Bibs and bobs #3

 Bibs and bobs #3

Delegating work to nonhumans or machines

A detailed and thoughtful post by Peter Greene about using robots as replacement teachers. 

i’ve long held the view that the easily justifiable use of machines in education was to support students with various disabilities. It’s not a simple task. Whenever you have a machine do something for you, there is always an exchange that takes place between the human and the machine. This exchange is often bracketed as adapting to the interface of the machine. That is important and obvious but there are always more subtle capacities in play for the user. An illustration that I have used to clumsily make this point is that of a calculator. If you use a calculator there often will be complementary skills that are necessary for the user depending on the nature of the calculation. The most obvious one is approximation skills, i.e. you can look at a sum and quickly work out that the answer will be roughly .5 or 5,000 or whatever. There are other complements that I won’t point to. The idea of complementarity I trace back to Bruno Latour’s famous reflection on the sociology of a few mundane artifacts. The simple summary is this: it is not a simple consideration. Latour clearly demonstrates that with his analysis of an automatic door closer. To me all of the noise around using AI falls into this problem space: when you delegate you still have work to do, different from what the machine has done.

And then

DALL-E now open to everyone.

Then there was text to video from Meta AI. 

On Writing

The Uneven U notion for writing drafts is neatly explained. Well worth a read via Naomi Barnes.

Books

An open access pdf of Weller, M. (2022). Metaphors of Ed Tech. AU Press. https://doi.org/10.15215/aupress/9781771993500.01  available here. A useful commentary from Stephen Downes.

Researching

Metaphors and stories to talk and think about some routine research work via Stephen Downes. 

Managers, leaders and such

A useful, thoughtful piece on those who find themselves in leadership, management roles.

Humour

Social theorists as Jedi knights – A Twitter Thread

Universities pay staggering salaries to Presidents, Chancellors, VPs and provosts by the dozens, etc and in every administrative office there is a 57 year old woman named Peggy with a title like "Admin Assistant II" and that's the person who actually runs the university, via the Thesis Whisperer.