report. Journal articles are considered a creative work because new information is being created.

Examples

1. You want to use a cartoon you found at gocomics.com to illustrate a concept during class.
   

   green here.
   

   red
   here.
   

   red
   here.
   

   red
   here, you’re at least in the pink.
   

   Before you delete all of your gocomics.com cartoons from your presentation, let’s do a little research. Gocomics.com has in their FAQ a
   page on educational use of their cartoons. In that FAQ, you’ll read that “you may use up to seven (7) cartoons per year at no costs (sic) as part of our fair use policy,” and that includes overheads—which tells you how long ago the content on this page was written.
   

   
   

2.               You want to make some chapters from a textbook available to your students as free, downloadable pdfs in your learning management system.

green here.

red
here. If you’re using just one chapter, you may be on safer ground, especially if that one chapter is just to help students get through the first week of classes while they wait for their textbook to arrive. See economic impact.

red
here.

red
here.

3.               You’re showing an entire TV show episode or movie from Netflix to your class via Zoom.

green here.

red
here.

red
here.

red
here. 

One option is to use just a small clip from the video. Another option is to work with your librarians to get a copy of the video that you can use in class. College libraries play under some different copyright rules. Our library video licenses come with permission to show the videos to classes. Your Netflix subscription does not.

The final say

Since I posted about Dot cards a couple weeks ago, they’ve added a new feature called dot.Exchange. If you’re not already familiar with Dot cards, please read that previous blog post first. The rest of this will make much more sense.

After you tap your Dot card on the back of someone’s phone, and they launch their phone’s browser to view your Dot card profile page, they’ll see this double-arrow button.

Tapping the double-arrow button generates this pop-up. Your new friend can enter their contact information. When they press the Exchange button, they’ll be asked if they want Dot cards to use their phone’s gps to add a location.

This is the email Dot card immediately sent me.

Everyone who adds their contact information this way will be added to my Dot card contacts.

Clicking on Snoopy in my Dot card contacts gives me Snoopy’s contact info along with ways to contact him, the ability to set up a follow up reminder, and the option add a personal note (perhaps describing Snoopy as a kid with a big nose).

Saving Snoopy’s contact info in my Google contacts was pretty simple. From my phone, I tapped on the 3-dot menu icon and selected Download. When I opened the downloaded file, my phone showed me Snoopy’s information with an Import button at the bottom of the screen. I clicked Import, and my phone asked me where I wanted to import it. My Google account—where all of my contacts are stored—was an option.

Snoopy also got an email from Dot card. For Snoopy’s email address, I entered my college address. My college sent it to junk mail, so I had to fish it out of there. I don’t know if the filter grabbed it because the message came from Dot card or because Snoopy was in the message. Your mileage may vary.

Snoopy’s email message included the means to download my contact information, the same buttons I got for texting, calling, and emailing. Snoopy also got a button for viewing my profile again.

One last note about this new dot.Exchange feature. On your Dot card contacts page, in the top right corner is a gear icon. There are three settings option. The first and last are turned on by default. If you turn on Quick Capture Mode, as soon as your new friend opens their phone’s browser, the form where they can enter their contact information immediately comes up. New friends may be hesitant to enter their contact information (“Where is this going?!”) before they even see yours. I’m going to leave Quick Capture Mode off. I’m okay with my new friends seeing (and saving) all of my information first, and then I can suggest they click the double-arrow button to share their information with me.

The next time you see me at a conference, hold up your Dot card, and we’ll exchange info. Don’t have a Dot card, yet? Order one here for a one-time cost of $20.

I want to pronounce the names of others how they want them pronounced, and I assume that others feel the same way about my name—that they want to pronounce it as I pronounce it. Let’s make it easy for everyone and put a “hear my name” badge in our email signatures, in our learning management systems, and on our dot cards. The free service called NameCoach makes this easy.

This is what my NameCoach icon looks like in my email signature.

I’ve embedded the clickable button in this blog post. Click on it.

My NameCoach webpage will open. Click the speaker icon next to my name to hear a recording of me speaking my name. That’s it. Slick, eh?

If you don’t want to use the button, you don’t have to. The button is just an image that you link to your own NameCoach webpage. Here’s a direct link to my NameCoach web address: https://www.name-coach.com/sue-frantz.

Creating your own NameCoach profile

To get started, go to the NameCoach login page. In the top right corner, click the sign up button. Signing up as an individual is fine.

Fill out the form, which includes creating an audio recording of your name. There are three options for doing an audio recording. 1.) Phone: enter your phone number and their automated system will call you. 2.) Web recorder: press the record button. And for the DIYers, 3.) Uploader: upload your own recording.

Everything you enter on this form can be edited later, including your recording.

Using NameCoach

After you’ve created your profile, go to your “My NameBadge” page.

At the top of this page, you’ll see largely what others will see: your name, the speaker icon to listen to your name, pronunciation notes if you included them, and gender pronouns if you included them.

Below this section, you can share additional information about where your name came from (mine: Germany, probably Rhineland), what your name means (mine: free/Frenchman, if the internet is to be trusted), or a funny or interesting story about your name (mine: I’ve got nothing).

In the next section, from the “Publish your Namebadge” tab, click “Customize Link.” Change the end of your profile url into something that’s more you. If wonder-woman is available, claim it.

Next, click on the “Add Namebadge to your Email Signature” tab. This tab is really just about copying the button—with or without—text. After copying your preferred button, you can paste it anywhere, not just in your email signature. This is how I copied the button that pasted at the top of this post.

That’s it. You are now good to go.

Any time you want to make changes to your NameCoach page, just follow the link in your signature to get to your public profile page, click the login button, and log in.

Are you ready to stop carrying around business cards? Or, perhaps more accurately, are you ready to stop forgetting your business cards at home?

I just got back from the American Psychological Association’s 2023 convention where I made liberal use of my business card replacement. A Dot card is the size and thickness of a credit card and has a one-time cost of $20.

When you want someone to have your contact information, you place your Dot card against the back of the other person’s unlocked phone. If their phone is NFC-compatible and if NFC is enabled, a pop-up will appear on their phone. (On iPhones, the NFC scanner is near the camera; on Android, it’s near the center of the phone.) If the pop-up doesn’t appear, flip your Dot card over, and they can use their phone’s camera to scan your card’s QR code.

When the person taps the pop-up, their phone will ask if they want to open the link using their browser. Yes, yes they do. That link will open your customizable Dot card profile page. You can add, remove, or change information on your profile page whenever you would like.

Here is the top part of what people see when I tap my Dot card on the back of their phone or if they scan my Dot card’s QR code.

In addition to my email addresses and phone number, my Dot card profile also includes links to my Intro Psych textbook, the Teaching Psychology book I co-authored with Doug Bernstein and Steve Chew, my Macmillan Communities teaching psychology blog, and this Technology for Academics blog. Oh, and my Venmo info.

The recipient can save this information to their phone’s contacts by tapping the Save Contact button. If all of the information does not come in, then they can look for your dot card profile web address under your entry in their contacts.

I use my Dot card for personal and professional contacts. If I wanted a Dot card that I could use with students, I would order a second card and that would allow me to create a second Dot profile page that would contain information more appropriate for my students.

Dot also makes stickers that you can affix to the back of your phone. Those only work when the other person has an NFC-enabled phone, though. The advantage of the card is that it includes a QR code on the back as a back-up. At this most recent convention, I did encounter a few phones where we had to use the QR code.

Updated Saturday, August 19, 2023: See this blog post on a new Dot card feature called dot.Exchange.

Special shout out to Garth Neufeld for introducing me to Dot cards!

Using AI to detect AI feels like a little like the start of the robot wars. Yet here we are.

The makers of GPTZero—the ChatGPT/AI detector—have released a Chrome extension (from your Chrome browser, download it here).

Once you have added Origin by GPTZero extension to Chrome, visit any webpage, such as an assignment in your course management system. Highlight the text you want to check for the likelihood the text was written by AI. You need to highlight at least 250 characters.

Right click on the text, and select “Scan text with Origin.”

GPTZero’s Origin extension will generate a popup that will produce its conclusion.

In the bottom right corner of every webpage, you will now see the Origin icon. Instead of using the right-click menu, you can copy the text, click the Origin icon, paste the text into the Origin box, then click “Origin check.”

A couple thoughts on student use of AI.

1. Some instructors are asking students to use ChatGPT to generate answers to questions, and then asking students to critique ChatGPT’s answers.
2. Some instructors are telling students that they will be using tools like GPTZero to evaluate the likelihood that the student’s submitted work was AI-generated. Instructors are encouraging students to use GPTZero to evaluate their work before submitting it. If a student did use AI to do their work, the student’s challenge is now to rewrite the AI’s answer to sound more human. Students may decide that that’s more work than doing their own writing from the start.

In what feels like eons ago, I wrote a blog post on protecting your data when in public. I looked up that post. I published it on January 20, 2020, just three months before most of us stopped going out in public. Good timing, eh? Now that most people are out and about, here is that post again revised with updated information from the FBI regarding juice hacking. Read on!

USB condoms

Let’s start with USB condoms, because, frankly, that’s why you decided to read this post. It’s okay to be honest. We’re friends.

The cable you use to charge your phone and your tablet serve as both a power cable and a data cable. Electricity and information flow through this same cable. As long as you are home, you are safe. When you venture out into public, however…

Let’s say you’re at the airport with a long layover and a low phone battery. You plug your USB cable into one of those now-ubiquitous charging stations. Unfortunately, someone with nefarious intent has been there before you. Once you plug in your USB cable, the nefarious person begins to steal any data that flows through your cable, such as passwords, or sends malware to your phone.

This is called juice jacking, and the FBI officially recommends not using USB outlets in public spaces.

Option 1. Do what the FBI recommends, and don’t use public USB outlets (including in your hotel room). Instead, use your device’s charge adapter and only plug into electrical outlets.

Option 2. Use a charge-only cable rather than a data/charge cable. It took some effort to find the right search term for Amazon to give me what I was looking for. I had success with “usb data blocker charge cable.”

Option 3: Use a USB data blocker adapter. A USB condom, if you will. Plug your USB cable into a device that’s about the size of a flashdrive then plug the device into a public USB outlet. You can purchase two PortaPow Data Blockers from Amazon for about $10.

Another risk

In addition to juice hacking there is a lot of risk with using public wifi. Every time you connect to public wifi, such as at a coffee shop or airport, a nefarious person may be lurking on that same wifi. With the right skills that nefarious person could swipe any data you send over that connection, such as your login names and passwords.

VPNs

Like a USB data blocker, you can put a layer of protection between you and public wifi. In this case, the solution is software, not hardware.

A virtual private network (VPN) is well, a kind of private network. After installing the VPN on each of your devices (phone, tablet, laptop – anything that may leave your home and connect to the Internet), every time you connect to public wifi, sign into your VPN with your username and password. That login provides the layer of protection you need. All of the information flowing between your device and the Internet will be encrypted. No one can read it without knowing your VPN username and password.

There are several very good VPNs out there. I use Private Internet Access (PIA), but ExpressVPN is always on the lists of excellent VPNs. A good VPN costs a few dollars a month, but most occasionally run big sales or offer year-long or multi-year purchases. You can install the VPN on all of your devices, but there is a limit to how many devices can connect to the VPN simultaneously from that same account. There are free VPNs, but they may not be as fast or may limit how much data you can send through their servers each month. If you want to go that route, I recommend checking out Hotspot Shield Free or TunnelBear.

On your device, when you connect to a VPN, you can choose where the server is that you’d like to connect through. Going through a VPN will always be slower than traveling the Internet naked. The VPN is a password protected gateway. You first have to go through the gate, don your virtual hazmat suit, and then head out to the Internet. It takes a little bit of time to do that.

For fastest speeds, connect through a server that’s physically closest to you. From my home router, I generally don’t use a VPN. My password protected router gives me the shielding that I need. Here are some sample Internet speeds I just ran today; check yours with Speedtest.net.

From my home router without a VPN: download speed was 113 Mbps; upload speed was 12Mbps

Connected to PIA VPN going through server in Denver, closest to where I live: download 42 Mbps; upload 11 Mbps

You can connect to servers just about anywhere in the world. This is very handy if you’re traveling in, say, Europe, and want to spend an evening watching Netflix. You may, though, only watch Netflix shows for a European audience. If you want access to all of the Netflix shows you watch in the United States, you can use a VPN, and choose a server location in the United States. Netflix will think your device is in, say, Chicago even though you and your device are actually in Vienna. If you intend to use your VPN in this way, choose ExpressVPN as your VPN provider. Netflix isn’t fooled by all VPNs, but ExpressVPN, at least as of this writing, can pull it off. (Here is a short list of other VPNs that can, too.) ExpressVPN is a little more expensive than other VPNs; you get what you pay for.

Travel router

If you travel a lot and are frequently connecting several devices to, say, a hotel’s wifi, it can be a hassle. You (and your spouse, and your kids) have to connect each of your devices, and then—as you now know—run a VPN on each of your devices. Some hotels limit the number of devices that can connect to their wifi. One hotel I stayed in had a limit of six devices. Since it was just me, I came in well under their limit. If I added my wife and a couple teenagers (fyi, I don’t have any teenagers, and, no, I don’t want yours), we’d easily be over the six-device limit.

Consider purchasing a travel router. The travel router connects to the hotel wifi just like any device does. The router works by adding a new password-protected wifi signal. My travel router uses the same name and password as our home wifi. As soon as the travel router is up and running, all of my devices see the home wifi name and will connect to it automatically. And what about that hotel device limit? The hotel sees the travel router as one device; it won’t see all of the devices connected to the router.

With a travel router, there is no need to use a VPN since it comes with the built-in protection of a username and password and encryption. (If your router doesn’t come with encryption automatically enabled, enable it.)

I use the TP-Link N300 travel router. Setting up the software and connecting can be intimidating, although TP-Link’s Tether app for phones makes setup and connecting much easier. It’s been five years since I bought it, and other travel routers have since come on the market. Try this GL.iNet travel router for about the same price.

A number of years ago, I wrote about password security. Still, the number one threat to your online security are your passwords. Strong, unique passwords for every site you log into will provide you with the best protection. In that post I advised using a password manager. I still do. Here are PCMagazine’s recommendations. For your most important sites—such as banking and email—use two-factor authentication. If someone does get your password, they still won’t be able to log in without access to, say, your phone.

VPNs, travel routers, and data blockers keep your passwords protected as they flow from your device out onto the Internet.

Stay safe out there.