Likely a mis-applied generalization, but in a few different education spheres I am sensing that both the overload of new tech and the adoption of pre-built systems are contributing to a decline in the will/awareness to look being what an interface presents us.
Thus the shiny front allure of GenAI to vibe the work for us, enabling us to lounge around at the top of Maslow’s pyramid pondering deep, lofty thoughts.
I’ll share just one anecdote before wandering to the actual topic here. Hey, its’s my blog and I can write anyway I like. You want a five paragriph summary free of typos? Go elsewhere.
The Judge the Sharpness Edge of Innovation?
I spotted a post on an education email list about an institution’s efforts to support faculty understanding of GenAI and promote experimentation. It’s the “you can understand unless you play” idea. This is all good and I agree. But here is what was touted as an example of the “groundbreaking” achievements of these efforts.
A faculty member had discovered how they could embed content from the realm of Pressbooks OER (most aka textbooks) directly into an LMS. It opens up all kinds of “innovations and potential to tap into OER”. All you need is to find the URL for the content you want to reuse, and then you ask Claude to generate the “code” (an iframe HTML) to copy to insert into a type of LMS assessment. They even had a highly produced video with styled music and lighting to demonstrate this “powerful” technique.
The responses were “this is awesome”. Then the questions- “do we have to use Claude for each one we do?”
Hold the bus. Do we really need to have GenAI generate an iframe tag? Is it that hard to look up?
I’ve long abandoned my hope that most people would have an understanding of the structure of the web screens they look at all day. But I’d at least hope for a conceptual understanding of what it means, dare I say even “transclude” content from one domain to another?
I remain a bit shocked.
Wither Maker Culture?
Yeah its still out there but seems to have stayed in the lanes of techie making. It felt like way back when a movement to the “make” culture to broaden.
Maker culture emphasizes learning-through-doing (active learning) in a social environment. Maker culture emphasizes informal, networked, peer-led, and shared learning motivated by fun and self-fulfillment.[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maker_culture Note the reference link to a 2013 Open University title on Innovating Pedagogy has evaporated. That says something
To me, the best parts of web based technology as opposed to commercial software is that the web is open to create end arounds. tomake your own functionality that may not exist in the interface given. But this seems to be what has happened with many web users- unless there is a button available on the screen to click, that ends the possibility of what one can do.
I for one not only enjoy for what I can do by my fiddling and gizmo-ing but the act of doing it myself, the discovery, what I learn to take forward to the next problem, is the energy and motivation that makes me feel alive.
If all ya want to do is limited to the buttons on the screen or what is dispensed from a text prompt like a pieace of Pez candy, well enjoy yourselves.
If a web tool does not do what i think it can or ought to do, that’s when I plunge into the make space.
So join along with me for a simple thing any of you can do, not tech skills required, to generate an archive of everything you post in a social media platform*
* that provides RSS feeds, meaning that is limited.
Make-ing an Archiving Gizmo
Since the world has shifted mostly from sharing outwardly from the pastoral garden sites we manage (cough The Blog) to spraying into the social streams, well it can be hard to find something you said a month, a year ago, not to mention 4 days ago. In Mastodon I can use the from:me [keywords] in the search, yet it seems slow and challenging to reach back in time.
This was always the value of not seeing my archives as some kind of precious preservation or backup, but as a tool for my own ongoing use. Back in the days of the bird themed platform that shall not be named by single letters, I was lucky to set up a system developed by the genius Martin Hawksey to automatically archive my utterances. In fact, despite the fact I have dumped my history, I have it not only preserved, but I can still search my own archive.
I did not do any “making” in the making of that, and yes it would be nice to have the same features for my Mastodon-ing, but what I have cobbled together serves the same purpose for me. Stop reading and take a look (note the first sheet is raw data, the second more clean, and the third has notes and even stats) (I love making sheets).
It uses an IFTTT applet to monitor the RSS feed for my account. Note that Mastodon makes it very complex to get an RSS feed – you tack “.rss” onto a URl. My account at https://cosocial.ca/@cogdog has an RSS feed at https://cosocial.ca/@cogdog.rss
That’s the trigger, and the action is adding a row to a Google Sheet.
I forget about it.
But when I am trying to find a link or just the text of an old post, I just go to the second sheet and do a command F.
It’s just useful, and lets me do search more efficiently and more quickly than what the interface provides.
Just to go a bit next level, I made another gizmo using Make.com (free for small use and much more powerful than IFTTT because you can manipulate output and apply functions) that archives all of my Mastodon posts with a #dailycreate hashtag (I will give a free dog biscuit to the first person who can reply with how to get an RSS feed from that)
Hardly “Groundbreaking”
I am not trying to brag any technical prowess here, merely that we have the tools and means to go beyond what a system provides via the interface. The how one does this can vary. Sure you can ask GenAI to do it, and might get something that’s better.
That’s not the point.
Making is important to me. It’s how my mind thrives and grows. It gives me tools and ideas to use on something else.
We talk about web/digital literacies yet with all the advances in tech, across the board I see them declining in the conceptual understanding level. I am sure someone will disagree. This came into play yesterday as I got to record a conversation with Valerie Irvine for the UVic EDCI136 course on digital literacy (video will be added when ready) which I pitched as Not So Stupid Web Tricks (Techniques > Tools).
This is done as a Google Doc because I set up a series of activities where I hope/ invite the students, or anyone, its open, to share what they tried and created.
I feel like I am a dwindling minority who sees a conceptual understanding of the web as important and the willingness to dabble beyond the presented interfaces.
Oh well, I am not stopping making. Make it so (often).
Featured Image: Make It So flickr photo by cogdogblog shared into the public domain using Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication (CC0)
