And now in Chinese: 在线学习环境：隐喻问题与系统改进. And some thoughts on the value of printed texts.

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Warm off the press, and with copious thanks and admiration to Junhong Xiao for the invitation to submit and the translation, here is my paper “The problematic metaphor of the environment in online learning” in Chinese, in the Journal of Open Learning. It is based on my OTESSA Journal paper, originally published as “On the Misappropriation of Spatial Metaphors in Online Learning” at the end of 2022 (a paper I am quite pleased with, though it has yet to receive any citations that I am aware of).

Many thanks, too, to Junhong for sending me the printed version that arrived today, smelling deliciously of ink. I hardly ever read anything longer than a shopping bill on paper any more but there is something rather special about paper that digital versions entirely lack. The particular beauty of a book or journal written in a language and script that I don’t even slightly understand is that, notwithstanding the ease with which I can translate it using my phone, it largely divorces the medium from the message. Even with translation tools my name is unrecognizable to me in this: Google Lens translates it as “Jon Delong”. Although I know it contains a translation of my own words, it is really just a thing: the signs it contains mean nothing to me, in and of themselves. And it is a thing that I like, much as I like the books on my bookshelf.

I am not alone in loving paper books, a fact that owners of physical copies of my most recent book (which can be read online for free but that costs about $CAD40 on paper) have had the kindness to mention, e.g. here and here. There is something generational in this, perhaps. For those of us who grew up knowing no other reading medium than ink on paper, there is comfort in the familiar, and we have thousands (perhaps millions) of deeply associated memories in our muscles and brains connected with it, made more precious by the increasing rarity with which those memories are reinforced by actually reading them that way. But, for the most part, I doubt that my grandchildren, at least, will lack that. While they do enjoy and enthusiastically interact with text on screens, from before they have been able to accurately grasp them they have been exposed to printed books, and have loved some of them as much as I did at the same ages.

It is tempting to think that our love of paper might simply be because we don’t have decent e-readers, but I think there is more to it than that. I have some great e-readers in many sizes and types, and I do prefer some of them to read from, for sure: backlighting when I need it, robustness, flexibility, the means to see it in any size or font that works for me, the simple and precise search, the shareable highlights, the lightness of (some) devices, the different ways I can hold them, and so on, make them far more accessible. But paper has its charms, too. Most obviously, something printed on a paper is a thing to own whereas, on the whole, a digital copy tends to just be a licence to read, and ownership matters. I won’t be leaving my e-books to my children. The thingness really matters in other ways, too. Paper is something to handle, something to smell. Pages and book covers have textures – I can recognize some books I know well by touch alone. It affects many senses, and is more salient as a result. It takes up room in an environment so it’s a commitment, and so it has to matter, simply because it is there; a rivalrous object competing with other rivalrous objects for limited space. Paper comes in fixed sizes that may wear down but will never change: it thus keeps its shape in our memories, too. My wife has framed occasional pages from my previously translated work, elevating them to art works, decoupled from their original context, displayed with the same lofty reverence as pages from old atlases. Interestingly, she won’t do that if it is just a printed PDF: it has to come from a published paper journal, so the provenance matters. Paper has a history and a context of its own, beyond what it contains. And paper creates its own context, filled with physical signals and landmarks that make words relative to the medium, not abstractions that can be reflowed, translated into other languages, or converted into other media (notably speech). The result is something that is far more memorable than a reflowable e-text. Over the years I’ve written a little about this here and there, and elsewhere, including a paper on the subject (ironically, a paper that is not available on paper, as it happens), describing an approach to making e-texts more memorable.

After reaching a slightly ridiculous peak in the mid-2000s, and largely as a result of a brutal culling that occurred when I came to Canada nearly 17 years ago, my paper book collection has now diminished to easily fit in a single and not particularly large free-standing IKEA shelving unit. The survivors are mostly ones I might want to refer to or read again, and losing some of them would sadden me a great deal, but I would only (perhaps) run into a burning building to save just a few, including, for instance:

  • A dictionary from 1936, bound in leather by my father and used in countless games of Scrabble and spelling disputes when I was a boy, and that was used by my whole family to look up words at one time or another.
  • My original hardback copy of the Phantom Tollbooth (I have a paperback copy for lending), that remains my favourite book of all time, that was first read to me by my father, and that I have read myself many times at many ages, including to my own children.
  • A boxed set of the complete works of Narnia, that I chose as my school art prize when I was 18 because the family copies had become threadbare (read and abused by me and my four siblings), and that I later read to my own children. How someone with very limited artistic skill came to win the school art prize is a story for another time.
  • A well-worn original hardback copy of Harold and the Purple Crayon (I have a paperback copy for lending) that my father once displayed for children in his school to read, with the admonition “This is Mr Dron’s book. Please handle with care” (it was not – it was mine).
  • A scribble-filled, bookmark-laden copy of Kevin Kelly’s Out of Control that strongly influenced my thinking when I was researching my PhD and that still inspires me today. I can remember exactly where I sat when I made some of the margin notes.
  • A disintegrating copy of Storyland, given to me by my godmother in 1963 and read to me and by me for many years thereafter. There is a double value to this one because we once had two copies of this in our home: the other belonged to my wife, and was also a huge influence on her at similar ages.

These books proudly wear their history and their relationships with me and my loved ones in all their creases, coffee stains, scuffs, and tattered pages.pile of some of my favourite books  To a greater or lesser extent, the same is true of almost all of the other physical books I have kept. They sit there as a constant reminder of their presence – their physical presence, their emotional presence, their social presence and their cognitive presence – flitting by in my peripheral vision many times a day, connecting me to thoughts and inspirations I had when I read them and, often, with people and places connected with them. None of this is true of my e-books. Nor is it quite the same for other objects of sentimental value, except perhaps (and for very similar reasons) the occasional sculpture or picture, or some musical instruments. Much as I am fond of (say) baby clothes worn by my kids or a battered teddy bear, they are little more than aides memoires for other times and other activities, whereas the books (and a few other objects) latently embody the experiences themselves. If I opened them again (and I sometimes do) it would not be the same experience, but it would enrich and connect with those that I already had.

I have hundreds of e-books that are available on many devices, one of which I carry with me at all times, not to mention an Everand (formerly Scribd) account with a long history, not to mention a long and mostly lost history of library borrowing, and I have at least a dozen devices on which to read them, from a 4 inch e-ink reader to a 32 inch monitor and much in between, but my connection with those is far more limited and transient. It is still more limited for books that are locked to a certain duration through DRM (which is one reason they are the scum of the earth). When I look at my devices and open the various reading apps on them I do see a handful of book covers, usually those that I have most recently read, but that is too fleeting and volatile to have much value. And when I open them they don’t fall open on well-thumbed pages. The text is not tangibly connected with the object at all.

As well as smarter landmarks within them, better ways to make e-books more visible would help, which brings me to the real point of this post. For many years I have wanted to paper a wall or two with e-paper (preferably in colour) on which to display e-book covers, but the costs are still prohibitive. It would be fun if the covers would become battered with increasing use, showing the ones that really mattered, and maybe dust could settle on those that were never opened, though it would not have to be so skeuomorphic – fading would work, or glyphs. They could be ordered manually or by (say) reading date, title, author, or subject. Perhaps touching them or scanning a QR code could open them. I would love to get a research grant to do this but I don’t think asking for electronic wallpaper in my office would fly with most funding sources, even if I prettied it up with words like “autoethnography”, and I don’t have a strong enough case, nor can I think of a rigorous enough research methodology to try it in a larger study with other people. Well. Maybe I will try some time. Until the costs of e-paper come down much further, it is not going to be a commercially viable product, either, though prices are now low enough that it might be possible to do it in a limited way with a poster-sized display for a (very) few thousand dollars. It could certainly be done with a large screen TV for well under $1000 but I don’t think a power-hungry glowing screen would be at all the way to go: the value would not be enough to warrant the environmental harm or energy costs, and something that emitted light would be too distracting. I do have a big monitor on my desk, though, which is already doing that so it wouldn’t be any worse, to which I could add a background showing e-book covers or spines. I could easily do this as a static image or slideshow, but I’d rather have something dynamic. It shouldn’t be too hard to extract the metadata from my list of books, swipe the images from the Web or the e-book files, and show them as a backdrop (a screensaver would be trivial). It might even be worth extending this to papers and articles I have read. I already have Pocket open most of the time, displaying web pages that I have recently read or want to read (serving a similar purpose for short-term recollection), and that could be incorporated in this. I think it would be useful, and it would not be too much work to do it – most of the important development could be done in a day or two. If anyone has done this already or feels like coding it, do get in touch!

A conversation about generative AI with David Webster

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A week or so ago, early (for me) on a Monday morning, Professor David Webster and I had a conversation about generative AI, which was recorded as the first of a podcast series on the topic, hosted by the University of Liverpool. Here is that podcast. In it we explore both the darker and the more optimistic aspects of genAI, in a pleasantly rambling discussion that, surprisingly, lasted for about an hour.

I hadn’t spoken with Dave for well over a decade, at a conference in Hawaii, long before we became full professors or got elevated to loftier roles in our respective institutions, but it felt like we were just continuing the conversations we had back then. The only thing missing was a cold beer, swaying palm trees, and the sound of ukuleles drifting in the warm breeze. Well, that and a 6.5 earthquake that took out the power for a day and that made the conference a lot more memorable than it otherwise might have been. This conversation was a lot less earth shattering but it was just as enjoyable.

Downes.ca ~ Stephen’s Web ~ How Education Works: Teaching, Technology, and Technique

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Source: Downes.ca ~ Stephen’s Web ~ How Education Works: Teaching, Technology, and Technique

I somehow missed this when it was first posted, despite fairly avidly following OLDaily and keeping my eyes wide open for commentary on How Education Works. My only excuse is that I was travelling the day this was posted, and it was a hectic few days after that.

I’m very pleased that Stephen has some nice things to say about the book, and that he picks up on the fact that it is indeed as much about technology (and our deep, intrinsic intertwingularity with it) as it is about education. Absolutely.

I’m quite attached to the soft-hard metaphor that Stephen is lukewarm about but only, as he hints, because of what it implies about the dynamics of technology. When I started writing the book I used to talk a bit simplistically of soft and hard technologies. I still think that can be a useful distinction and there’s still plenty on the subject in the book. However, any soft technology can, in assembly, be hardened, and any hard technology can, in assembly, be softened, so it is really just another (I think slightly better) way of thinking about affordances of technologies, not about the technologies as they are assembled. For similar reasons, it is only slightly less fuzzy than existing theories of affordances, offering a framework for explaining technologies but not much that is predictive. The thing that led to the first of many rewrites of the book was my growing realization that the more important distinction is between soft and hard technique (the subset of technologies that are enacted by humans). The thing that matters most is the extent to which we are part of a pre-set (hard) orchestration, or we are the orchestrators, in any instantiation of an assembly of technologies. That is a much more precise distinction that both explains and predicts, and it is the basic distinction that (I think) is implicit in most social-constructivist models of technology in society, including Franklin’s distinction between holistic and prescriptive technologies, Boyd’s dominative and liberative technologies, Pinch & Bijker’s interpretive flexibility, and the dynamics of actor-network theory. Understanding the interplay between the rigid and the flexible in any given technology provides us with the means to control what should be controlled, to think about how we are being controlled and, if the hard components lead us down unwanted paths, ways of leaving those paths.  And, of course, it is primarily technique (soft and hard) that education explicitly seeks to develop, so it gives us a very useful tool for understanding the complex nature of education itself.

Athabasca University bids a deeply reluctant farewell to Peter Scott in the vilest attack yet by the Albertan government

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Peter ScottYou may have heard that the president of Athabasca University, Peter Scott, was replaced yesterday with Alex Clark, erstwhile Dean of the Faculty of Health Disciplines at AU.

This was a complete surprise to everyone at AU (apart from Alex), very much including Peter. None of the members of the executive team, including the provost, knew of it in advance. I gather that the secret was kept even from academic members of the Board of Governors: it was, it seems, presented to them as a done deal, on the day it happened. From the reactions I saw when it was announced, student board members may not even have known about it until that point. It was therefore – presumably – voted on in secret by the unholy cabal of governors who were appointed by the minister of advanced education last year, after the rest were sacked or forced to resign, and who make up the majority of the board. Essentially, Minister Nicolaides just fired our president.

The same seems to be true for the hiring of our new president.  Although Alex had been a strong candidate when Peter got the job, and he is well qualified for the role, there are some serious questions to be asked about the appointment process, in which it appears that none of those voting had any involvement in the original appointment, no one asked the opinions of academics on the original hiring committee, and no one even asked the opinions of the academics on the board itself. This, like Peter’s dismissal, can only be seen as a political hire. And it is not an interim appointment, unlike that of his successor as Dean of FHD.

Peter was fired over the phone (ironic that this was done virtually by those who oppose our virtual strategy) without notice or explanation. The timing of his firing, a few days after an agreement was signed that, despite the Albertan government’s best efforts, has largely been seen by the press as a win for Peter (it was a loss, but a manageable loss), seems hardly coincidental. When all else failed, they stabbed him in the back when he was as down as anyone could be. Peter had in fact been away thanks to the sudden death of his wife, that occurred very shortly after her diagnosis with cancer at the end of last year. She had been buried abroad, 8 working days before he was fired. It is hard to imagine how he is feeling right now, but tears well up just thinking about it. All of this was well known to the board and to the minister.  The moment was chosen with intent and malice. This was monstrous in the extreme.

It should have been so very different.

When Peter came to AU, not much more than a year ago, I cried tears of happiness. This was the leader we needed at the time we needed him: a brilliant, dynamic, imaginative, compassionate, principled man who had played a key role as a leader in transforming not just his prior institutions but the field of online and distance learning itself. Now, I cry tears of anger, outrage, and sadness. Peter could have transformed the university into something magnificent, and I believe he would have done so were it not for the utterly outrageous behaviour of the Albertan government. They fomented the union unrest into which Peter was thrust from the moment he arrived and then, over the last year, have outrageously and heavy-handedly directly meddled in the university’s affairs, against which Peter rightly and courageously fought. Peter’s assumption was, perhaps, that Alberta was like most of the rest of the world in recognizing academic freedoms, autonomy, and rights as sacrosanct. I don’t think he fully realized, at that point, that Alberta is not like that. It has a philistine government run by corrupt little despots, sponsored by corporations whose main activity is violence against the planet (this applies to most of the board of governors, as it happens). Going up against the Albertan government and, especially, appearing in the eyes of the world to win the fight, is like going up against a particularly nasty, stupid, and vindictive gang of playground bullies. Peter never had a chance to focus on the things he needed to focus on, because he was being pummelled on all sides by thugs the entire time he was with us.

Whatever happens next, AU will not be the university it could have been. The government has forced us to make 15% cuts this year, and we were already too close to the bone, cutting into it in places. We have already lost a good portion of the best executive team ever to lead us and we are very likely to lose more. The government-appointed governors, none of whom have the slightest understanding of our institution, have shown themselves to be nothing but lackeys for a morally bankrupt and abhorrent minister, willing to stop at nothing to achieve ends that have nothing to do with the well-being of the university. The union’s actions, that were deeply divisive and at least partly engineered by the government, continue to divide us. The half-hearted, hasty, and poorly implemented near-virtual plan (that was in progress before Peter’s arrival and that played a major role in the union strife) continues to cause major problems, most notably failing to address communication needs, so dividing us further. Perhaps most challengingly, we are half way through the biggest transformation that has ever occurred in the university’s history, from which we are unable to back away without enormous cost, but with a diminishing number of leaders and champions who can make it happen. Now we have a president who was (at least in part) chosen because of his willingness to live in Athabasca, which is a truly terrible idea about which I have written extensively in the past. I wish him well, but he will face a steep uphill struggle building trust among many of the staff who feel betrayed by the government’s despicable actions and the shady circumstances leading to his being hired, about which speculation is now rife, within and beyond the university. We are all in a state of shock and dismay right now. None of us feel any sense of security. Many of us are talking about leaving or preparing to leave.

For one fleeting moment, as the war with the government seemed to have been more or less resolved towards the end of last year, I felt great hope for the future of the university I have loved this past 15 years. My hopes are greatly diminished today. Nothing can repair all the harm that has been done. Our greatest hope now is that there will be a new government that is willing to help to reverse at least some of the damage. The Albertan elections are not far off. If you live in Alberta, don’t forget what this government has done. You could be next.

And, Peter, if you are reading this: you will be very much missed. I know that I speak on behalf of almost all of us here at AU when I say that our hearts go out to you.

The Socio-economic Contribution of Religion to American Society: An Empirical Analysis

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http://www.religjournal.com/pdf/ijrr12003.pdf

Jesus wept.

This is a study from 2016 on the socio-economic contribution of religion to US society, published in the Interdisciplinary Journal of Research on Religion. Its baseline estimate, based on revenue of faith-based institutions alone, is greater than the combined revenue of Apple and Microsoft. Its upper-end estimate (making some implausible assumptions about ways faith affects how people live their lives) accounts for around a third of the US economy. The mid-range estimate, that the authors reckon is likely to be the most accurate, suggests its value to US society is well over a trillion dollars, making it equivalent to the 15th largest economy in the world.

Holy shit.

Originally posted at: https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/15660010/the-socio-economic-contribution-of-religion-to-american-society-an-empirical-analysis

A beautifully expressed letter about the town of Athabasca, and Athabasca University's place within it

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The staff and students of AU are currently on tenterhooks, awaiting the results of the AU Board of Governors’ briefly postponed deliberations on how it responds to the Albertan government’s demands on AU’s future, so I have (personally) held back a bit on further commenting or adding fuel to the debate over the past couple of days. The contents of this post, though, have already reached the relevant parties, so I don’t think there is a need to delay posting it.

Over coming days, depending on how the situation develops, I may be posting a compilation of some of the comments provided by AU staff in our recent letter to the Albertan minister for advanced education and to our own board of governors. This one comment, however, written in the form of a letter, deserves its own post.  It is extremely personal, it is passionately and compellingly written, and it written by someone who loves the town of Athabasca and who cares about its people and its future. Many thanks go to its author, both for writing the letter and for giving me permission to post it in public. It is a brave decision to allow this: they have asked me to withhold their name but they are fully aware that their identity may be obvious to those who know them. 

I think it is a brilliant letter that flows from the heart directly to the page. I hope you do to. I am proud and humbled to have this person as my colleague.

As much as possible I have tried to present this almost exactly as written, but I apologize for any mistakes I may have made when converting it from the original PDF.

Greetings,

Subject: Athabasca University

I live and work in Athabasca because I choose to live and work here. I moved to Athabasca in May 2005 from Newfoundland with a 2-year plan to find employment, pay off my student debt and move back to the province where I was born and raised, a province that I dearly love.

My first year in Athabasca I worked at Scotiabank as a Customer Service Representative. In May 2006 I was hired as the Benefits Administrator for Paramount Energy Trust now known as Perpetual Energy Inc. an oil and gas company where I spent 12 years of my professional life. I loved my job however the economic downturn in the oil and gas industry forced Perpetual Energy to downsize resulting in the closure of their Athabasca field office and a decision to liquidate most of their assets in Northern Alberta. In October 2016, Sequoia Resources Corporation acquired Perpetual’s remaining assets in the North as well as some in the Central region of Alberta and as a result my position with Perpetual was terminated and I was hired by Sequoia Resources Corporation which lasted 18 months before the company became insolvent and eventually claimed bankruptcy.

During my 17 years in Athabasca, I have seen significant changes in the local economy. When I moved to Athabasca it was a thriving and prosperous town, with a flourishing economy due to the presence of oil and gas companies. However, in 2007/2008 there was a downturn in the economy and many of the oil and gas companies were forced to restructure, downsize, and implement cost reducing measures to ensure their continued presence in Athabasca. Tough decisions were made, all debt reduction measures were exhausted and many of these companies (directly or indirectly involved with the Oil and Gas Industry) were forced to close their doors and/or file for bankruptcy which negatively impacted the local economy. Following is a list of companies/business and organizations (and their current operating status) that operated in and contribute/d to Athabasca’s prosperity and viability during my 17 years here:

  1. Athabasca University
  2. ALPAC
  3. Miller Western – Closed
  4. Athabasca County
  5. Aspen View Public Schools
  6. APL – Bankrupt
  7. CNRL
  8. Husky – Closed
  9. Paramount Energy Trust (now known as Perpetual Energy Inc.) – downsized dramatically; field office closed/majority of Northern Properties sold
  10. Syntech (merged with Tarpon)
  11. Tarpon (acquired by PTW Energy Services)
  12. Pyramid (now known as PTW Energy Services)
  13. IEC – Bankrupt July 2019
  14. Pronghorn ?
  15. Sequoia – Insolvent/Bankrupt Spring 2018
  16. Pioneer Sales & Rentals – recently closed

The downsizing, restructuring and closures of many of these businesses not only affected the employees but as well the local economy.

I understand and respect some of the issues and concerns that the Municipal Governments and the Keep Athabasca in Athabasca University campaign has brought forward. However, one of the arguments that KAAU has regarding the near virtual initiative that I struggle and disagree with is the out migration of AU employees because of the opportunity available to them to work from other locations in the province and beyond. There are people migrating out of Athabasca but not all of them are AU employees, a lot of them are people and families who have depended and thrived on the oil and gas companies, and they are following the salaries that have afforded their families a lifestyle that a lot of the remaining businesses in Athabasca can’t provide or compete with. I know this personally through my involvement with the Oil and Gas industry and my continued relationships with those that worked with me in that industry. Of the sixteen businesses listed above 11 of those were directly or indirectly involved with the oil and gas industry, four of them closed, three of them went bankrupt and three businesses merged into one. I feel like the KAAU group, the town and the county through their campaigning and lobbying are placing the responsibility of Athabasca’s success and survival on one industry/business/corporation and that organization right now is Athabasca University and that is not realistic.

A town/county needs a contingency plan for the long-term. Placing all your eggs in one basket (or relying on one or two industries) will not provide the economic security and stability required for long-term success. Local municipalities need to focus on running their towns/counties like a business and finding ways to diversify and attract new businesses if they want to be viable. A couple of years ago AU put forth a proposal to work with TED, the Athabasca Rotary Club, the Town, County and Chamber of Commerce through an AU Research project on Rural Development and Sustainability to identify and assist Athabasca with achieving this, however these organizations and committees were not receptive and did not embrace the opportunity. If these groups had engaged with AU and combined their talent and resources, the Town would already have a long-term plan promoting the abundant opportunities and amenities of rural living available in Athabasca. Financially, I try to support the local economy as much as possible, but the reality is even people that live in Athabasca do not support the local economy. Many Athabasca residents will travel to the city to get groceries and necessities because prices are lower, and the selection is wider especially for people that have different dietary and lifestyle needs.

I am discouraged and disappointed by all the misinformation and disinformation circulating on social and in print media regarding AU’s intentions/plans relating to the near virtual initiative. The personal attacks and negative comments directed toward coworkers and individuals that I respect is hurtful, everyone is entitled to their opinions, but it is very unprofessional and disrespectful to intentionally tarnish another person’s reputation, integrity, and credibility because you disagree with them. There are diplomatic ways for everyone to have their voices heard and I wish everyone would convey their messages and ask their questions in more professional and respectful manner.

The individuals involved in the Keep Athabasca in Athabasca University Group, as well as the members of the Town of Athabasca & Athabasca County are campaigning and lobbying the government based on their views, but these views are not held by all Athabasca residents or AU employees. I understand and respect their stance on the issue and the goal that they are trying accomplish but as an AU employee, a long-time resident of Athabasca and someone who supports the near virtual initiative, no one from the KAAU advocacy group, the municipal council/s or the UCP Government (including my own member) has ever contacted me or any member of the Team that I work with at AU to ask for our opinions and views on how working virtually has impacted and improved our work-life balance.

The Article published in the Town and Country regarding the Town Hall meeting held at the Athabasca Multiplex on March 24, 2022, whereby the Provincial Government more notably The Premier, Mr. Jason Kenney and The Minister of Advanced Education Demetrios Nicolaides as well as the Minister of Agriculture, Forestry and Rural Economic Development Nate Horner announced that the Alberta Government was giving Athabasca University a deadline of June 30, 2022, to:

“develop and implement a comprehensive talent development, attraction and retention strategy, by June 30 of this year, to maintain and grow a broad range of employees in Athabasca, and to develop and implement a reopening strategy for the Athabasca campus to resume most employees working onsite, and to allow public access to services like registries, student support and specialized services,” Kenney said.

The most concerning statement for me was “to develop and implement a reopening strategy for the Athabasca campus to resume most employees working onsite”. I am a resident of Athabasca and I choose to live here; I have proven (since March 2020) that my job can be successfully executed virtually from my home office. My work-life balance has improved significantly because I can work from home. If the Provincial Government forces AU and its employees to return to place-based work at the Athabasca campus it will have a negative impact on my work, home life not to mention my mental health and well-being. My Grandmother always told me that it takes a village to raise a child. I never fully understood this until my daughter was born, I don’t have a village (my immediate family lives on the East Coast of Canada) and my husband works outs, so when my daughter is home from school sick working virtually allows me the opportunity to provide her with the care that she needs without lost time from work and it does not infringe on my vacation time, meaning that I do not have to use “our” (as in my family’s) vacation time to care for my sick child. If I were place based at the AU Campus, I would have to use my vacation to care for her which would significantly decrease the amount of vacation available to me if not completely exhaust my allowable annual vacation. Last year alone my daughter was absent from school a total of 26 days due to illness, annually I am entitled to 23 days of vacation. With the 2022-2023 school year fast approaching this is concerning, I am the sole care provider for my daughter and as mentioned above I do not have a village that I can rely on for support when my daughter is sick at home. Therefore, if the 2022-2023 school year produces the same number of absences due to illness as the 2021-2022 school year, I will end up owing AU 3 days for overused vacation. Annual vacation is imperative for Mental Health and Well Being, what do you recommend I do if I have no vacation time for rest and rejuvenation during the year. In addition, lost time from work not only affects me but my entire team which causes an additional array of problems and issues.

I also have some underlying health issues with adverse symptoms that sometimes prevent me from going to the office however working virtually allows me to work in the comfort of my own home managing the symptoms that otherwise I would have to take a sick day for.

COVID has introduced a new reality to many including my immediate family. I have asthma, my husband has non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma (Cancer) and is immunocompromised so cohorts and ensuring that all our contacts are vaccinated is a new part of our reality. As a result, minimizing contact is of the utmost importance as we strive to mitigate the risk of infection and the resulting consequences that it could have on my family.

My workspace at AU isn’t ideal, privacy is limited with five co-workers working in a common space, it is a high traffic area with lots of distractions. Every member of our team has different working habits and routines some people enjoy listening to music while they work, others enjoy using diffusers and essential oils, however when you’re working in an common area you have to be cognizant and respectful of your coworkers some might not like background noise, other people may have allergies and asthma etc. so using diffusers and essential oils is not recommended, which is totally understandable and acceptable. Then there is the issue of trying to regulate the temperature/air conditioning to accommodate everyone which is extremely difficult. Working virtually provides individuals the opportunity to control these variables as each employee has the freedom when working virtually to customize their workspace by implementing mental health and well-being practices that contributes to a peaceful and calm working environment which enhances creativity and productivity.

We are supposed to live in a democratic society where everyone’s voice is heard. However, if AU’s current situation and the COVID Pandemic has taught me anything its that the loudest voices which accounts for approximately 20-25% of the population seems to be the only ones listened to. Their comments and influence carry more weight than the remaining 75-80% of the population which is discouraging and is not in line with the democratic process. Maybe the UCP Government more specifically Demetrios Nicolaides, Minister of Advanced Education and Glenn Van Dijken, Athabasca’s MLA along with the Municipal Council’s and lobby groups should focus on and make more of an effort to contact the front line employees at AU, who are also constituents who will be impacted the most by this decision and take into consideration the positive and negative aspects of the Near Virtual Working Environment and how it has enhanced Work-Life Balance for many employees.

I’m tired of my voice not being heard which is why I decided to compose this letter. I’m tired of being told, I’m tired of the lobbyist/activists, Municipal and Provincial Governments not respecting the voices on the “other side”. I believe some of the asks that the Athabasca Municipal Governments has imposed on AU is unreasonable “500 jobs”? How do the local Municipal Governments and the lobbyists propose on addressing the impending issues associated with a population increase upwards of 1000 people? To my knowledge the town has not provided a contingency plan to the current residents on how they intend to accommodate the influx of an additional 1000 people. Has any consideration been given to the human impact and quality of life? Where will these people be housed? How do the town/county plan to address infrastructure? Is there a plan to recruit and retain new Doctors, there is a shortage here now and as recent as July the Hospital in Boyle had to close their emergency room for a month due to Doctor shortages? What about our schools? Our new high school which was opened in September 2018 has already resorted to using trailers attached to the school.

Mandating employees to return to placed based work is not the solution, I’m confident it will only create more problems. Some of AU’s current employees have already been approached by recruiting companies because of the attention that this issue is getting in the media. It is estimated that upwards of 30% of AU’s current workforce will resign if this mandate is enforced which will significantly diminish our talent pool. I’m not sure if the KAAU members or Local Municipal Governments have contacted Professional recruiters to determine how difficult it is to recruit talent, but that conversation might be worth having.

Regards,

[redacted]

Weary, old, a little broken, but not letting go of the dream: edtech in the 21st Century

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Anne-Marie Scott joins a long line of weary edtech illuminati who have recently expressed sadness and disillusion about life, the universe, and, in particular, the edtech industry (she has plans to do something about that – good plans – but her weariness is palpable). One of the finest antidotes to it all, Audrey Watters, has pretty much given up on trying to do anything about it. Even the usually-optimistic Tony Bates has lost his cool over it (specifically the exploitation of data harvested about students, including children, by cloud-based tools, which I predicted would be a growing issue a while back).

Personally, I burned out long ago, and the remaining embers are barely glowing. My desire to change the world is undiminished, and I still have some ideas that I don’t think anyone else has tried before, but the means, the time, the energy, and (too often) the will left me years ago. I lost most of my passion for most of edtech research long, long ago: so much rehashing of things that we’ve done again and again, so little change apart from for the worse, so many mistakes being made over and over on ever larger scales, so little that’s good getting the exposure it needs, too much that’s awful being over-exposed. The emergency responses to the pandemic just depressed me further, and my own university is devoting pretty much all of its energy and resources into reinventing its infrastructure, leaving little space for my quirky brand of toy making (though the Landing is very slowly, in fits and starts, beginning to get the attention it deserved 10 years ago). But I will not go gentle into that good night. Not yet.

Online learning (e-learning, edtech, technology-enhanced learning, etc), by its nature, has a strong propensity to do ‘human’ badly, which is a pity because education is about very little else than being human with other humans. Edtech (and almost everyone who creates it) wants to control, to measure, to collect, to impose order on disorder. Even its most organic, volatile, social spaces are filled with instrumentality, on the part of both people and machines. Much of the time, human actions are input for the algorithms that seek to control them. Machines try to make automata inside us in their own distorted image. We become what we behold, and what we behold becomes what it has made us, a spiralling loop toward mediocre grey, mirrors reflecting mirrors till all the light has gone.  And the machines, in turn, are cogs in machines, that are cogs in machines, each one turning the next, grinding their gears, oblivious to our humanity, black-boxing what we once did ourselves in uniform, impenetrable digital containers, where efficiency is a measure of what can be measured, and of little or nothing that actually matters.

Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, those of us working in the still-fresh online learning field hoped we’d change the educational establishment but, instead, the educational establishment changed us. It took our monkey-paw rainbows of wishes, chewed them up, and spat them back at us in trademarked beige. It threw away what it didn’t need to reinforce its mediaeval mission, and made what was left into a cyborg prosthesis, an automated monk, each part like the next: efficient, sterile, bland, each human interaction with it a data point, each person a vessel for implementing its measured objectives, ignoring what it couldn’t measure as though it wasn’t there. In the process of putting mediaeval pedagogies online, we lost most of what made them (nearly) work, and amplified the things that make them fail, creating machines (pedagogical and digital) that attempted to control learners more than ever before.

Personalized learning depersonalizes the person. The tools provide a more efficient means of making people who are more the same, as near as possible cookie cutter images replicating the machine’s pre-programmed domain model in learners’ brains.  Increasingly, too, we are learning to be human from machines that learned to be like us from the caricatured curated facades we presented to others in the simplifying mirror of cyberspace. More and more of those facades that are mined by the machines are now, themselves, created by machines. They will be what the next generation learns from, and we in turn will learn from them. Like photocopies of photocopies,  the subtle gradations and details will merge and disappear and, with them, our humanity. It’s already happening. Meanwhile, outside the educational machine, we are herded like sheep into further centralized machines that use the psychology of drug pushers to feed us ever more concentrated, meme-worthy, disposable content, that do the thinking for us so that we don’t have to, that automate values that serve no one but their shareholders, that blend truth, lies, beauty, and degradation into an undifferentiated slurry of cognitive pink slime we swallow like addicts, numbing our minds to what makes them distinct. Edtech is learning from that model, replicating it, amplifying it. ‘Content’ made of bite-size video lectures and pop quizzes, reinforced by adaptive models, vie for pole position in charts of online learning products. These are not the products of a diseased imagination. They are the products of one that has atrophied.

This is not what we intended. This is not what we imagined. This is not what we wanted. Sucked into a bigger machine, scaled up, our inventions turned against us. Willingly, half-wittedly, we became what we are not. We became parts in someone else’s machine.

How can we, again, become who we are? How can we become more than we are? How can the edtech community find its soul again? Perhaps, for example:

  • By revering the idiosyncratic, the messy, the unformed, the newly forming;
  • By being part of the process, not makers of the product;
  • By supporting each personal technique, not replicating impersonal methods;
  • By embracing the complex, weird, fuzzy mystery, not analyzing, not averaging, not simplifying;
  • By appreciating, not measuring;
  • By playing for the joy of the game, not playing to win;
  • By tinkering, not engineering;
  • By opening, not closing;
  • By daydreaming about what could be, not solving problems;
  • By embracing, not rejecting;
  • By making machines for humans, not adapting humans to be parts of machines;
  • By connecting people, not collecting data about them;
  • By owning the machine, not renting someone else’s machine;
  • By sharing, not containing;
  • By enabling, not controlling;
  • By following the learners, not leading them;
  • By looking through the screen, not at it;
  • By doing with, not doing at one another;
  • By drinking from the living stream, unfiltered and unflavoured;
  • By finding softness, not imposing hardness;
  • By asking why, who, and where, not what, how and when;
  • By making learning, not just what is learned, visible;
  • By making learners visible (if they want);
  • By loving the small, the personal, the trivial, the bright seams of gold;
  • By being – and staying – beginners;
  • By grasping the end of the long tail;
  • By living on the boundaries, and tearing down the barriers;
  • By rejecting the central and the centralizing;
  • By engaging with the local, the specific, the situated, the social;
  • By knowing we learn in a place, caring we are in it, and cherishing who we share it with;
  • By searching for the cracks and filling them with light;
  • By doing the dangerous things;
  • By breaking things;
  • By feeling wonder.

We must make playgrounds, not production lines. We must embrace the logic of the poem, not the logic of the program. We must see one another in all our multifaceted strangeness, not just in our self-curated surfaces. We must celebrate and nurture the diversity, the eccentricities, the desires, the fears, the things that make us who we are, that make us more than we were, together and as individuals. The things we do not and, often, cannot measure.

The things that make education worthwhile.

The reasons it matters.

 

Interesting product: Bionic Reading

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https://bionic-reading.com/about/

Having spent a while researching the literature on ways that visual landmarks and other text enhancements (and deliberate obfuscations) affect comprehension and recall, I am a little sceptical about the underlying theory for this patented product that is based on the assumption that we read better if the first chunks of each word are bolded, like this. The primary foundation appears to be a 1980 paper that uses gaze duration/eye fixation to predict readability of text. The Bionic Reading product creates artificial fixation points at the start of each word, so the theory seems to be that we can read faster, and recall more as our eyes are guided through the text. I don’t see any mention of any other research on the Bionic Reading site that supports its claims apart from the 1980 paper, but (ironically) maybe it’s because I missed it.

The assumptions may be a bit over-simplistic: we don’t read everything the same way, there are differences in ways that different people read, subject matter matters, intent matters, and so do many other factors. I found that I could grasp the meaning of the sample plain text that they provide on the home page far quicker than I could the bionic text equivalent: it was a small enough chunk that I could absorb the gist of it in a second or so, whereas I had to read the bionic text word by word in order to understand it, which took several seconds. Familiarity matters, though: there are recognition mechanisms at work here, both in making unadorned text easier to grasp (for me), and in learning to read the bionic text. I suspect that, after a while, the (possible) benefits would diminish as we learn to recognize whole words more easily in their modified form. It makes me wonder whether the benefit is similar to that of making a font more difficult to read, for which there is some (contested) evidence that it can improve recall. When we have to try harder to read the text, for some but not all kinds and lengths of text, we tend to recall more. In fact, anything that makes it more likely for us to read something word by word – as long as the flow is not lost – can aid comprehension and recall, under some circumstances.

The product is interesting, though. It provides an API that can be called to convert any text to bionic text, for use (in principle) in any app. It might make an interesting variation on the ways that we are using to modify text in our Landmarks application (for which I claim prior art, having written about this in 2012). Landmarks is intended to make chunks of e-text more recognizable, especially when text reflows, so it isn’t trying to compete in the same territory. However, the ways that the Bionic Reading app make passages of text more distinctive from one another might play a useful part in overcoming the big problem with most e-texts: that everything looks pretty much the same, and there are very few navigational cues, so it’s harder to remember what you read and where you read it.

Originally posted at: https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/13620551/interesting-product-bionic-reading

So mouse jigglers are a thing now

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https://www.amazon.ca/s?k=mouse+jiggle

A mouse jiggler is a mechanical device that literally jiggles your mouse, or a dongle that electronically mimics mouse movement. There are even a few real mouses with jiggling functions built in. Why? Though there are a few people who might use it to keep their computer awake (there are better ways), mainly it is because there are companies that track whether their employees are working based on whether they are moving their mouses frequently enough. This would be laughable were it not so goddam serious.

I hardly know where to begin with the many things that are wrong with monitoring your employees’ mouse movements to check that they are working. Anyone ever heard of respect? Anyone ever heard of trust or the importance of it? Anyone ever heard of autonomy or why it matters? Anyone ever read even a blog post about motivation (let alone any actual research)? Anyone ever heard of the McNamara Fallacy?  Anyone ever considered whether people are more productive when given autonomy than when forced to conform? Anyone ever looked at how people actually work, and what makes them productive? Anyone ever even thought about it? So I thoroughly applaud the many people who are buying these devices to fool their employers into thinking they are working when they are, quite rightly and inevitably, emphatically not doing so. The employers deserve everything they (don’t) get. There are devices from a few dollars up that will jiggle your mouse for you so, if your employer seriously thinks that your job is to move a mouse, get one now! Screw them and let them stew in their own vile festering juices. If the measure of your value can be diminished to whether you are sitting in front of a computer (even if you are a data entry clerk) then cheat all you can, because no one cares about you, or whether you can actually do your job.

It is possibly even more concerning that some people get them because, though they may not deliberately be monitored for ‘activity’,  they don’t want their status to be shown as ‘away’ in whatever real-time system they use (IMs, Slack, MS Teams, etc) in case anyone thinks they are slacking. It is sadder when, rather than submitting to unwarranted policing, people police themselves because of what they believe other people will think of them.

There are lessons to be learned from this for online ‘educators’ who think that they can automatically proctor online exams, or who think that log files and similar activity trackers based on automated collection of computer use can tell them anything useful about whether or how their students are learning. Making learning visible is not about measuring compliance, especially when the means to measure it is such a weak, irrelevant, and easily gamed proxy that assumes everyone is average. It’s about designing the learning experience so that students can share their learning – process and product – with you and with one another, voluntarily, as fellow human beings doing something marvellous, unique, and unquantifiable.

Originally posted at: https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/11154838/so-mouse-jigglers-are-a-thing-now

Requiem for an email address

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Some time today my email address and all its aliases at the University of Brighton will suddenly cease to exist, vacuumed away by an automated script that doesn’t care.

It has been 30 years since I sent my first ever SMTP email from that address, from a Vax terminal, carefully ending it with a single dot on its own line to signal the end of the message. Among the (yes) millions of emails (for years, well over 100 every day) that have since been sent to and from the account have been announcements of the births and deaths of many loved ones, job offers, notifications of awards, letters to and from long lost friends, and a metric tonne of spam and bacn. Among those messages were expressions of love, sorrow, pleasure, anger, and joy. It has been the tenuous thread connecting me with those I love when all others have failed. It has helped me make new friends and keep old ones. It has taught me, and I have taught with it. It has given me delight, angst, inspiration, frustration, fear, and exaltation. It has, in the past, been so much a part of my identity that my students used to refer to me as jon-dot-dron. I’ve been through eight physical addresses and at least as many phone numbers in the time I’ve had the account. It has been my prosthetic memory and my filing system. Its archives contain (or contained) records of the history of half my life. Some of those emails are what made that history. There are/were messages in it from more than a few loved ones who have since died, or with whom I’ve lost contact. It followed me through many jobs and roles at the University of Brighton – student, IT manager, lecturer, honorary fellow, and more.

But the Centre for Learning and Teaching to which my final role was attached is no more, and so my email account must now die with it.

I can think of no other digital entity associated with me that has lasted as long as that email address apart from, perhaps, the user account with which it was associated (which is also disappearing today). The nearest thing to it was my ‘Ship of Theseus’ PC that existed for over 20 years, from the 1980s to the 2010s, every single part of which had been replaced multiple times, and which (like the Ship of Theseus itself) had spawned a few offspring along the way that were made from its discarded parts. I was a little sad to let go of that, too, but its surviving contents lived on in something better, so it was no great loss. This is a bit different.

Pragmatically, it is pointless for me to retain my Brighton email account. With just a handful of exceptions a year, the only emails ever sent to it nowadays are spam or bacn, I hardly ever send emails from it, and it takes effort to maintain the thing. But I will miss it. The comfortable fiction that we are just what goes on in our brains and bodies has seldom seemed less believable. Our minds extend into those around us, the artefacts we create, the artefacts we use, the people we cherish. Those emails contained a bit of me, and a bit of all those who sent them. It was where our minds met. I think this should be recognized with more than a shrug. And so I write this both to celebrate the existence and to mourn the passing of a little bit of me. 

jon.dron@brighton.ac.uk/jd29@bton.ac.uk

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