Bibs & bobs #4

 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

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.

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.

cj has moved back

 It's 2022, omg and it's time for a change and reassess of my online stuff. So it's all back to where it all kicked off. The other site has gone to a digital third space. 

cj has moved

I've begun to colonise a small piece of digital bit space. All of my scribbling, notes and crazy stuff will appear there from now on. And, I have gently eased myself into another blog.

Taleb the scribbler

With a wee bit more time on my hands now, or that is what I keep telling myself, I have been chewing on the fun scribbles of one Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I think that iconoclasts who write in an entertaining manner are folk who tickle my intellectual fancies more often than not. A good book to me is one that provokes new ideas, disturbs what I thought were settled ideas (yes, I do have a few) and also is a tad playful. Taleb's two books Fooled by Randomness and The Black Swan both qualify on these grounds. Taleb is wonderfully skeptical and delightfully curious in his exploration of ideas which touch on much of what count as important in education, the academy and other interesting and important bits of social space.

I came across an excellent review of The Black Swan. Well worth a read.

Researching the self and the (in)significance of trends

I was checking to see if an interview that I did for a local issue had appeared yet. In my searching, I stumbled over a small piece I wrote for CPSR in 1997. At the time, I recall having a bit of fun doing the scribbles. But that was written or at least published (an odd term these days when most everything is published) ten years ago. I was pondering the cultural and educational imperialism of the US. It seemed to fit with my lived experience at the time. And now with the flood of AJAX software (I recall reading that AJAX was simply Java script that worked!) that imperialism is a little less certain. Sure the US is still the centre of the Internet universe but the "all to all" of social media makes national boundaries almost quaint. I don't want to get all romantic about the longer term play out of "all to all" networking but there is now a small but fairly insightful (IMHO) group of folk who figure that all of this is really Gutenberg 2. In 1997 I got it kinda wrong. I am puzzling the prospect of a global community which shifts to an "all to all" communication system and the impact that will have on virtually all of the social institutions we have built upon the one to many, broadcast logic of the past century. My favourite piece on this was written a good while back (1994) by Jay Weston. I figure it is one of those not seeing the forest for the trees moments. Lots of good folk all out their busily worrying about "applying" various bits of "social software" to their educational practice and somehow unable to zoom out to see the larger shifts that are happening. Popular culture (music a movies) might be the current sites of interest but I think it is now only a matter of time before we see similar kinds of disruptions around various bits of formal education.

Peeling onions

Roger Shank recently picked a couple of video clips from The Onion, a sometimes useful source of satire about most things human. For those afficionados of curriculum debates I'd recommend: Are Our Children Learning Enough About Whales? For those with interests in international comparisons this piece may appeal.