Media Literacy Roundup: 2 March 2024
Periodic links and ideas from Wes Fryer
Greetings from cool and wet Charlotte, North Carolina. Can you believe it is March already?! It is almost Spring Break for us, and the week after our Spring Break our Air Force Academy daughter will be coming home for her Spring Break as a “recognized” fourthclass cadet! I hope this update finds you enjoying your weekend and finding ways to remain hopeful and optimistic in our culture and news cycle full of so much that is depressing and terrible. Perhaps some of these ideas and links can help! In this update I’ll highlight:
Upcoming Webinars on Mastodon, Sketchnoting and iPhone Videography
Generative AI Video from OpenAI (Sora)
Heal Our Culture” Project Updates
Wisdom with Wes (9 more episodes!)
Perplexity AI
Archived Webinars on Custom GPTs (with ChatGPT) and AI Visualization for Bible Verses
1. Upcoming Webinars on Mastodon, Sketchnoting and iPhone Videography
I’ve decided to make all my “Webinars with Wes” (with Zoom) on weekday evenings (mostly Thursdays) FREE to attend live, and $2.99 to access later on-demand. Each webinar is 30 minutes long. Next week’s topic is “Mastodon for Beginners,” and you can register free via Zoom.
Like many Twitter users, I finally decided last year to abandon the platform since it became a literal “dumpster fire” after Elon bought a controlling share in the company. You can learn more about my reasons for making this change, and why I’m so excited about MASTODON (over alternatives like Meta-owned Threads or Twitter-initiated Blue Sky) by reading my November 2023 post, “Meet Me on Mastodon (My “Dear John Letter” to Twitter),” or watching my video version of this post.
Other upcoming webinar topics include “Bible and Sermon Sketchnotes” (March 21st) and “Quick Edit iPhone Videography” (March 28th.)
2. Generative AI Video from OpenAI (Sora)
In my last update I shared how I used Pictory.ai to create several marketing videos for the STEM and media literacy middle school courses I teach, in advance of student course registration for 2023-24. The capabilities of Pictory are impressive, but the videos are not (at this point) truly generative: Allowing users to CREATE via an AI LLM (large language model) new video footage via a text prompt. Pictory draws on a library of stock video footage and provides a variety of different video clip options… Which is helpful and powerful, but not quite the same as a text to video image generator platform.
Enter Sora from OpenAI. Announced February 15, 2024, Sora is mind blowing. It is incredible (as well as scary) to see what a generative AI video platform can produce today, and to imagine what this is going to look like in five years or even one more year. The official OpenAI website describes it as “an AI model that can create realistic and imaginative scenes from text instructions.” YouTuber Marques Brownlee’s video from 15 Feb 2024, “AI Generated Videos Just Changed Forever,” provides an excellent overview of Sora’s capabilities as well as analysis. The 10.5 minute video from OpenAI, “Introducing Sora — OpenAI’s text-to-video model,” includes even more examples of stunning AI generated video and is also worth watching. I added both these videos to my frequently updated “Wonder Links” page for students, and my sequential Wonder Links page for Spring 2024.
3. “Heal Our Culture” Project Updates
I’ve posted several updates to the “Heal Our Culture” project website since my last Media Literacy roundup. The first is a post titled, “Healing Health Care,” which includes a six minute video reflection I recorded on February 17th from the VA Hospital in Salisbury, North Carolina, after an eye exam and appointment. (Aren’t those sunglasses so cool?!) In my comments I mention and recommend the book “How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for the Soul of America” by Heather Cox Richardson.
I also shared two posts on the HealOurCulture.org website, “Descendant Documentary” and a rather wide-ranging post about national and local civil rights struggles titled, “Robert F. Williams.” I encourage you to check out all of these resources, and consider following the “Heal Our Culture” project page on Facebook I’ve created and am now updating regularly.
I have a “slow hunch” (to borrow language from a favorite author, Steven Johnson) that I’ll be continuing to work on this project intensively for many moons.
4. Wisdom with Wes (9 more episodes!)
In my last Substack update I introduced a new “Quick Edit Video” project I titled, “Wisdom with Wes,” and shared links to my first 3 episodes. I’ve recorded most of these before school and after adding a few text titles and “picture-in-picture” enhancements, published them to my YouTube channel in this playlist. I’m excited to report since February 10th I added 9 more episodes! These topics are wide-ranging and the videos are generally short, lasting less than 5 minutes. The most recent episodes include:
Thoughts on Healthcare (cross-posted to “Heal Our Culture”)
Critical Thinking and Heresy (Inspired by the 6 week #ConCW course I’m teaching online now)
If you’d like to learn how to quickly (and rather painlessly) create and share videos like this using only an iPhone, plan to join me on March 28th (in the evening) for my webinar, “Quick Edit iPhone Videography.”
5. Perplexity AI
In addition to ChatGPT, Claude.ai, Google’s Gemini AI (formerly “Bard”) and Microsoft’s Co-Pilot AI, I’m starting to use the AI platform Perplexity.ai. It reminds me a bit of “MetaCrawler” which I used in the mid-1990s, which simultaneously used several search engines at once to try and turn up helpful results. I learned about Perplexity listening to the February 16, 2024 episode of the “Hard Fork” podcast, “The State of A.I. + Will Perplexity Beat Google or Destroy the Web?” That episode includes a fascinating interview with Aravind Srinivas, chief executive of Perplexity, who is seeking to build an “answer engine” that would supplant Google as well as now infamous AI competitors like OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The podcast epsiode’s description was:
A year ago, a chatbot tried to break up Kevin Roose’s marriage. Ever since, chatbots haven’t been the same. We’ll tell you how. Then, we’ll talk through the latest ways the world is adapting to artificial intelligence. And finally, Aravind Srinivas, the chief executive of Perplexity, will discuss his company’s “answer engine,” a challenger to Google’s search engine that could reshape the web as we know it.
A $20 subscription to Perplexity not only provides top-tier access to ChatGPT 3 and DALL-E for image generation, but also access to Claude.ai’s paid tier as well as Perplexity’s best AI chatbot. I’m still paying OpenAI $20 per month for access to it’s top / best LLM, but I’m considering a move to Perplaxity. One thing holding me back is the “CustomGPT features” of ChatGPT 4, as well as the detailed, archived chat logs from past interactions.
If all of these AI options sound and feel overwhelming, you’re not alone. I’m overwhelmed as well, and I feel pretty up to date and connected with these changes. The pace of change is just so fast today, especially with AI models!
To help with this, I plan to facilitate at least one more “AI PlayDate” this spring, most likely online but possibly also in-person / face-to-face here in Charlotte. When those are scheduled, I’ll post information on my social media channels as well as in this newsletter. In the meantime, you can check out resources and some Zoom recordings from the AI PlayDate events I facilitated in December 2023 and January 2024.
6. Archived Webinars on Custom GPTs (with ChatGPT) and AI Visualization for Bible Verses
If you missed my first two “Webinars with Wes,” you’re not out of luck because I recorded them!
“Bible Verse AI Visualization” is available via a link on the Archives page of Webinars with Wes, and the direct link to the shared links / webinar show notes is publicly available. You can purchase immediate, 30 day access to the recorded video via Stripe.
Last Thursday’s webinar, “Custom GPTs 101,” is also available for purchase via Stripe. All the referenced links and resources from the webinar are openly available in the archives section of webinars.wesfryer.com.
Have a restful weekend and great week!