My own internet of things
The gap between theoretical ideas and messy reality, as seen in Neal Stephenson, Adam Smith, and Star Trek.
Ed Finn
I have just started reading a really interesting discussion about algorithms, language, mathematics and the human-machine interface in Ed Finn’s “What Algorithms Want: Imagination in the Age of Computing” published by MIT Press.
Again, this is a placeholder for what I’m reading rather than my thoughts on what I’m reading. It will expand …
Sadly, Clive James died recently, but his death lead me to explore his writings, initially through his multi-volume autobiography, and then through some of his other works (which can be found at the his website linked above). I will expand this post soon as there is so much to write and say about his work (stories of his life, the art of writing, poetry, cultural criticism etc) and how it impacts on me. For the moment, this post is just a marker of what I want to write about.
An exploration of what we can know about what we don’t know: why ignorance is more than simply a lack of knowledge.
Daniel R De Nicola
I’ve started reading this philosophical approach to knowledge, what we know, and more importantly, what we don’t know. The distinction between knowledge and ignorance is an important one to think about, and is a critical distinction for education and training. It is also an interesting thing to explore in an era of mass education, deliberate misinformation, and outsourcing of many aspects of memory to technology.
Every year or two, I have a burst of creative energy during which I aim to update all my online presences and return to writing regularly. Each time I do this, I am motivated by a specific short-term goal, such as preparing for a job interview, or writing a funding proposal, or sharing the domain-specific content that is exciting me at the moment. This time, the specific driver was being interviewed by a colleague who is doing a PhD on blended learning, which resulted in me revisiting my own web content from 15 years ago, and surprising myself at how little has changed. In reviewing my own material, I also noticed that my memory of time and place is getting less reliable as distance grows – so although I first published on "blended learning" in 1996, we actually referred to it as "mixed mode" delivery. What I did was not deemed to be particularly interesting back then because all projections were that the future of education was fully online and traditional teaching would be a thing of the past. It was also not considered to be research, despite the fact that it was published, and was presented at a conference.
Revisiting the past provides a good opportunity reflect on the fact that my primary driver for engaging in online teaching was to address a budgetary dilemma – fire my sessional teaching staff or make budget cuts elsewhere (such as printing). Having gone the online path, it was then exciting to find new opportunities offered by the media and to rethink traditional delivery, i.e., to engage in reflective practice. One thing I can see is that very little has changed in terms of my understanding of teaching practice, and that technology is just part of the broader tool-set available to me as a teacher. I still see teaching as a conversation between teacher and student about the "way of thinking" embodied in the particular domain of interest.
A second driver for my return to the online space is the fact that I have a new online "mentor", Dan John, who is as prolific and readable as my first online "mentor", Stephen Downes. While Stephen Downes has a philosophy background and works in the online learning space, Dan John has a theology background (I guess it's a particular branch of philosophy) and works in strength and conditioning of athletes. Both people are my gurus because, not only do they link theory and practice, but they also have genuine expertise in both domains, as demonstrated by their own practice and by their "train the trainer" workshops. They demonstrate the type of interactional expertise described by Harry Collins, which should be foundational to educational practice.
I have found inspiration in Dan John's simple message regarding Park Bench versus Bus Bench workouts, and in his exposition of goal-setting in terms of "do this, now do that" as the program to go from Point A to Point B. The particular insight in terms of goal-setting is that Point B, the goal, is generally well-defined (even when aspirational), but the notion of Point A (where are you right now?) is mind-bogglingly unclear to most people. Furthermore, if Point A does become clear (for example, my level of strength and athleticism is pretty good for the average over-50 woman, but is at the not-naturally-gifted end of Novice for an athlete, despite the fact that I have been training for 5 years), many people are unwilling to go back to basic fundamentals required to achieve Point B.
I suspect my current obsession with Dan John's work is to help me maintain a degree of sanity in an educational context that blatantly markets the express bus to Point B without any consideration of the range of Point As that the bus is allegedly servicing. This occurs at a macro (degree) level, which in addition to ignoring Point A also ignores how much space is available at Point B for all the alighting passengers (jobs in particular industries, or even the industries themselves in an uncertain future). It also occurs at a micro (unit) level, where pre-requisites for undertaking a unit of study (i.e, formal specifications of Point A) are actively discouraged, while "learning outcomes" (formal specifications of Point B) are mandated and "quality assured".
It remains to be seen how long my burst of creative energy lasts for, but I am also encouraged by the idea that our graduate students in the Digital Technologies and Training Lab are at a stage of development that they have lots of ideas to express in writing along the way to completing their PhDs. Hopefully they will begin to see the benefit of writing short thought-pieces to help them articulate ideas, to share those ideas with an audience, and to allow them to reflect on their own work ten years down the track when they've forgotten what they were thinking now.
My last “yearly” blog revival was actually in August 2017, which is actually more than a year ago … and this time I am motivated by the need to collect together all the different strands of ideas into slightly more coherent public writing.
And for various reasons, the 2018 version of revival really didn’t happen. Instead, I tried to write stuff in longhand and re-write for my blog, but neither the longhand nor re-writing was sufficiently regular.
It is disturbing to find that many people in the higher echelons of education do not seem to understand some basic aspects of marking, grading and formative versus summative assessment.
Firstly, we assess the quality of the artifact or performance, not the inherent quality of the student themselves. We are identifying that the assignment is a credit level assignment, not that the student is a credit level person, or has credit level intelligence.
Secondly, when we mark an assessed piece of work, we might begin with 100% and deduct marks for each “error”, or we might start at 0 and add marks for each relevant point. However when we grade a piece of work, we are using an ordinal scale, not an equal interval scale. If we inherently use a grading system, we need to understand the inherent qualitative properties of such a scale, and the fact that it is ordinal at best in quantitative terms. I say “at best” because within the non-passing grade category, there are a number of different ways to fail that are not all equal, and I would probably argue that a 45 – 50 based on a genuine attempt at all assessments is lower in rank than a half-baked attempt on some assessments in the 30-40 range.
Thirdly, even when we use so-called objective assessments such as multi-choice tests, not all questions are created equal. There are many methods by which we could scale/rescale scores on MCQs including providing different weightings for questions of different levels of difficulty, or deducting points for incorrect answers. These methods may be much more robust than scoring each question as one point, but would most likely be very unpopular with students, and would actually be difficult to implement at a conceptual level (how do you actually rate the difficulty of each question – by performance, by expert-ranking, by whether it differentiates between “good” and “bad” students (but how do we know who these people are given that we are using the test to assess this?).
While I have always been a proponent of grading rather than marking, I have become accustomed to using marking pro-formas that define marking criteria and their weightings. I note that these rubrics tend to use grading of sub-sections of an artifact to generate a numerical score that is then combined with other scores from the rubric weighted according to the pre-defined set of weighting criteria. This allows for an acceptable spread of grades for each artifact and is apparently “more objective” than grading the artifact itself holistically. From where I sit, it is really a way of ensuring that there is a spread of marks that we can then post-hoc turn into a distribution of grades without further reference to the actual artifacts being graded.
So far as I am concerned, when we have done this, we have actually abrogated our professional responsibility to our disciplines, and become part of a credentialling factory that is obsessed with quantification of performance outcomes under the umbrella of “quality assurance” -while being oblivious to the notion that quality and quantity are inherently different constructs.
Waleed Aly makes some important points here – we end up so far down the slippery slope in what we don’t bother challenging in our leaders that it becomes hard to identify when it all went so horribly wrong. Each incremental step seems small until you look at how far we have collectively fallen in our acceptance of injustice, intolerance, corruption and greed. The problems in Australian academia reflect the problems in Australian society – so much is corrupted and wrong, but it is difficult to know how to make appropriate change from within.
It’s true in a sense that Trump has stolen the Republican party. But it’s also true it was there for the taking. There are many reasons Trump is succeeding – anger and disillusionment among a humiliated electorate is one of them. But there’s also the fact that the Republicans have been training their voters to indulge every reactionary prejudice for years. Trump simply does this better, louder, and with less varnish than his rivals. Can we be surprised when he vanquishes them? Can the Republican establishment really cry foul when he outdoes them?And is it so different here? Well, in a way, yes. A moderate is presently in the top job and the reactionary forces aren’t yet taking endorsements from former Ku Klux Klan wizards (they’ll have to settle for Reclaim Australia for now). But there’s an important commonality too: that the contradictions that were once holding conservative parties together, and delivering them political success, have now fallen apart. The most important of these is the contradiction between liberal economics and the politics of “values”.It’s hard to be the staunch defenders of family, culture and tradition while you’re also staunch advocates of things like high-skilled immigration and workplace “flexibility” of the kind WorkChoices offered. It’s hard to believe the market should be free to exploit and commodify whatever consumers will tolerate – sex, culture, children – and yet pretend we are bound together by inviolable, sacred values.
It’s that time of year again – time to organise my technology world and work out what tools I’ll be using to make stuff happen at work and at play. I spent a month in Africa at the end of 2013, and for a variety of reasons, that time away involved very little use of technology and almost no use of voice/text. Given that my average number of texts per month has been around 500 for at least the past 5 years, this was quite a change, but not one that was at all difficult. I sort of liked not being at the beck and call of anyone.
I also have a few computers that have reached their complete end of life. I have a 12″ Powerbook G4 Which I purchased around 2003 when I first became a “web developer” – it was my badge of street cred 🙂 I also have a 15″ Powerbook G4 with an Intel chip purchased in 2006 when I became a bona-fide Consultant. Both computers have lasted well beyond their life expectancy – one is being used for dev work by a colleague, and the other finally met its death during the recent heatwave, when Tim left it in the car for 5 over 40 deg days.
During my travels (Sudan, Tanzania, Canberra), my work laptop, a 13″ Macbook Pro housed in a hard-shelled case, suffered screen-cracking in my checked luggage, despite having been transported in a similar fashion many many other times. I use an external monitor for my Macbook Pro at work anyway, so the laptop is still very usable, and I am also trying to return to being a regular bike commuter rather than a fair-weather occasional bike rider, so I also want to reduce the weight I carry every day by not hauling a laptop with me everywhere.
To this end, I’ve been playing with a Sony Experia Android phone (big but with a 22 MP camera) as a possible alternative to an iPhone/iPad/laptop combo, and I’ve been thinking about switching from an iPad to an iPad mini and then using a non-smart phone just as a phone. What I’ve realised is that I really want a lighter but fully functional laptop and that the smartphone/iPad solution is not workable for what I do (data analysis, writing, editing, graphics). So the real answer was a Macbook Air.
The days of burning DVDs seem to be a thing of the past now that we have cheap multi-gigabyte thumb drives and multi-terabyte external drives, so the limited hard-drive capacity of the Macbook Air is no longer a consideration. I did a quick pricing of a tricked up version via educational pricing, and was a bit despondent that it came out at over 2K – money I can’t really justify if I want to travel as well.
Anyhow, to cut a long story shorter, many planets aligned when I went to ride my bike to work and discovered a popped spoke – I went to my favourite bike store in Mount Waverley so that Dicky could fix my wheel, and this brought me within spitting distance of my favourite Apple reseller. I went to look for my Macbook Air, and discovered that smaller Apple resellers find it hard to get into the Apple Educational pricing (not best pleased with that, since I want to support local businesses and they’ve been great in the past when they were in Burwood. However, I also discovered the ex-demo market and for less than my brand new Macbook Air educational pricing, I now have an ex-demo fully tricked up Macbook Air plus an ex-demo iPhone 5, both of which are mine. Very happy. (For the moment. Until I find out things like iPhone 5 and Macbook Air can’t use Airdrop between them, nor can they pair up to send files via Bluetooth. Say what????? I have to go via email or DropBox???? I could send files from my old Nokia to my old Mac so what’s going on here – it doesn’t stop piracy in any way, shape or form, but it makes it a pain in the arse to take a photo on my iPhone and insert it into my blog post!). I was able to support a local business, and in the two days that I’ve had my new toys, I’ve referred more than 10 people there too!
So, in the next few months, I am planning to ramp up my technical proficiency in a number of areas:
So my new tools of choice are going to be my Macbook Air for anywhere, anytime work/play and my software tools of choice may well turn out to be:
I will also be exploring the different options for file sharing, as befits someone whose expertise is supposedly in Digital Technologies and Training, and as we head into the possibly-post-Facebook world 🙂
Every few years, I get excitable about writing things and sharing information on the inter-web. As can be seen below, I seem to have bursts of activity every year or so in different places, and these soon peter out.
The most important aspect of blogging for me is to have something to say that will still be worth reading in days or weeks or years, and that what I have to say is not totally a product of the emotional/contextual circumstances of the time of writing. I mostly write for me, and my original motivation for keeping my material on a website was so it was easily accessible for me, irrespective of what computer I was currently using and where I was working from. The added motivation has also been in terms of sharing my thoughts without imposing them on anyone – you can come and read my writing anytime you like, and you can see my ideas on various topics if you want but there is no need for us to reach any shared consensus, and there is no need for me to make assumptions about what you find interesting, or for me to decide who will want to read my content. Similarly, I am not leaving anyone out – it’s on the web so anyone can read. Comments are limited purely because I don’t have a large audience and so there are more ads for inappropriate products that there is real dialogue.
Anyhow, my new “active” blog is the Digital Technologies and Training Lab site and the Motion Capture Lab site, which are both work-related sites focusing on digital technologies, training, cognitive skills, expert skilled performance and problem internet use. I’m not sure how much cross-posting I’ll be doing, since one of the focus areas of the expert skilled performance work involves martial arts, so all of my writing is in some sense “work-related”.
My recent favourite authors are Marshall McLuhan and Lev Vygotsky (with a bit of Zenon Pylyshyn and Fodor for good measure). I have been reading The Gutenberg Galaxy on my Kindle, and I am still trying to come to terms with the best way to capture ideas and beginnings of papers to share with myself and others. I had a recent love affair with Moleskin A5 black squared notebooks combined with post-it notes as a review/tagging system, but I have too many of them with too diverse a collection of stuff.
I have played with blogs and wikis as reading logs and I briefly considered tweeting stuff from the Kindle annotations page, but I’ve decided to stick with WordPress as a tool and I’ve reinstated my Edublogs offerings, one for me as a possible site to put class-related information, and the other as a site for my Lab to use as a shared blog.
My Edublogs blogs are: