Nature

I've just read a report on how 20 minutes of Nature, three times a week are good for you, and how the benifits improve it the nature is wilder. that is Wilderness vs.calming city park.

I've thought for some time about a related concept, the idea of a field density of human decisions. I feel more comfortable, in a location where the density of human decisions around me is low.

Beaches, forests, mountains, and conversly I feel very stressed in cities, or crowds, where the decision density is high.

Just a thought.

 

The peacemaker Colt, and AI as guardians of Etiquette.

 My Cousin Nancy, sent me a poem, she had written on her phone. The phone refused to letter her use the work Damn, telling her that she was better than that.

A hundred years before, there was a theory that having an armed citizenry in the old, rosy and romantic west, ensured that it was a polite society.

Currently there are some areas of the US with very high levels of gun ownership, particularly among the criminal classes, but the evidence is still out, as to whether this has resulted in politer public life. I suspect it has not.

Returning to the phone, enforcing standards of discourse. The work around it to use a broader vocabulary, and perhaps regional terms, for which the phone is unable to pick up a double meaning. I can see language becoming increasingly local, and dependent on dialect, as phones take on a greater and greater role of policing word use.

More echo chambers and birdwhistles.

Once more the law of unintended consequences rears its ugly head.

Are we reading or Thinking

 I've just finished reading a short paper by Edmund Gettier. Its pretty much standard fare for any student of modern philosophy, and can be found by a trivial google search. His paper attacking the concept of Justified True Belief, was perhaps anticipated in part by Russel's example of Alice, and the Clock, but this is common in academia, as often a field is ripe for a new concept.

It did not cite Russell, though it did Cite A.J Ayer, whose work on the Problem of Knowledge had been published previously.

Both these papers are considered important in their field, and I think were considered to be so well known that they might not need citing, at that time. 

On a personal note, as in this is just my opinion, I think that as the universities have spread their wings to include more and more people, there has been a change in emphasis in academic literature away from thinking and original ideas, and towards citations and Authorities, in what is know as “Scholarship”.   This was the way of the schoolmen, and is similar to the Confucian approach to education.

These may not be the most fruitful of paths to follow for creativity and innovation.

Edmund Gettier Is justified True Belief Knowledge? Analysis. vol. 23 (1966).

A. J. Ayer. The Problem of Knowledge McMillan (London, 1956).

AI AI its off to work we go AI AiAi.

We sit on the cusp of an AI revolution, and the explosive development of ChatGPT and its ilk have finally

woken the media to the creeping presence of AI driven tools in everyday life. For a very long time AI was like controlled Nuclear Fusion, progress was just around the corner.

Nuclear Fusion has yet to become commercially viable, but AI is now sucking in money as if the word "bubble" never existed.

So perhaps a few thoughts here. 

AI is not one thing there are many different AI methods out there. They are behind recommender systems, speech recognition, autonomous driving, smart speakers and so forth.

Word is probably the most commonly used program which uses AI, without most people being aware of it.

AI challenges our ideas of putting together ethical frameworks for use. 

A framework which supports Transparency and explainability, and the right to be removed from the model, along the lines of European GDPR legislation, 

Has nothing to say about the thought of one million two inch long autonomous drones equipped with movement recognition and munitions, being shipped to an enemy port to enforce a curfew for a week.

Dystopias abound.

On the other hand the potential to use pattern recognition to synthesize new drugs or medicines, or the Idea of a mental pattern recognition pacemaker, which could intercept a seizure and close it down, is tempting.

So far, all the proposals for education I've seen have been very conventional, but perhaps a future deep learning algorithm could examine the practice of many teachers, and identify teachable moments, and work out whats the best way of maximising learning.

I've been teaching AI for the past two years, and first encountered it in 1982-3. During that time I have been privileged to encounter many humans who's mental landscapes are very different in the way they are wired or in their ability to interact with others. Many of these encounters have been in therapeutic settings.

Studying AI has given me insights into how many different ways of thinking there are, and into just how many ways humans differ from mental models.

This blog is called thoughts in transit, and I put it down as just that a location for ideas which are still travelling and which have not yet come together.

One final thought. In trying to understand the coming AI technological revolution, the closest model I found in existing technology is electricity.

Something who's ubiquity we take for granted which permeate's almost every aspect of our world.

summative assessment seen as harmful.

I went on a visit to a school open day for parents of prospective students, and I took the oppertunity to do a survey of the teachers present. I was asking about IT use in the main, but I asked the religion teacher how you teach religion. Well this obviously depends on the course, and as she said she is not looking to convert, but to inform and there is a lot of comparative religion material in the course. However one remark struck me: She said the students were generally fine and interested in first and second year, but when they got to third year and realized that there was an exam at the end of it, teaching them became more up-hill work.

Its been a while

I hope to re-engage here. This has always been a personal space for my own musings, and the fact that it is publicly viewable, is a property which I use to force me to exert some editorial control as opposed to just random typing. I think writing about educational matters is a useful discipline, as is a significant part of reflective self directed CPD.
To anyone who has followed me in the past, expect more here, I'm working on a couple of posts which will rollout when they're ready.

Thoughts from Thinking and speech (Vygotsky)

I'm returning to thinking about education as a practice, and this has involved me in reading more theory over the past couple of weeks.  To take a break this evening, I decided to watch a video from Nicolai Veresov on Vygotsky. In watching it, I was drawing an analogy between speech and teaching, and came up with the following thoughts.

Teaching is a means of social interaction. We lose the sense of it if we break it down into its component parts.

Teaching combines the function of social interaction and the function of thinking.

View Teaching as a unity of thinking and communication.

The social world is the engine of development. Other factors control the rate, but are not the engine. (pure Vygotsky here)

Adult teaching is a function of society. If you want to truly understand it, you have to see how its assumptions developed in the child. That is, consider the educational histories of both the students, and the teachers.