OLnet academic & fellow blogs

(With Maren Deepwell and Tom Farrelly at the Education After the Algorithm seminar at DCU)

As I mentioned in a couple of posts, I gave a keynote in Dublin this month. I was also the examiner on an excellent PhD about the impact of the VLE on mental wellbeing. So, I’ve been keeping my academic hand in.

It’s an odd time to be an academic. Mind you, it’s an odd time to be anyone. Part of what you do as an academic is attempt to find the truth. I’m aware that often there is not one single truth, and conclusions can vary depending on context, but in general, research, writing, teaching is a pursuit of knowledge, and knowledge relies on some notion of truth being valuable. Amongst the many other casualties occurring (both real and metaphorical) this notion of truth being meaningful is one that I find very undermining. Even liars generally accept the notion that the truth is powerful, it’s the very fact that people value the truth that gives lies meaning. But what we’re witnessing with Trump and Musk and the mucus band surrounding them is the dismissal of truth even mattering. They say something outlandish, people respond to it, and point out that what they said is not in fact true, and they just shrug and move on. You might as well say “that doesn’t rhyme with orange” as “that isn’t true and here is the evidence”. It simply isn’t relevant whether it’s true or not. And when that is the case, we don’t have the tools to respond, our behaviours are based on people agreeing that truth matters, even if we disagree with what that might be.

Books

I’ve spoken to two other people who happened to be reading the same boom as me this month, which was Laurence Rees’s The Nazi Mind; 12 Warnings From History. Hmm, I wonder why that would be. Rees’s book on the Holocaust was an authoritative and accessible account, and in this book he pulls together accounts of victims and perpetrators with elements of psychology to provide the 12 warnings. I know it’s an over-used analogy, but to say there are parallels in the US right now is no stretch – it is very clear and obvious.

Away from all that stuff, I have a theory that you could create an engaging social history course through the medium of music biographies. These so often get at social attitudes, technological and media developments and significant cultural moments. To that end I read autobiographies from Thomas Dolby and Chris Blackwell. While not necessarily the best books, they do provide a slice through all sorts of social change. The best music book I’ve read in a while is James Kaplan’s 3 Shades of Blue, which recounts the lives of Miles Davis, John Coltrane and Bill Evans leading up to, and after, the recording of Kind of Blue. It provides an intelligent analysis of the how that album fits into jazz history and styles also.

Vinyl

One of my favourite current bands, The Delines, released a new album this month. They capture perfect noir slices of life on the fringes in America, cut through with pathos and subtle observation.

Apart from that, as I mentioned in my last post, I have been on a Van Morrison riff. I owned two or three of his albums, but for some reason set off on a second had record buying spree, culminating in a tour of Dublin record shops. It’s a real pleasure to do a deep dive into an artist with a substantial back catalogue (particularly when you can pick up old albums for £8 on Discogs) and see their developments, missteps, experiments, successes and failures. I know what you’re thinking, Martin, please share with us your Van Morrison top ten albums. Oh, if you insist, although controversially, Astral Weeks is not no 1:

1. Veedon Fleece
2. Astral Weeks
3. St Dominic’s Preview
4. Moondance
5. Into the Music
6. His Band and the Street Choir
7. No Guru, No Method, No Teacher
8. Tupelo Honey
9. It’s Too Late to Stop Now
10. Beautiful Vision

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In a desperate bid to outfox AI I am endeavouring to create links between seemingly disparate topics, just for the sake of it. Today, the completely obvious connection between the opening tracks on Van Morrison’s albums of the 70s and learning design. Buckle up.

Van’s Cashback Openers

I’ve been listening to a LOT of Van Morrison recently. I’m not sure what started it, but I’ve been down that rabbit hole for a while now. Van is both an incredible musical genius and an incredible misanthrope. It is one of the perpetual gifts and mysteries of the creative act that great art can come forth from people who you wouldn’t want to spend 5 minutes with. For such a legendary miserable, paranoid man, his music is often filled with unbridled joy.

1968’s Astral Weeks is often regarded as his masterpiece, and it certainly is one. But just as it sits outside of much of musical convention, it also remains distinct in his discography (although you can make an argument that there is a trilogy with Veedon Fleece and No Guru). From 1970’s Moondance through to 1979’s Into the Music he went on an incredible run of albums, comparable to Bowie’s 70s output in consistency and exploration, although different in style. Moondance was very much a reaction to Astral Weeks. Whereas Astral Weeks was mainly long, free form jazz pieces, that weren’t radio friendly, Moondance was three minute pieces of pop rock perfection that pretty much invented radio friendly.

My take is that Morrison learnt from these two albums and decided to combine the approaches. Nearly all of his albums during the 70s start off with an absolute barn-storming opener. He is a contender for most consistently brilliant opening track on an album of any artist during this period. It’s an under-appreciated art I feel. Hit em hard with the first one and then you’ve got them. With Morrison maybe the intention is more, “look you’ve got this amazing track, that’s your album’s money’s worth right there, now let me get on with the other stuff.” Jackie Wilson Said, Domino, Wild Night, Bright Side of the Road, And it Stoned Me – you’re not going to argue with any album after one of those openings. These are the Cashback songs, that allow Morrison to explore the wanderings of, Listen to the Lion, say. Except on Moondance where it continues all in the same vein largely.

Ironically (an oft-used word when it comes to discussing Van), perhaps his best opening song, certainly the most beautiful, is not in the classic Cashback mode. The distinctly un-radio friendly Fair Play, which kicks off Veedon Fleece, has delicate strumming, and light jazz piano, before Van starts singing in a nasal tone, taking us on a tour of rural Ireland while he considers the tension of past life in San Francisco. Typical of that album however, it is no poppy three minute up tempo number, instead luring the listener into the rich tapestry that follows. 

By contrast, the opener to 1989’s Avalon Sunset is the anti-Cashback song, a song so bad that the album never recovers from it. A shallow duet with Cliff Richard (FFS!), “Whenever God Shines His Light” displays the worst tendencies of Morrison’s faith songs. It is unforgivably smug, like one of those Christians who when you tell them you are an atheist respond with a condescending smile and a promise to pray for you. Although the rest of the album has some highlights, it never fully recovers from that opening misstep.

Get to the Learning Design!

In his autobiography, Island Records founder Chris Blackwell, recounts how many artists were snooty about singles and buried their best tracks deep down in an album, instead of opening with it, as if the listener has to earn the right to get it. I think we do this with course design sometimes, hiding the good stuff in week 8 or whatever. There is a strong argument I feel for a Cashback opening salvo. In that first week hit the students with something interesting – this can be a juicy anecdote, an application of concept to current affairs, a big question they will be exploring over the weeks, a fascinating experiment, and so on. We often spend that first week onboarding, doing ice-breakers and establishing some foundational knowledge. Or even worse, there is the equivalent of that Avalon Sunset opener, where the student is immediately plunged into some deep reading where every sentence is akin to digging wet clay, in a kind of “weed out the weak students early” mentality.

With the ICEBERG model we looked at issues that can cause students to stop studying. I think getting students to buy in early on is an important factor. If that first weeks peaks interest and excitement, then it gives the educator a lot of leeway to undertake more difficult stuff later on. It needs to be content related, not just an icebreaker (although forming social connections is also important), something that engages the students conceptually with the subject matter. In ten years time this might be the one thing they remember from that course. My advice then when designing a course is to look at week one and think, “have I got a Cashback opener in there? Is there a “Jackie Wilson Said?””. It needn’t be long, but if there isn’t one then get one in there.

And while you’re considering that, you can listen to the Van’s Cashback songs from the 70s.

(image is a Bryan Mathers sketch of my keynote)

As I mentioned in my last post, I gave a keynote at the Education After the Algorithm conference in Dublin last week. It was a thoughtful, engaging event, congrats to Eamon Costello and all involved.

A screencast of my talk is below. I concentrated on two metaphors, which I’ve blogged here previously, namely DDT and the introduction of rabbits into Australia. My intention was twofold: to highlight how the information ecosystem may be prone to some of the similar impacts from AI agents as these environmental ecosystems were to the introduction of these outside agents; to demonstrate the utility of metaphorical thinking to consider the impact of AI more generally.

I made the point that we are, rightly, wary of the introduction of chemicals and invasive species into our natural ecosystem, but remarkably cavalier about the introduction of agents into our information ecosystem. I asked whether the people in the year 2100 would look book on our current attitudes and marvel at our hubris.

Anyway, here is the talk if you’re interested:

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 background

During the 18th and 19th centuries, the European rabbit was introduced into Australia primarily as a food resource and for hunting activities. There is a myth that the subsequent explosion of the rabbit population can be traced back to one single introduction, that by Thomas Austin in 1859. An English settler Austin wanted to establish a rabbit population for hunting in his estate in mainland Australia, and requested that his family in England send some rabbits. This seems like one of those “too on the nose to be true” myths, but remarkably there is some genetic evidence for the single origin myth.

Surprisingly, they bred like rabbits, I mean, if only there was some way to know this advance. The species established and spread rapidly across the continent due to its high reproductive capacity and its ability to exploit a diversity of grassland ecosystems.

Roy-dufresne et al state that the European rabbit occupies over 70% of the Australian continent, suppressing the regeneration of native vegetation, competing with native and domestic mammals for food and habitat, sustaining inflated populations of invasive predators, and causing approximately A$200 million per year of associated economic losses.

BTW if you haven’t read the book or seen the film, I recommend The Rabbit Proof Fence, by Doris Pilkington Garimara. In this three aboriginal girls follow the length of the rabbit proof fence to return to their family after being forcibly removed. That isn’t the main thrust of this metaphor, but there may be something about the disregard of existing knowledge and the unequal impact of policies that could be explored.

The response

It was apparent very early that the rabbit population was a serious problem. In 1883 he Parliament of the day passed the “Destruction of Rabbits Act”. This did not have much success, relying on people to effectively hunt the rabbits to control.  In 1901 a Royal Commission was appointed with the delightful naming task of to “Enquire into the Rabbit Question”.

Their proposal was the construction of a rabbit-proof fence of some 500 miles. This effectively meant surrendering millions of acres of pastoral country to the rabbits. In the end three fences were constructed (imaginatively named Number 1, 2 and 3 Fences). These met with some success, but they were expensive to maintain and could fall into disrepair.

Another approach was to introduce predators to control the rabbit population. Cats and red foxes have been introduced but it seems their population is determined by rabbit population and not vice versa. This has often led to boom and bust population cycles and also prey-switching by the predators to native species.

More effective, but also more extreme is the biological warfare approach. Diseases such as myxomatosis and Rabbit Hemorrhagic Disease which target rabbits but not other species have been deliberately introduced. This has proven a more successful method, with the rebounding of native species observed although concerns about immunity developing are also valid.

The lessons for AI

If we take the information ecosystem to be analogous here to a natural ecosystem (something that could be argued), then there would seem to be a number of lessons we can draw from this historical metaphor.

Firstly, there is a rapid spread beyond the immediate area of application. We can see this with Ai bots in social media, where it is not just the immediate recipients who can be affected, but cross-fertilisation on platforms and stories picked up by traditional media mean these stories, or pieces of misinformation can spread widely.

There are unpredictable impacts. Although I mocked the carelessness above, I’m not sure anyone would have predicted just how widely rabbits would have spread, and all the different impacts they have on an ecosystem. By their very nature, ecosystems are complex, so a reduction in one species or habitat can lead to a growth in another. So with AI, we cannot predict what flooding the information ecosystem with AI generated content will mean for all sorts of practices that rely on accurate, and transparent knowledge.

Existing agents are displaced. One of the biggest impacts of the rabbit invasion is that they out-competed native species. There is an argument that we should just let such invasive species be and establish a new ecosystem. This paper argues however that “wild rabbits hold many natural Australian ecosystems in a degraded state and any beneficial ecological roles rabbits provide are small by comparison”. With AI we might argue that it is more efficient in producing summaries and provides reasonable quality output, but as this research found, the overall quality was reduced. We could create a similarly degraded state then in the information ecosystem. Also, those agents that are displaced in this case are, you know, people.

Solutions are expensive. The longer the problem goes untended then the more expensive the solutiosn become.

Possible solutions

Drawing from this metaphor, some approaches to AI could be suggested. To be clear, I’m not necessarily proposing these, my intention here is to demonstrate how we can use metaphors to think through the options when we’re confronted by something new and unpredictable. Here are some responses that I can see from the rabbit metaphor:

Do nothing. There is a school of thought that any intervention in an effort to control an invasive species causes more damage than its worth and is often unsuccessful anyway. We should just allow new ecosystems to develop and then learn to live with them. This is the libertarian wet dream.

Create human content boundaries, the knowledge equivalent of the rabbit proof fence. This would involve ring fencing certain practices as being AI-free, for example student assignments, academic journal submissions. As we have seen with the fence though this is difficult to maintain.

Introduce predators. Maybe if we have AI bits running around producing content we can train other AI bots to detect and remove this kind of content. An AI bot arms race, what could go wrong?

Legislation. Just as there is strong legislation about bringing flora and fauna into Australia we could apply strict rules about the usage of AI.

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, but now they are all gathered in The Vinyl Lounge (please say this in an appropriately sonorous tone), I find myself playing a lot of different albums, and a lot more of them. I read David Hepworth’s account of the history of the peak of the LP as social artefact, and he talks about how the record player in the 70s was the main item of furniture in many homes. Television only had 3 channels which mainly featured awful sit-coms with vicars and very middle class people. So going round to someone’s house often involved collectively listening to the latest album by a favoured artist. “Do you want to come round to my place and listen to the latest Neil Young album?” was something that might be asked and not met with a weird look. The Vinyl Lounge is something of a return to that foregrounding of music in this household.

I’m giving a keynote at a really interesting event next month in Dublin called “Education after the algorithm: Co-designing critical and creative futures“. Now that I have time on my hands, it’s a treat to be able to spend time creating a keynote from scratch, instead of hastily cobbling together existing slides in a new order. I can’t say this will improve the quality of the keynote, but it at least feels more of a creative task. I’ll blog some bits on that talk later.

Books

Without intending to create one, there was a unifying thread to some of the books I read this month, which might be articulated as something like “we need to appreciate difference and nuance”. I don’t think it was the intended message, but the takeaway for me from Nick de Semlyen’s entertaining account of the big action stars of the 80s was just how few of those films still stand up. Some Arnie movies such as Terminator, Total Recall, Predator are still watchable, maybe the first two Rockies and the first two Die-Hards (which were outliers anyway), but hardly anything else. I can live without seeing a Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, or, god help us, Steven Seagal movie again, thanks very much. That is, I think because their simplicity doesn’t stand up to repeated viewing, and it is subtler movies that have persistence. It was also interesting to be reminded in this book of just how close Stallone and Reagan were, with Sly offering advice, and then only a few days later having Stallone, Mel Gibson and Jon Voight announced as “Special Ambassadors”. Rambo as foreign policy handbook, here we go again.

The antithesis to the “masculine energy” (sorry, little bit of sick came up there) of this book was Sacha Coward’s exploration of LGBTQ+ representation in folklore. He stresses that we should not over-romanticise the acceptance in the past, but does set out how fluid genders, homosexuality and non-conformist representation is found in so much of folklore throughout history. This again came a week before, and in sharp contrast to, the US decree that there are only two genders and these are determined at conception (although as many have pointed out, technically this means Trump is the first female President). Another book with, as Spinal Tap would say “too much fucking perspective” was James Shapiro’s Shakespeare in a Divided America. He makes a convincing case of taking a number of historical Shakespeare productions in the US and using them as examples of the divides in that country. At the outset I thought this might be rather overstretching the importance of Shakespeare to everyday Americans, but then I was unaware of events such as the Astor Place riots in New York in 1849 which saw cannons deployed in Times Square because of riots that started essentially as beef between two Shakespearian actors.

The sense of reading this books to the backdrop of the first week of Trump’s presidency was that we like to kid ourselves that we generally progress in attitudes, but that flatters us and does a disservice to history.

Vinyl

I’m trying really hard, and failing miserably, not to relate everything to the current shitfest in the US, but it is difficult. For instance, it’s tempting to say that it is a reminder of the need and power of art, that this month’s best new release for me came from a trans woman, Jasmine.4.t. And while that is a theme of her cracking debut album it deserves to be appreciated just for the accomplished record that it is. Similarly. I picked up Raye’s live at the Albert Hall album. With it’s strong theme of female power and also nuanced take on lifestyle choices, being recorded in that building emblematic of the British Empire by a young black woman from South London is symbolic. It’s also just a great live album. Also, if she doesn’t do the next Bond theme, then I don’t know what they’re doing.

To round this off, I guess the passing of David Lynch also has made me reflect on this clash between complexity and the desire to force simplicity on the world. Growing up, Lynch’s Eraserhead, Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks were huge influences on me and many of my peers. We would, annoyingly, be able to quote from the endlessly. It was moving to see all the tributes to Lynch, and while that evidences the quality of his art, it also speaks to something larger. Similarly with David Bowie there are some people who, beyond their actual work, come to embody the nature of possibility of human creativity. They remind us that in the acts of curiosity and creativity we discover who we are and connect to others. It is amazing to me that Lynch got to make many of the films that he did, but even more so that these deeply weird, personal works resonated with so many people. In the current climate, (as we must now refer to it), the empathic human creative act is also a deeply political one.

But is it safe?

Maren and Jim over at Reclaim are starting a blogging community, so it feels like the 2000s again. Get a Northern Voice conference going in Canada someone, before it becomes part of the USA! I don’t really need encouragement to blog, but if you do, Maren has some advie on getting your blogging mojo back. I’m trying not to do that thing of linking everything to “current events”, but I do feel that having your own platform, your own voice, community and identity when so much of that is controlled by people you wouldn’t trust with a glue pen, does add extra currency to blogging.

Brian Lamb (he releases blog posts with the frequency of The Stone Roses releasing albums) uses prompts from Tom Woodward (more of a Taylor Swift release cycle), so in the interest of saving cognitive effort, I’ll use them too.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

Two of my OU colleagues, John Naughton and Tony Hirst were avid bloggers at the start of the 2000s, and enthused about the process of this form of writing. I was all about the internet and elearning back in the day, so I thought I’d give it a try. After a couple of false dawns I settled on edtechie initially over at Typepad and then on Reclaim.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why do you use it?

WordPress, hosted on Reclaim. I’m not really a WP expert or advocate, but it does what I need, and I can easily find plug-ins and themes for my needs. There has been some dodgy dealing around WP recently but it doesn’t tie me into a particular provider.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

I tried Blogger for one of those abortive early attempts, and then used Typepad before Jim Groom lured me over to the Reclaim side with promises of free biscuits.

How do you write your posts?

Badly (ba-dum tss). I vary but I often have an idea that might arise from a conversation, or something I’ve read that percolates around for a few days. Then I bash it out in one sitting, usually it only takes 20 mins or so, as I’ve done a lot of the thinking (if it’s required) by then. I also deliberately don’t want to make these into fully formed academic essays, they are thoughts I have along the way and I don’t want the pressure of making them perfectly formed to get in the way of writing.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

Going to conferences often used to provoke a post or two, when I’d be in a session and something big or small would trigger off a thought. Or sometimes it’s in reaction to something – usually stupid about ed tech. Maren and I have a lot of conversations, usually when walking the dogs, and these can lead to writing posts.

Do you normally publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit?

Publish, read it and see how many typos I’ve made, edit it, publish again and then forget about it.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

I’m often surprised by things I’ve written about and then forgotten. Rather immodestly I sometimes find an old post and think “that’s really rather good. Well done me.” I don’t have a favourite post, but readers will know I like an overstretched metaphor, so something like 10 Lessons from Apocalyptic Literature or Edtech & Symbols of Permanence I think get at the playful possibilities of blogging while also, hopefully, saying something thoughtful. That’s why I love blogging, you can’t do that stuff in an academic journal.

Any future plans for the blog?

Not really, now that I’ve left the OU and I’m not involved in educational technology as much, I wonder if the identity of the blog should change. But I’ve always had a personal element to the blog, it’s not like it’s an ed tech newsletter, so I think I will persist here. But I guess people may have to get used to fewer posts about open education and more about baking pies and walking Teilo on the beach.

(Image – Life is sharing, CC-BY some geezer called cogdog, who he?)

I’ve been reading Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine recently. It’s an engaging account of the Luddite rebellion, which is well researched and told, but what really brings it to life are the direct comparisons he makes with Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and the mill owners, who use technology to accrue capital in the hands of a few, and take agency from working people. The fact that “luddite” is a derisory term instead of championing people who fought for their livelihood and humanity is a victory of those same entrepreneurs.

Anyway, as was the intention of the book, it got me thinking about AI. He makes the point that the Luddites were not anti-technology, they were anti “technology being used to enrich a few and strip everyone else”. They were pro some technologies, for instance he gives an example of a tool that could automatically assess the quality of weave. The mill owners didn’t want this technology however, as they preferred to be the sole arbiters (and thus payers) of quality. This got me thinking, what would AI not driven by entrepreneurs look like?

Before I start on this, I need to be clear – I am not advocating for the use of AI tools such as I set out here. I think they would be gamed and probably disastrous. But they are no more fanciful than the applications we are seeing proposed. My point here is to demonstrate that when AI proponents state that AI is inevitable, the model they are proposing is one that is steeped in ideology. By looking at possible alternatives, this becomes apparent.

Let’s start relatively small. Social media is a toxic dumpster fire emitting fumes globally, right? Partly this is down to AI bots, so you could equally use AI bots to train to find and delete posts that promote disinformation, hate speech, etc. Bots who’s aim is to improve the overall quality of the online communication space. I wonder why Poundshop Hitler doesn’t want to implement that on X?

Let’s go bigger. How about an AI system that monitors the housing market and allocates resources to build houses most in demand, and sets rental prices to the maximum benefit of society as a whole? Or full on AI socialism, that dynamically taxes (entrepreneurs love dynamic pricing after all) and reallocates wealth according to the utilitarian benefit of the nation as a whole? Richard Eskow makes the point that AI is trained on our data, so we should own it.

Just to reiterate, these would probably all be a nightmare, but no more than AI infiltrating your workplace. It’s noticeable that improved efficiency is the number one benefit of AI that people promote (all those effing summaries). Why not improved equity, social justice, happiness even? So, the next time a tech bro is advocating about the coming AI singularity, respond by saying you look forward to the AI Socialist Wealth Redistribution System. They will miraculously find reasons why that couldn’t possibly work…

Maren celebrated the 101st episode of her podcast recently, and I was the invited guest. We riffed off the idea of Room 101. If you don’t know this it borrows the idea of Orwell’s Room 101 which contains your biggest fear, which was converted into a light entertainment radio and TV programme where people nominate pet peeves to go into Room 101 so we don’t have to experience them anymore. Going into the new year we volunteered what we would like to put into Room 101 for 2025. Here were my options:

Anything “bro” – I was watching the US coverage of the election back in November, and I knew we were doomed when the commentators seriously debated the “bro-vote”. Tech-bros, gym bros, AI bros, podcast bros – it never ends well and usually denotes a bullish, unreflective and most damagingly unhumorous approach. The only acceptable bro-ing is when I take my dog Teilo for a long walk, and we have some bro-time.

Unwanted AI in every product – British cuisine is often derided as “chips with everything” and the current interpretation of innovation seems to be AI with everything. AI is surely useful, but this blanket application because, hey, if we say it’s got AI, we’ll look modern. It is usually just pointless, but is often annoying and at worst is sinister, mining data and trying to profile me. I think many people are finding the “AI with everything” approach a turn-off despite what marketing gurus think.

The “death of the university” articles – MOOCs, blockchain, AI – these were all going to kill the university or at least mark a distinct revolution. I posit the idea that journalists who write puff pieces about the death of the university should be legally obligated to return to that story 3 years later and see how it has turned out.

Personally doomscrolling – this is one for me, to avoid some of the nasty noisiness in the world coming our way in 2025. Bro-time with Teilo is the answer.

So those were my choices, listen to the show to find out what Maren put in Room 101. What would be your contenders?

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 end of an eventful year, during which I left the Open University, became semi-retired, got engaged and had to do a lot of emergency care for elderly parents. It seems odd now to think I was still working at the OU 12 months ago, the human ability to adapt to a new context and take it as the new norm is always a surprise. And speaking of new norms, 2025 looks set to be a shitfest right, so start erecting those cognitive defences now.

I signed off on my N-Tutorr report this month, my report acts as an overview, and I enjoyed flexing the writing muscle again. They should all come out in the new year. One of the things I’ve tried to emphasise in my report, which looks at the impact of five technological trends on higher ed, is the old Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy advice of Don’t Panic. I think a lot of the ed tech industry relies on generating a sense of panic – that feeling that if you don’t engage with [Insert New Tech] now, and engage with [Insert New Tech] completely, then it will be too late, and all will be lost. This is a useful notion to foster for purveyors of [Insert New Tech], because quite often once the dust has settled, the actual benefits are less all pervasive than initially trumpeted and uptake would be less. But that doesn’t matter because now we’re onto [Insert New Tech 2]. This is different from saying that these technologically driven changes to education are not useful, but that the scale and immediacy is not at the levels pitched in the media. I’m sure you can think of one current tech that fits that bill…

Books

I finished the year having read 171 books. I read a lot, across all formats, and across a lot of genres. Admittedly I read a lot of ‘low-brow’ fiction, mainly horror, for entertainment, but the notion that reading has to always be worthy is much to its detriment. Audrey has some interesting reflections on reading this month, we follow each other on Goodreads so I often pick up on recommendations based on her reading (I don’t think the reverse happens much, sorry Audrey!). Like a 6 year old in a playground, I’m asking if you want to be my friend too.

Anyway, let’s see what 2025 brings. I keep expecting to have a quiet year, and then “stuff” happens.

(Spot on image, update from his earlier version by Chaz Hutton https://www.instagram.com/p/DDbmv-yNijL/)

When explaining the concept of enshittification, Cory Doctorow sets it out as the manner in which platforms die “First, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.”

It speaks to a general degradation of experience, of the thing that once drew you to a service or platform becoming increasingly lost, amidst adverts, trolls, bad user experience, and principally through a lack of care for the users. This can be done because users are locked in, as John Naughton notes, through a lack of interoperability and the network effect. So we have to just put up with more crap, as the platforms get rinsed for everything they can.

I was thinking about this recently when I saw Zoom’s new announcement (I thought it was parody at first, but alas, no, these tech dudes mean it). In it they state that “Zoom is now about so much more than video meetings. We are an AI-first company…” Then they go onto claim that their AI Companion will “Over time… translate into a fully customizable digital twin equipped with your institutional knowledge, freeing up a whole day’s worth of work and allowing you to work just four days per week.”

Let’s just take a moment to consider how batshit crazy that is. Will all our digital twins have meetings? Will I come back to work to find my digital twin has volunteered real me to take on more tasks? I’ll bet our digital twins won’t ask any awkward questions of company policy, though. And yeah, that age old promise of “it’ll free up more time”, and not, you know, be used as an excuse to lay people off.

I’ve seen calls for an AI university, for AI to make medical diagnoses, and as I highlighted in the last post, AI as the gatekeeper to knowledge sources. And as we already know, try speaking to a person at a bank, service provider and increasingly Doctor’s surgery.

A while ago, I suggested that if you wanted to know what the wealthy proponents of AI really valued, then watch their own behaviour. Now ask yourself, would Elon Musk be happy to have a meeting with your digital twin instead of the real you? Would they send their kids to AI schools, or be subject to AI medical diagnosis. Somehow I doubt it. But they have money, so can get the best doctors, teachers, investment bankers and so on. The AI version is for the rest of us.

This is enshittification – not of a platform, but of your life. Many aspects of your everyday life will be downgraded to the AI-as-default version. The things you currently do and take for granted will be sold back to you as the premium version. For a monthly subscription you can have access to real people, otherwise it’s AI for you. Paying for access to better service has always been the case of course, but AI allows for it on steroids due to a combination of two factors: performance and cost. It’s just good enough to meet most needs without damaging the customer base and it’s a lot cheaper to run than people. Also, as with platform enshittification, now that everyone is doing AI, where are you going to go? There’s no escape.

The demands of capitalism turn AI into an enshittification engine, and we’re locked in. This is almost inevitable with the combination of those two factors of performance and cost. So, the next time you see people propounding how AI will improve your life and efficiency, substitute “the enshittification of my life” for all those promises and you’ll be closer to the truth. But let’s not feel hopeless, as Doctorow says, it’s a choice. You can choose to use different platforms and providers (sometimes) and we can all choose to value and promote good human actions. I would suggest that openness also offers some antidote to this. As does not promoting every piece of tech utopian bullshit. This is not about AI being useful, it clearly is in many places, rather it’s about what happens when it gets enmeshed in society and capitalism without due care.

Anyway, merry Christmas everyone.

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’s also much, much safer.” The Apple Intelligence adverts you may have seen also make the ability to create quick summaries the main selling point.

David Wiley gives an example of how he’s “created a research assistant agent that reads through preprints each morning and identifies the latest research on the impact of generative AI on teaching and learning”. I can see how that would be useful, and I know from having a daughter in higher education, it’s useful to get a summary of research in a field that you don’t need to go into depth for. I still think summarising is useful. But Audrey and Maren have made me ask the question is it that great? First, if we just want the summary version of everything, then why are we writing all this other stuff to start with? Second, just how reliable is that summary you are getting, and will it miss the interesting nuance. Third, doing that reading, watching, listening is often actually the thing you want to be doing, the process is the point. Anyone who watches sport knows there’s a lot of difference between watching a full game and getting the highlights.

But beyond the whole “summary fetishisation” there is a more worrying trend. That is when you can only get access to the AI summary. Tom Scocca reports on how The Washington Post has (or is experimenting with) removing its archives, and instead giving access to AI trained on its archive. So much more efficient, right? Needless to say, anyone wanting to do actual research will want access to full archives, not just some bland summary of them. As Scocca puts it “No one who cared about the purpose of the Washington Post or the purpose of the Washington Post archive would have ever allowed the Ask The Post AI to be deployed. But the world has allowed the management of knowledge to be taken over by ignoramuses, and now the ignoramuses have built ignoramus machines in their own image, manufacturing non-knowledge on a scale previously unimaginable.”

You can see lots of others going the same way, we only need summaries, let the AI do the hard work. This would be a disaster for our information ecosystem. Summaries summarised into new summaries. No actual knowledge, just summaries all the way down. It’s an example of two things – first the unquestioning belief that summaries are always a good thing, and second handing over systems to AI without due care to consequences.

For fun, here is the AI summary (from Pop AI) of this post. I will say, it’s pretty good. But it lacks that Weller charm right?

________

The document discusses the implications of using AI for summarizing content, highlighting both its benefits and potential drawbacks.

1. AI and Summarization:
   • The conversation between Maren and the author reflects skepticism about the utility of AI, particularly in summarizing documents. Maren prefers to engage with the full content rather than a summary.
   • Audrey’s newsletter emphasizes that while summaries are efficient and safer, they may lack depth and nuance.
2. Usefulness of Summaries:
   • David Wiley’s example of an AI research assistant illustrates the practical benefits of summarization in academic settings, especially for those who need to stay updated without delving deeply into every piece of research.
   • The author questions the value of summaries, pondering why original content is created if summaries are preferred. There is also concern about the reliability and completeness of AI-generated summaries.
3. Concerns About Access to Information:
   • A troubling trend is noted where access to original content is being replaced by AI-generated summaries, as seen in The Washington Post’s experiment with its archives.
   • Tom Scocca criticizes this approach, arguing that it undermines the purpose of archives and the integrity of knowledge.
4. Impact on Information Ecosystem:
   • The document warns against the over-reliance on AI for summarization, suggesting it could lead to a cycle of summaries devoid of original knowledge.
   • This trend reflects a broader issue of uncritical acceptance of AI systems and their consequences on knowledge management.

The document raises important questions about the role of AI in summarization, advocating for a balanced approach that values original content and critical engagement with information rather than solely relying on AI-generated summaries.

(Image – Summary judgement by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Pix4free)

It’s been a very good year for vinyl, with lots of top-of-their-game releases from favourite artists and a few new ones I’ve discovered. I’m stealing Pitchfork’s use of RIYL (Recommended If You Like) this year, so here are ten of the new releases I’ve enjoyed the most this year:

Bill Ryder-Jones – Iechyd Da. RIYL: sitting on the sofa wearing a hoodie and eating cheese puffs while watching epic movies in the afternoon; finding patterns of beauty in smoke eddies.

Brittany Howard – What Now. RIYL: Microdosing at a barbecue; nu-retro vintage clothing.

Hurray for the Riff Raff – The Past is Still Alive. RIYL: Reading Cannery Row on an abandoned train; hanging around on industrial estates after dark.

Aaron Frazer – Into The Blue. RIYL: Wearing a hat at a jaunty angle; ironic dad dancing.

Waxahatchee – Tiger’s Blood. RIYL: Chugging beer in a pickup, crushing the can and tossing it out of the window while bellowing to the radio.

Casandra Jenkins – My Light, My Destroyer. RIYL: Thinking big thoughts about the stars and distance; spending one hour looking at a single painting in the museum.

MJ Lenderman – Manning Fireworks. RIYL: Raymond Carver stories; Sean Baker films; Raymond Carver stories directed by Sean Baker.

Laura Marling – Patterns in Repeat. RIYL: Analysing the hidden meaning in kids TV; sacred moments of silence and peace while on the loo.

Beth Gibbons – Lives Outgrown. RIYL: Contemplating life’s meaning while gardening; making a big pot of tea to accompany your screaming into the void session.

Nilüfer Yanya – My Method Actor. RIYL: Feeling nostalgic about thinking 30 was getting old; Secretly playing indie rock in your Airpods at a nightclub.

Bonus album – this one actually came out in 2023, but I didn’t get it until this year and it would be a shame for it to miss out, because it’s a firecracker of an album, and Raye made the BBCs list of 100 most influential women.

Raye – My 21st Century Blues. RIYL: Winding up tech bros on social media; Female revenge movies.

Remember, if you like seeing pictures of album covers out on the wild in Wales (I mean, who doesn’t?) there is my rather niche Instagram account. Here is my Spotify playlist of these and other vinyl purchases this year:

(My post-apocalyptic survival skill is making pies)

I’ve been trying, unsuccessfully, to avoid the whole US election fallout this month. So let’s get that out of the way. Amongst many depressing things that has been noticeable since that night in November is the complete failure of traditional political commentating. They are still applying the idea of the rational voter, so end up effectively asking questions such as “what policy of the deranged, self-declared tyrant really appealed to you?” or “where did the Democrats campaign go wrong in failing to appeal to the supporters of a man who thinks Hannibal Lecter is real?” I’m no US political analyst but this doesn’t seem to be a failure on the part of the Democrats, or Harris. It is a failure of the US electorate (or at least a good chunk of them), and they will have to own it. It’s a shame it has to take everyone else down as well.

Anyway, in other news, I completed a report for the N-TUTORR project on digital transformation in higher ed. There is a suite of these reports coming out in the new year, from a range of excellent authors, so look out for them. I’ll blog more about the content of mine when it is published. Rather like Trump, I feel like I’ve been trying to avoid reading or writing about AI this month, and again failing. Like Trump, AI is just so noisy. One positive of the election has been the mass exodus to BlueSky which feels like the old days of Twitter, at least for a while. I am @edtechie.bsky.social over there. I’m trying to get some momentum back into social media posting (no, I don’t know why either), so at the moment I’m trying the scattergun approach across interests.

Books

One of those interests is reading. This month I reached my 2024 reading goal of 150 books with over a month to spare. I know having reading targets is a contentious idea, but I didn’t feel pressure to hit that target, it is now just more part of my daily practice. This month I read a couple of books with a theme which might be labelled “strangely hopeful”. The first was a 1995 Belgian, dystopian, feminist sci-fi book called I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman. It’s an extraordinary book, with a group of women finding themselves captive on an unknown planet for an unknown reason. Their guards disappear suddenly, for reasons also unknown. And they never get answers (except to find similar bunkers holding men or women, all of whom didn’t escape). But it ends with musings on hope and purpose. Similarly thought-provoking was Cal Flynn’s Islands of Abandonment. She visits sites that have been abandoned by humans, for example Chernobyl, and repeatedly finds that nature has flourished in these zones. In ecology’s version of man or bear, it seems that given the choice between radiation (or other seemingly unfavourable conditions) and the presence of humans, it is always better not to choose the human option.

Definitely not hopeful reading is Annie Jacobsen’s impeccably researched Nuclear War: A scenario. She takes us through all the decision making procedures, actions and consequences of an imagined nuclear strike on the US. You will be unsurprised to hear that it doesn’t end well for anyone. I grew up in the nuclear angst of the 80s (we used to doodle atomic mushroom clouds on our school books, like it was normal), I agree with the author’s contention that we’ve become complacent about the nuclear threat after the Cold War. But the threat is still very real, and what the book brings home is the dizzying escalation. Within hours we’ve gone from normal life to global armageddon without any of the usual careful escalation tactics. You could have a nap and wake up to find the world has ended. The book also reinforces the absolute power of the US president. In this interview she also makes the point that you want the Commander in Chief who “is of sound mind, who is fully in control of his mental capacity, who is not volatile, who is not subject to anger”. So, nothing to worry about there then.

Vinyl

A new Laura Marling album is always a treat and her new album, Patterns in Repeat sees her reflecting on parenthood. Also, I picked up a reissue of an old favourite of mine, and a dusty, Americana classic Giant Sand’s Chore of Enchantment. There is a “lost years” period for lots of vinyl issues during the late 90s, when CD was so popular, and everyone so assured of the decline of vinyl that new releases either didn’t come out on vinyl at all or had limited release. This was one of them, and I had previously owned it on CD, and any vinyl copies went for a lot of money. So, hurrah for reissues. If we all have to go and live in the desert after nuclear war, this will be a fine soundtrack.

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 seen enough enshittification to know that BlueSky will probably go that way on day too. But for now, let us enjoy the frothing from the Musk fanboys.

The first argument they like to put forward is that, hey, they like to hear the views of different people because they’re open-minded. What they usually mean is they like to shout at people who they disagree with because that’s how they get their kicks and how dare you take that fun away from them.

Others protest how will we know what the far right are thinking if we don’t have a shared platform? LOL, you could go and live in a hut in Tristan da Cunha and Trump, Musk, Murdoch etc are so noisy that you’d still hear them. Or a variation on this is that we should all engage more. Yeah, because famously the likes of Trump, Farage, etc are all about the two-way engagement. As this nice piece of satire puts it “But some snowflakes didn’t like constantly being bombarded with all of those valid right-wing concerns about the economy, and taxes, and what kind of genitals everyone should be allowed to have.

John Naughton says BlueSky feels like a breath of fresh air, and I agree. I don’t use social media anywhere near as much as I used to, and when I do, you know what, I kind of want to find it enjoyable. And not be immersed in crap. But I’ll go further, the fact that so many of the people you don’t want to hear from think you shouldn’t be on BlueSky (or Mastodon, or Threads) is a compelling argument to join. It’s an act of mini-resistance. They want to, as I said in the last post, operate their “flood it with shit” policy and if you’re not there, then they can’t. They also don’t want you to be off enjoying yourselves somewhere else, they rely on people being ground down and miserable. So, yeah, head off to BlueSky or wherever and chat about the weather, cats, food, sports, reasonable politics without the reply guys popping up to tell you, well actually. We used to worry about the echo chamber a lot back in the early days of Twitter, and now look back on those days fondly. It’s not really an echo chamber, it’s just ignoring assholes.

(Image via https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Disinformation_and_echo_chambers.jpg)

Continuing my annual series of selecting one educational technology that became significant that year.

I’ve covered AI in a few previous entries, but this year’s entry returns to it I’m afraid, and namely the rise of the term and the content it describes – AI slop. The term AI slop initially referred to that ridiculous artwork of Jesus and prawns (to be fair, these are weirdly quite funny), but can be broadened to encompass all AI generated content that is of low value. AI slop is a great term, although it’s not clear who came up with it. White supremacist Steve Bannon boasted of their policy of combat the media by “to flood the zone with shit.” Just generate outrage, confusion and distraction to the degree that the truth gets lost, or ceases to matter. Well, now AI can ramp up that shit-flooding to biblical proportions. In ed tech, Michael Barber’s fantasised Avalanche may actually be coming, but it will be an avalanche of slop, a tsunami of shit. Amazon is being flooded with AI generated books, reddit bots and Facebook swamped with AI posts, Google search diluted by dodgy advice. Wikipedia tries to stand firm.

The metaphor of ecosystem is one that is over-used but it works here I think. Our information ecosystem may be much less robust than we think. It’s not that AI generated content is bad, or incorrect, necessarily, but rather that it is just bland and often useless. As anyone who has seen an AI generated Facebook post will know, with either an image proclaiming to be real, or a post analysing something with obvious errors, it drains attention. It’s the quantity that becomes difficult to combat, and this is where the ecosystem analogy comes in. Rabbits are not particularly harmful individually, but when introduced into Australia, they bred like, erm, rabbits, and overran the local ecosystem. Attempts to control the flood of AI content and protect our information spaces are likely to be as effective as the famous rabbit proof fence. It’s not unrealistic to imagine the internet being similarly overrun by AI slop and us humans edged out.

In education the issues are numerous. Academics have barely accepted the use of Wikipedia by students, how are they going to cope with buckets of slop? Students will have more of this stuff to wade through, they will use tools to generate content that just about meets assessment needs. University policies and boards spend their time combatting and policing the use of this stuff. Journals are inundated with AI generated papers. Given that the great claim of AI is that it improves efficiency, all this extra work that it generates doesn’t seem to be taken into account. “Fighting AI slop” should become an entry in work-planning so we can record just how much time is spent doing this.

There is some evidence that AI improves performance at the lower end but lowers creativity overall. That can be expanded to encompass its impact on education overall. So, yeah, 2024 was when we really began to see the impact of AI on our information ecosystem, and become aware of the potential long-term damage.