pedagogy

WeekNotes for 2024 Week 39: Attention as Pedagogy

weekNotes

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:

Show Up & Make

I’ve rebranded the Makerspace co-working sessions (which are also my sort-of office hours) from “Makerspace Sandbox Sessions” to “Show Up & Make” so the idea is easier to understand. This name also aligns with a long-running program called Show Up & Write that the library runs with our centre for teaching and learning, which is nice since I am now also collaborating on this project with Alexis Brown, a faculty member from CELT.

It’s only the second week and I’ve already done 3 of these sessions. People are coming! Not many yet, just 2-3 each sessions, but it’s a start. Most interestingly, students have come who have never been to the Makerspace before, and they are coming not with projects or ideas, but with questions about what they can use the makerspace for and how. This is excellent but unexpected: these events were designed for people with ongoing projects or questions.

This is yet another example of something I learn again and again: there are many people who need permission to come into unfamiliar spaces, and events provide that permission.

Attention as pedagogy / Attention as love

For a long time, I’ve been thinking about how attention is the most valuable resource I can offer. Sure, I have some expertise in some areas, but even where I have something useful to share the prerequisite is still paying enough attention to know how I can help (see: reference interviews).

I increasingly find the thing students most want from me is my attention. They don’t really want to explain an idea to me so I can help them than they want to explain an idea to me so they can see how that idea fits into their emerging sense of self; I provide a mirror for them to explore their own emerging sense of self and knowledge. The worst thing I can do is step all over that process by taking up all the space.

What I can do is be interested. I can give them my attention. And sometimes I might be able to give them some advice or suggest they think about something else.

photos

links

How to Raise Your Artificial Intelligence: A Conversation With Alison Gopnik and Melanie Mitchell

A very common trope is to treat LLMs as if they were intelligent agents going out in the world and doing things. That’s just a category mistake. ==A much better way of thinking about them is as a technology that allows humans to access information from many other humans and use that information to make decisions==. We have been doing this for as long as we’ve been human. Language itself you could think of as a means that allows this. So are writing and the internet. These are all ways that we get information from other people. Similarly, LLMs give us a very effective way of accessing information from other humans. Rather than go out, explore the world, and draw conclusions, as humans do, LLMs statistically summarize the information humans put onto the web.

Baking Bread, Finding Meaning

In short, they are distinguished by the sort of engagement they elicit from those who take them up. ==In Borgmann’s view devices are characterized by how they combine a heightened availability of the commodity they offer with a machinery that is increasingly hidden from view. Basically, they make things easier while simultaneously making them harder to understand.== Devices excel at making what they offer “instantaneous, ubiquitous, safe, and easy.”

Focal things, not so much. ==Focal things ask something of you. Borgmann speaks of their having a commanding presence. They don’t easily yield to our desire for ease and convenience. A radio and a musical instrument both produce music, but only one asks something of you in return.==

Why Aren’t Smart People Happier?

One way to spot people who are good at solving poorly defined problems is to look for people who feel good about their lives; “how do I live a life I like” is a humdinger of a poorly defined problem. The rules aren’t stable: what makes you happy may make me miserable. The boundaries aren’t clear: literally anything I do could make me more happy or less happy. The problems are not repeatable: what made me happy when I was 21 may not make me happy when I’m 31. Nobody else can be completely sure whether I’m happy or not, and sometimes I’m not even sure. In fact, some people might claim that I’m not really happy, no matter what I say, unless I accept Jesus into my heart or reach nirvana or fall in love—if I think I’m happy before all that, I’m simply mistaken about what happiness is!

All this has happened very quickly, which may make it seem like we’re careening toward a “general” artificial intelligence that can do all the things humans can. But if you split problems into well-defined and poorly defined, you’ll notice that all of AI’s progress has been on defined problems. That’s what artificial intelligence does. In order to get AI to solve a problem, we have to give it data to learn from, and picking that data requires defining the problem.

WeekNotes for 2024 Week 17: “I’m Okay, You’re Okay” Reports and Iridescent Circle of Clouds

weekNotes

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

“It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” – Wendel Berry, 2000, Life is a Miracle

thinking about

It’s the end of the academic term, which means many things require reports.

While I am beholden to write reports and sometimes even do them of my own volition, I’m not sure how often they’re read or have any impact, especially if they are required by some process but not by any actual person. I’m reminded of a colleague at a previous job who would joke that our annual performance reviews should take the form of a form filled out by both the employee and their manager that just had a checkbox for “I’m doing okay” and “you’re doing okay” and if everyone agrees everyone is doing okay, that would be the end of the review.

The one beneficial thing these reports could provide, honest assessment and reflection, is often lost by the need to be relentlessly positive, especially if your job or resources for your organization is at stake. Their format, usually formal and narrative, further obscures anything valuable they might contain.

All this makes them one of the things we do that AI is actually pretty good at, and I suspect a lot of us (me included) are using it for summarizing and drafting reports, if not for writing the whole thing. If done poorly, as it usually is, just further removes and obscures what is valuable.

I’d love to just a submit a shorthand “I’m okay, you’re okay” style report for many of these, but I suspect that wouldn’t go over well. But here is my shorthand “I’m okay, you’re okay” END OF THING REPORT for a couple of things I’ve written up recently.

Makerspace End of Term Report

  • I spent less time than I wanted in the space with students and staff, but more than last term. I am working on increasing this by getting out of other commitments, but this is taking time.
  • It feels a little less busy in the space this year, but I don’t think this is a problem (though we should probably do some formal assessment to find out). There are still a lot of people using the space, and more of those seem to be learning independently and working on intensive projects over longer periods of time. If true, I am not sure if this is due to a change in our users’ behaviour, a change in how we run the space, or both.
  • Trained staff who understand the vision and culture of the space remain essential to student success and we are losing two staff members this year, one to a promotion and one to pursue a master’s in library and information science. While it’s wonderful watching colleagues move on to their next thing, it does cause some uncertainty about the future.
  • Sustainability and Indigenization connect with many other values that we want to promote, such as equitable access, belonging, community, and critical making. They are multipliers for the rest of our values.

Sustainability Grant

  • I was far too ambitious when I wrote this grant. Present Frank always assumes future Frank will have more time than he currently has, which is never true.
  • We completed most of the concrete objectives but none of the stretch goals
  • Student workers bring energy, connections, perspectives but require a lot of time, probably as much time as doing most tasks yourself. it is still worth it to gain those perspectives and connections and provide mentorship.
  • I need to get better at delegating work

Coyote Grant

  • We did a lot in a short time, including hosting welcome events for Indigenous Students and sponsoring workshops on feather work, moccasin making, and beading.
  • We need to start earlier in the year, probably right away in September, if we expect to collaborate with student clubs on events as we wanted.
  • Indigenization is about relationships and community. Everything we do must be part of an ongoing connection.

Department Chair

  • There is most likely a joke about to be made along the lines of: “the first rule of being department chair is don’t talk about being department chair”
  • There are many problems in the world that are in the category “not big enough to deal with the consequences that will arise when dealing with them” and which are therefore left alone until they become big enough that it’s worth dealing with those consequences.

photos – Iridescent Circle of Clouds

I recently started playing Dungeons and Dragons with a group of friends and I’ve been playing around with using AI to teach me the rules and strategies. It works surprisingly well to give it your character sheet and some background story and then ask it questions over time about rules, spells, etc. It’s also a good way to learn how it’s memory works and when it breaks down.

Last night after we played I used the same chat to generate some images of the character. ChatGPT’s image generation now allows you to ask for specific edits to images and even parts of images. It’s definitely not perfect and to my amusement, no matter how many times I asked it to give me a baseball cap it remained convinced (for training data reasons I suspect) that gnomes wear pointy hats. I love this because this is exactly my partner’s preferred “toque on baseball cap” hat style.

I also asked it to write a bio in the style of a New Yorker profile. It’s not perfect, but this was it’s first draft and it’s pretty good:

“Iridescent Circle of Clouds,” a rock gnome Druid, recently emerged from decades of hermetic solitude in the desert, arrives in the world with a conviction as clear as it is radical: that all existence is conscious, nothing possessing more intrinsic value than anything else. This philosophical outlook, born from long contemplation and the harsh realities of the desert, flavors his every interaction with a curious blend of detachment and profound connection. Despite his austere background, he has cultivated a somewhat incongruous taste for the finer things—silk robes, aged bourbon, the cool draw of a well-crafted pipe—each a reminder of the sensory joys he once eschewed. As he navigates the bustling towns and verdant wilds beyond his sandy confines, “Iridescent” often seems to orbit the edge of solipsism, seeing the universe’s vast complexity as a mirror of his own consciousness. This true neutral character is constantly weaving his personal revelations into conversations, seeking his place in a world he regards as both an extension of self and a boundless mystery to be unraveled.

links

Matt Pearce on Journalism After the Death of Hyperlinks

But I am going to say something that I mean sort seriously but not literally: I don’t really care about copyright! I don’t really care about paywalls! I’m okay with it if you only ever see my reporting via a chatbot! Copyright and paywalls are simply means to an end, and that end is the pursuit of human knowledge and self-liberation: the end is our freedom. And one of the principles of human freedom that I hold dear to my heart is that nobody should be providing labor to massively profitable corporations for free.

Sara Hendren on The City and the Limiting Virtues – This year we formalized our values and pedagogies into a program description and passed that through out faculty council. The main reason I decided to do this was because I think I’ve learned that its as important to know what you aren’t (in our case, we are not a classroom, a lab, or a print shop) as what you are, and this document clarified both. This article reminded me of that.

The library holds a gradation of the limiting virtues: a half-quiet first floor with new books, tables and chairs for afterschool tutoring, and the information desks for everyone — the neighborliness of a public institution’s front door. The second floor features enclosed meeting spaces for groups on a first-come, first serve basis, plus a really really quiet room for patrons wanting the moderation of all notifications off. The entire third floor is devoted to children — a beautiful raucous energy, with activity rooms, cozy nooks, and floor-to-ceiling windows on every side. A teen room in the old structure holds high-backed wing chairs and booths for semi-sedentary socializing, and a maker space occupies much of the basement. Things you can do and things you can’t, by design.

L. M. Sacasas – Vision Con

But what if, as Bennett suggests, the world is already enchanted and the real alchemy that summons the miracle of being is that fusion of time and care that we call attention?

3D Printed Tokens hanging on the glass wall outside the Print Room

Three Challenges for Makerspace Users

Makerspaces

I give a talk when classes and other groups visit the Makerspace that is meant to explain what we are, how we can be used, and hopefully makes them feel welcome. That’s a lot to accomplish and in the first year or so I was trying to fit in too many details, which made the talk overwhelming, even to me. The important parts were often drowned out by all the details.

This year, I took advice from Design Is Storytelling by Ellen Luptin and The Art of Gathering by Priya Parker and redesigned the talk to be shorter, punchier, and focused on values and calls to action. One thing I added is that I now end with 3 challenges. I’ll share them here along with some comments about how they connect with the values I ‘m trying to promote in the space.

Make something personally meaningful to you

“Making as learning works best when you have a personally meaningful project. When a project means something to you, you will work harder to make your vision a reality — your vision will be here (usually I show right hand wayyy to the right) and your current abilities will be here (show left hand wayyy to the left) and you will do all the things you need to do to close the gap between them. This might mean starting over a couple of times, learning new skills, and finding people to help you. What you do in Makerspace doesn’t need to be connected to your classes, so think about how you might use the Makerspace for something you really care about.”

In my experience, personally meaningful projects really do result more learning, better stories, higher-order learning outcomes, and more creative objects. That is why we don’t require users to only use the space for class assignments. It’s important to give users explicit permission to make something they care about because they often think they can only use the space for class assignments. This is especially true for equity-seeking groups who don’t see themselves as allowed to use the space.

This is also why I require faculty who want to use Makerspace for assignments to give students choice about what modality/tool they use and as much freedom as possible for what they are making. Makerspace assignments that require everyone do the same thing (e.g. 3D print a particular kind of object) aren’t really makerspace assignments, they are lab assignments that happen in the Makerspace.

Make a story illustrated by an object

“Sometimes we get too focused on the things we are making and lose sight of why we are making it. This can cause us to make the thing we can already make, instead of what we actually want to make. Instead, try thinking about what you’re doing as telling a story that is illustrated by the thing you’re making. Why are you making this thing? Who is it for? What will it mean to you and others? What impact, good and bad, might it have? Who helped you make it? Think of the story as a container for the thing you’re making that explains what it is meant to be and why it is important.”

I’ve written before about stories being the proper way to talk about outcomes in makerspaces and this challenge is really about starting with that idea by getting people to use stories as framing devices for their projects. Users often become hyper-fixated on what is possible instead of thinking about what they really want to make. Being practical has its place, but often I want them to think bigger instead of thinking practically. Stories help them do that by giving them an outcome that is achievable even if the thing they want to make is going to require a lot more work, resources, collaborators, time, etc.

Stories also foreground what is meaningful about what they are doing, and how it fits into a social/ecological context of place, community, nature, class, etc. It makes them think about the people who will use the things, and the people who helped them make the things.

Make a gift for someone

“The third challenge links the first two: Consider making the first real thing you do in Makerspace a gift. Gifts make things meaningful and ties them to stories about people and community. It helps us think about who the thing is for, how it will be used, and if it will have a positive impact. Consider making a gift for a friend, a family member, or a community organization. The identity token you 3D print in Makerspace is a gift for the space: a piece of communal art that shows the impact of our community.”

This challenge has a number of purposes. Giving the first thing you make after learning a new skill is an important part of Indigenous teaching, and this challenge is meant to bring that learning and spirit into Makerspace. It is also the last thing I say in the welcome talk, and so it is a bookend to the land acknowledgement that I use to open to the talk, which includes a call to be good stewards of the land, resources, and community. In this way it is meant to subtly help users see that they are anchored in a community and that they have a responsibility/role to make it a good community that has a positive impact.

Hooks not Directives

I think of these challenges as hooks I’m establishing that users might later use when thinking about what they are doing, and why they are doing it. They aren’t meant to be rules or directives, they are meant to subtly shift users towards thinking more ambitiously and about context and community.

Minimalist Making

Makerspaces, Posts

Minimalist making is an idea I’m adapting from Danica Savonick’s concept of “Minimalist Digital Humanities” that builds on the idea of frugal innovation and minimal computing. The principles are basically the same and I am using this space to brainstorm some thoughts about their application to academic makerspaces and making generally. I am particularly thinking of curricular situations here, but the same things likely apply to individual makers. Digital humanities is really digital making and I’d love us to better support digital making in the future.

Basically, Minimalist Making is making that embraces the following principles:

  1. Keep it simple
  2. Make it fun
  3. It must be relevant
  4. Keep it low impact (social, environmental, and economic impact)

Keep it simple

  • Whatever you are initially thinking, start smaller. Much smaller.
  • What pre-work can be done ahead of time?
  • What infrastructure needs to be in place? Does equipment work? Are supplies available? Are instructions and troubleshooting tips at hand?
  • The goal here can never be to do the work for users, that would negate the value of a makerspace, rather it is to set conditions that are realistic for the level of expertise of the users (zone of proximal development)

Make it Fun

  • Choice and user autonomy is essential. To me, making is about having a vision you want to bring to fruition. If you need to mandate a particular activity or outcome (and should you really? really?) what can the user choose to make it their own? Design, colour, process, etc.
  • Make the environment fun. Add music. Make it social. Conversely: have an option for people who don’t find that fun, like a room they can use that is quiet.

It must be relevant

  • As noted above: something I suspect is that making works best when you have a vision in your head you are trying to achieve, and so each time you iterate you are pushing against the limits of your abilities and closing the gap between your vision and what you can actually do. If the thing you are doing is arbitrary, you don’t have a vision or gap to close, just the artificial assignment requirements. This is one type of relevancy.
  • What skills are you developing? How will they help the user?
  • What is the impact of what you are doing on your community, society, culture, the environment, etc?
  • There is a link here with mindful making as well, thinking about users and purpose and values.

Keep it Low Impact

  • Think about costs, waste, time, equipment, stigma, etc.
  • Impacts should be proportional to outcomes and should never be arbitrary
  • Ask users to think about what the impact of their making will be, positive and negative, on the space, other users, the community, etc. all the way out in ever expanding circles.
  • Environmental and economic impacts are the easiest to think about here, but social, cultural, emotional impacts are the most important
  • There are big questions here with cultural impacts as well, especially when people are making things from other cultures or traditions.