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Why Regulate AI?
Why should we regulate artificial intelligence? This was the question we tackled at the Thursday evening discussion group at Meadowlark Hills Retirement Community in Manhattan, Kansas, on March 20, 2025. This presentation and conversation was shared by Wes Fryer of Charlotte, North Carolina, a 1988 graduate of Manhattan High School and current middle school and…
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Reading Wish List
Long form reading may be a relic of the past for younger generations in US society and culture for a variety of reasons, but I still believe in both the power of reading and its importance in our shared civic culture. For a number of years now, I’ve maintained a public aspirational reading list on…
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6 Things to Do
In today’s fast-paced world, it feels almost impossible to tune into any news—whether it’s from broadcast television or social media—without feeling overwhelmed. As of early February 2025, the sheer volume and intensity of current events have many people feeling either elated or deeply troubled. Regardless of where we fall on the political spectrum, navigating this…
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Sharing Mastodon Lists
I am a BIG fan of the federated social media platform Mastodon, and this evening I used Claude.ai to generate code in an HTML file which allows me to quickly share my LISTS on Mastodon with others. Unlike Twitter, lists on Mastodon are PRIVATE and not directly sharable with others. I spent some time both…
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NFC Sticker Automation
Here’s a geeky tale for you. We have an old Bluetooth stereo in our car that does not support CarPlay, and it irritatingly connects automatically to my iPhone in the mornings before school when I start the vehicle to warm it up. This evening I successfully configured a NFC sticker (37 cents each in a…
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Dynamic Audio Waveform Videos
Have you seen audio podcast “highlight videos” as reels on YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, or other social media websites which include an audio waveform animation that is synchronized to the podcast? Today I explored a few tools, with help from ChatGPT recommendations, to create my own “dynamic audio waveform video.” Here is the 12 minute video…
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NotebookLM Introduces Me
Tonight’s Jason Neiffer #edtechSR inspired AI experiment: I asked Google’s NotebookLM AI model to take my bio, resume, vitae, portfolios, etc and create a “deep dive” podcast, sharing an audio introduction of me for a diverse audience. It’s 12.5 minutes long, and surprisingly insightful. I added it to my “About” page and posted it to…
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Packet Defender 1.0
Today was the first day of our spring semester, and I’m teaching middle school web design again. As part of our introductory class, we watched the video, “The Internet: IP Addresses & DNS” from Code.org and then played a Kahoot I made with AI about it, using the video transcript. As we learn to create…
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TIP Teachers: Jan 2025
This evening I was able to join the monthly evening Zoom meeting of TIP Teachers, which is “Teachers for an Informed Public” in the state of Washington. As usual, a wealth of helpful media literacy resources were shared in the session, and I’ll attempt to highlight several of them in this post. First of all,…
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Multi-dimensional Digital Identity
This is a comment and reflection I shared on this blog post by Allysia Doratti, one of Dean Shareski‘s EC&I 832 graduate students in fall 2024: Mirror, Mirror, On My Feed: Exploring Identity in a Digital World. Hi Allysia- Thanks so much for this thoughtful post and especially for the reflections on digital identity and…
