Putting the “umph” in AI’s triumph of theory

A tidal seascape of dark forks stuck in the sand with distant clouds.

Tidal Forks by Nate Angell generated using DALL-E with the prompt "a sea of forks being bent by tidal flows in the style of Dalí", shared via CC BY 4.0.

“In a just world, every article about GPT-4 would nod toward Barthes and Foucault.” — Ted Underwood, The Empirical Triumph of Theory I’m late to the party, I know, but I recently became aware of Ted Underwood and his truly awesome work. I couldn’t resist reading when I saw his post The Empirical Triumph of … Read more

Rant on PoMo

An anthropomorphized hammerhead shark in a carpenter's outfit, hammering in nails on an unfinished building using his head.

man this guy is totally nailing it right now from the BoJack Celebrity Tumble Site, ~2016.

I’m posting a complete, slightly edited version of a 31-part Twitter thread I posted on 18 July 2019 so there’s a record of what I wrote in one place where people can read, comment on, and annotate it. I invite you to do all that below. I’ve edited it here slightly only in order to correct typos in the original, to expand abbreviations that were necessary just to make it fit in tweets, to add links for context, and to reduce somewhat the intensity of my ranty swearing (this is a family blog after all).

Everyone should take what follows recognizing its original genre: the late-night Twitter rant. It’s certainly not a great introduction to the complex ideas and bodies of work it references. It simplifies a lot of what I hope is my more nuanced thinking about these topics. Its rhetoric is a bit incendiary and could even feel insulting to you, the reader. I bet you are a better person than the imaginary audience of my original rant. Certainly the mini-argument I make at the end about why this flawed idea circulates in the USA is incomplete, and maybe even totally wrong. I do hope the rant can serve as an easy-to-digest argument against what I think is a common, but flawed idea about “postmodernism” and its role in shaping contemporary culture. And maybe we can add some depth to it through annotation and further conversation.

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Mothering Digital

Today folks are gathered at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Mother of All Demos (“MOAD”). Held in 1968 in San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium, SRI’s Douglas Engelbart and others demonstrated networked computer systems they were developing, including the mouse, hypertext, and real-time collaborative editing. The MOAD has become a notorious event in computer and internet history, both presaging and shaping the digital technology environment we live in now.

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Opening Knowledge Practices

I’ve become increasingly interested in how I can help empower people to have greater agency in their lives to build a better life for everyone through our mutual engagement in acquiring, generating and sharing knowledge, an effort I’m calling “opening knowledge practices” or OKP for short.

Why do I call it “opening knowledge practices”?

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Post-Fact Fictions: Let’s Get REAL About Information Literacy

Graphic showing overlapping petals labelled information literacy, data literacy, statistical literacy, critical reasoning, visual literacy, technology literacy.

Literacy Rainbow (6/6) by Justin Grimes licensed CC BY-SA.

Read more posts about Renewable Experiential & Applied Learning (REAL)

I’m still thinking about the 2016 US election and what it means for the people, ideas and future I care about. One thing that is clear to me is that understanding and participating in such an election calls on all of us—regardless of our point of view—to increase our information literacy and use it to inform our critical reasoning. How’s your statistical and data literacy doing?

Folks are saying we now live in a “post fact” world, but I recognize that “facts” have always been generated within cultural, political, economic, and social contexts. If anything, we are drowning in facts, not sailing away from them. To survive, we need to get better at understanding how facts are now made, circulated, and given value.

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Open Batteries

Kid's art hung on fridge.

Josh's First Fridge Art by Jessica, licensed CC BY-SA.

Read more posts about Renewable Experiential & Applied Learning (REAL)

When kids are little, we are quick to share their works, without worrying if they are worthy, or if sharing gets in the way of the creator’s growth. A first scribble hung on the fridge engages its crayon-wielding artist in community, audience, and their own creative evolution. I still remember my first daughter’s prolific Blue Period, quickly far too large for her limited fridge gallery.

Yet as soon as kids enter school, their work descends into an underworld of assessment: kindergarten’s finger paintings give way to worksheets, reports, and standardized tests that fall quickly to their final, lonely resting places, giving off the dying breath of grades.

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