On artists and the future of AI at PublicSpaces

On June 6th, 2024, I was at the PublicSpaces conference as a panelist in a session titled The Future of AI & the Internet. You can watch the full panel here. Below, I’ve divided my contribution into a set of short videos.

On how AI (so far) has been a headache for me as a teacher, as I’ve had to redesign all of my assessments:

On the importance of artists (quoting Marshall McLuhan who considered artists the antennae of our society, our radar, looking at least a generation ahead), but also making it clear that you don’t need future thinking to see the very real harms of AI today:

On how AI is not necessarily different than other technologies. The problems that come with AI aren’t technological problems, they are political problems. Technology is not the problem, politics is:

On what it would mean for me to have agency over AI and what I would want it to look like. That means thinking about the power dynamics. I want to flip the script and have AI working for me rather than working for big tech. I prefer nature over technology and like AI that help me be in nature, like BirdNet:

On the fact that explainability and transparency in AI systems have no use in unequal power dynamics:

On how to become a better storyteller: ingest better stories, stop looking at any personalized content as it is terrible for your mind:

Delivery Models for Learning

Marcel de Leeuwe, Ruud Smeulders and I hosted a Masterclass on Learning Business Models at the Dutch E-learning Event. TU Delft’s Pieter de Vries has written a solid report (in Dutch) about this session: De waarde van Online Learning gezien door de ogen van Board members.

You can find the Dutch slides from the session on SlideShare:

[slideshare id=18969560&doc=masterclassele13slideshare-130416235358-phpapp01]

I particularly like how Ruud adjusted the ubiquitous Business Model Canvas to be suitable for learning business models specifically (see slide 17).

The biggest piece of work that I did for the session was to try and created a typology of learning delivery models. I wanted to stretch people’s minds and make them think creatively about all the different ways that you can implement a learning intervention.

I started by defining five dimensions in which one way of delivering learning can be different from another. Although I define these dimensions as polar states, I do realize that you often have situations that are in between the two poles. The dimensions are as follows (in no particular order):

Facilitated ↔ Self-directed
Many learners ↔ One learner
Integrated in work ↔ Outside of work
Continuous ↔ Beginning and end
Content focused (consume materials) ↔ Activity focused (produce materials)

These binary dimensions give us 32 (2 to the power of 5) different learning delivery possibilities. This frames a broad range of activities as learning: from a magazine subscription (facilitated, one learner, outside of work, continuous and content focused) to team work in a project (self-directed, many learners, integrated in work, beginning and end and activity focused).

Not all possibilities make immediate sense. But with a little bit of thought I came to the following archetypical learning delivery methods (ordered from high to low involvement from the learning and development department):

Buying external knowledge (high)
E-learning module of about an hour (high)
Electronic performance support (high)
Few days face to face course with a trainer (high)
Multiweek online facilitated course (high)
External coach (medium)
Newsletter (medium)
Online community of practice (medium)
“Lunch and learn” session (medium)
Open learning materials (e.g. a wiki) medium)
Asking an internal expert (low)
Master-apprentice relationship (low)
Stretch assignment (e.g. a trainee programme) (low)
Teamwork in a project (low)

So here is my assignment for you: First try and map each of these archetypes to the five different dimensions. Then try and think which of these you are already using and which ones you would like to use. Finally, it would be good to try and list your personal preference for these five dimensions. For example: I like (to create) events that are activity focused, have a beginning and an end, involve many learners, are as integrated into the work as possible and fall somewhere in between self-direction and facilitation. I would love to hear your thoughts and comments!

As this blog is licensed under Creative Commons license, I would more than welcome anybody who would visualize these dimensions and the resulting delivery models.

Changing the Responsibility for Learning

Last week has been a busy week with both the E-learning Event and a webinar for En Nu Online. I’ll share some of the presentations that I did in this short post.

Based on my presentation at last year’s E-learning Event I was interviewed by the Tijdschrift voor Coaching about culture and the quantified self. You can read a PDF of the Dutch interview by clicking the image below:

Marcel de Leeuwe and I hosted a session at the E-learning Event on Do-It-Yourself learning (building on what we had done earlier at the Masie conference last year). The slides are available on SlideShare.

[slideshare id=18969719&doc=ele2013-diylearning-dezwart-deleeuwe-130416235818-phpapp02]

We copied one of Mitra’s Self Organized Learning Environment (SOLE) experiments and gave all the attendees a challenging assignment to be solved by themselves in groups of four while Marcel and I walked out of the room for 20 minutes. This gave us interesting results: the attendees had no problem engaging with the assignment and were hard to stop after 20 minutes of discussion, while Marcel at the same was struggling with letting go (“Can we please check whether they are doing ok? Shouldn’t we tell them they only have 10 minutes left?”). This taught us that it is often our own behaviour as educators that is an inhibitor for people making themselves responsible for their own learning.

Minimally invasive pedagogy (as Mitra calls it) could then be a way to battle the now pervasive learned helplessness.

During the boardroom session at the E-Learning event I worked with Marcel (again) and Ruud Smeulders to deliver a masterclass on Learning Business Models. I’ll publish a full post about that session a little bit later.

In the webinar for En Nu Online we also discussed self-organized (or self-directed) learning. I did a short presentation, explained my rules for a Socratic conversation and then we discussed on the basis of a few questions. One interesting topic we addressed was the balance between providing a safe learning environment while at the same luring the learner into a stretch or into a zone where they are less comfortabe. The webinar has been recorded (there were some technical issues during the start, heroically battled by Sibrenne Wagenaar and Joitske Hulsebosch). You can view the Dutch recording on YouTube:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ae2DgT0IONE

Self Organized Learning Environments: An Assignment

This post is an assignment for the participants of the “Sociale media voor Leren en Veranderen in Organisaties en Netwerken”-leergang by En Nu Online.
(Click here to get a Google Translated Dutch version of this post).

Last February Sugata Mitra was awarded the TED prize for 2013. The prize money will help him carry out his wish:

My wish is to help design the future of learning by supporting children all over the world to tap into their innate sense of wonder and work together. Help me build the School in the Cloud, a learning lab in India, where children can embark on intellectual adventures by engaging and connecting with information and mentoring online. I also invite you, wherever you are, to create your own miniature child-driven learning environments and share your discoveries.

Watch Mitra describe his plans here:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3jYVe1RGaU]

I can’t link to this video without also linking to some of the criticism of his work. Audrey Watters raises some questions about, among other things, the history of schooling as it is told in the video, about (neo-)colonialism and about the commercial interests. Donald Clark lists 7 reasons for doubting Mitra’s success story.

Self Organized Learning Environment (SOLE)

According to Mitra you can organize a Self Organized Learning Environment (SOLE) for children by putting multiple children in a group, adding some broadband Internet and some encouragement and then drop in what he calls “curiosity catalysts”: large, open, difficult and interesting questions for these groups of children to answer. Self-driven learning is also becoming a current topic in professional development. See this post by Jane Hart as one example. We will explore whether Mitra’s thinking can help us in the workplace.

Basic assignment

For this assignment please do the following:

Please download the Mitra SOLE toolkit from the TED website
Read the toolkit
Answer the following three questions by posting a comment at the bottom of this blog post:
- What might be the key differences between child-driven learning (self-organized, curious, engaged, social, collaborative, motivated by peer-interest, fueled by adult encouragement and admiration) and the way adults learn?
- What are the skills of a self-learning professional? How can professionals be supported in their self-directed learning?
- What curiosity catalysts can you think of that you could ask your direct colleagues (or customers)? Think of two good questions.
Find a new web-resource about self-directed learning (or self-organized learning, do-it-yourself learning, new-fashioned learning etc.) and post it as a comment on this blog post. It is “new” when nobody has posted it here before (so be quick!). It would be interesting to know why you chose this resource in particular.

Bonus assignment

There is no better way to judge how something works then to try it out. Starting from page 9 of the Mitra SOLE toolkit there is a home assignment: create a SOLE for children in your own home.

It would be wonderful if some of you could try this out with a group of children. Of course you will then send your feedback to Mitra and his team, but a comment here on the blog and/or some thoughts during the seminar are well appreciated too.

A Short Video-Interview About Self-Organized Learning

Marcel de Leeuwe and I will be hosting a workshop on do-it-yourself learning at this year’s Dutch e-learning event. Marcel did a short interview with me about the topic as a warming-up exercise. In the interview I explain (in Dutch) why self-organized learning is becoming relevant now and what this might mean for the Learning and Development organization.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/61215307]