Year: 2023 (Page 2 of 2)

I do believe that we waste countless opportunities to make ourselves, our families, and our societies better because of the phobias we have about technology. We have done this to ourselves through poor design, breeding false mythologies, and the accretion of power to those who would perpetuate them. I continue to believe that technology, especially information technology, offers us unprecedented possibilities for liberation, both on a personal and societal level. There will be dislocations and political challenges, but we can overcome them with a clear-eyed view of the limitations and opportunities that our technologies provide us. Technology is neither moral nor immoral. It is amoral. It is a canvas upon which we paint. The picture we create depends entirely on us. It’s time to pick up the brush. – Discovering Digital Humanity, pp. 15-16.

Source: xkcd 1289

The New York Times is the latest media outlet to see ChatGPT as “technology” undermining education as we understand it. The fear that familiar institutions are being undermined is entirely justified. It is the inevitable consequence of systems of power based on Industrial Age technology being eroded. In recent chats about the technology with colleagues on Bryan Alexander’s Future Trends Forum, I compared ChatGPT and AI to the general alarm that greeted writing in ancient Greece.

And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality. – Plato, Phaedrus

Plato/Socrates are not wrong here. It is hard to argue with the impact that literacy has had on human augmentation, but there is a lot of nuance to unpack here. We have all met humans who are well read but unwise, because they cannot properly apply the technology of reading/writing to their practice of life. However, as I wrote about in Learn at Your Own Risk, education is mired in a mindset that favors precisely this kind of book-service over knowledge-service.

All too often, the educational establishment (and those who seek to regulate it) equates the “reminiscence” of words with an understanding of those words. What we have witnessed over the history of industrial education has been a gradual scaling of access to writing, first through the mass production of books and then through the mass production of readers.

The reading and repetition of these words has become the bedrock of what we understand as “education.” Even those who teach critical thinking believe that without forcing our students to address this foundation first, we cannot get them to the analysis level of understanding.

This connective tissue of analysis, however, has proven to be a far more elusive (and hard to measure) goal, especially at the lower levels of higher education. I have spent a career trying to teach (and to figure out how to teach) “critical thinking.” It almost always fails on the shoals of trained practice and a lack of meaning in the student experience. I have seen many faculty (myself included) who claim to be teaching critical thinking through writing but who have capitulated to lower expectations.

We have trained most of our students to play along with the education game without really understanding what it was for. This invites them to do things like “cheating” the game because there is no opportunity cost, especially if no one catches them. More pernicious is the tendency to do the “minimum necessary” to pass the class.

ChatGPT threatens this construct. It has the critical thinking skills of a toddler, but we find that hard to distinguish from the efforts of our own students because we have such low expectations from them (derived, in my case, from long, hard experience). It may finally force us to address the loss of meaning many students experience when asked to conform to the existing educational paradigm.

After experimenting with it, I was confident that ChatGPT couldn’t do what I was asking my students to do. However, what I wasn’t confident about was whether I could distinguish between what it did and what they actually produced. It met the “minimum necessary” standard in many aspects of prose (although lacking in the proper citations). ChatGPT’s results weren’t very far off from the kinds of submissions that I routinely get from my students.

This realization didn’t make me toss out my prompts or assessment strategy, however. Instead, I grasped at the opportunity to use ChatGPT to get my students to engage in the critical thinking skills I claim to be teaching them.

My plan for this semester is to have them submit their prompts to ChatGPT as a draft for the first blog and then ask them to critique and build upon the AI’s results. This forces them to augment their approach by using the technology critically.

On a larger scale, however, ChatGPT is yet another chink in the armor of what we’ve been doing in industrial education for over a century. The technological threats to this have been mounting since the early days of the public internet in the 90s. Google search, crowdsourced papers, paper mills, question banks, etc. are all technologies that distributed collective intelligence has enabled. The resources at students’ fingertips have advanced exponentially even as faculty practice has not.

ChatGPT is moving so fast that most of my colleagues don’t even know it exists yet. However, they have been aware of the last two decades of internet-enabled technologies that have threatened our legacy assessment techniques, such as multiple-choice exams and standardized regurgitation essays.

In most cases, this realization has not forced them to re-evaluate their practice. Instead, defense has been the preferred strategy. Efforts to police the use of technology through proctoring and anti-plagiarism software are doomed to failure. If anything, pandemic remote teaching should have taught us that.

As I write in both of my books, the problem here is not one of technology, but rather of adapting ourselves, our practices, and systems to new realities. And, to take this further, there are tremendous opportunities resulting from these adaptations. We need real thinkers at all levels to tackle the complex problems of today and tomorrow.

Technology can connect us and augment us if we design and use it to do so. Applied properly, ChatGPT can form part of a suite of tools to make us better and more critical thinkers.

A friend of mine asked me the other day what I thought the purpose of society should be. My response was: we have a responsibility to our children to make the world better than when we came into it and societies should strive toward that goal. I then referred him to the Platonic concept of the philosopher-king. Technology has the possibility of making us all kings. Education has a duty to make us all philosophers.

Originally Published on the ShapingEDU Blog on January 12. 2023

We must get lost before we can find ourselves. Maps should not concentrate on preventing us from getting lost. Instead, they should point us to new ways of finding our way. Expressions like “we navigate learning“ don’t come from nowhere.

When we learn, we explore the edges of what we understand, but we also explore our imaginations and what they’re capable of. I wrote about this extensively in Discovering Digital Humanity. However, my work on the Tool Augmentation Tool reinforced my perception of just how important a role mapmaking plays in the process of creativity, innovation, and learning.

I recently wrote about how tools map our brains. Those who use those maps are engaging their brains in exploration. The idea is to get the user lost in their imaginations and then have to find their way back again. I use maps extensively in my classroom instruction in much the same way, as I try to map out the semester to my students while giving them ample room for creative exploration.

Creative exploration, however, doesn’t always happen. Both students and the academic decision makers that I regularly work with start with the assumption that I’m going to provide them with a map that will navigate them to their destination.

My challenge as a teacher lies in guiding without prescribing. This creates tension as I struggle to show them how to grow their own insights instead of just adopting mine.

Cartographic scholar Alan M. MacEachern’s work offers some valuable insight into how to create maps (and, by extension, all other kinds of abstract visualization) as tools for the visual exploration of information. In 1990, MacEachern and John H. Ganter wrote that:

[T]here is an assumption not only that the message is known, but that there is an optimal map for each message, and that our objective as cartographers is to identify it. For cartographic visualization the message is unknown and, therefore, there is no optimal map. (p. 65 – emphasis in original)

All-too-often we perceive the “destination” as a known entity. One problem with our growing dependency on Google maps is that we have lost the ability to find our own way through a map creatively. Most of the time, it presents a series of turns that magically transport us to the end of your journeys.

However, Google is not perfect. It makes certain assumptions when it plots the “optimal” route for me. The problem is that Google doesn’t really know me. It doesn’t understand my preferences for the journey. Do I want the fastest route, or do I want to compromise that to make the journey more relaxing? Do I want to explore a road I’ve never traveled before? It can’t really answer these kinds of questions.

Our educational processes often mirror the shortcomings of Google Maps because they likewise ignore the sensemaking aspect of our journeys. Industrial education has produced increasing levels of specialization, coupled with processes that emphasize “learning” modules and tests. Like Google, it gives us a series of turns defined as “courses” and “degree plans” that navigate the student magically to a degree.

We extend prescriptive navigation into the microcosms of individual courses. The term “course” itself implies a singular pathway through the process. Our college journeys have become nothing more than sequences of turns, lacking in sensemaking or meaning. Both students and the systems that control their movement through their learning journeys resist efforts to create randomness in that process.

A map with a singular pathway toward a destination is not a map, it’s a course. Maps imply a level of exploration. They should help you understand the broader context of your journey. Otherwise, we will never see outside the tunnel of our path and will miss the larger picture of the world that maps abstract. MacEachern and Ganter imply this when they state,

Maps and other visual representations are valuable to science, not because of their realism, but because they are abstractions. The abstraction process, if successful, helps to distinguish pattern from noise. p. 66

It is hard to create maps that encourage exploration without creating prescriptive instructions. In my classes, I try to create maps that explicitly force the students to explore. Getting them to follow them into the unknown and unpredictable, however, is not so straightforward. Grades form an unwavering destination for all of them. All that matters is finding the shortest path there, not what you may discover along the way.

I have a similar problem when I try to create maps to help others integrate technology into their practice. Considering a problem is more difficult than simply “getting the answer.” When I was working for an architecture firm, they were intent on having me produce an “ideal” learning space. When I pointed out that learning spaces were environments that helped people self-actualize their learning, and, for that reason, there was no one-size-fits-all solution, they didn’t like that answer.

Learning spaces contain within them implicit maps. We can extend this to any technology or technology environment. The Tool Augmentation Tool is an attempt to construct a map to help us understand the landscapes we create as we design environments for learning and innovation. It shows a series of pathways through a maze, but at every juncture, the user must add external inputs that change the character of the pathways that are being traveled.

We must also create maps that preserve a role for the teacher. You can teach by careful map design, but you can also design maps where either the teacher or a group of peers teach while using the map as a tool. The collaborative aspect of mapmaking is central to my practice as a facilitator of learning. Using tools like Miro to create maps of ideas opens vast new possibilities for innovation.

The Tool Augmentation Tool sets up a system of systems that moves users from tool to task in a variety of ways. It forces them to view the map from the perspective of a synchronous activity, both in-person and distantly. This shift in perspective creates different mental maps of the impact a particular technology will have on practice. The exercise then asks the user to consider the same two modalities (in-person and distant) as a set of asynchronous experiences.

Finally, it requires that the user reconnect these distinct explorations to form either a tool recommendation or a deep understanding of how a tool will impact a task., “The system should permit, indeed perhaps demand, that the user experience data in a variety of nodes.” (MacEachern and Ganter, 1990, p. 78)

A good map should force the user to zoom in and out and change our perspective. It jostles our complacency with “accepted” data. There are no “best practices” in this world. There is no “dogma” other than a goal of human augmentation.

Technology has made mapmaking infinitely more accessible. Tools like Miro have made interactive explorations of connective spaces possible in ways that were impossible even a few years ago. Building collaborative maps helps us find our humanity and make sense of a complex world of interconnections.

Sensemaking is the core of learning at all levels. It represents an intensely personal journey. We have a duty to help each other navigate that path but should not dictate it for others. Synchronous collaborative mapmaking makes it possible to journey together without giving up our individuality along the way. We are all designing the map of the future. Without collaboration and exploration, this would be an impossible task.