Things I was Wrong About Pt3 – The democratisation of social media
(Remember FriendFeed?)| The Ed Techie
(Remember FriendFeed?)| The Ed Techie
wrongness | blog.edtechie.net
Weblogs | blog.edtechie.net
I did a short blog series a while back, about things I was wrong about. One of these, inevitably, was the democratisation of social media. I won’t rehash the reasons why I was wrong about it, but it came to mind again last week during an excellent talk by Bonnie Stewart on Reclaim TV. Bonnie set out her blogging journey, and how it played into her PhD and recent work at UHI.| The Ed Techie
Asides, Music | blog.edtechie.net
Many of you will have seen the Microsoft research that was circulated online, listing vocations that were most and least vulnerable to AI. I read the paper, and to be fair, it has a proper methodology, it’s not just some opinion based metric. The researchers generated a score based on whether people in a particular occupation used AI, and how widely. They state: “The score captures whether AI is being used (with sufficient activity share) for the work activities of an occupation and wheth...| The Ed Techie
Film, horror, politics | blog.edtechie.net
July has been one of my busiest ‘academic workload’ months since leaving the OU, being the examiner for two PhDs, a Professorial promotion case and completing my reports as external examiner at Warwick. It’s good to occasionally flex the academic brain muscle still. And yes, I have to confess, I have been enjoying the comedy around the Warwick “Beyond” rebrand. It has become a byword in our house already, for any pretentious but ultimately meaningless marketing twaddle. In other new...| The Ed Techie
I’ve read a couple fo books recently that have had me pondering about some aspects of the current political climate and in particular the sheer relish in cruelty that we see from some of the Maga or Reform crowd. The first book was Scott Poole’s Wasteland: The Great War and the Origins of Modern Horror. He traces the impact of the First World War and how it shaped the early horror output, especially the burgeoning film industry. He argues that films such as 1924’s Nosferatu are direct r...| The Ed Techie
AI, Writing | blog.edtechie.net
There’s a dual interpretation of the title in this post. First, I’ve been using my own writing as a tool to understand what AI can and can’t do. It provides a useful medium for doing this as I have a lot of it, and it’s something I’m deeply familiar with so I can gauge the quality of the output. I tried feeding a couple of writers tools, including Sudowrite and Novel.AI as well as Claude and Gemini with both my academic text (Metaphors of Ed Tech) and fiction writing (my in progress...| The Ed Techie
As part of Reclaim Hosting’s “On Writing” series, I had a chat with Jim Groom about my 20 years of blogging. You can see the recording here. Kudos to Jim for this series by the way, it’s fascinating to hear people like Kate Bowles talk about the role that writing plays in her life. In preparation for the chat, I tried to impose a series of phases on my blogging life. You can always slice these things different ways, but here is the one I came up with, which we talk about in the video:...| The Ed Techie
(Happy 50th anniversary to the best film ever made) One year on from leaving the OU has seen my busiest work month since I left. On one day I had three meetings. Three! I needed to have a lie down afterwards. I was part of the panel assessing applications for GO-GN’s Pilot Hubs. It’s great to see GO-GN continuing to expand and develop and the idea of regional hubs is one we had mooted for a long time, so congrats to the team on getting funding for these. I also had my annual award board a...| The Ed Techie
A couple of weeks ago I was invited to the UN as part of a group of experts considering a proposal to develop a UN online university in STEM for Least Developed Countries (LDCs). I’m not sure how I got invited, and I didn’t attend physically, because, well, because it meant travelling to the US (an aside, I’m not sure the UN can continue to function with it’s HQ in New York, even if it is notionally sited on it’s own territory). This is a non-commercial venture, with the collaborati...| The Ed Techie
I left the OU a year ago, so have been reflecting on how that year has gone. Because I’ve been missing writing all those monthly, annual, random, reports, here is my Annual Report to be submitted to the funding council (ie me). With tongue a bit in cheek, I’ve adapted the format from an annual report that I used to prepare for a research funder for Post-OU Martin Inc. Key Metrics Outcome Indicator Target Progress to Target Comments Novel Words writtenNovels published 70,000 words1 novel p...| The Ed Techie
Some of you will have seen how at least one author has been caught accidentally leaving AI prompts within the finished text of their book, and also how a suggested summer reading list in the Chicago Sun-Times contained AI hallucinations for books that don’t exist. There was, rightly, an outcry against this laziness, and a sense of being cheated (also, does no-one do any editing anymore?). But beyond these obvious, egregious examples, I find the question of artistic integrity (and related, a...| The Ed Techie
Clip art used to require specialist access and skills. It was literally clipped stock art, that could be used in creating physical paste-ups which would be photographed to create ads (I remember a friend of mine who worked in graphic design in the 80s having widely admired scalpel skills for cutting out images). Then in the late 80s it became almost entirely digital with desktop publishing, but this was still largely the domain of professionals. It was with the advent of the Microsoft product...| The Ed Techie
AI, Writing | blog.edtechie.net
higher ed, post-OU | blog.edtechie.net
AI, analogue | blog.edtechie.net
I’ve seen a few stories recently about how people (often men) are sort of disappearing into AI blackholes. Whether it’s being convinced you are a spiritual leader, hunted by the CIA, unhealthy sexual fantasies, or generally reinforcing self-beliefs it’s hard to see how this is going to stop. As humans we’re programmed to anthropomorphise, we see Jesus’s face in toast for goodness sake, so even when you know it’s not real, it’s pretty hard to resist the emotional response that ...| The Ed Techie
There’s a bit of a mini-rant following but before we get to my ejection of the toys from the pram, I want to set out a general principle. If you want to know what people really value then follow what they do with the small scale stuff. All of those Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who want to disrupt school, or recommend dropping out of college? Watch where they send their kids to be educated. It’ll probably be some Montessori type institution with lots of face to face interaction, and then i...| The Ed Techie
This piece by Beth Singler argues that much of the language of Artificial Intelligence has religious connotations. Audrey Watters also writes about myths and faith in Silicon Valley and ed tech. These pieces chimed with some thoughts I’d been having about how ed tech futures are pitched. There are some resonances with religious beliefs regarding cataclysm, and salvation I feel. This is not to criticise anyone’s religious beliefs, I should stress, but rather to offer some insight into the ...| The Ed Techie
AI, edtech, MOOC | blog.edtechie.net
It is Mental Health Awareness week this week, and this year they have the theme of community. As the Mental Health Foundation states:| The Ed Techie
I’ve been at something of a blogging impasse recently, stymied by my own self-censorship. I was going to say something about the new AI start-up Matter and Space and in particular what I perceived as a bit of white saviour complex in their promo, but a) Audrey digged deeper than I would and b) it’s not really my place to comment on it. After turning down a prestigious invite to the UN recently (because of travelling to the US), I also wanted to say something about the difficulty of hostin...| The Ed Techie
When I was planning to leave the OU, I began planning lots of mini-projects for myself. This was driven partly by an anxiety that without the structure of work I’d find myself watching Facebook reels for hours, or rearranging my sock drawer on a daily basis. As I don’t play golf m(and have no desire to do so, or own a motorbike, I needed to fill the time I reasoned. But I quickly found myself with a list of twenty or so activities I wanted to undertake, from becoming a coffee nerd to star...| The Ed Techie
I took part in a Reclaim Hosting session as part of the blogging community yesterday. Maren ran the session on How to Get Your Blogging Mojo Back and Lee Skallerup Bessette gave a fascinating talk on her blogging history. One topic she raised was a thorny one that many of us have wrestled with in the blogging area. And that is, whether to have specialised blogs or an all-encompassing one. Lee talked about how she had established different blogs for swimming, knitting as well as ed tech. Jim G...| The Ed Techie
For my upcoming keynote at the Education after the algorithm: Co-designing critical and creative futures symposium in Dublin, I am exploring metaphors relating to ecosystems and AI. I’ll blog the whole talk after the event, but one of those metaphors I am using is the introduction of the European rabbit to Australia.| The Ed Techie
After 3 long years, January has finally ended. On the personal front it’s been going well. Now that I don’t have as many meetings, I decided to shift the ‘vibe’ of my room from ‘home office’ to ‘vinyl lounge’. This involved the inevitable trip to Ikea, and purchase of the favourite of vinyl collectors, the Kallax unit. It’s interesting to note the manner in which the change in the physical set-up alters your behaviour. We used to have our records split across three rooms, bu...| The Ed Techie
We went to the coast for a week over Christmas, and had an unexpectedly sunny day on Boxing Day, the drinks in the picture above were outside a pub in Tresaith.| The Ed Techie
In one of our dog walking chats, Maren and I were talking about AI (I know, I know), and she was saying she didn’t really see the benefit of it in most circumstances. I was trying to be the AI pragmatist and responded that “it’s good for summarising documents”. To which Maren replied “but I don’t want that, I want to read the thing”. And Audrey has made a similar point in her newsletter pointing out that the summarised version of knowledge is “more efficient, to be sure. It’...| The Ed Techie
As the great Xodus to BlueSky gathered pace over the past fortnight it was fun (ie, not fun at all) to see the entirely predictable “it’ll just be an echo chamber in BlueSky” pieces. Because they are attempting to legitimately monitor content lots of trolls feel hard done by. “Come back” they say “the racists and misogynists just want to chat”. Before all the Mastodon gang pile in, I want to stress that this isn’t necessarily a pro-BlueSky piece, more an anti-X one. I’ve see...| The Ed Techie
I’ve read a few historical science books recently, The Radium Girls, and The Chemical Age amongst them. One common factor when detailing the dangers of chemicals is the manner in which they were treated as a miracle cure, wonder drug, panacea for all ills. You shake your head in wonder at accounts of people drinking “radium water” to improve their health, or states deploying DDT with wild abandon. In all of these cases, initial positive results in some areas were extrapolated to be a cu...| The Ed Techie
(I’ve been going through some old photos – I’m the little blond one in the above, where it appears that I grew up in the 1930s)| The Ed Techie
Because I was too busy indulging in self-pity in my last post I forgot to blog about Udacity being acquired by Accenture to build a platform to take advantage of AI, blah, blah. Audrey Watters taking a rare foray back into ed tech to say “I told you so” reminded me to blog something. Audrey says it better, but that’s never stopped me before… There are lots of takeaways from this tale. Here are some that occur to me:| The Ed Techie
I’ve been reading some interesting takes on horror recently: the meta-fiction of Native American author Stephen Graham-Jones; the influential feminist analysis of horror exploitation movies Men, Women and Chainsaws by Carol Clover; a personal account of the importance of horror in Kris Rose’s Final Girl: How Horror Movies Made Me a Better Feminist; and The Black Guy Dies First, Robin Means Coleman’s analysis of black representation in horror. And it got me thinking about analogies to ed...| The Ed Techie
I expect we’ll see a lot of these types of posts so I apologise in advance for bandwagon jumping. For those outside the UK, there has been a recent TV drama, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which has dramatised the Post Office scandal, where hundreds of sub postmasters were falsely accused (and convicted) of fraud because of a faulty accounting system that was rolled out in the 00s. The TV series has caused fresh outcry, actions and recriminations, and is probably one of the most important dra...| The Ed Techie
