Digitalization and Data – The Rhizoblog

A Link Blog Post

^{Photo by}^{Clarisse Croset}^on^Unsplash

Writing Something at Last

This is more of a “link blog” than anything reflective and in fact it is really just a lightly edited version of a page that was used in a course that I was teaching in Emerging Trends in Education. However, perhaps it does serve as a way to reopen this blog and my writing. Perhaps there are some links here that might be useful.

Quote of the week.

“The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men but that men will begin to think like computers” (Sydney Harris – Journalist)

Jon Dron quickly mentioned the quote during his recent webinar and so brought it to my attention.

How Good are you at Identifying Fake GAI Images?

Try this to find out. Might be a useful resource to use with students as well.

No Need to Worry – Everything is Going to be Wonderful

So says Sam Altman, Head of Open AI in his recent blog post. Why? Because “Deep Learning Worked”

AI in Early Years and School Settings

Much of the literature shared on AI in education has a higher education focus. Happy to see this from the Teacher Learning Network (TLN) in Australia which provides “high quality professional development for staff in early childhood, primary and secondary school settings.”

Link Here to home page and PDF of the Issue here.

UNESCO AI Competencies for Teachers

A new report. It does include a short summary for the TL/DR.

Funding for AI in Education

Google.org announces new AI funding for students and educators. I had personal experience of this sort of thing with Microsoft. A Faustian deal or a useful source of money and PD, both of those or neither? You decide.

Call for Papers

Metaphors of AI in Higher Education – Discourses, Histories and Practices: Call for Papers. If you have ideas and want to talk them through, happy to do that.

Contrarian Views?

There have been an increasing number of calls for the development and enactment of “AI Literacy” and this almost always includes a focus on the ethics of AI. Punya Mishra questions that assumption.

Bloom’s Two Sigma from the 1980’s is pretty well embedded as a given and often cited to support arguments in education. Just how valid and reliable is the research and has it been repeatable? This article takes a look.

Both of these are shared in the spirit of being “critical” and questioning assumptions.

Where Good Ideas Come From?

This is not so new, but rather it is only recently that I made a connection. One of the Substacks that I read is by Steven Johnson. He is also one of the main people working at Google and behind their NotebookLM project.

What I had not connected is that this is the same Steven Johnson who wrote “How We Got to Now” and also “Where Good Ideas Come From“. Both of these I had read some years ago but I just had not made the connection that it was the same guy.

This led me to revisit “Where Good Ideas Come From” because I think there are some interesting insights in that book, some of which have also been built upon by others. For example, he writes a whole chapter on the The Adjacent Possible and another on Liquid Networks. Some of you will no doubt recall that Jon Dron also writes and speaks about the Adjacent Possible and the role of Path Dependencies, in his papers, books and presentations. I also think that my own thinking about a Liquid Curriculum and also Networked Knowledge is influenced by Johnson’s writing in this book, although I was not seeing the source of my own ideas.

If you do not have time for the book or just prefer video then here are some resources:

This 4 minute video focusses on The Slow Hunch and the importance of Connectivity.

This is 17 minute Ted Talk Video, provides greater detail.

Although these are more than a decade old, I think they might be useful. To bring this right up to date, this Sept 2024 article from Verge picks up the story with NotebookLM and how he envisions a Chatbot as a teacher! Now no matter what you or I think of that and your natural objections, we have to engage with these narratives.

Punya Mishra (of TPACK fame and many articles and books) – does not agree and explains Why ChatGPT Isn’t Your Next Teacher.

Writing Speculative Fiction

“Jon knew that almost all of the work being submitted by students had in fact been produced by some sort of AI or other. If not the whole thing, then at least it had been co-written with natural language processing assistance.”

In late 2022 the journal Postdigital Science and Education issued a call for short stories and vignettes in the form of speculative fiction that look at education in the postdigital era.

I took the opportunity to write a short piece and was delighted that it was accepted. I was also really impressed with the editors and the amount of support and help provided with this journal.

Click!

Student Henri Kase sighed as she hit the ‘Submit’ button on the university’s Next Generation Leaning Management System (NGLMS). What a farce, she thought to herself. At least the new GPT-15 natural language processor meant that she did not have to waste too much time on these stupid and ultimately meaningless tasks. When will the education system finally wake up to the world in 2035? Who had the time to possibly read all those boring old eBooks and papers? Why read them anyway when a personal AI could give a neat summary of all the key points?

Henri stretched her back and neck, reaching for her VR headset so that she could get back to the CryptoSouk™ and start trading again. That was, after all, the activity that paid for her university fees and living expenses.
Curcher, M. The Pseudo Uni. Postdigit Sci Educ (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-022-00384-3

To continue reading click here.

Having never written in this style before, it was an interesting experience and on I am tempted to explore again. I got the timeline completely wrong, when I drafted the first version ChatGPT had not been launched and I was looking more than 10 years into the future. It now seems as if this is about coming year.

This was written based on my experiences of trying the GPT-3 playground and was written before ChatGPT was launched and then really took off. The mainstream media and education seems to be in something of a frenzy over this, for understandable reasons.

I have been thinking of writing some posts about the impact of ChatGPT and other LLM technologies on education, but already there is probably a surplus of writing on this topic, with everyone and her dog having sort sort of “hot take” on what this might mean for education. For sure we do need to be talking seriously about this and at the same time we want to avoid making badly informed and poorly thought through knee jerk decisions. We teach in interesting times!

Also be sure to check out the many other excellent submissions to this call, including The Levity Bureau by my good friend Chris Smith.

Futures, Trends and Innovations in Education -First Thoughts

I started writing this post several weeks ago, but the pressure of work meant that it did not get completed and published until now.

I recently started co-teaching an MBA course called Emerging Trends and Innovation in Education which has led to me reflecting on education and its relationship with time. It strikes me that the future is part of the raison d’être of education, for without a future of some kind there would seem to me to be little point to education. I think this holds true whether you define education and its purpose more broadly or you use a more narrowly defined characterisation that focuses on formal schooling. One aspect of the pandemic has been that it has made visible the many important functions and roles that teachers and formal schooling play in society. In my view is that this is a good thing for parents, employers and politicians to appreciate that the role of teachers and schools is not limited to the delivery of a curriculum.

Although there are those who lobby for tradition and the “maintenance of standards”, often harping back to some imagined golden age when things were better, it is still their desire to transmit this golden past into the future. So although backward looking, the overall aim is recreate this ‘glorious past’ in the future.

As I am often stating, the question then arises of whether we see the role of education as that of maintaining the status quo, of continuing the world as it now exists or, if the objective is to change the world in some way. If it is the latter, then a wider debate emerges of what that change looks like. It is for this reason that I often become frustrated with those who simply call to improve education and make it better. Better for whom and it what ways? Improve how and for what ends? Without clarity these are just empty platitudes. This is also one of the reasons why I believe that education is always political, not in a party political way, but in terms of whether the objective is stability or change and if change, then what type of change.

Postcard by French commercial artist Jean-Marc Côté in 1899 to commemorate the 1900 world’s fair, “Exposition Universelle,” in Paris. This is his vision of education in the year 2000. The postcards were later published in a book with Isaac Asimov in 1986.

Education has a long history of trying to predict the future and I have no doubt this will continue. As I write this post there are countless projects trying to predict what “post pandemic” education, schools and universities will look like, all with various interest groups vying to push their own agendas. Therefore educational leaders and teachers need to be aware and mindful of of those who are trying to create these futures and frame the narrative. This does not mean we should resist all change or be cynical, but it does mean engaging critically in the debate.

My clone, who lives in the cloud.

I have a clone and it lives in the cloud. Many people have such a clone.

Scene 1.

I climb aboard the bus and swipe my bus pass. It bleeps and the green glow of the circular light confirms I can board. It’s 15:56 at Tenniskeskus, bus stop number 5043. In a database somewhere in the cloud the link is made between me, my journey, my address, my payment details and contact information. Here are all the details of my travel by public transport. In my pocket the GPS of my phone and the mobile phone masts confirm the same journey.

Scene 2.

I am at the checkout of Prisma (a large supermarket chain, like Tesco’s or Walmart). Each item scanned and totalled, the frequent customer card swiped and the data detailing what I have purchased, when and where is captured and in a database somewhere this logged and connected to my profile and payment details.

Scene 3.

I am on the internet using social media to stay in contact with friends and family. As I scroll through my stream, neatly configured by my previous use so as to try to ensure my addiction and engagement, by a ‘blackboxed’ algorithm. I slow to read a post, the cookies note that I slow and read, that I liked, or expressed some other emotional reaction. Perhaps I comment or post a gif. Captured. To the cloud. Logged. Tracked.

Scene 4.

A friend emails me on Gmail and I reply, we discuss health and world affairs and family matters. The algorithms scan the mail, looking for the key words so as to build and develop the huge library of data being stored. Sold to advertisers, part of the surveillance economy and the data exhaust of the ‘free’ use of these technologies.

Scene 5.

My writing for work is co-authored on Google Docs, collected and stored, then, when submitted and posted to databases, further logged and collected. Details of who reads it, where they are located, captured and noted.

Scene 6.

Images of me are tagged by friends and family and attached to my profiles for work, bureaucratic and social purposes. Facial recognition software recognises me. Someone starts a meme posting photos with a ten-year age gap, so that the machine can learn how we change as we age. Another friend does a quiz of social media to see what kind of dog they would be and the fact that they are my friend is collected and stored along with so much else.

I could go on and on, but the point is made. There exists this huge, almost unimaginable set of data points about us, our choices, our behaviours and opinions. What we read, what we borrow from the library, who we connect with, our friends and family. Our smart TV captures what we watch and when. What we write and post and how we react. Everything we have ever searched for on Google – think about that! That data might know me better than I know myself – or want to know and admit to myself.

Some of this data is already connected and aggregated. As a thought experiment, imagine if it were fully and seamlessly integrated. That the data was then plugged into bots and tools that would continue to post, comment, email, write and teach my online classes. Using machine learning and AI to replicate my style, my ticks and errors, my humour and cynicism. To generate “uncanny valley” pictures of me, perhaps doing new things, in new places with people I have never met, or perhaps even ones with people who do not actually exist in the real world. How long would it be able to fool people? It could even virtually duplicate journeys I did not actually make. It could post and reply to WhatsApp and text messages.

For everyone except those who see me face to face, my data clone would, I believe, pass the Turing test pretty well. My data clone lives in the cloud and knows so much more about me than I can remember about myself and about my life. Details of key dates and anniversaries and so much more. Can you recall in detail what you bought at the store on February 23^rd, 2018 at 16:43? It is there, the data is there, logged and tracked.

A clone who lives in the cloud, a ghost in the machine? I am not the first to consider these ideas. There is a science fiction podcast called LifeAfter that consideres how a digitally created loved one might serve as a comfort for the bereaved. There have also been those who seek to deliberately create the quantified self, but I think most have us have created clones without being aware that we were doing it.

I wonder how my clone is today, is it well, did it log and record this post and add it to the datafile? Was it me that wrote this, or my clone?