Bibs & bobs #2

Bibs and bobs #2

The digital

Cory Doctorow calls digital spades shovels. He is a shining light of digital sanity in the darkness created by big tech’s attempts to control pretty much anything that can make a $. Stephen Downes attended a meeting of the Canadian Internet Registration Authority at which Doctorow spoke. His speech is here. Well worth a read. It’s a primer on interoperability, switching costs and monopolies.  A taste:

Interoperability is when one thing works with another: your shoelaces interoperate with your shoes, your AAA batteries interoperate with your TV remote, your coffee-maker interoperates with your electrical outlet. …

To understand what interop has to do with digital monopolies, we need to understand the role that “network effects” play in the growth of these mo­nopolistic services. A system has “network effects” if it gets more valuable as it adds more users. …

Network effects come up a lot when economists talk about competition in digital markets. But an even more important concept gets a lot less at­tention: “switching costs.”

Switching costs are whatever you have to give up to go from one situation to another. The switching costs of moving include movers, boxes, realtor fees, a moving van, the time it takes to enroll your kid in a new school…

When it comes to digital monopolies, switching costs are more important than network effects.

Here’s why. Today, people struggle to leave Facebook because doing so involves leaving behind their friends. Those same friends are stuck on Facebook for the same reason. People join Facebook because of network effects…

Why can’t you switch from Facebook to a rival and still stay in touch with your friend on Facebook? It’s not because of the technical limitations of networked computers. It’s because Facebook won’t let you.

Delegating work to nonhumans or machines

The wonderful Janelle Shane has a fun post about prompts to an AI chatbot, remoteli.io twitter chatbot. In a recent O’Reilly newsletter, there is mention of a prompt economy, in which designers of prompts for the various Open AI apps can sell their prompts that generate specific imagery. They point to a piece about the emergence of AI whisperers, something than Shane has been doing for some time. It’s likely to see more prompt-like hustles emerging as more machine learning apps appear. 

There is a similar logic at play in using LLMs to generate text for particular purposes, e.g. student essays and other formulaic pieces of writing. These developments are at the edges. The sloth-like response of formal education systems will eventually try and ban such activity, but, as has happened for most digital developments, the bans won’t work. How do you do a plagiarism check on text produced by an LLM? There are as always, more thoughtful folk, like Mike Sharples and Mark Johnson, to name a couple, thinking about the more useful ways in which these LLMs might be put to good educational use.

There is much to think about in this new space where Sapiens works with LLMs. It’s a fecund site for idea generation.

Automatic speech recognition (ASR)

A development that will have a more than large impact in the academy and elsewhere is well described by Alberto Romero: OpenAI Whisper   This is a must read for most.  Siri, Alexa and all their mates are now in an interesting space.

Books

Marín, V. I., Peters, L. N., & Zawacki-Richter, O. (Eds.). (2022). (Open) Educational Resources around the World: An International Comparison. EdTech Books. https://edtechbooks.org/oer_around_the_world  

This book is a collection of the full country reports and working papers created by the Center for Open Education Research members from the countries that were included in the study.

For ANT enthusiasts, Yaneva, A. (2022). Latour for architects (1st ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429328510  is open access.

Alt-Academic

This is not that alt but anything that reinforces doing intellectual work differently is worth a plug: Means, A., Jandrić, P., Sojot, A. N., Ford, D. R., Peters, M. A., & Hayes, S. (2022). The Postdigital-Biodigital Revolution. Postdigital Science and Education. https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-022-00338-9   It’s open access.  

It is odd to keep thinking about the postdigital given we are not yet post A4 thinking when it comes to the publication of academic research.

Alt-think

Venkatesh Rao is probably my favourite alt thinker. His polymathic approach to pretty much anything never ceases to amaze and generate questions for me. His recent piece on tangle logic is a good illustration. My favourite recent piece is his post on AI as artificial time. 

  

Humour

Education research is in need of a Randall Munroe to respond to and encourage the asking of  fun, playful, totally weird “what if” questions. A taste from his recent book: 

What would the daily caloric human-intake needs be for a modern T. rex gone rogue in the boroughs of New York? And how catastrophic would it be if, as the children’s tune goes, all the raindrops were lemon drops and gumdrops?

A playful post on golf and the four stages of humans:

Golf likewise seems silly, but it serves a critical purpose. Golf is the only way men of a certain age can routinely get away from their families without getting into trouble. 

Bibs & bobs #1

This is my first attempt to assemble things I come across and which may be of interest into a blog post. These finds are more or less serendipitous and I think I am drawn to them because they help me make connections with my large set of notes that might be described as a really rough and ready zettelkasten which I maintain in DEVONthink.

Education

Dean Ashenden is one of the wiser heads in the noisy and too often ill-informed debates about schooling and education. This piece is well worth a read. If the whale is to be unbeached, it will need to be done by other than by the policy parrots who have far too much say in the lives of the four million. As Ashenden puts it:

Schools are sites of the production of learning, not by teachers but by a four million–strong workforce otherwise known as students. The big determinant of their productivity is not the quality of supervision but the organisation of their work.

AI

As if the digital has not done enough to grab and hold, sometimes, our attention, enter AI and all the cute, fun dodads to perhaps stretch our attention further. This post by Charles Arthur offers a useful over view of developments.

 

Books

A thoughtful piece on the personal library by Freya Howarth. In an environment of non stop ideas and information some of which can be found in a bound ordering of knowledge (aka a book), spending some time on curation and organisation is worth it. It will make the offline search for that quote, reference a little easier.

Research, intervention and evidence

This long, interesting and provocative post by Kevin Munger draws on the work of Donald Campbell and his notion of the experimenting society. A useful companion piece is: White, H. (2019). The twenty-first century experimenting society: the four waves of the evidence revolution. Palgrave Communications, 5(1). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-019-0253-6  which describes waves of evidence-oriented research. The fifth wave (machine learning, big data) is gestured to. His closing comment:

Most interventions don’t work, most interventions aren’t evaluated and most evaluations are not used. As a result billions of dollars of money from governments and individual donations is wasted on ineffective programmes.

Perhaps a little to the side of this analysis is Kim Chan and Renée Mauborgne’s notion of blue ocean strategy (two books). Guillame Carton offers an insightful commentary on their ideas and the place of academic work. More than useful for all those seeking to put the odd dent in the universe. Their thinking resonates with the often used example of Cirque du Soleil’s invention, i.e. take all the features of a traditional circus and invert them. 

Fun

Tom Gauld does great cartoons about books, libraries and also writes wonderful books for kids. A recent one:

James Ladwig picked up this Twitter thread. Well worth the read. 

 I spend a good deal of time skim reading the too many sources that make up my information diet. Good thing 1’s and 0’s don’t put on body mass. When I come across something that I think might be of interest to folk I know I usually share it via twitter or on one of a too many platforms that are used by academics and would-be academics who are working in a common idea space or who are institutionally trapped by an imposed social media platform. 

At the suggestion of my much better half, I have opted to collect and where I can curate stuff on this site and not play the individual “you might find this useful/interesting” game.