Ellis: Your Trusted & Experienced Teacher Colleague

This is pretty cool: imagine you have 24/7/365 access to a very experienced colleague who is also up-to-date with the latest research and best-practices when it comes to learning differences and mental health. Well, Ellis is supposed to be just that & (of course) is powered by AI.

• Ellis: Your On-Demand Classroom Companion
• Ellis Product Walkthrough 2026 (YouTube)
• https://www.askellis.org/

It's difficult to imagine that this could work...but a) it may be better than nothing and could b) be useful in Higher Education where the teachers (= professors) usually have little or no training or experience with such issues.

Ethics in GIS

Interesting read: Enlisting AI to Mainstream Ethics in Spatial Data Science Education

Here's a new-to-me term: Ethics Across the Curriculum or EAC - the idea that ethics should be woven throught the entire curriculum from beginning to end. Here are some resources:

• The Guide to the Geographic Approach  contains 15 open-access modules & some of those include ethical issues and questions.
• Now there is GISEthics.org and its collectiom of 21 case studies.

What to do in-practice? Three things: 1) use a formal case study analysis, 2) use a disucssion forum prompt, and 3) include an ethics-related learning objective. How you may ask? Try the AI-based Ethics Case Study and Discussion Prompt Creator and create yourself a case study that aligns with your course content, a customized discussion forum prompt. and even your learning objective for the course syllabus.

Here's a complete case study from Claudi.ai: When the Map Has a Memory

ChatGPT Images 2.0

I have not tested it, but apparently ChatGPT Images 2.0 can basically create a complete research poster for you. Not sure how this would work in-practice for anything that includes 'original' research, but it should work fine for the classic student literature-review poster.

AI & Jobs: Vulnerability

Saw this on Flowing Data: Jobs vulnerable to AI. This links to Measuring US workers’ capacity to adapt to AI-driven job displacement where the authors 'mapped' job vulnerability as a function of a) exposure andb) adaptability.

Brilliant!

Brilliant has been around for a while, but the free version always has been a little limited. But there is an Education Version for K-12 as well that offer free premium access - might be interesting!

Napkin.ai

From the website: "Napkin turns your text into visuals so sharing your ideas is quick and effective." Sounds interesting and there is a free version.

Try it here: https://www.napkin.ai/

The Top-20 Programming Languages

Here's the latest TIOBE index: https://www.tiobe.com/tiobe-index/

• Learn Python, it's that simple!
• Or, one of the many versions of C!
• Don't bother with any of the other!

ChatGPT Edu

This - or something like that - is what we need at Westfield State University:

• AI Tools @ CSU
• ChatGPT Edu @ CSUN

AI chatbots can effectively sway voters – in either direction

AI chatbots can effectively sway voters – in either direction & that sounds scary. The article in Nature is better, but behind a paywall: AI chatbots can sway voters with remarkable ease — is it time to worry?

And why are we surprised? An engaging back-and-forth conversation with a nice 'person' that can synthesize a lot of information in conversational way has always been a great way to learn and maybe change your mind. The challange was scaling this.

How can we leverage this for teaching & learning? If chatbots are so effective, why are we not using them in-class or as homework assignments: Have a 10-minute chatbot chat about Topic X & synthesize the main points handwritten on this piece of paper.

The Future Of AI

Cool piece in Nature: The Future of AI

Nature spoke to six people at the forefront of AI development — people who are driving the technology’s development and adoption, and those who are preparing society to adapt to its rapid rise. In this video series, they describe their greatest ambitions for the technology, their expectations of where and how it will be adopted in the coming years, and their concerns for the future.

The usual caveats apply: selection bias, who signs their paychecks, etc.

ToolUniverse

ToolUniverse is a unified ecosystem that transforms any large language model (LLM)—open or closed—into a powerful AI scientist. By standardizing how LLMs identify and call tools, it integrates over 600 scientific resources, including machine learning models, datasets, APIs, and analysis packages.

With its AI-Tool Interaction Protocol, ToolUniverse provides a common interface for seamless communication between LLMs and tools, ensuring compatibility across platforms such as GPT, Claude, Gemini, and open-source models.

More over here: ToolUniverse Documentation

Sora: When Tik Tok Meets AI

From the App Store: Turn your ideas into videos and drop yourself into the action. Sora is a new kind of creative app that turns text prompts and images into hyperreal videos with sound using the latest advancements from OpenAI. A single sentence can unfold into a cinematic scene, an anime short, or remix of a friend's video. If you can write it, you can see it, remix it, and share it. Turn your words into worlds with Sora.

Sounds great? Sounds horrifying? Try Sora 2 here: https://openai.com/index/sora-2/

Is this the end of 'creativity' on Tik Tok? Well, maybe? But: could you use something like that for teaching & learning: maybe as a new way to 'write' as opposed to a traditional paper or slidedeck presentation?

How To Make Animated GIFs

Great video: How to Make Dataviz GIFs (4 Steps with Free Software)

1. Assemble the frames as slides in MS PPT.
2. Save each frame as an image (use JPG as it creates a white background).
3. Upload the JPGs to a free GIF website (e.g. Ezgif).
4. Share the animated GIF!

Or, make it natively in MS PPT = save as animated GIF! But this does not allow you to adjust the timings between the frames and transitions.

Sketchfab & Cannon Mountain

Sketchfab looks fun & calls itself "The leading platform for 3D & AR on the web". The free plan may be enough to get you started, but anything after that is $15 / month.

Here's an example: Cannon Mountain (New Hampshire)

GIS Certificate @ CCSU

Looks like they are running a 3-course GIS Certificate:

• Beyond the Map: Advanced GIS in Action
• GIS Advanced Certificate course
• GIS Essentials Certificate - Course 1 Fundamentals

They seem to have an Introduction to GIS & an Advanced GIS course - not sure what the 3rd course required course this.

Back in the days: a Bachelor's degree was 120 credits, the Gen-Eds were 40 credits, the Major was 40 credits, the Electives were 40 credits, a Minor was 18 credits,  a Certificate was 12 credits, and 1 full-semester course was 3 credits. Yes, there were some variations, but that's about what you could expect a normal public college or university.

Now the trend is towards 90 credits for the Bachelor's degree (completed in 3 years), Minors with 15 credits, and Certifciates with 9 credits.

AI For Science

Which AI model is best for scientific questions? Ai2SciArena offers a way to test & compare AI models in this context. And the results? See below!

• Try it here: Ai2SciArena
• More Information
• Nature, 10 July 2025

Chart Makers

Here are three options:

• RAWGraphs
• Chartbuilder
• Infogram

As always: user beware! Some of these 'free' ones / tiers can suddenly disappear or turn commerical.

The Climate Justice Instructional Toolkit (CJIT)

The Climate Justice Instructional Toolkit (CJIT) (by MIT) offers a wide-range of climate justice adaptable teaching modules, a starter guide for teaching climate justice, resources for students, and climate justice data sets that can serve as supportive tools to enhance professor and instructor teaching content and approaches.

StreetWhip

Explore the world by combing Street View & AI in StreetWhip - basically the inverse of all these geo-guessing games.

IRB

Yep, the IRB process is both necessary & tedious.

• Excellent video here: Do you need an IRB??
• IRB Decision Tree (U. Wisconsin La Crosse)