Archives for May 2023

Prompts are getting a lot of attention at the moment, thanks to the AI boom. It seems worth noting, though, that prompts are a venerable old technology. They are good for real life too.

The practice of prompting is a handy lens through which to think about all sorts of common interactions—in principle, it has to do with providing some sort of stimulus in order to provoke a response. It seems useful to think about prompts as ways to test ideas; as little experiments.

An interpretation of a stimulus (the prompt) can be expressed in multiple ways, through multiple possibly legitimate responses. The testing of interpretations, and the expressions of responses associated with these, is very, very helpful for learning.

This post was retrieved from a past blog (and lightly edited in the process).

The thesis in the title of this post occurred while I was reading Cal Newport’s A World Without Email, which makes a great case for the problems posed by email technology in knowledge-work contexts.

Toward the end of the book Cal (citing Neil Postman) makes the argument that technological change is not additive but ecological. The quote is this (as transcribed from the Audible version):

Technological change is not additive, it is ecological. A new medium does not add something, it changes everything. In the year 1500 after the printing press was invented you did not have ‘old Europe plus the printing press’, you had a different Europe.

My line of thinking is this: To what extent does this kind of observation hold true for education? Or perhaps, rather than education, situations where the changing technology is the human body and/or human knowledge?

Thinking back on time recently spent with Dewey’s ideas, I’m inclined to think that an ecological take on learning (as per the use of ecological above) is a fairly reasonable proposition. In this vein, a useful topic to review in the future might be the distinction between concepts of learning and change.

Thinking about education (and learning, and change) as ecological rather than additive has interesting implication for educational design. Riffing off of Dewey, how might seeing sequential educational experiences as ecological rather than additive shift our approach to structuring those experiences?

With AI having its moment, I’ve been thinking about the value of individuality. Chatbots are now clearly exhibiting personalities of a sort—they are, for example, capable of quipping (or at least, generating something that we might perceive as a quip).

One of the curious things that might happen as the AI becomes more personable is that it becomes in some ways and not in others. How does its personality hold together, relative to its knowledge? One of the most interesting aspects of this is that the more personable an intelligence becomes, so too the less omniscient—the bots can’t yet deliver all possible responses to a prompt at once (because there are infinite possible responses). To deliver something in language is to choose one option from many possibly legitimate (or illegitimate!) choices.

This little essay has been languishing on my hard drive for a while; this seems like a better place to store it. A quick reminder too that I only send out one post via email each week, in a bid to avoid clogging anyone’s inbox—six additional posts from the week can be found here.

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I have been trying out a guiding maxim: Work with others whenever possible, especially when collaborations come about organically. This started as a loose research strategy, after I had had a gut full of solo work finishing my PhD—I missed being around people; especially the interested-chatting aspect. By organic I mean that feeling you get when you realise you’ve been chatting for three hours about some issue and you’re already looking forward to the next such conversation—usually these kinds of meetings lead to some mutual sentiment of ‘we should talk again’, and eventually, ‘we better write one of this down!’ 

I’m reminded of Neil Gaiman’s quoting of George R. R. Martin’s (who may have quoted someone else) impression of writers as falling into two camps: architects and gardeners. Allowing for the moment that writing and research have enough in common for the analogy to hold, I think it is reasonable to argue that lot of research is akin to architecture; things are, in general and for good reason, carefully designed—when some unforeseen issue disturbs the plan an alternative is engineered. This analogy can extend into other parts of research as well though, and I am pointing here mainly to the composition of research teams. In this respect, the architectural approach is one involving a clear division of roles and, often, some sort of hierarchy (e.g. project leaders, collaborating researchers, assistants). The reasons for this social structuring seem closely intwined with the broader context of research activity, and in particular, its institutional nature. 

I have found that I prefer the gardening approach. The kinds of collaborations I’m talking about here are not generally the product of fixed infrastructure, in the sense of committed grant monies or other formal schemes that set up guide rails around the project (including stipulations about its outcomes).

It is worth noting that architecture and gardening are heuristic concepts. I’ve identified the distinction because it has seemed useful in my own thinking, not because one is more objectively useful than the other. A point worth noting is that these approaches don’t really exist in the dichotomous ways I’ve alluded to—the gardeners have to architectural sometimes (especially if they want to be published), and vice versa.

My reasons for preferring the gardening approach include some of the following. First, I fundamentally enjoy and get motivation from working with others. Second, my own knowledge is far extended when I collaborate with somebody who has knowledge of things that I don’t. Third, the results take me into areas I might never have explored on my own, and generate problem conceptualisations that I might never have stumbled upon. 

I can imagine some well-founded critiques that might be levelled at this kind of philosophy. One concern might be for the legitimacy of the problems themselves—this approach involves a mutual exploration of ‘interesting stuff’, usually leading to the sentiment of ‘we should write about this!’ The ensuing writing project often serves as an anchor point for research. This means that problems are generated on the basis of the researchers’ extant knowledges, rather than through traditionally experimental means. I don’t think this is particularly controversial, given that the collaborators often hold scholarly expertise certified through PhD awards, but it does mean that the problems that surface as candidates for exploration aren’t really generated in an analytical way (at least initially). 

If we wanted to be particularly knowledg-ey about it we could think of the personal approach (that is, gardening) as some sort of epistemic experiment. These collaborations usually deal in some respect with things that have a relatively objective existence out there in the world. This, it seems to me, the main difference between research collaboration as I’m attempting to understand it here, and the more colloquial activity of hanging out. 

 The process is first and foremost dialogic. Sitting and talking a lot from a place of intrinsic motivation is a core part of the process. Over time, this seems to produce a very different kind of artefact to the architectural approach; it isn’t really clear at the end who wrote which bit, and most of the work is done synchronously, in real time, together. In fact, synchronous communication seems particularly important to the business of actually ‘doing’ the research. This can be exhausting at times (I have twice recently partaken in Zoom sessions lasting more than 7 hours), but it is rarely boring, and seems to lead pretty consistently to a flow state.  Cycles of synchronous discussion complemented with periods of marination seem mutually compatible.

I have a number of questions about the process that I don’t fully understand. Is there an ideal number of collaborators? Most of my work to date has involved duets or trios. In line with the gardening metaphor, is this kind of work seasonal? Just as agriculture is generally not an immediate-reward proposition, it seems like a long-term approach to production of work; quick turnarounds of work are not usually possible, or perhaps even desirable. How many projects can be logically balanced at one time? My calendar includes appointments stretching months into the future, and setting the next meeting has become a practice in and of itself. There seems to be some benefit to having multiple projects unfolding slowly over time, in the sense that this process affords some time for the epistemic soup to simmer, and sometimes interesting threads materialise between projects.

Authenticity is a very popular term at the moment; to the point that it sometimes provokes an academic eye-roll.

In art, we sometimes use it to describe a sense of realness in our experience of making or perceiving a piece of work. In education, the dominant use at the moment has to do with the way in which the tasks we set our students prompt responses that are more or less in line with the types of things they will encounter outside the classroom.

Because authenticity is an abstract term it cannot have a single essential definition—it always requires some interpretation for it to be meaningful, especially in a practical sense. This is worth pointing out, because our options not only include working backwards to deduce its historical meanings, but also to propose useful interpretations that differ in some respects from what has come before.

This seems applicable to other inherently abstract concepts as well (e.g. knowledge, wellbeing).

This post owes some of its thinking to conversation with James Pawelski.