No escape plan was ever devised
Not for the institutions, nor for students, who have no way to export their learning data (content, connections, relationships with peers, etc.) out of the system in a way that could be integrated into something outside of the institution.
I haven't met anyone who makes this argument who then says that a one stop convenient, reliable, private and secure online learning environment can’t be achieved using common every day online systems
Reliable: As a simple example, I'd trust Google to maintain data reliability over my institutional IT support.
And you'd also need to make the argument for why learning needs to be "private", etc.
The skills gained immediately transfer to other areas of academic work, such as community and industry engagement
Another example of why online learning could (should?) take place in public.
Imagine if, upon graduating, an engineer already had an online, public portfolio of work that could be shared with potential employers.
What I’m trying to suggest is that it's highly doubtful to me that the LMS plays much of a role in auditing at all, not least because it is hardly ever used well - even after all this time and money
If it were to be used for audits, it's doubtful what the value of the audit outcome would be. The LMS may provide data on "time spent" logged in, for example, but who cares about that?
Safe to say, there are many more examples just a search, or conversation with the right contrarian, away
Another example: Most universities will have some rhetoric around a commitment to principles of lifelong learning, but at the same time they use a learning management system that seems designed to reduce the possibility of learning after students graduate.
I also, quietly, fell back in love with the internet. I'm not sure when it happened, but I find myself thinking about the possibilities again. There are so many ways to support communities, break down barriers, and create new opportunities
This was meaningful because I feel that I've had a similar experience over the past few months. I found myself thinking about the open web and indieweb, being drawn to it and getting excited by it again.
The task management set-up
Having gone through the description below, I can't help but feel that there's an awful amount of manual effort going on here. My own thinking is that task and project management as part of a daily workflow needs to be something relatively friction-less.
When there's too much structure in a system, with too many steps, I feel like I would be spending more time managing the system than doing the work.
One of my goals in my own system is to reduce the number of steps required to complete any single activity.
I do not use my mobile to look at or add tasks, or mark them completed. I basically always work laptop-first. This means that the availability of my tasks lists on mobile, and the capability to edit them there, is not important to me
I used to work from the premise that I have to be able to add tasks to a system that is cross-platform (because otherwise, how could I add that one task while walking between meetings, and have it show up in my work for the day on my laptop?).
But now I've switched to a "working context", which means I'm sitting in front of my laptop. It's where I capture 99% of the work I need to do. If, on the rare occasion I need to capture a task or note, I use Joplin.
I am using a system for myself to plan and do my work, maintain lots of things in parallel, and keep notes. That system consists of several interlocking methods, and those methods are supported by various tools. What I describe in my review of 100 days of using Obsidian, is not about Obsidian’s functionality per se, but more about how the functionality and affordances of Obsidian fit with my system and the methods in that system
Important point to make. I think of this as "Principles before tools", which means that I start with what I want to achieve, and then find tools that help me do that more effectively.
Most Canadian institutions have built their internationalization programs in a way that minimizes their costs (no new programs or delivery sites) but also maximizes the costs to the students (high tuition plus displacement plus living expenses). But what if there’s a market for a cheaper alternative: same degree, similar product, but no displacement costs?
Postgraduate students who can complete their degrees remotely. We know that our own PG students struggle significantly with the costs associated with moving to South Africa from other African countries.
Put yourself in the reader’s position and see if you can get a grip on how they might respond to your writing.
It seems like good advice but it's actually quite hard to divorce yourself from what you know. See the curse of knowledge.
This is why I think that having this list of questions is a good idea; you don't have to rely solely on putting yourself in the reader's shoes.
And then there was what Lanier calls “data dignity”; he once wrote a book about it, called Who Owns the Future? The idea is simple: What you create, or what you contribute to the digital ether, you own.
See Tim Berners-Lee's SOLID project.
“I think people are spending more time in a self-directed way by connecting with others on video chat or things like that than they are passively receiving a feed,” he said. “And so I actually think things have gotten a little better.” The fact that people were using computers not to pass time in algorithm-driven loops but to talk to one another, and then perhaps go outside, was a source of optimism for him.
"...using computers to pass time in algorithm-driven loops..."
His thoughts on this subject have been influential enough that they may sound familiar to you by now: That anytime you are provided with a service, like Facebook, for free, you are in fact the product being sold. That social media companies are basically giant behavior-modification systems that use algorithms to relentlessly increase “engagement,” largely by evoking bad feelings in the people who use them. That these companies in turn sell the ability to modify your behavior to “advertisers,” who sometimes come in the old form of people who want to persuade you to buy soap but who now just as often come in the form of malevolent actors who want to use their influence over you to, say, depress voter turnout or radicalize white supremacists. That in exchange for likes and retweets and public photos of your kids, you are basically signing up to be a data serf for companies that can make money only by addicting and then manipulating you.
It is strange that every interaction we make on a social media platform is, in part, a small aggregation of yet more data about ourselves, and that each aggregation increases the shareholder value of that company by a little bit. And for what? So that we can feel a bit more connected in each of our little online worlds.
Being side by side, instead of separated—and being able to make eye contact, as we now could—worked on the psychology; it made you a little more playful, a little more relaxed.
Video chat does none of this currently. What's different about looking at each other through a screen? Is it an evolutionary thing, where we just haven't evolved to communicate effectively through video? Sure, we can move information with video chat but can we connect?
Lanier is sometimes credited as the father of virtual reality; he is also sometimes credited as the owner of the world's largest flute
Nice juxtaposition.
Lanier calls this technology Together mode
I like this concept. It'd be interesting to see if different apps could have a "together mode".
“Being under constant surveillance in the workplace is psychological abuse,” Heinemeier Hansson added. “Having to worry about looking busy for the stats is the last thing we need to inflict on anyone right now.”
I really like the Basecamp approach (I forget where I heard this...could have been in one of the Rework podcasts):
Don't try to get the most out of everyone; try to get the best out of them.
If you're looking for ways to build trust in a team, I can't recommend the following books published by Basecamp:
For example, to help maintain privacy and trust, the user data provided in productivity score is aggregated over a 28-day period.
So that the fact that the metrics are collected over 28 days is meant to maintain privacy and trust. How?
In a statement, a Microsoft spokesperson said: “Productivity score is an opt-in experience that gives IT administrators insights about technology and infrastructure usage. Insights are intended to help organisations make the most of their technology investments by addressing common pain points like long boot times, inefficient document collaboration, or poor network connectivity. Insights are shown in aggregate over a 28-day period and are provided at the user level so that an IT admin can provide technical support and guidance.”
That's weird because in this article they say that this is just a confusing mistake, and that Productivity score "was never designed to score individual users."
But by default, reports also let managers drill down into data on individual employees, to find those who participate less in group chat conversations, send fewer emails, or fail to collaborate in shared documents.
This is going to be awesome when it debuts in universities. I can't imagine that any academics will be concerned when a departmental chair or administrator asks you why you're not sending more emails.
Recent patent filings show that Microsoft has been exploring additional ideas to monitor workers in the interest of organizational productivity. One filing describes a “meeting insight computing system” that would generate a quality score for a meeting using data such as body language, facial expressions, room temperature, time of day, and number of people in the meeting.
So this will require that you have to have video turned on. How will they sell this to employees? "You need to turn your video on so that the algorithm can generate an accurate meeting quality score using your body language and facial expression.
Sounds perfect. Absolutely no concerns about privacy violations, etc. in this product.
“Over the last few days, we’ve realized that there was some confusion about the capabilities of the product,” Spataro wrote. “Productivity Score produces a score for the organization and was never designed to score individual users.”
Does anyone belief that they created a user interface that included individuals, by accident?
Microsoft says it will make changes in its new Productivity Score feature, including removing the ability for companies to see data about individual users, to address concerns from privacy experts that the tech giant had effectively rolled out a new tool for snooping on workers.
It's great that MS has reacted so quickly to the outcry around the privacy of workers.
I thought it would be super-interesting to see how academics might have responded to the idea of institutional administrators keeping tabs on the number of hours that they'd spent in meetings (via Teams), composing and reading emails (via Outlook), writing articles (via Word), and so on.
And yet these would be the same academics who do this kind of monitoring of student work.
with the help of new generations of innovators and explorers, these visions of the future can become a reality. As you look through these images of imaginative travel destinations, remember that you can be an architect of the future
These are really beautiful and inspiring posters.
Via @chrisaldrich
Hard things are hard.
And if you can get better at doing hard things it gets harder for others to replicate what you can do. When you're good at doing things that others can't easily replicate, you increase the value that you bring to an organisation.
See Newport, C. (2016). Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World (1 edition). Grand Central Publishing.
The idea for Foam occurred to me on a Friday afternoon. By the following Friday, we had our first 1000 users.
Good ideas are often immediately recognised, by many people other than yourself, that they are good.
Feynman: "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself. And you are the easiest person to fool"."
Providing this better interface is what applications do.
Applications provide an interface to functionality.
Business model: Foam is a free product. If I was willing to pay for Foam, I’d want to pay the creators of the open source extensions behind it, not just the person who combined them into a product.
Good point. However, loads of companies use open source libraries to build their software. And we pay the companies, not the people who built the libraries. How do we get around this?
I think this is a neat way of creating value in software. The essential value of Foam isn’t code—it’s the opinionated curation of existing building blocks.
This is true in other areas as well. Use principles to make choices about what products to use; that way you can always swap out the products. Putting together a collection of software - instead of a monolithic approach - means you can select the tools you like working with.
When openness and design are in tension, I choose design.
I chose Evernote over other alternatives because their design was better. I chose Google Reader over other apps because their design was better. When companies change their policies or shutter services, design simply isn't relevant. But openness is always relevant.
Do longer term-style assignments where your formative feedback applies to their work.
Project-based learning approaches where student outputs that are assessed are real-world projects that simulate what they'd need to create in order to solve real problems.
If you give any question to a student that has a clear, definitive answer, you are tempting them to cheat.
We should be assessing how people use information to solve problems they care about, rather than whether or not they can recall information.
There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”
Not just in the US but increasingly seen around the world as part of the anti-intellectualism associated with the Wokeness.
Memory systems are in their infancy:
This simply isn't true. We know an enormous amount about how to increase memory. And memory systems have been around for centuries.
In this essay, we’ll use the term “executable book”
There's something here...but not "executable" which suggests a process that runs according to a preconfigured pattern.
But empirically open-ended exploration can be just as, or more successful
Maybe we just haven't sufficiently defined what we mean by "goals".
out of open-ended exploration, not in a primarily goal-driven way
How was the development of writing not goal driven? I'm no expert but I believe that early forms of writing were developed in response to the need to record transactions. How is that not goal-driven? Of course no-one sat down and said we need more irregular verbs. But they absolutely would have identified the need to include words with more nuance than those that existed. So the process may have been open-ended (they didn't articulate objectives, deadlines, milestones, etc.) but those open-ended explorations would have been in the service of achieving objectives.
It’s inconceivable
This is a form of argument I detest. Reduce the problem to an absurd form (prehistoric people setting OKRs) and then make fun of it.
But achieving goals absolutely would have been the impetus for language development. Want to survive the winter? Develop a way to share ideas. Want to collect more food? Develop a way to share ideas. What to fashion a more robust spear? Develop a way to share ideas. Of course language developed in response to achieving goals.
Surely if there were major ideas to discover, people would do so?
Not necessarily. All/most of those smart people are working within the same paradigm, which means that the possibility of building something outside the paradigm is limited. Take the online advertising that's made Google and Facebook the monsters they are. How easy do you think it's going to be for someone to shift the paradigm so that online advertising isn't what's paying for the web? The smart people want to make online advertising more effective, rather than figure out a new paradigm.
genuinely transformative tools for thought
Has this been formally defined anywhere in the essay? And who gets to decide what is a "genuine" tool for thought?
It’s poured money into developing new mediums The plural of medium is, of course, media. However, in this context media would usually mean many pieces of new content. That’s not what we mean: we mean multiple different new mediums (Illustrator, Photoshop etc). We’ll reserve the unusual pluralization for this somewhat unusual meaning. for designers and artists – programs such as Illustrator, Photoshop, and so on
It's not clear to me what makes Photoshop, for example, a tool for thought. People have been editing photos for as long as we've had photos. What does photoshop add that makes it a tool for thought?
Unfortunately for Adobe, such mediums are extremely expensive to develop
There are open source versions of all Adobe products that are free. Yes, they're expensive in terms of the hours put into development but I'm resistant to the idea that Adobe is some kind of visionary company.
In particular, we need to do detailed, second-by-second user experience testing, to understand and shape users’ emotional and intellectual experience
This sounds a lot like the tech product design and testing experience that was contrasted to with the lone genius / deep insight analogy presented earlier. I'm not convinced that second-by-second user experience testing is what we need.
It’s not yet generating nearly deep enough ideas about memory and cognition
But there's nothing here that hasn't been known for 100 years. It's not just that these aren't deep enough enough, they're not even insights.
The warning is this: conventional tech industry product practice will not produce deep enough subject matter insights to create transformative tools for thought. Indeed, that’s part of the reason there’s been so little progress from the tech industry on tools for thought
This also isn't fair. You provide what you acknowledge is a "fanciful" story for how Arabic numerals were created (a single genius with deep insight rather than a culture working over centuries) and then make the claim that this is somehow linked to the lack of progress on thinking tools in the tech industry because our current system is more like a focus group. Is the suggestion that the authors of this piece are the geniuses with the deep insight?
This is rather sobering if we compare to conventional modern design practice. In a typical practice, you’d interview domain experts (in this case, mathematicians), and read any relevant literature. You’d talk to users of existing systems, and analyze serious behavior, both individually and at scale. In short, you’d do what people in the design community refer to as immersing themselves in the target field.
This isn't really a fair comparison, though. For all we know, the invention of Hindu-Arabic numerals did go through this process. It was likely the outcome of centuries of work, with people at the edge of convention pushing boundaries about what another system might look like. There would've been discussions with all sorts of people. I'm not sure what the analogy is meant to provide, since it seems so divorced from reality.
knowledge which has an arbitrary
It's not an arbitrary structure; you've literally just said that the associations between memory chunks are the structure.
We’ve had people go so far as to tell us that mnemonics make memory a solved problem
This reminds me of Donald Trump: "People are saying...". Who are these people and why should we care what they are saying?
This is a straw man argument...making a claim that few people familiar with the literature would support, and then taking a position in opposition to the claim.
One such idea is elaborative encoding
This is a bit confusing because it uses "elaboration" in a different way to the literature on learning and memory. Like with spaced repetition, we know that elaboration (i.e. explaining concepts recalled from memory without reference to the source material) is a great way to learn new information. See Dunlosky, J., Rawson, K. A., Marsh, E. J., Nathan, M. J., & Willingham, D. T. (2013). Improving Students’ Learning With Effective Learning Techniques: Promising Directions From Cognitive and Educational Psychology. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 14(1), 4–58.
help write good cards
How to take smart notes, by Sonke Ahrens: https://www.amazon.com/How-Take-Smart-Notes-Nonfiction-ebook/dp/B06WVYW33Y. It includes these suggestions and loads more.
Isn’t this “just” an essay with flashcards embedded?
Pretty much, yes.
Another way of looking at the data from this informal experiment
Why do we need an informal experiment to confirm the results of loads of formal (published in peer reviewed venues) experiments?
the more people study
It's not about studying more; it's simply taking advantage of the fact that memory traces are reinforced through active recall over increasingly longer periods of time. And we've demonstrated this reliably since Ebbinghaus in the 1880s.
This is the big, counterintuitive advantage of spaced repetition: you get exponential returns for increased effort
At the moment this is looking like more (but not necessarily better) evidence in support of spaced repetition.
Exponential scheduling
What does this even mean? If this refers to the practice of active recall over increasingly longer periods then we already have this built into every spaced repetition algorithm out there.
With the time taken to review a typical question being just a few seconds
After receiving the email, opening the browser, logging in...then it takes a few seconds. Again, this just seems like a less efficient form of spaced repetition.
Then, through repeated review sessions in the days and weeks ahead, people consolidate the answers to those questions into their long-term memory.
How is this any different to extracting questions from the text and adding them to something like Anki? Except that in Anki I have the questions with me all the time, I don't need to be online, don't need to register anywhere, and can choose the questions that are meaningful to me, can connect it to other knowledge...it seems that this simply embeds a less useful form of spaced repetition into the text. Or am I missing something?
The musician and comedian Martin Mull has observed that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”. In a similar way, there’s an inherent inadequacy in writing about tools for thought
The medium we're working in now probably isn't the optimal format to discuss a new paradigm.
The borders of a college campus are permeable. Online learning communities should also be permeable, engaging local communities, disciplinary communities, and broader publics
We shouldn't try to use technology to close off learning but rather to open it up.
Having kids showed me how to convert a continuous quantity, time, into discrete quantities. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old. If Christmas-as-magic lasts from say ages 3 to 10, you only get to watch your child experience it 8 times. And while it's impossible to say what is a lot or a little of a continuous quantity like time, 8 is not a lot of something. If you had a handful of 8 peanuts, or a shelf of 8 books to choose from, the quantity would definitely seem limited, no matter what your lifespan was.
See also the Wait but Why post about something similar to this.
It’s easy to come into the office, sit at your desk and start checking email. Before you know it, your whole morning has been hijacked.
Don't start your day by checking email.
international law is clear that everyone is entitled to an adequate standard of living, to be free from hunger, to basic healthcare and to at least a free primary education. And in case there is any doubt about this these rights have been tested in law – they are written into the constitutions of India and South Africa and have for example been used to require governments and companies to make anti-retroviral drugs for people living with HIV/Aids available to them.
Fair enough re. the HIV medication. But where is the equivalent example for being "free from hunger"? Where is the Constitutional protection for hungry citizens when politicians steal from the country?
residents have been forced from their homes in the middle of the night, which were then destroyed by bulldozers. The police stood by while it happened.
This is currently happening in South Africa where the evictions are being carried out by the police. See here and here.
Also, this seems to now be conflating the question of evictions with poverty. Of course they're aligned but are they the same thing? Is this a bait-and-switch argument?
Just because a single individual neat violator can't always be sited does not mean that injustice is not being done.
But is it clear that "injustice" = "human rights violation"? As Foley says in his article, bad things are bad things but they're not necessarily human rights violations.
The intelligent backbone would help teachers orchestrate collaborative problem solving and project-based work. It would also enable seamless learning across school, home and in between so that we are far more resilient to unforeseen circumstances like COVID-19. And, of course, the intelligent backbone would enable the best learning resources to be made available to all learners in the most appropriate way for each learner, class, year group or institution.
So it's a magical system that fixes everything in education? The complexity of a system that could achieve this is mind-boggling. This is not a 10 year prediction. This is a "one day in the distant future" prediction.
they are written in a way that considers what we know about how human learning takes place
One of the problems with companies developing AI for education is that they're focused on things like efficiency, rather than learning.
The requirement for ‘informed’ consent is important and it can be challenging, because in order for someone to give their ‘informed’ consent, they must understand enough about what is going to be done with their data for them to be capable of being ‘informed’
The problem is that ML is trained on retrospective data, sometimes gathered far removed from the possibility of being considered for the training. Do we have to retrospectively get consent for this data to be used?
For example, systems that use AI so that they can adapt the support each learner is given as they progress through the curriculum; systems that recommend the most suitable resources for a teacher or student to use for learning based on each learner’s particular needs, and voice-based interfaces that enable students and teachers to interact without needing to use a keyboard or a touch screen
This links to what Downes said about the use of AI by teachers vs the use of AI by students. These are use cases that make the teachers work easier. And that's going to be the focus of the technology i.e. aimed at teachers and schools. Who is doing the work of helping students use the technology to improve their learning?
The influence of historical data skews the results towards repeating what a school or college has achieved in prior years rather than what a pupil has or is likely to achieve in the current year.
My understanding is that the algorithm uses past performance to predict the performance this year, but that seems insane. Why would anyone want to do that? I thought an AI was actually grading each piece of work.
a grade difference between awarded and teacher assessed grades can have a big impact on students who either do or do not get to their preferred universities
OK, so it's not that the algorithm didn't perform according to expectations (it was 96.4% accurate relative to teacher-awarded grades). The problem is that some students were downgraded and this would affect their university performance. But couldn't the same thing be possible with teachers who make mistakes?
The DCP algorithm predicts grades for each school or college based on the historical performance of that school or college adjusted by any changes in the prior performance of this years’ students as compared to previous years’ students at that school or college
When it says that the algorithm "predicts grades for each school", does that mean that it's not looking at the work of each student? Which would be weird.
we must take great care to ensure that the data that the algorithm processes, as well as the algorithm itself is thoroughly tested, fair and unbiased
Who is doing the work to make sure that the same is true of teachers? I don't mean that teachers are these things in some malevolent way...only that bias, poor judgement, and lack of fairness are built into our cognitive processes and we're not even aware of it.
marking with vertical lines in the margin passages which they found "striking." The more people who found a passage striking, the more vertical lines accumulated
It's not enough to note that a text was "striking"; we need to be able to count the number of readers who thought it was.
Inkshedding allows each member of the group to 'gather' her/his thoughts before they are scattered by that first, articulate, confident person who gets up to say what you weren't even thinking about.
This is a democratic way of getting ideas out into public for further discussion.
"the shedding or spilling of ink; consumption or waste of ink in writing."
Don't worry about wasting ink; this is about getting words onto the page. It's meant to be messy and unorganised.
the writer said something "striking," something that seemed to them interesting or new or outrageous
What stands out to the reader?
in order to to understand and respond to what was said rather than to evaluate and "help" with the writing
It's about responding to the content and not the structure.
The Evaluation section of GPT-3 is very comprehensive, evaluating on a massive battery of NLP tasks in the Zero-shot (given only a natural language description in the generation context), One-shot (a single example in the generation context), or Few-shot (a small handful of examples in the generation context) settings. This setting is worth emphasizing as perhaps one of the biggest differences in ability between GPT-2 and its predecessors, because being able to infer the task from just one or a few examples is a massive step forward in generalization. Whereas previous models all relied on task-specific tuning, GPT-3 can be “tuned” merely by giving it instructions in plain English!
The algorithm is able to infer the task from a few examples. In cases where the algorithm is fine-tuned, it can be done using instructions in plain English.
White supremacy and its legacy can still be found in our legal system and other institutions through coded language and targeted practices.
The legacy of white supremacy is that it is built into the systems and infrastructure that govern our daily lives.
This white-dominant culture also operates as a social mechanism that grants advantages to white people, since they can navigate society both by feeling normal and being viewed as normal. Persons who identify as white rarely have to think about their racial identity because they live within a culture where whiteness has been normalized.
This is white privilege; these advantages.
This means everyone will go about the Art of Focus in their own way. It takes experimentation, dedication, and an understanding that no one can do it for you.
OK, so by saying that "it takes experimentation", what does the author mean if not that it's a science-based approach? Either it means that learning how to focus is a science, or we have a problem because we don't use words according to what they mean.
Doing great work is an art
I agree. But "doing the work" is not the same as "having a system for doing the work".
There’s no “science” of productivity
I disagree. You absolutely can be scientific in how you think about productivity. For example, "don't multitask" is a science-based piece of advice that should form part of a productivity system.
Learning how to do that kind of work, I think, is something of an art.
He's conflating the process for working with the work itself.
switching from research to note-taking may show that the current trail of literature isn’t leading anywhere important – a finding we would have missed if we kept immersed in skimming texts and finding additional material
And finding additional material can create the illusion of progress.
to know
He can only "know" this if someone explains it to him. Did you?
he would not have made an appointment
It's often not the patient who makes these appointments. They are simply told by the doctor to go to the physio. This patient may not have had any idea what he was doing there. If the doctor had told him to go see the physio who would help with the pain, you can see why the patient would be upset when you didn't give him the injection.
could not as this was not part of my duty
Instead of saying that it's not part of your duty - which may sound like you simply don't want to help him - you could say that you're not allowed to give injections. Did he think you were a doctor? Did you correct him? He may simply have been confused.
1 hour booking service
You could elaborate on this process. Is it fair? Why or why not? It relates strongly to the concept of Justice in the allocation of resources, which we discussed at length in the module.
Number 27
What is this referring to?
new modes of communication change what can be imagined and expressed
We didn't realise that the web allowed us to "play" with teaching and learning in ways that enabled what Freire called "acting on the world". We didn't realise that we could use the web to transform, instead of merely transmit.
new modes of communication change what can be imagined and expressed
We didn't realise that the web allowed us to "play" with teaching and learning in ways that enabled what Freire called "acting on the world". We didn't realise that we could use the web to transform, instead of merely transmit.