Reflection: Tools for Learning

This reflection will include my thoughts on various digital tools we’ve utilized throughout the semester in this course. The following are a compilation of the 6 tools that I’ve found most useful and that are highly likely that I’ll use them later on:

• Slack: I’ve been previously using slack for work related purposes. Which it is the target usage for this platform. I was surprised to see that this course communicates mostly on slack, a platform which I don’t think most students wouldn’t be familiar with. So using slack in a classroom setting was quite new. I like that slack allows for the flexibility of organizing different spaces for different topics, and have spaces only accessible to a certain group of people. It also allows for video and audio calls for 1 to 1 or for group calls (also called huddles). I believe that slack does allow for better communication and high productivity among teams (assuming people check the app or have notifications on). The sound of the huddle calls can be quite intimidating however, especially in work 🥶. But I do like that you can just throw emojis as a response to most messages.
• Poe.com: It is probably the best place where you can find all the different LLMs in one place. People also create their own versions of some LLMs targeted for certain applications, some allowing the uncensorship of LLMs, allowing it to talk about topics that it won’t usually talk about. I used this especially in developing the idea and story of my game. Only drawback to it is that it has limits for the number of bots you use per day, and the number of prompts you use for some of these bots, and these limits have become more aggressive in the recent years. I have and will see myself using it frequently in the future, at least until another platform comes to replace it with better free features😉. I believe the future holds will go more towards more accessible AI, where it gets cheaper, and most likely better in terms of multimodality, inference, and reasoning performance (like that Google Gemeni demo!). But also there’s concern regarding the privacy of our data and history of communication with the LLMs, like how will they be trained on our data, and more importantly can it spew out private information about us if it was somehow trained on it🤔.
• Zoom: Zoom is one of the most important platforms to me, especially since the covid period. It has allowed for many opportunities in remote work and remote collaboration. I personally use it very frequently in work, in team projects, and in recording/practicing presentations, especially with the fact that I live pretty far from university so I prefer to work with team mates remotely. I also like the new AI features they introduced, like the meeting summary or transcripts, those can be very useful, which I quickly learned how I can use them. Only negative thing that I have about it is the fact that any meeting I create as a student shuts of after 40 mins, which does interrupt our work quite often and requires me to create another meeting.
• The Smart Classroom Projectors: this in combination with the moving chairs/desks provide the best classroom viewing experience of any classroom so far. I loved how you are just free to position yourself however you like and move around with the desks when doing group work. I appreciate the touch features of the projectors but I feel that some of them were wrongly calibrated for some reason, I remember a couple of the projectors being almost unusable for writing with your fingers. Other than that, the possibility of connecting my own devices to any of the projectors wirelessly is a huge plus. Thanks to this course I now have a better idea on how to utilize these devices and the smart classroom in general, So hopefully I can somewhat replace the classroom technician.
• Google Slides: It is the best tool for collaboration on presentations out there, but I’m solely mentioning it here because I never knew that we could create a story board game on it. I never realized that I can have shapes or text link to other slides to form this navigation mechanist, which I fully utilized during the creation of the digital narrative game, learning that I can leverage small use cases to reach the particular story-flow I wanted. While it it does allow for high versatility, I feel like it can do more towards the designs of slides, like having more templates, or making it easier to import an external design template on to an existing set of slides (compared to creating a new presentation with he designs and copying everything over). I do easily see myself using this platform for collaboration on academic work.
• Google Colab: I used this in the Deep Learning course. It is basically a cloud service which allows you to run python code on a private environment, also allowing you to use high power resources from the cloud rather than your local device. I never used it prior to this semester, but thinking about it, it would have probably saved me in tight situations in the past where I had quick code assignments that I didn’t want to install lots code libraries on my personal device to be able to run it. I definitely intend to use this platform in the future, especially in collaborative projects, as it also allows for multiple people to work on the code snippets. One con I have with this platform is the fact that there is a time limit when it comes to using the more powerful computation servers. You only get to use them for 12 hours, after which you they stop you from using them for another 12 hours, which is fair enough I guess. I believe Colab has a lot of potential to grow, I see it incorporating AI copilots in the future that can help you write or explain code, which can be a game changer. I also hope that they expand this platform to support more programming languages, eventually converting the IDE (the software for integrated development environment) to be cloud-based.

Overall, this course has enabled me to utilize numerous tools and platforms to complete the various assignments; some more familiar to me than others. I believe we made proper use of these tools inside the classroom, and I see myself applying what I learned beyond the classroom as well.