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The Downfall of Doppler Labs: Inside the Last Days of a Hardware Startup | WIRED

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Oh drat. So Doppler Labs is no more. This is very sad.

I love my Here One bluetooth earbuds, have recommended them to many people, and would do so again. For simple noise cancelling they run countless rings around every other headphones and earbuds I have ever tried, including top of the line Bose devices costing a lot more (not that these were cheap). The moment that you turn the external sound down and enter a state of blissful silence is miraculous. But they are so much more than that: having entered that world of silence you can bring up sounds that you want to hear, notably the voices of people around you or (more specifically thanks to 6 built-in microphones) in front of you (or, for secret agents, behind you). It is quite eerie to sit on a bus and hear, with fair clarity, the conversations of people around you but to barely hear the rumble and clatter of the bus itself. It’s not always perfect, but it is still pretty remarkable. I’ve even been able to talk with people on a float plane, with massively reduced rumble and noticeably enhanced speech, almost normally. And it is marvellous to be cycling while listening to music while being able to hear approaching traffic and other significant things around me well enough to be safe. Or to wander through a park in the heart of a noisy city and hear nothing but birdsong. I particularly love being able to sit in a crowded bar or restaurant and to hear the conversation of people on the other side of the table but not those of the rest of the room (though it still has difficulty dealing with over-loud music). As a former professional musician with consequent hearing loss, this is transformative: I don’t need a hearing aid (yet) most of the time but, for those odd occasions when my hearing fails me, Here One provides a great solution. To cap it off, the sound quality for music etc is top notch – vastly superior to any other earbuds I have ever owned (mind you, they cost more than twice as much as any I have hitherto owned, so I would hope so). I suspect that at least some of the reason for this is that they store a hearing profile for me that knows which frequencies cause me difficulty and that therefore shape the sound to suit me better. They are basically computers for the ears.

There are weaknesses, some of which have till now been improving through software upgrades since I got the things. It’s a big pain having to control the buds from a cellphone for even pretty simple stuff like volume control. Though there are a few things that can be done by tapping them/double-tapping them (like switching off the noise cancelling or answering a phone) the process is unreliable and there’s a limited range of things you can do that way. The battery life, though improved since the first release and now quicker to recharge, is not that great, notwithstanding the fact that you can charge them two or three times from the case itself. I would prefer to be able to plug in a cable and/or battery booster to use on long flights without interruption. Despite multiple options for earpieces, they don’t always feel firmly set in my ears and, because the seal is pretty solid when they are inserted right, it can get uncomfortable on take-off and landing in planes, especially if you have a cold. And they don’t have a flight mode so, technically, I shouldn’t be doing that anyway. It is really annoying when bluetooth fails as, inevitably, it sometimes does (even though it may not be the fault of the earphones). It is hard to pair them with multiple devices, and the set-up for non-supported devices (anything that is not an iPhone or Android phone, basically) is gruelling and unreliable. It would be nice if they were waterproof. They stick out a bit, albeit not as much as most bluetooth buds. Sometimes they fail to turn off and cause feedback when returned to the case. But these are things I can live with, in return for wearing a completely new category of smart device that enhances the quality of my life.

I was really looking forward to some of the promised new features, especially real-time language translations, but I guess that will have to wait until it is a standard cellphone/smartwatch feature because it is no longer going to come from Doppler Labs. I am much more worried about the loss of support, and the fact that what I have now is what I will have for as long as the buds themselves last: it was one of the appealing things about them that they got better with each software/firmware update. If security flaws are discovered, they won’t get fixed. More worryingly, next time I change my phone (a common event) I may not be able to install the software that is essential to making them work at all. Even if I can, my experience with older iOS devices is that upgrades to phone operating systems often render older software unusable, so they could become a very expensive bit of junk very quickly. It would be nice to think that Doppler Labs might open source their software so that this is not a problem but, from the article, it sounds like they will be selling off the patents to the highest bidder and the chances of opening things up are therefore pretty slim. I fear there are not enough of the things out there in the wild to spark a community-based alternative. On the bright side, no doubt the brilliant innovations will be snapped up by a bigger, more sustainable firm and will find their way into more mainstream devices (Apple would be foolish to miss this one), but I will miss this company and I will miss this product.

This is the second high profile and apparently highly successful Kickstarter device that I have owned to suffer this fate, and I fear the outcomes will be similar. My Pebble watch continues to do basic service but I don’t know for how much longer. There has been nothing new arriving for it since the company folded earlier this year, and the apps it used to run are diminishing every week, as services that they rely upon fold. In olden days, we used to be able to continue to use our devices no matter what happened to their manufacturers. Nowadays, not so much.

I doubt that I will learn my lessons well from this as I am a great optimist when faced with a revolutionary new technology, but it’s something we all have to remember: software embedded in our hardware is an ongoing commitment, and we are surrounded by the stuff at work and at home, from TVs to cars to watches to lightbulbs to routers to phones, and so on. Increasingly, we’re no longer buying a product, we are buying into a service, so the quality and potential longevity of the company is even more important than the quality of the machinery. The only truly effective way to keep it safe, reliable, and sustainable would be for it to be open source and/or to use open standards, and for it not to rely on a single cloud-based service to operate. Sadly, far too little of the Internet of Things comes close to that. And far too much of it is hidden behind DRM, closed APIs, and other sinful mechanisms.

Address of the bookmark: https://www.wired.com/story/inside-the-downfall-of-doppler-labs/

Originally posted at: https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/2812321/the-downfall-of-doppler-labs-inside-the-last-days-of-a-hardware-startup-wired

Ominous clouds

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Clouds over the West Pier, Brighton Though Microsoft has been unusually prone to the kind of chicanery described in this article for most of its existence, the problem of price hiking combined with shifting, decaying, or dying cloud services is inherent in the cloud model they are using itself.

Good clouds

Cloud services can make good sense when they are directly replaceable with competitive alternatives: there are compelling reasons to, say, run your virtual servers in the cloud (whether in virtual machines or containers), or to handle network services like DDoS protection, DNS management, or spam filtering, or even (under some circumstances) to run relatively high level application layer services like databases, SMTP mail, or web servers. As long as you can treat a service exactly like a utility – including, crucially, the ability to simply, cheaply, and fairly painlessly switch service providers (including back in-house) whenever you want or need to do so – then it can provide resilience, scalability, predictable costs, and agility. Sometimes, it can even save money. There are still lots of potential pitfalls: complex management concerns like privacy, security, performance, faults, configuration, and accounting need to be treated with utmost caution, service contract negotiation is a complex and trap-strewn art, training and integration can be fiendishly difficult to manage when you no longer control the service and it changes under your feet, and there are potential unpredictable problems ahead when companies go bust, change hands, or become subject to dangerous legislative changes. But, on the whole, a true utility service can often be a sensible use of limited funds.

The soon-to-be-defunct Outlook.com Premium looks deceptively like a utility service on the surface, ostensibly offering what look a lot like simple, straightforward, SMTP/IMAP/POP email services, with a cutesy (ie. from Hell) web front end, with the (optional) capacity to choose a domain that could be migrated elsewhere. To a savvy user, it could be treated as little more than a utility service. However, there’s a lot of integrated frippery, from tricks to embed large images, to proprietary metadata, to out-of-office settings, to integrations with other Microsoft tools, that makes it less portable the more you use it, especially for the less technically adept target audience it is aimed at, especially if you are using Microsoft Outlook or the Web interface to manage it. Along with some subtle bending of protocols that make even the simplest of migrations fraught with difficulty and subject to lost metadata at best, by far the most likely exit strategy for most users will be to shift to the (more expensive) O365 which, though not identical, has features that are close enough and easily-migrated enough to suit the average Joe. And that’s what Microsoft wants.

Bad clouds

O365 is not a utility service at all, despite using the lure of almost generic email and calendaring (potentially replaceable services) to hook you in. It’s a cloud-based application suite filled to the brim with proprietary applications, systems and protocols, almost all of which are purpose-built to lock your data, processes, and skill set into a non-transferable cloud that is owned and controlled by an entity that does not have your interests as its main concern. In fact, exactly the opposite: its main concern is to get as much money from you as possible over as long a period as it can. If it were a utility like, say, electricity to your home, it would be one that required you to only plug in its own devices, using sockets that could not be duplicated, running at voltages and frequencies no one else uses. Its employees would walk into your house and replace your appliances and devices with different ones whenever they wanted (often replacing your stove while you were cooking on it), dropping and adding features as they felt like it. The utility company would be selling information about what devices you use, and when, to which channels you tuned your TV, what you were eating, and so on, to anyone willing to pay. You would have to have a microwave and toaster whether you wanted one or not, and you couldn’t switch any of them off. It would install cameras and microphones in your home that it or its government could use to watch everything you do. Every now and then it would increase its prices to just a bit less than it would cost to rip everything out and replace it with standards-based equipment you could use anywhere. Though it would offer a lot of different devices, all with different and unintuitive switches and remote controls (because it had bought most of them from other companies), none of them would work properly and, as they were slowly replaced with technologies made by the company itself, they would get steadily worse over a period of years, and steadily harder to replace with anything else. You would have to accept what you were given, no matter how poorly it fitted your needs, and you would be unable to make any changes to any of them, no matter how great the need or how useless they were to you. Perish the thought that you or your home might have any unique requirements, or that you might want to be a bit creative yourself. Welcome to Microsoft’s business model! And welcome to the world of (non-utility) cloud services.

Bad clouds closer to home

Given the tone of this article it is perhaps mildly ironic that Engadget, the source of it, reporting on the product less than a year ago, gave advice that “the Premium service might strike a good balance between that urge for customization and the safety net you get through tech giants like Microsoft.” You’d think a tech-focused site like Engadget would know better. I suspect that many of their reporters have not been alive as long as some of us have been in the business, and so they are still learning how this works.

It’s a short-sighted stupidity that infects way too many purchasing decisions even by seasoned IT professionals, whether it be for groupware like O365, or LMSs like Moodle, or HR hiring systems, or leave reporting systems, or e-book renting, or online exam systems, or timesheet applications, or CRM systems, or whatever. My own university has fallen prey to the greedy, malfunctioning, locked-in clutches of all but one of the aforementioned cloud services, and more, and the one it thankfully avoided was a mighty close call. All are baseline systems with limited customizations, that require people to play the role of machines, or that replace roles that should be done by humans with rigid rules and automation. Usually they do both. It is unsurprising that they are weak because they are not built for how we work: they are built for average organizations with average needs. If such a mythical beast actually exists I have never seen it, but we are a very long way from average in almost every way. Quite apart from the inherent business model flaws in outsourced cloud-hosted applications they cannot hope to match the functionality of systems we host and control ourselves or that rely on utility cloud services. They inevitably leave some things soft that should be hard (for example, I spend too much time dealing with mistakes entering leave requests because the system we rent allows people to include – without any signal that it is a bad idea – weekends and public holidays in their leave requests) and some things hard that should be soft (for example, I cannot modify a leave request once it has been made). A utility cloud service or self-hosted system could be modified and assembled with other utility services or self-hosted systems at will, allowing it to be exactly as soft or hard as needed. Things that are hard to do in-house can be outsourced, but many things do not need to be. Managing your own IT systems does cost a lot of money, but nothing like as much as the overall cost to an organization of cloud-based alternatives. Between them, our bad cloud systems cost equivalent of the time of (at least) scores of FTEs, including that of highly paid professors and directors, when compared with custom-built self-hosted systems they replace. You could get a lot of IT staff and equipment for that kind of money. Worse, all are deeply demoralizing, all are inefficient, and all stymie creativity, greatly reducing, and reducing the value of, the knowledge within the organization itself.

It’s a huge amount harder getting out of bad cloud services that it is getting into them (that’s the business model that makes them so bad) but, if we are to survive, we have to escape from such foolishness. The longer we leave it, the harder it gets.

Address of the bookmark: https://www.engadget.com/2017/10/30/microsoft-axes-outlook-com-premium-features/

Originally posted at: https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/2810115/ominous-clouds

Study links student cheating to whether a course is popular or disliked

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examWe already know that extrinsically motivated students (mainly those driven by grades and testing) are far more likely to cheat than those who are more intrinsically motivated. I bookmarked yet another example of this effect just the other day but there are hundreds if not thousands of research papers that confirm this in many different ways. And, as this article reaffirms, we already know that mastery learning approaches (that focus on supporting control, appropriate levels of challenge, and, ideally, social engagement) tend to make cheating far less likely, because they tend to better support intrinsic motivation. Hardly anyone cheats if they are doing stuff they love to do, unless some strong extrinsic force overrides it (like grades, rewards, punishments, hard-to-meet deadlines, etc). 

This research reveals another interesting facet of the problem that exactly accords with what self-determination theory would predict: that, whether or not the pedagogy is sensible (supportive of intrinsic motivation) or dumb (extrinsically driven), a student’s dislike of a course appears to predict an increased likelihood of cheating. This is pretty obvious when you think about it. If someone does not like a course then, by definition, they are not intrinsically motivated and, if they are still taking it despite that, the only motivation they can possibly have left is extrinsic.

The increased chances of cheating on disliked courses, whether or not mastery learning techniques are used, is completely unsurprising because it ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it. If mastery learning techniques are not working then it probably means that we are simply not using them very well. Most likely there is not enough support, or not enough learner control, or insufficient social engagement, or not enough/too much challenge, or there’s too much pressure, or something along those lines. It is actually much more difficult and usually far more time consuming to teach well using techniques that respect learner autonomy and individual needs than it is to follow the objectivist instructivist path, at least in an institutional environment that deeply embeds extrinsic motivation at its very core, so it is not surprising that it quite often fails.  It is also very possible that the problem is almost entirely due to the surrounding educational ecosystem. For instance if it is one that forces students down institutionally-determined paths whether or not they are ready, whether or not it matters to them, or if not enough time is allowed for it, or if the stakes for failure are high, then even well-designed courses with enthusiastic, supportive, skilled, well-informed, compassionate, unpressured teachers are not likely to help that much.

Some people will take a pragmatic lesson from this to look more carefully for cheating on courses that they know to be disliked. That’s not the solution. Others will look at those courses and try to find ways to make them more likeable. That’s much better. But really, once we have done that, we need to be wondering about why anyone would be taking a course that they dislike in the first place. And that points to a central problem with our educational systems and the tightly coupled teaching and accreditation that they embed deep in their bones. Given enough time, support, and skilled tuition, almost anyone can learn almost anything, and love doing so. We live in a time of plenty, where there are usually countless resources, people, and methods to learn almost anything, in almost any practical way, so it makes no sense that people should still be forced to learn in ways that they dislike, at inappropriate times, and at an inappropriate pace. If they do, it is because (one way or another) we make them do so, and that’s the root of the problem. We – the educators and, above all, the educational system – are the cause of cheating, as much as we are the victims of it. And we are the ones that should fix it.

The original paywalled paper can be found here.

Address of the bookmark: https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/10/06/study-links-student-cheating-whether-course-popular-or-disliked

Originally posted at: https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/2762299/study-links-student-cheating-to-whether-a-course-is-popular-or-disliked

This was actually accepted for an IEEE conference and then published

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I invite you to draw your own conclusions about this paywalled paper and the amount of quality control and editorial input that goes into IEEE publications nowadays. Here’s the abstract, which is one of the more coherent passages in the paper:

Abstract—The momentum contemplate evaluates the relationship among online social recreations and the e-learning utilization by look at the impact of social, subjective and teaching nearness on e-learning use between female understudies by method for playing on the web social diversions. This study utilizes an exploratory research plan, comfort test procedure. The outcomes propose that all scales are basically related with E- learning use. It is found that E-learning uses is emphatically tremendous and has a direct related with social nearness. The relationship between E-learning use and psychological nearness has a decidedly strong enormous connection; in like manner, the relationship between E-learning use and teaching nearness has an emphatically strong colossal connection. The disclosures inferred that the characteristic of online social amusements; both intellectual and teaching nearness impact E-learning utilization.

There’s not enough research about female understudies. I’m glad that someone is filling that gap. It’s well worth what otherwise appear to be the subscription fees IEEE is charging (US$33 in case you were wondering) . 

Address of the bookmark: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8052647/

Originally posted at: https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/2760723/this-was-actually-accepted-for-an-ieee-conference-and-then-published

The NGDLE: We Are the Architects | EDUCAUSE

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A nice overview of where the NGDLE concept was earlier this year. We really need to be thinking about this at AU because the LMS alone will not take us where we need to be. One of the nice things about this article is that it talks quite clearly about the current and future roles of existing LMSs, placing them quite neatly within the general ecosystem implied by the NGDLE.

The article calls me out on my prediction that the acronym would not catch on though, in my defence, I think it would have been way more popular with a better acronym! The diagram is particularly useful as a means to understand the general concept at, if not a glance, then at least pretty quickly…

ngdle overview

Address of the bookmark: https://er.educause.edu/articles/2017/7/the-ngdle-we-are-the-architects

Originally posted at: https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/2752680/the-ngdle-we-are-the-architects-educause

The return of the weblog – Ethical Tech

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Blogs have evolved a bit over the past 20 years or so, and diversified. The always terrific Ben Werdmuller here makes the distinction between thinkpieces (what I tend to think of as vaguely equivalent to keynote presentations at a conference, less than a journal article, but carefully composed and intended as a ‘publication’) and weblogging (kind of what I am doing here when I bookmark interesting things I have been reading, or simply a diary of thoughts and observations). Among the surprisingly large number of good points that he makes in such a short post is that a weblog is best seen as a single evolving entity, not as a bunch of individual posts:

“Blogging is distinct from journalism or formal writing: you jot down your thoughts and hit “publish”. And then you move on. There isn’t an editorial process, and mistakes are an accepted part of the game. It’s raw.

A consequence of this frequent, short posting is that the product isn’t a single post: it’s the weblog itself. Your website becomes a single stream of consciousness, where one post can build on another. The body of knowledge that develops is a reflection of your identity; a database of thoughts that you’ve put out into the world.

This is in contrast to a series of thinkpieces, which are individual articles that live by themselves. With a thinkpiece, you’re writing an editorial; with a blog, you’re writing the book of you, and how you think.“

This is a good distinction. I also think that, especially in the posts of popular bloggers like Ben, the blog is also comprised of the comments, trackbacks, and pings that develop around it, as well as tweets, pins, curations, and connections made in other social media. Ideas evolve in the web of commentary and become part of the thing itself. The post is a catalyst and attractor, but it is only part of the whole, at least when it is popular enough to attract commentary.

This distributed and cooperative literary style can also be seen in other forms of interactive publication and dialogue – a Slashdot or Reddit thread, for instance, can sometimes be an incredibly rich source of knowledge, as can dialogue around a thinkpiece, or (less commonly) the comments section of online newspaper articles. What makes the latter less commonly edifying is that their social form tends to be that of the untarnished set, perhaps with a little human editorial work to weed out the more evil or stupid comments: basically, what matters is the topic, not the person. Untarnished sets are a magnet for trolls, and their impersonal nature that obscures the individual can lead to flaming, stupidity, and extremes of ill-informed opinion that crowd out the good stuff. Sites like Slashdot, StackExchange, and Reddit are also mostly set-based, but they use the crowd and an algorithm (a collective) to modulate the results, usually far more effectively than human editors, as well as to provide shape and structure to dialogues, so that dialogues become useful and informative. At least, they do when they work: none are close to perfect (though Slashdot, when used well, is closer than the rest because its algorithms and processes are far more evolved and far more complex, and individuals have far more control over the modulation) but the results can often be amazingly rich.

Blogs, though, tend to develop the social form of a network, with the blogger(s) at the centre. It’s a more intimate dialogue, more personal, yet also more public as they are almost always out in the open web, demanding no rituals of joining in order to participate, no membership, no commitment other than to the person writing the blog. Unlike dedicated social networks there is no exclusion, no pressure to engage, no ulterior motives of platforms trying to drive engagement, less trite phatic dialogue, more purpose, far greater ownership and control. There are plenty of exceptions that prove the rule and plenty of ways this egalitarian structure can be subverted (I have to clean out a lot of spam from my own blogs, for instance) but, as a tendency, it makes blogs still very relevant and valuable, and may go some way to explaining why around a quarter of all websites now run on WordPress, the archetypal blogging platform.

Address of the bookmark: https://words.werd.io/the-return-of-the-weblog-f6b702a7cf99

Originally posted at: https://landing.athabascau.ca/bookmarks/view/2740999/the-return-of-the-weblog-%E2%80%93-ethical-tech

Instagram uses 'I will rape you' post as Facebook ad in latest algorithm mishap

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Another in a long line of algorithm fails from the Facebook stable, this time from Instagram…

"I will rape you" post from Instagram used for advertising the service

This is a postcard from our future when AI and robots rule the planet. Intelligence without wisdom is a very dangerous thing. See my recent post on Amazon’s unnerving bomb-construction recommendations for some thoughts on this kind of problem, and how it relates to attempts by some researchers and developers to use learning analytics beyond its proper boundaries.

 

Address of the bookmark: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/sep/21/instagram-death-threat-facebook-olivia-solon

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Infants make more attempts to achieve a goal when they see adults persist

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A straightforward and briefly reported study that supports the rather obvious hypothesis that quite young (15-month-old) children can and do learn from observing adults, at least in the short term. The twist here is that adults in the study were deliberately trying to model an attitude (grit) more than a distinct behaviour, in an attempt to teach the kids to do the same.

It is fair to say that the researchers demonstrated to the kids that persevering with problems after initially failure can lead to desirable results, and that the kids appeared to be more inclined to do the same after watching adults doing so: this accords well with the title of the paper. I’m not sure that the adults adequately demonstrated grit, though. I don’t know about you, but I actually enjoy solving problems and positively relish the failures that teach me how to succeed. In fact, in many situations (programming, for example) I deliberately make things fail in order to understand how they do so, and that’s part of the fun, even though (and partly because) I may curse and fume when the process fails to enlighten me. Same for many commercially available puzzles, from Rubik’s Cubes to letter-sliding games. Seems to me that grit involves more than doing something enjoyable on the way to achieving some anticipated goal that matters to us. It’s often about doing unenjoyable things, sometimes for goals we don’t even find particularly interesting or worthwhile, often over a prolonged period. That’s not what was happening here. This is interesting, though, if only to confirm that really quite young kids are able to see others as beings like themselves, and to transfer the lessons of stories that they construct about what they perceive others to be doing into actions they then take themselves.

The brief timeframe of the study means that it doesn’t show whether this is how grit is actually learned over time.  The extent to which lessons persist depends on a great many things, including prior experience, repetition, who is repeating it, success in the short term, effectiveness of the attitude in overcoming meaningful challenges in the long term, social value of the attitude, current context, and counter-examples over time. Outside an experimental context we pick up attitudes and sentiments from kids as much as they do from us, from one another, and from the world at large. There are usually very many others around us who are all engaged in a rich reciprocal dance with us through which we collectively construct our various intersecting cultures and subcultures, including our attitudes and values. Also, life is seldom so neatly structured and categorized that a lesson can be so directly transferred from one context to another. At least, such cases are not the interesting ones. Though the experimenters tried to make the tasks a bit different, the study was really set up to highlight the similarities, and to lead to results that would please the children.  In real life, we usually need to connect one situation with another that is quite different, separated by time, and to choose between competing strategies to deal with it, often with others around us that are adopting different approaches, all of which will influence us. Often, we are not even particularly interested in the outcomes. It’s much harder to do experiments that reflect that reality. In fact, it’s probably impossible, at least without adopting the ethical precepts of Josef Mengele. The researchers laudably note a range of other limitations, including cultural differences, beliefs of children about adults, task specific issues, and so on, and make no extravagant claims that it can be generalized further. Indeed it cannot.

That said, this is good evidence for something that I believe is not a bad idea: that teachers (formal or otherwise) should act as they hope their students will act. A very large part of the role of a teacher is to model how people in their field (or society at large, in the case of younger kids) think and behave, to enact and demonstrate their approaches and attitudes,  perhaps more than to pass on the facts, skills, and technologies of their discipline, or to provide support for gaining such knowledge.

Bearing that in mind, while there is value in ‘grit’ and I don’t want to knock it too much, I think there are other attitudes that might matter a whole lot more, especially those that enable us to not just stick with stuff we don’t enjoy but to find pleasure and meaning in it. Passion is way more useful than grit, in the long run. Caring, too. Teachers that light fires in students’ hearts achieve way more than those that simply show them how to stick at things they hate.

Abstract

Persistence, above and beyond IQ, is associated with long-term academic outcomes. To look at the effect of adult models on infants’ persistence, we conducted an experiment in which 15-month-olds were assigned to one of three conditions: an Effort condition in which they saw an adult try repeatedly, using various methods, to achieve each of two different goals; a No Effort condition in which the adult achieved the goals effortlessly; or a Baseline condition. Infants were then given a difficult, novel task. Across an initial study and two preregistered experiments (N = 262), infants in the Effort condition made more attempts to achieve the goal than did infants in the other conditions. Pedagogical cues modulated the effect. The results suggest that adult models causally affect infants’ persistence and that infants can generalize the value of persistence to novel tasks.

Address of the bookmark: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/357/6357/1290

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No, you aren't a 'visual' learner

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It’s a damning indictment of our collective resistance to truth that the point of this article still has to be restated, yet again. Amazingly, 93% of the general public and 76% of educators still erroneously believe that we should be taught in ways that match our learning styles. I assume this is so in the US – unless things have changed recently, the percentages, for teachers at least, are even worse in some other countries where the idea has been pushed harder from the top down, such as the UK and Netherlands. To be quite clear: this belief is not supported by any compelling evidence at all.

The fact that it is false (or, at best, no more provable than, and just as likely as, astrology) doesn’t mean that designing for learning styles necessarily a terrible idea, inasmuch as it can encourage reflective practice on the part of teachers and can even result in quite useful outcomes. As the article puts it:

“If you’re trying to vary what you do in the classroom to respect different styles, variation in instruction is probably a good thing, anyway,” he says. But rather than formatting lessons differently for auditory, kinetic or visual learners, he and Macdonald suggest that teachers tweak their instruction based on content.

“I think it really depends on your objectives for the lesson,” Macdonald says. “Some types of content really lend themselves to visual presentation … if you’re teaching maps, that’s got to be visual. If you’re teaching music, those are [the] types of things that need to be auditory.

“But if your goal is to get a multifaceted exposure to certain content, it can be helpful to weave in all different types of modalities.”

That thinking about learning styles can be a useful design tool is a fair point, and one that I have often made myself (including in quite some detail in my first book), though it’s a happy side effect of a mistake, rather than a consequence of a good theory. Using star signs would probably work just as well.  I am not convinced that content should always lead design either: objectives-driven teaching is not the only fruit and, for some expansive subject areas and pedagogies, it is positively (positivistly?) harmful. But, notwithstanding its constraints and limitations, at least it is not based on a fiction.

There are many risks to using a false world model, even if it has some practical value or plausible results (pre-Copernican geocentric astronomy was better than Copernicus’s own theory at predicting movements of planets), not least of which being that it blinds us to real possibilities and leads us in worthless, wasteful, or even harmful directions. Even when the consequences include better teaching, it’s a terrible lesson to teach someone that they are a visual (or sensing, or whatever nonsense the particular theory suggests) learner. No they are not. They might have some habits, reinforced patterns, or preferences, sure. But that just means they need to try a bit harder to extend themselves and to learn to use some alternative approaches because they are definitely going to have to use them at some point when there’s no teacher in control of things but themselves, and nothing to fit their preferred style available. My learning style is and should be whatever the hell I need.

I’ve mentioned before that I believe a better (if less attractive) term would be ‘being-taught habits’ because one of the least savoury aspects of the whole learning styles gestalt is that it actually has little to do with learning, and everything to do with achieving better indoctrination; of asserting the power of the teacher (at least, it would if it worked). For that kind of thing, we’d learn more from the sciences and arts of the advertising industry than from any snake oil learning style theory. We might equally learn from preachers and religions: they are mostly pretty good at making people think and behave the way they wish.

There are other ways to gain the useful side-effects of designing for learning styles that do not rely on falsehoods, or that make no claims that they match reality one way or the other – de Bono’s Thinking Hats, for instance, or design-based research. And it doesn’t take much to make learning style theories less dumb. I am personally quite fond of Gordon Pask’s serialist/holist model, despite coming perilously close to a learning styles theory at times, because it describes a continuum of learning strategies, without suggesting too much (OK, fair enough, Pask slipped here and there) that such strategies be fixed, habitual, or generally preferred by particular learners.  They are simply perspectives we can choose as and when it is helpful to do so. However, if possible, when designing learning activities, we should use approaches that are based as much as we are able on how the world is, not how we think it should be. From that perspective, learning styles are a potentially dangerous and time-consuming dead end.

Address of the bookmark: http://theweek.com/articles/725352/no-arent-visual-learner

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Amazon helps and teaches bomb makers

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Amazon’s recommender algorithm works pretty well: if people start to gather together ingredients needed for making a thermite bomb, Amazon helpfully suggests other items that may be needed to make it, including hardware like ball bearings, switches, and battery cables. What a great teacher!

It is disturbing that this seems to imply that there are enough people ordering such things for the algorithm to recognize a pattern. However, it would seem remarkably dumb for a determined terrorist to leave such a (figuratively and literally) blazing trail behind them, so it is just as likely to be the result of a very slightly milder form of idiot, perhaps a few Trump voters playing in their backyards. It’s a bit worrying, though, that the ‘wisdom’ of the crowd might suggest uses of and improvements to some stupid kids’ already dangerous backyard experiments that could make them way more risky, and potentially deadly.

Building intelligent systems is not too hard, as long as the activity demanding intelligence can be isolated and kept within a limited context or problem domain. Computers can beat any human at Go, Chess, or Checkers. They can drive cars more safely and more efficiently than people (as long as there are not too many surprises or ethical dilemmas to overcome, and as long as no one tries deliberately to fool them). In conversation, as long as the human conversant keeps within a pre-specified realm of expertise, they can pass the Turing Test. They are even remarkably much better than humans at identifying, from a picture, whether someone is gay or not. But it is really hard to make them wise. This latest fracas is essentially a species of the same problem as that reported last week of Facebook offering adverts targeted at haters of Jews. It’s crowd-based intelligence, without the wisdom to discern the meaning and value of what the crowd (along with the algorithm) chooses. Crowds (more accurately, collectives) are never wise: they can be smart, they can be intelligent, they can be ignorant, they can be foolish, they can even (with a really smart algorithm to assist) be (or at least do) good; but they cannot be wise. Nor can AIs that use them.

Human wisdom is a result of growing up as a human being, with human needs, desires, and interests, in a human society, with all the complexity, purpose, meaning, and value that it entails. An AI that can even come close to that is at best decades away, and may never be possible, at least not at scale, because computers are not people: they will always be treated differently, and have different needs (there’s an interesting question to explore as to whether they can evolve a different kind of machine-oriented wisdom, but let’s not go there – SkyNet beckons!). We do need to be working on artificial wisdom, to complement artificial intelligence, but we are not even close yet. Right now, we need to be involving people in such things to a much greater extent: we need to build systems that informate, that enhance our capabilities as human beings, rather than that automate and diminish them. It might not be a bad idea, for instance, for Amazon’s algorithms to learn to report things like this to real human beings (though there are big risks of error, reinforcement of bias, and some fuzzy boundaries of acceptability that it is way too easy to cross) but it would definitely be a terrible idea for Amazon to preemptively automate prevention of such recommendations.

There are lessons here for those working in the field of learning analytics, especially those that are trying to take the results in order to automate the learning process, like Knewton and its kin. Learning, and that subset of learning that is addressed in the field of education in particular, is about living in a human society, integrating complex ideas, skills, values, and practices in a world full of other people, all of them unique and important. It’s not about learning to do, it’s about learning to be. Some parts of teaching can be automated, for sure, just as shopping for bomb parts can be automated. But those are not the parts that do the most good, and they should be part of a rich, social education, not of a closed, value-free system.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.alphr.com/politics/1007077/amazon-reviewing-algorithms-that-promoted-bomb-materials

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Update: it turns out that the algorithm was basing its recommendations on things used by science teachers and people that like to make homemade fireworks, so this is nothing like as sinister as it at first seemed. Nonetheless, the point still stands. Collective stupidity is just as probable as collective intelligence, possibly more so, and wisdom can never be expected from an algorithm, no matter how sophisticated.