Bibs and bobs #4
Maps and their effects
A wonderful video by Johnny Harris about “the island of California” a period in human history that I found useful when thinking about scenario planning. The video is also a neatly framed instance of fake news.
AI and education
There is a no shortage of commentary, hype, spin, doom saying and wishful naming [McDermott, D. (1976). Artificial Intelligence Meets Natural Stupidity. SIGART Newsletter(April), 4-9.] to be found in relation to AI and education. This excellent post by Michael Feldstein gives a useful overview of the current state of what I think of as LLM wrangling. As I have noted and the focus of much of my thinking is concerned with the problem of delegating work to machines. It seems to be very much black box territory. You poke the LLM with text to see how it responds.
This is exactly the logic that ought to inform thinking about how to deal with LLMs as they currently exist and their deployment in formal education settings. Instead of having educational panic #971: OMG we can’t use a plagiarism checker to see if this was written by a student or a machine. I recall the time when software that generated crossword puzzles appeared. Many teachers were overjoyed, an app (called software way back when) that created busy work for students. Yay! There were however a few teachers who embraced the app differently. They had students use the app to produce crosswords. You can guess which students learned more about a topic built around a crossword.
Educational panics about the digital go back at least as far as the advent of electronic calculators a very long time ago. The opportunity to think through their use and ask more sensible questions, e.g. what complementary skills do students need in order to use these devices, was largely missed. Approximation skills anyone?
Formal education requires a selective amnesia. It is illustrated by an almost manic capacity to preserve practices that have long outlived their usefulness. The origins of the practices are long forgotten. They were likely developed to solve a particular problem at the time, a problem that no longer exists. The practice lives on, ghostly, inexorably. Age-based schooling is an obvious example. In time so will the current madness around measurement.
So as we begin to see educational panic after educational panic over AI and formal education. It is reassuring to know that there are sane folk out there, e.g. the book by Mike Sharples & Rafael Pérez y Pérez, Story Machines, which illustrates an alternative approach to think about writing and LLMs. The Story Machines website is here.
I’m still of the view we seem to be too attached to a single and limiting view of AI which is why I like the argument in the post Venkatesh Rao wrote about AI as artificial time or super history It’s different, and IMHO a better way to think about AI as it is currently being developed.
Neurotypification
a normal person is anyone who has not been sufficiently investigated - Edmond A. Murphy
Elegant post on measuring mental traits. A demolition job on the notion of normality.
via @RosemarieNorth
Neurotypical syndrome is a neurobiological disorder characterized by preoccupation with social concerns, delusions of superiority, and obsession with conformity. There is no known cure —Laura Tisoncik
So many spectra, so little time to find my spot on each.
Searching
This list of search options was compiled by the good crew at Recomendo.
Links
Stephen's Web ~ Education at a Glance 2022 ~ Stephen Downes links to the OECD annual report.
HOME | OpenAcademics well worth a prowl around.
ditto for Academic Chatter | Twitter, Instagram | Linktree
and Online Library and Publication Platform | OAPEN fo open access books
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