Bibs & bobs #7

 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/ 

Bibs & bobs #6

 Delegating work to nonhumans

A good deal of academic and student work involves coming to terms with publications which can prove tricky and time consuming if you are unfamiliar with the genre and or content. This online app does a fair job “explaining” chunks of text from any paper you submit to it.

And for the music oriented folk, an app for forming musical ideas: Note. 

This post by Stripe Partners opens the delegation issue further. Specifically it explores the shift of humans as craft people to expert technicians and then, with the advent of AI, to users. Having machines do all the heavy lifting involved in a task that once required significant technical skill results in non-expert users “self-serve”. The shift is represented thus:

It’s an important framing of what we are going through re all the AI apps that have  appeared. What keeps nagging at me though is the observation that E. O. Wilson made as reported in an opinion piece in the NY Times by Tristan Harris:

A decade ago, Edward O. Wilson, the Harvard professor and renowned father of sociobiology, was asked whether humans would be able to solve the crises that would confront them over the next 100 years.

“Yes, if we are honest and smart,” he replied. “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology.”

Bruno Latour

If you had not already joined the dots, a big influence, probably the biggest in my puzzling about the delegation of work to nonhumans is Bruno Latour who sadly passed away recently. There have been a number of tributes about Latour’s work and contribution to intellectual life but I think Stephen Muecke’s post on Aeon recently has been one of the better ones I have come across. 

Educating at scale, tutoring and the digital 

I’ve been participating in a local biweekly conversation based at Griffith, the curriculum collective, convened by the always thoughtful Steven Hodge. The group as been working through what might thought of a recent collection of publications in and around theorising curriculum.  

The problem of how to pass on what might be judged to be good, useful, valuable, important or just interesting to the next generation is something the species has muddled through since it emerged on the planet. That we are able to do so has meant that Homo Sapiens and not cephalopods run things. 

Over time circumstances have determined that humans have used, and at a times experimented with, a variety of formal and informal modes of educating the young while at the same time mulling the bigger questions of why, what and how.

We now live in an era dominated, at least in terms of student numbers, by what is sometimes called mass schooling. Mass schooling requires a crude application of a one size fits all logic. It is in play in many parts of formal education, e.g. age-based schooling, special needs schooling, year level teaching of a discipline in universities etc. 

Two posts helped to open up the curriculum question for me. Erik Hoel writing about how geniuses used to be raised and Henrik Karlsson musing about GPT-3 augmenting human intelligence.  There is much to be said here. The connection between a history of curriculum and the emergence of mass communication comes into view. The emergence of AI systems that support a notion of curriculum that begins to resemble some aristocratic tutoring is, to say the least, intriguing. 

I’m not holding my breath in this respect given the massive investment in systems of mass schooling, the conservative nature of formal education systems and the sorry history of curriculum reform. Nevertheless, it’s a possibility that is worth keeping an eye on.

Bibs & bobs #5

 Bibs and bobs #5

Delegating work to nonhumans

This b&b is short. I’ve been spending way too much time mulling the big framings of automation versus augmentation. While I have a lot of sympathy for the argument put forward by Erik Brynjolfsson in this paper: Brynjolfsson, E. (2022). The Turing Trap: The Promise & Peril of Human-Like Artificial Intelligence. Daedalus, 151(2), 272-287. https://doi.org/10.1162/daed_a_01915, What needs a lot more attention is what actually happens when augmentation happens, the trade-offs, the capacity swaps between human and nonhuman. There is a lot of noise in AI around the neglect of this issue, e.g. the alignment problem and the other panics associated with giving large language models tasks. Much more to say and think about.

Abstractions

A wild, playful and insightful ride courtesy of Venkatesh Rao, @vgr. If you emerge from this unmoved then good luck with keeping those trusty mental routines spinning the way they always have.

Expectations

There is a lot of fun things the brain does when we tinker with things like expectations, placebos and the like. 

Reproducibility

Via Steve Stewart-Williams, 

73 teams tested the same hypotheses with the same data. Some found negative results, some positive, some nada. No effect of expertise or confirmation bias. "Idiosyncratic researcher variability is a threat to the reliability of scientific findings." 

link.

Humour

If you are in need of inspiration for a book dedication, a list.  And if you were a fan of Whose Line is it Anyway?, you might enjoy ToonProv. 

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.