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.