12 Media Webinars this week about AI, journalism, storytelling, NIL, and more

Mon, Oct 9 - The Darkening Tide of Digital Repression and the Risks of Journalistic Reluctance 2023

What: This seminar examines why journalists often fail to take the necessary information security steps to better protect themselves, their sources, and their stories, despite ongoing threats to journalism.  

Who: Jennifer R. Henrichsen, Assistant Professor at the Edward R. Murrow College of Communication at Washington State University

When: 3:10 pm, Pacific

Where: Microsoft Teams

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Washington State University

More Info

Mon, Oct 9 - Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI: Empowering a Deeper Conversation

What: Navigating the positive and effective uses of AI and generative AI within K-12 school settings. Seven essential guidelines recommended for school superintendents and school leaders when implementing actionable steps and policies around AI and generative AI will be described.

Who: Matthew Friedman currently serves as the Superintendent of Schools in the Quakertown Community School District in Pennsylvania; Kelly May-Vollmar is the Superintendent of Desert Sands Unified School District, California; David Miyashiro is Superintendent of Cajon Valley Union School; Pete Just, CETL serves as the Executive Director of the Indiana CTO Council. District, California.

When: 5 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsors: The School Superintendents Association, The Consortium for School Networking, ClassLink

More Info

 

Tue, Oct 10 - Storytelling for Impact

What: Tips, techniques and tools to help the modern marketer tell better and more impactful stories to activate their audiences around ideas and actions.

Who: Kiersten Hill Director of Nonprofit Solutions for FireSpring

When: 2 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: FireSpring

More Info

Tue, Oct 10 - Boost your reporting with data visualization: a toolkit for journalists

What: The basics of data visualization for journalists. By the end, you'll have everything you need to make your own charts and share them with your audience.

When: 11 am, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Flourish

More Info

Tue, Oct 10 - How ChatGPT Reduces Costs and Time by 70% in Lesson Writing - See a Proof in Action

What: What is the overview of the ChatGPT ecosystem and the tools and plug-ins you can use?  What are the learning platforms that can integrate with ChatGPT and reduce your cost? What are the steps to take so ChatGPT can be used to reduce research, writing, and development effort and expenditures? How do you deal with copyright and ownership of the content? What ChatGPT tools can you use in graphics, videos, and animation?  

Who: Ray Jimenez, Ph.D. Architect of TrainingMagNetwork.com, Chief Learning Officer of Vignettes Learning. He spent 15 years with Coopers & Lybrand in the areas of management consulting and implementation of learning technology solutions.

When: 12 noon, Pacific

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: OpenSesame

More Info

Wed, Oct 11 - Interpretable AI, algorithmic accountability, and AI ethics

What: What is interpretable machine learning? How can we make algorithms accountable for their decisions? How can we better explain how AI works in critical situations?

Who: Dr Stylianos Kampakis who has more than 10 years of experience in the area of data science working with organisations of all sizes on topics like data strategy and algorithm design.

When:11 am, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: The Tesseract Academy

More Info

Wed, Oct 11 - Athletes as Influencers: Working With NIL, Pros and Retired Players

What: Get best practices and actionable strategies to activate and optimize your athlete influencer relationships.  

Who: Giancarlo Morena Sr. Director of Marketing Celsius, Jared Kozinn Head of Sports  Partnerships  Dansons, Pit Boss; Bob Lynch CEO and Founder  SponsorUnited        

When: 1 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: AdWeek

More Info

Wed, Oct 11 - Digital Marketing for Nonprofits with HootSuite

What: Gain invaluable insights from industry experts on how to effectively manage and market your social media channels. Learn the dos and don'ts of social media management specifically tailored for nonprofits. Have your pressing questions answered in real time during our open Q&A session following the presentation.

When: 12 noon, Central

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: TechSoup

More Info

Thu, Oct 12 - Ideas That Will Instantly Grow Your Audience

What: Implementing a simple, but effective SEO strategy that will immediately get you results; Social media tactics that uses Meta’s tools to quickly grow your audience; How to take traditional topics like education and sports and build fast digital-only features that are useful, searchable and shareable; AI approaches that will help you create content efficiently but ethically.

Who: David Arkin, the owner of David Arkin Consulting and Tara Jones, who works for his consulting firm as a digital content strategist.

When: 1 pm, Central

Where: Zoom

Cost: $35

Sponsor: Online Media Campus

More Info

Thu, Oct 12 - Telling Hard Stories: 2023 Dart Awards Celebration & Winners' Roundtable

What: Questions of craft, ethics and storytelling, and explore innovative best practices in hard-hitting, humane reporting on violence and tragedy.

Who: Janelle Nanos, Enterprise Reporter, The Boston Globe; Raquel Rutledge, Investigations Editor, The Examination News; Meg Shutzer, Investigative Journalist and Documentary Filmmaker; Connie Walker, Host, Gimlet, a Spotify Studio; John Woodrow Cox, Enterprise Reporter, The Washington Post

When: 6 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma

More Info

Thu, Oct 12 - Reading Instruction and AI: New Strategies for the Big Education Challenges of Our Time

What: Experts in the field explore these instructional pain points and offer game-changing guidance for K-12 leaders and educators.

Who: Brandi Renfro Educational Consultant, Promethean; Lauraine Langreo Staff Writer, Education Week; Glenn Kleiman Senior Adviser, Stanford Graduate School of Education; Julie Cohen Charles S. Robb Associate Professor,  University of Virginia's School of Education and Human Development and others

When: 2 pm, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: Education Week

More Info

Fri, Oct 13 - How journalists can (and should) start using AI in their work 

What: A practical look at what journalists need to know about AI tools and their applications within journalistic work. Best practices for using AI in the newsroom.

Who: Francesco Marconi, a computational journalist, and the co-founder of AI company Applied XL, formerly R&D Chief at The Wall Street Journal and AI Co-Lead at the Associated Press,

When: 11:30 am, Eastern

Where: Zoom

Cost: Free

Sponsor: National Press Club

More Info

The heroes of an epic adventure

A team of researchers interviewed a group of people who've been through a course of psychotherapy this is what they found:  

Those former patients who currently enjoyed better psychological health tended to narrate heroic stories in which they bravely battled their symptoms and emerged victorious in the end.

In other words, these people saw themselves as the heroes of an epic adventure and their problems as obstacles that are part of the hero's journey. Now crucially, in those accounts. there was a dominant recurring theme around personal agency. This is the sense that you are the subject influencing your own actions and life circumstances just like the hero in pretty much any story you've ever come across.  

So how can we do this for ourselves?

Tip number one is to practice self-distancing, which is a simple act of viewing yourself from the outside in. It allows you to take a calmer, more objective view on the events of your life.

Tip number two is to focus on building your sense of personal agency. My recommendation is to start by practicing your ability to take intentional action. The capacity to intentionally set and achieve goals is widely considered a cornerstone of self-agency.

Hazel Gale

Your Inner Voice Can Mislead You

It’s very disturbing when you realize that our brains are a fiction-making machine. We make up all kinds of crazy things to help us feel better and to justify the decisions that we’ve made. The inner voice is the one who arbitrates a lot of that maneuvering around the truth, so we have to be very careful. It’s a master storyteller and far more important than you may realize.

Jim Loehr, performance psychologist and cofounder of the Human Performance Institute, quoted in Fast Company

The Good Myth

Six developmental trends may be identified as a standard or a criterion against which we may compare a particular personal myth. Over the course of adolescence through middle adulthood, a personal myths should ideally develop in the direction of increasing (1) coherence, (2)  openness, (3) credibility, (4) differentiation, (5) reconciliation, and (6) generative integration. The prototype of the “good story” in human identity is one that receives high marks on these six narrative standards.  

Dan McAdams, The Stories We Live By

Two Ways to Understand the World

The psychologist Jerome Bruner has argued that human beings understand the world in two very different ways. The first he calls the “paradigmatic mode” of thought. In the paradigmatic mode, we seek to comprehend our experience in terms of tightly reasoned analyses, logical proof, and empirical observation. In the second, “narrative mode” of thought, we are concerned with human wants, needs and goals. This is the mode of stories, wherein we deal with “the vicissitudes of human intention” organized in time. 

Masters of the Heritage Matic mode try to “say no more than they mean.” Examples are scientists or logicians seeking to determine cause-and-effect relationships in order to explain events and help predict and control reality. Their explanations are constructed in such a way as to block the triggering of presuppositions.

By contrast, good poets and novelists are masters of the narrative mode. Their stories are especially effective when, in Bruner’s words, they “mean more than they can say.” A good story triggers presuppositions. Good stories give birth to many different meanings, generating “children” of meaning in their own image.

Dan McAdams, The Stories We Live By

Data doesn’t say anything. Humans say things.

Data is not a perfect representation of reality: It’s a fundamentally human construct, and therefore subject to biases, limitations, and other meaningful and consequential imperfections.  

The clearest expression of this misunderstanding is the question heard from boardrooms to classrooms when well-meaning people try to get to the bottom of tricky issues:  “What does the data say?”  

Data doesn’t say anything. Humans say things. 

They say what they notice or look for in data—data that only exists in the first place because humans chose to collect it, and they collected it using human-made tools. Data can’t say anything about an issue any more than a hammer can build a house or almond meal can make a macaron. Data is a necessary ingredient in discovery, but you need a human to select it, shape it, and then turn it into an insight.  Data is therefore only as useful as its quality and the skills of the person wielding it.   

Andrea Jones-Rooy writing in Quartz