EdTechSR Ep 275 Twitter, Mastodon and AI

EdTech Situation Room by Jason Neiffer and Wes Fryer

Welcome to episode 275 (“Twitter, Mastodon and AI”) of the EdTech Situation Room from December 7, 2022, where technology news meets educational analysis. This week Jason Neiffer (@techsavvyteach) and Wesley Fryer (@wfryer) discussed the rise of Mastodon and the demise of Twitter, continuing conversations from episode 274 almost a month ago. My what a lot of technology news happened in the past month! Confusion and problems over Elon Musk’s new “anyone can pay for Twitter verification” policy, the significant uptick in hate speech on Twitter since Musk took over the platform, the importance of social media verification not only among journalists but also for African-American users on “Black Twitter,” were explored. The remarkable capabilities of “Lensa AI ,”to create avatars from uploaded selfie photos, shock and awe among educators over generative AI content creation platforms (summarized well in the Atlantic article, “The College Essay is Dead” were also explored. The episode post image was created using the generative AI platform, “MidJourney.” Our show was live streamed and archived simultaneously on YouTube Live as well as our Facebook Live page via StreamYard.com, and compressed to a smaller video version (about 100MB) on AmazonS3 using Handbrake software. Please follow us on Twitter @edtechSR for updates, and join us LIVE on Wednesday nights (normally) if you can at 9 pm Eastern / 8 pm Central / 7 pm Mountain / 7 pm Pacific or 3 am UTC. All shownotes are available on http://edtechSR.com/links. Stay savvy and safe!