“Learning by doing is really how we learn: Teaching others to do this is the next step in the education revolution.” —Roger Schank I found out yesterday from Socratic Arts that its founder, Roger Schank has died. Roger’s work has been an inspiration for my own over the past two decades. Roger’s work on story-centered curricula was helpful as our children were going through school. These are story-centered curricula. Students work in teams in virtual apprenticeships with experts producing deliverables that get increasingly complex throughout the year. No classes. No tests. One curriculum per y ..read more

On the last Friday of each month I curate some of the observations and insights that were shared on social media. I call these Friday’s Finds. “It’s very funny to me that the dominant Twentieth Century conception of AI was a slightly awkward nerd with an inhuman mastery of facts and logic, when what we actually got is smooth-talking bullshit artists who can’t do eighth-grade math.” —Adi Robertson “ChatGPT gets treated like technological magic, but that ignores the humans behind the curtain that make it function. OpenAI paid Sama to hire Kenyan workers at $1.32 to $2 an hour to review ‘chi ..read more

Are we moving into a post-job economy? Can the concept of the job continue to be the primary way that people work? Building ways to constantly change roles can be one way to get rid of the standardized job, which has decreasing usefulness in a creative, networked AI-assisted economy. We should be preempting automation by identifying what routine work should be automated as quickly as possible, so that people can focus on what machines cannot do — being curious, creative, empathetic, passionate, and humourous. One area of dwindling jobs is at the entry level. This creates a challenge for career ..read more

Writing my essays at university was always a painful process. We were still allowed to write them, though more professors were requiring essays to be submitted typed. My essays were never good because I often left them to the last minute and hand-writing a better version was just too much time and effort. As much as I loved reading and new ideas, I was not a good writer. A decade later I went to graduate school and word processors were widely available. I still could not type but at least I could peck away at several versions of an essay before submitting it. My writing got a bit better. David ..read more

The following opinion article was published this weekend in local newspapers — Telegraph Journal, Times & Transcript, & Daily Gleaner. Education changes: ‘like fixing a plane in mid-flight’ By Harold Jarche Politicians constantly tinker with our public education system because it is designed without a solid foundation, just a series of cobbled-together initiatives based on whatever was in vogue at the time. I participated in my first protest at the legislature in 2008 when the government of the day cancelled the early immersion program. Gaining a second language is one of the ..read more

In the book, Only Humans Need Apply (2016), the authors identify five ways that people can work with machines. They call it ‘stepping’. We are seeing an increasing need to do what they call ‘stepping in’ or using machines [and software] to augment work. In GPT-3 through a glass darkly I used the McLuhans’ media tetrad to examine this form of machine learning, which is all over the media today. GPT-3 Extends each voice & mimics creativity Obsolesces copy-writing and essays so that human insight becomes a luxury Retrieves the polymaths of the European Renaissance so that the best writers mu ..read more

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives published a recent issue on misinformation and disinformation in Canada. Here are some of the highlights. Disinformation: New tools, same poison Before it was called public relations, it was called propaganda. Many of the people who built the modern PR industry got their start in the Committee on Public Information, the propaganda arm of the American government, which aimed to sell the deeply unpopular First World War to the American public. Among other tactics, the CPI pioneered the use of what we would now recognize as “influencers” in a program c ..read more

What is the Tragedy of the Commons? In economics and in an ecological context, the tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use, act independently according to their own self-interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action in case there are too many users related to the available resources. —Wikipedia But the idea of the tragedy of the commons was disproved by Elinor Ostrom even befo ..read more

Harvard Business Review described The Fifth Discipline by Peter Senge, as one of the seminal management books of the previous 75 years. In 2017 reviewed mastery and models and showed how they still pertain to organizations 30 years later. I concluded that the challenge for learning professionals is to help organizations become learning organizations. It is also to master the new literacies of the network era and promote critical thinking, for ourselves and others. Questioning existing hierarchies is necessary to create the organizations of the future where power and authority are shared ..read more

As the pandemic emerged in 2020 I sought credible information and advice first from institutions and authorities and later from a network of expertise — encouraged to do-your-own-research — in view of growing misinformation and disinformation, even from authorities like the CDC and WHO. I am not the only person to turn to a networked solution — Twitter pandemic list — for my sensemaking in this pandemic. The People’s CDC is a networked alternative source of credible information that bypasses the corridors of institutional power. What emerged was the People’s C.D.C.: a ragtag coalition of acad ..read more