Weeknotes are a habit I'm cultivating where I share what I'm working on or thinking about, primarily in my professional life, without worrying too much about the ideas being full-formed.

thinking about / working on:

A new term begins today, along with a bunch of new and old programming. This morning over coffee while reading the newsletter Dense Discovery the author Grace Burrowes posed the question “What problems are we trying to solve?” as a question worth asking, and I thought I would use it here for what I am working on this week.

• How do we support users who want to experiment with computer and electronics prototyping in our existing space without changing our access model?
  • This week I am meeting with a group of faculty, students, and lab technicians to talk about how to turn one of our rooms into a space for computer and electronics prototyping. This has been an under-explored area since we opened almost 3 years ago because it’s hard to do within the space and expertise we have, and also because there’s ways it could break our current access model of “everyone can walk in and use everything within 2 minutes.”
• How do we craft a position description that meets our department’s immediate and future needs while combining experience real candidates actually have into a job that someone could successfully do?
  • We recently failed a job search, and so we need to re-think what we are expecting. There are, as always, constraints, but we have some room to try to make the position better and more likely to be successful.
• How can we provide computing power to users for exploring AI within an open lab environment?
  • This isn’t mine directly, but something happening I’m being asked my thoughts about, and which I care about a lot since we really need a better teaching lab for the Makerspace. I am leaning towards wanting a space that has enough compute to run basic local models, but nothing so fancy or specific it can’t be used for things like 3D modeling, video editing, etc.
• How can we provide introductory workshops for the users who need the permission a workshop gives them to come into the Makerapace, without becoming a teaching space?
  • When we opened I didn’t want to teach any workshops. Last year I did a few and they quickly filled up. People clearly need the permission a workshop provides, even if they know that we will literally just be making them do the tutorial that is on our website and they could do anytime. I’m still working on finding a balance here, both pedagogically and for my own workload, but I suspect I will do more of these this semester, including a new workshop on AI.

That’s all I have time for this week!

Weeknotes are a habit I'm cultivating where I share what I'm working on or thinking about, primarily in my professional life, without worrying too much about the ideas being full-formed.

I’m doing a Monday weeknote this week since I haven’t done one in a couple months and I need to get back into the habit. This summer has been chaotic with lots of unexpected personal and professional challenges. The fall semester is in sight though and it feels good to be getting back into habits. No links or anything else this week.

Working on:

• Makerspace Sandbox Sessions: These are going to be weekly or bi-weekly co-learning and working sessions where students, staff, and faculty can come work on their projects together. The idea is to kickstart more community engagement and collaboration and create a space for people to make progress towards their goals in a co-play situation. I have a pretty good idea of what this is going to look like now and so this week I need to figure out a schedule that is regular enough that it doesn’t feel random and flexible enough that people with a lot of different schedules can attend.
• Collaborating with AI workshop: Part of our new Skill Share Series of short, active-learning focused workshops in the Makerspace where people can come explore tools and methods in a slightly more guided way. I did this last week for our staff PD day and parts of it went well (the local AI models are good enough and fast enough to be usable on our computers) and parts need to be reworked (more examples to get people started).,
• Setting myself up for being successful as the only Department Chair this fall: My co-chair is on a 6-month sabbatical, so until December, I am both the full chair of our department and doing my normal Makerspace work. Chair work is a mix of ongoing responsibilities which can be planned for and dealing with the unexpected. If nothing else I need to make sure my systems are set up to deal with both.

Weeknotes are a habit I’m cultivating where I share writing (and some links) as a thinking-in-public process. The idea is to explore ideas I’m grappling with, primarily in my professional life, without worrying about them being full-formed. The potential visibility of these notes is a nudge to develop them a bit more than if they were private. While my audience is mostly theoretical, if you’re reading this, please understand these are meant to be exploratory and provisional.

quotes

What difference can AI make when the current rate of poetry production already exceeds our collective ability to respond to its existence? Jon Stone on AI Is No Threat to Poetry; We’ve Already Got It Licked

thinking about

Half a week late on this WeekNotes as I am still wrapping up loose threads from last term. One thread is a presentation the Makerspace team (including the technitions who work in the space) and our Assessment Librarian are giving next week at WILU on “Developing and Assessing a Culture of Change at the TRU Library Makerspace” It’s mostly done, but I need to finish my part about the emotional impact of working in a space built for change, so I’m going to brainstorm that here.

What is the good?

The Makerspace is definitely the most rewarding thing I’ve done professionally. Nothing else comes close.

Some of the reasons for this aren’t about how we are a culture of change: I work with a terrific team; we get to know our users really well and see them develop over time; for some students, we become a place of belonging; we help people explore things they’re passionate about; almost all of our users are engaged in our space; sometimes they change their plans because of the time they spend with us; we’re often able to help get them jobs and other opportunities.

What is emotionally impactful for me about being a culture of change?

One thing is that I’m always learning new things. We’re a growth focused learning space and so, in a way, our users’ growth makes us grow; as they learn something new about sewing or podcasting or 3D printing, often we do too. I love learning new things.

Another thing is that I am often surprised as some expectation or assumption is unsettled. Seeing that something I thought would be the case isn’t.

Which I guess is connected to the last thing, which it is that it is humbling in the best way. Seeing ideas or solutions I didn’t think of or couldn’t have done. Seeing that a staff member is really good at something they didn’t know they were good at; that they are better than I could be. That is very rewarding when you work together in a team.

What can be hard?

Trying new things takes a lot of time and energy. It can be exhausting. You need to be careful about boundaries and burn out. I am not good at that part.

Working with people who have ideas or want to get involved requires a lot of mentorship and mediation. Often a lot more than if you just did things yourself. Definitely more than if you just had a suggestion box.

Finally, not all ideas are great ideas and not every plan works out. You need to say no a lot, explain why ideas won’t work, or how they will break something fundamental to your mission or values.

links

Charlie Warzel on ElevenLabs Is Building an Army of Voice Clones

The core problem of ElevenLabs—and the generative-AI revolution writ large—is that there is no way for this technology to exist and not be misused. Meta and OpenAI have built synthetic voice tools, too, but have so far declined to make them broadly available. Their rationale: They aren’t yet sure how to unleash their products responsibly. As a start-up, though, ElevenLabs doesn’t have the luxury of time. “The time that we have to get ahead of the big players is short,” Staniszewski said. “If we don’t do it in the next two to three years, it’s going to be very hard to compete.” Despite the new safeguards, ElevenLabs’ name is probably going to show up in the news again as the election season wears on. There are simply too many motivated people constantly searching for ways to use these tools in strange, unexpected, even dangerous ways. (View Highlight)

Facebook’s AI Spam Isn’t the ‘Dead Internet’ It’s the Zombie Internet

At first, previously viral (but real) images were being run through image-to-image AI generators to create a variety of different but plausibly believable AI images. These images repeatedly went viral, and seemingly tricked real people into believing they were real. I was able to identify a handful of the “source” or “seed” images that formed the basis for this type of content. Over time, however, most AI images on Facebook have gotten a lot easier to identify as AI and a lot more bizarre. This is presumably happening because people will interact with the images anyway, or the people running these pages have realized they don’t need actual human interaction to go viral on Facebook.

Daniels: Why We Tell the Stories We Tell | SXSW 2024

Join award-winning writers and directors Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert as they talk about the process of developing, creating, and releasing their surprise hit movie that took the world by st— okay, look, if you’re still reading this, we should tell you that we’ve run out of new things to say about Everything Everywhere All At Once, so although we’ll try our best to stay on topic, we’ll most likely go on a bunch of tangents about the state of the world, the impending climate crisis, the collapse of consensus truth, the rise of AI, the importance and impossibility of self care, and our collective responsibility as storytellers to confront the issues of our time, because that’s probably going to be what’s on our mind, but we can’t make any promises, but at times we don’t feel qualified to talk about any of that stuff, anyway we hope you enjoy our SXSW keynote!

quote

It was a good thing for me to learn a craft with a true maker. It may have been the best thing I have done. Nothing we do is better than the work of handmind. When mind uses itself without the hands it runs the circle and may go too fast; even speech using the voice only may go too fast. The hand that shapes the mind into clay or written word slows thought to the gait of things and lets it be subject to accident and time. Purity is on the edge of evil, they say.

Ursula K. Le Guin – Always Coming Home

thinking about

I was in Vancouver last week, so I’m working today to catch up, but it was worth it to see some friends and family and spend some time in a rain forest.

On Wednesday, I’m giving a talk to a sustainability community of practice. My head is obviously still in the rain forest though because sustainability isn’t totally capturing what I want to talk about.

It’s easy to talk about sustainability as part of our operations. We’re a common good, so others don’t need to buy their own things (every campus is full of forgotten 3D printers in closets). We’ve built a tool library and are currently building a donation-based fabric stash of materials people can use for free. We recycle PLA from 3D printers.

Sustainability is also built into instruction and programming. During my welcome talk, I ask learners to be conscious consumers of materials, while recognizing that people need to use materials to learn. We partner with others to run events where people can learn how to repair their clothes, bikes, and small electronics. We’re even building a plant propagation station where people can exchange plant cuttings.

But what I really want to think about is how we can use making and technology as a site for repair and maintenance, not just of the built or natural environment, but as a way of rehabilitating our relationships with non-human species and the land.

The thing is, I’m not sure myself what this means yet. This is the topic of my upcoming sabbatical in January, but I want to get going on it now.

One thing I’m sure about is that makerspaces, and ours in particular, are not primarily innovation spaces. Our value is as learning spaces, spaces for belonging, and community spaces. That opens the door to broadening what we think of as appropriate uses and purposes for the space.

Many Indigenous cultures ground learning, making, and technology in relations with the rest of nature. Long term, I would like us to broaden our focus to find more ways of using the connections people gain in the space between themselves, their communities, and the material world as a way of rehabilitating their relationships with the natural world.

photos

A wonderful slime mold found on one of the trails near the Seymour river in Vancouver. Magnified through the loop.

links

In the 1950s and 1960s, a series of thinkers, beginning with Jacques Ellul and Marshall McLuhan, began to describe the anatomy of our technological society. Then, starting in the 1970s, a generation emerged who articulated a detailed critique of that society. The critique produced by these figures I refer to in the singular because it shares core features, if not a common vocabulary. What Ivan Illich, Ursula Franklin, Albert Borgmann, and a few others have said about technology is powerful, incisive, and remarkably coherent. I am going to call the argument they share the Standard Critique of Technology, or SCT. The one problem with the SCT is that it has had no success in reversing, or even slowing, the momentum of our society’s move toward what one of their number, Neil Postman, called technopoly.

From Tech Critique to Ways of Living

The most common failure cases I see in these kinds of situations is people starting from deep within their own heads, either because they’ve been fully immersed in a particular project, or because they’re reacting to their own fears or concerns. (Even if those are legitimate!) I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen an important document, like a cover letter for a job, or a pitch for fundraising, that essentially starts with a lengthy, off-putting, deeply insular recitation of a list of things that are basically a litany of the author’s insecurities. Don’t do this!

Make Better Documents.

That universities have adapted should make us confident that they will adapt to synthetic media models as well. But adaptation is never without some cost to the organism.. As a reliance on digital content has grown, universities have had to invest more and more to deal with unwanted effects, whether that means new ways of supporting staff and students, investment in digital platforms and infrastructure, IT support, security and privacy services, or subscriptions on increasingly poor terms.

Risks to Knowledge Economies

Weeknotes are meant to be quick, off-the-cuff reflections on whats happening this week, with a focus on projects and how they are moving forward.

situational

There is a lot happening at work right now that is making the actual work hard to focus on. The politics of post-secondary institutions labour are often painful in a way that is hard to describe, and I won’t try here. It helps to focus on students, who are almost always great. Protecting the real work of education often comes at a cost to that work. That doesn’t mean it’s not important, but it’s a constant struggle to find the balance. Otherwise you risk waking up one day and finding that you are no longer doing the work you wanted to protect in the first place, or worse, you have become the person who other’s need to protect that work from.

projects

makerspace sustainability

Quickly moving forward on the donation based fiber “bank” which we have renamed the “Community Fabric Stash” after realizing tht a) nobody knew what we were talking about, and b) the bank, e.g. food bank, metaphor was not great.

Cicyetkwu and Sarah have been working on promotion materials for the fabric stash and those should be rolling out this week.

This week I am hoping to connect with a student in trades who will build out some shelves to store materials. Originally we were going to buy shelving, but that does against the sustainability goals, and a student project from Trades will be more interesting/fun/aesthetically-pleasing.

Also planning another Repair Cafe with the wonderful folks at Kamloops Repair Cafe and the TRU Sustainability office. TRU to host Repair Cafe to repair students’ broken items

coyote grant and decolonization

Currently working with Cicyetkwu on an additional welcome event for Indigenous students, this one focused on making drum/shoulder bags. We did one of these last semester and had a Beat Sabor competition and went really well and we’ve seen an increase in Indigenous students using the Makerspace. Cicyetkwu and Melissa organized these and help run them, and honestly, this is work I couldn’t really do myself. We need to find a way to have regular Indigenous student ambassadors who know that community on campus and can bring people into the space.

This week we will hopefully connect with a student artist to run 2 workshops on beading this term. Figuring our appropriate honourariums and timelines, etc. The hope is some staff can also attend.

The other parts of our grant (sponsorship of the Indigenous Culture Club to run workshops in the space, more funding for Indigenous artists) are going to be hard to get done by the end of fiscal year. Hopefully next year we can get the grant earlier.

assessment project

This is the one that I feel the most guilty about. We wrapped up this research almost 10 months ago, and I am still, theoretically, working on a literature review. Actually I’ve done the reading and am now summarizing, but so many things have intervened that i feel very behind. Worse, another librarian and all the library technicians who work in the space helped with this research. I really need to get that started again this week.

links

None this week. Or rather, too many to share and not enough time this morning to parse 🙂