Change
I’ve been interested in change for a long time, particularly change in education. I have found that the way change is framed in education is often unhelpful. Typically it is some version of Everett Rogers’ Diffusion of Innovations. The use of terms like change agent, early adopter etc are always telltale signs that you are in diffusion land [1].
Education has a long history of reforms of various sorts that have all ended up in the dust bin which, I’d suggest is due to relying on unhelpful ideas about change. There is a lot of work, other than “rolling it out” or mandating it that needs to occur. One aspect of a key part of that work was recently written about by Steven Johnson.
Steven Johnson is one of the more interesting thinkers who shares his work online. He recently posted a piece on popularisers. Johnson wrote about the significant popularisers play in advances in medical practices, i.e. a new approach is developed that is shown to be a good solution to a medical problem. It does not automatically mean that word simply spreads from these initial experiments. It needs one or more folk to make the practice well known. He writes:
The key point here is that when we talk about the history of innovation, we often over-index on the inventors and underplay the critical role of popularizers, the people who are unusually gifted at making the case for adopting a new innovation, or who have a platform that gives them an unusual amount of influence
The notion reminded me of the three kinds of people that can produce large effects described in Malcom Gladwell’s book Tipping Point. He called them connectors, mavens and salesmen.
In the academic world it might be assumed that getting published or even posting in a blog is sufficient to selling an idea. If the idea is any good, Gladwell would suggest you need folk to make connections, dot joiners, who together with salesmen can spread the idea or new way of doing things.
Whatever label is used, it is an important idea for all the would-be/wannabe reformers or changers of things in education. The wee actor-network daemon that sits on my shoulder reminds me of the quote from Grint and Woolgar’s, The Machine at Work:
If Foucault is right that truth and power are intimately intertwined, those seeking to change the world might try strategies to recruit powerful allies rather than assuming that the quest for the truth will, in and of itself, lead to dramatic changes in levels and forms of social inequality. p. 168
And then as the daemon nudges me, you need to police the new arrangement, to keep all the things that have gone into a new way of doing something, in place. All too often, education reforms resemble a hit and run approach. Dump the innovation in a site, hold participants hands for a short time, get it working and then leave.
The discovery ecosystem
Michael Nielsen and Kanjun Qiu have written an important piece titled, A Vision of Metascience: An Engine of Improvement for the Social Processes of Science. They ask the intriguing question:
how well does the discovery ecosystem learn, and can we improve the way it learns?
They begin with the fun alien approach which simply put is if you had to invent a system for discovery from scratch would it look like what we have today? The same question can be asked of most of the creaking, ancient systems that operate today (think your favourite research funding agency, universities, schools etc), all glossed with digital glitter but steadfastly holding the line against any significant attempts to change them. Robert Pirsig [2] captures it well in this long quote:
To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as “the system” is to speak correctly, since these organizations are founded upon the same structural conceptual relationships as a motorcycle. They are sustained by structural relationships even when they have lost all other meaning and purpose. People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question because the structure demands that it be that way. There's no villain, no “mean guy” who wants them to live meaningless lives, it's just that the structure, the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it is meaningless.
But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcycle because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.
So, it’s not just a matter of tearing down silly structures and pointless measures, you’d have to do a memory wipe of everyone to be sure they structures and measures did not reappear in a different guise.
The difficulty of all the silliness is well captured in a conversation Clay Shirky had with Daniel Pink:
Pink: You say something else about organizations that I found especially compelling—about their instinct for self-perpetuation.
Shirky: Well, organizations that are founded to solve problems end up committed to the preservation of the problems. So Trentway-Wagar, an Ontario-based bus company, sues PickupPal, an online ride-sharing service, because T-W isn’t committed to solving transportation problems. It’s committed to solving transportation problems with buses. In the media world, Britannica is now committed to making reference works that can’t easily be referred to, and the music industry is now distributing music that can’t easily be shared because new ways of distributing music undermine the old business model. [3]
Change, as I have been trying to suggest in this wee blog post, ain’t a simple matter.
The local
There has been a good deal of commentary about the effects of embracing globalisation as the solution to the world’s economic problems. The push back as supply chains have been seriously disrupted, something we are likely to be living with on a semi-permanent basis, thoughts turn to the local and its geography economics and politics among other things.
Geography matters, as Tomas Pueyo keeps wonderfully demonstrating over and over.
I prompted Metaphor (mentioned below but imply is “you want links, I can find them for you”) with:
There is a growing unease about globalisation
It produced over one hundred links, many of which were particularly useful: links to books, papers, blog posts etc. Sure there is work to do to sift them a task also likely for AI down the track.
This snippet is a place holder for me. it may be that we are living through a correction to globalise anything that moves to one where the local is noticed for its importance.
Mind blowing
I have been watching The Peripheral, streaming on Prime weekly. It’s based on William Gibson’s book of the same title. Crudely, it is about humans “inhabiting” nonhuman avatars across time. Maybe it is another instance of science beginning to ape science fiction as this paper points precisely in that direction, without the time travel and with no mention of Gibson.
Delegating work to a machine
Another open access bit of AI. Metaphor:
Metaphor is a search engine that’s trained for link prediction. This means that given some context, it tries to predict the link that would most likely follow that text. You interact with Metaphor search by writing prompts: these are snippets of text that could precede a link.
You need a Discord account (easily done) to access the app. I have only tried it on a few ideas and it was more than useful. I tried it on the Mind Blowing paragraph about. Heck of a set of links were generated.
This app is mentioned in an excellent post by Rodolfo Rosini: The next Google search engine will be Generative AI.
I expect more and more of these apps which likely already have found their way into current standard research practices for folk who are not asleep at the wheel. It’s only a matter of time before grant writing apps begin to appear which will of course be met be grant assessing apps. The beat goes on as Sapiens continues to shrink.
[1] If you are interested, I wrote about this a long time ago: Bigum, C. (2000). Actor-network theory and online university teaching: translation versus diffusion. In B. A. Knight & L. Rowan (Eds.), Researching Futures Oriented Pedagogies (pp. 7-22). PostPressed. Download
[2] Pirsig, R. M. (1974). Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance: an inquiry into values. Morrow.
[3] Shirky, C., & Pink, D. (2010). Cognitive Surplus: The Great Spare-Time Revolution. Wired (June), np. https://www.wired.com/2010/05/ff-pink-shirky/
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