Learning With Ben

My favourite sentence from Asimov’s “The Fun They Had.” Looks like kids will still be mean to each other in the future.

As for what I think teaching will look like in 2050, well, that’s really not that far away and will depend heavily on politics. Predicting the future is in large part predicting what people collectively will want. I expect that alongside our desire for novelty, people will continue to desire familiarity and a sense of stability, and this should slow change, despite what might be possible (and in many ways attractive) technologically.

But it could look quite like “The Fun They Had”—kids working with individualized AI tutors. I suppose it’s likely there will still be some kind of daytime learning congregation for kids—in part because parents may still want their kids out of the way, and in part because kids do like being around other kids. But we could easily see more group-homeschool hybrid situations—where parents take turns teaching and supervising a small group of kids, in a more flexible, versatile mini-school, perhaps without a single dedicated location. I bet we will.

In schools generally, classes will continue to rely ever more heavily on pre-packaged YouTube-style educational videos, and teachers will largely revert to what they’ve always been at a fundamental level: babysitters.

At the same time there will be a small sub-culture of screen rejection. We’ll have another back-to-the-woods historical moment where families are unplugging to go live in caves and trees. Sort of a hunter-gatherer revival. That’ll be fun.

My one longstanding that’ll-be-the-day technology idea is for computers (or whatever “devices” are popular) to have smell reproduction capabilities, much like they now include instant image and sound reproduction from anywhere in the world. So I can smell the meal my brother’s having in Thailand, besides seeing it and talking with him. That really will be the day.

On the day of this class I took bullet-point notes on it for help when later writing my reflection. Unfortunately, more urgent assignments took up my next few days, and now that I’m finally writing this, more than a week later, I cannot locate said notes. Darn.

But I can reflect on what I remember. Tracy and Kaori spoke, but really mostly Tracy. There is no ad hominem here, but just in terms of sitting-through-a-lecture experience, this was really quite bad. Again, nothing against Tracy as a person, and this may really not have been her day, but it required voluntary effort from me to try to follow what she was saying and look around for something interesting in it. There was zero in how she was saying what she was saying to draw one in at all.

She did say a few somewhat interesting things though. Personal anecdotes are always interesting because they’re stories, and, being human, I like stories. Now I can’t say I remember any of these particular stories (I don’t); I just remember that they stood out over the rest of the content.

Well, the rest of the content with one exception. At one point, rather early on, she referred (unfavourably, of course) to colonialism, and followed up with the statement, “…and education is a colonial project.” Now, this is a shocking statement to hear from a specifically platformed adult in a university education program. It was clear from her tone that she didn’t like colonialism, and rather thought it evil. So whatever she was trying to say about education cannot possibly have been positive, and it sure sounded a lot like she was letting us know that education (just by the way) is an evil project—something specifically bad.

I, for one, do not know what to do with such a statement. It could make sense as an incitement to rebellion, but, why would a university want me to rebel against…education—a university’s sole reason for existing? Is UVic asking its own students to burn it down? Or at least to leave and stop giving it our (and other people’s) money? What’s the end game here? Or maybe I’ve accidentally found myself in a rebellious cell within this educational institution—one that’s trying to bring it down from the inside: it’s called the faculty of…education…and it’s tasked with…educating people in such a way as to prepare and qualify them to work as…educators in the field of…education (melting face emoji).

Or maybe our professor Michael is acting alone and in such a way as to keep his own hands clean—by bringing in someone else who’ll say the very subversive things he dares not say himself. Or, perhaps…he was as shocked as me to hear Tracy denounce education in this way, and, like me, didn’t quite know what to do with it.

I want to write it off as just a very stupid thing that was said. Sometimes people say very stupid things. I certainly have. The troublesome thing is the speaker really seemed to intend to say just what she said, and I have heard similar such bewildering statements a few times before. By the look of it, Kaori seemed to be on board with it. And it makes me wonder if our professor was too, and if so, who else? All my peers? Did they all take this in as wisdom? Has everyone around me grown inured to sanctimony? Or are we all just privately filing such things away as contextually nonsensical statements we must steel ourselves to endure so long as faculties of education hold a monopoly on teacher accreditation?

I wonder.

Chat GPT.

…And other AI things, but watching Chat GPT create a country song in real time was trippy. And kind of a downer. AI art too, and writing… I felt this inner deflation while watching it go. Like, what’s the point anymore? Nothing matters. My skills don’t matter. My pride in doing things myself without cutting corners is not worth anything in this new world. Raw human effort is basically obsolete.

Of course that only applies (so far) in the realm of work-y things. I still get to do and get better at forming relationships, interacting with humans, playing, thinking, experiencing.

And I can keep ignoring AI developments (as I mostly have been) for a little while longer. Live in this soon-to-be-bygone blissful state of imagined self-determination and potential productive power.

As for the discussion around AI-related ethics, I have some sense that it too just doesn’t matter. Some artist goes to court to defend their imagined “rights”? Some entitled Hollywood writers going on strike? Who cares? THE usefulness of AI is not in working within systems; it’s in generating work-arounds. If my computer is writing better stories than some kid whose dream was to work in the television landscape of yesteryear, what do I care? I (the consumer) will sit in front of my screen and be entertained in the most efficient way available to me. If millions of healthy males are already trading in the messy business of real-life sexual intercourse for an ever-expanding world of online pornography (as they are), then who is going to get them to care about artists’ “rights”?

The genie’s out of the bottle. Hold on to your jobs for a few more years, people, but don’t imagine you’re doing anything other than ever-so-slightly delaying the inevitable. You’re rearranging the deck chairs, sure—more power to you!—but the ship’s going down.

OK, so I asked Chat GPT to rewrite the above text (my own) better. And what it came up with was worse. I continued giving it prompts like “it’s for a personal blog,” “too wordy,” “less formal,” “try again,” “ok, just a tad less goofy,” and “one more time,” but still, it was…just not as good.

So for now I’m still better (at being me) than the robots. Of course, I haven’t tried version 4 of Chat, which could be way better. But let’s not go there. Maybe ever?

This was a fun class! And a useful one. It was also disappointing though, because I met with some time-consuming struggles in Powerpoint that prevented me from contributing to the gallery walk. I had just never used the program before and even getting a text box to behave normally and not wig out on me was surprisingly difficult.

But it’s clearly a useful and versatile tool that I’d like to get good at using. It would just obviously be very useful for teaching. Worksheet creation? Brilliant. And as Michael suggested, when I get comfortable with it I can really consider a new Powerpoint project as a blank canvas on which to paint.

Speaking of which, when I was growing up in the 90s, my family had a computer. It ran on DOS with all the now-super-retro startup noises. There was really no internet to speak of. The computer had solitaire on it—I spent hours on that. And it had an MS Paint program better than anything I’ve seen since. Intuitive. Uncluttered. Versatile. I spent days making beautiful images on that thing. No other program I’ve used since has been nearly as immediately fun to use. And, it came with the computer. It was basic. I had it and mastered it way before the internet. Since buying my first personal computer in 2011—a MacBook Pro—it has always struck me as tragic, absurd, perverse that no comparable program comes with all modern computers. That’s my little rant about digital art.

It was interesting to consider the difference between pixel-based and vector-based images though—I’d never thought about that before but it immediately made sense to me.

Also it was nice to get a few practical pointers, like exporting Powerpoint projects as PNG files (a good filetype for images), and how to export just a slice from a project (select, right-click, save as picture).

Oh and the gallery walk was hilarious, delightful, and actually inspiring.

We went outside this week! Outside is nice. Experiences in link-to-practice (in-a-real-elementary-school time) reminding me of what it felt like to be a student in school are now blending with my inner experience in this week’s tech class. This reflection will be the result of that.

Schools are strange things. One thing that seems strange about them is the corralling of so many bodies into such confined, indoor spaces. I worked for years in outdoor education (at summer camps and an outdoor centre) and we would bring everyone inside for meals, and that’s about it. On rainy days we’d be in and out, but still mostly out—and not so much because of how being outside meets some arbitrary measure of goodness by contributing towards some arbitrary measure of well-being, but rather because being inside for too long with a large group is tangibly unpleasant. It’s loud and it’s smelly and every individuals’ quirks grate harder on everyone else. This is painfully obvious in classrooms. People want space around them. Not that they don’t want the ability to be close and congregate—they certainly do. But they don’t want to be confined—forced into close interactions for long periods of time everyday. Why does a long road trip in a packed van sound uncomfortable? Whose dream is to be stuck in a submarine that only surfaces twice a week? These are obviously confining situations that hopefully enable people to see the principle I’m talking about. School can so, so easily feel like jail.

So when Kirsten (or anyone) touches on the importance of connection to “the environment” or to “place”—outdoor, non-manufactured environments generally or in the immediate surround—and wonders about and discusses ways to connect with it through technology, it’s a bit of a head-spinner for me. Like a strange, cart-before-the-horse type of question. Kids should be outside. Just put them outside. Live with them, largely outside, and if you earn the right to be seen as something of an elder—someone worthy of harnessing their attention—they will want to know what you know. If you know specific facts about the land, they will take an interest in that through the natural processes of admiration and curiosity. If you have specific ways of learning more than you ever could from just face-to-face conversations and hands-on experience—like, say, you Google stuff—they’ll want to know how to Google stuff. Kids will learn from whomever they look up to.

But as for fostering “connection to place,” that is no mystery. They will connect to the place where they are happiest. If that’s outside, in a particular physical landscape, then that’s where it’ll be. If it’s in a virtual space, then that’s where it’ll be. But don’t be inside a class wondering how to connect kids to stuff outside. Do three things:

• Build yourself into a life-model for kids
• Give kids unconditional love (connecting them to both you & happiness)
• Be outside with them

If, somewhere in there, you want to introduce them to some app or other, you can do that. Just don’t imagine that that will generate meaningful connection to the land.