Writing is my artistic expression. My keyboard is my brush. Words are my medium. My blog is my canvas. And committing to writing daily makes me feel like an artist.
Today is my 27th Wedding Anniversary. Including the time we’ve dated, I’ve now spent more than half of my life living with my wife. What a wonderful adventure it has been! I feel blessed to have found such a wonderful person to spend my life with. And together we’ve raised two amazing daughters that I couldn’t be more proud of. Tonight we celebrate as a family, breaking bread together at one of our favourite restaurants. Tomorrow we head off early to go to a funeral of a friend’s parent. The contrast in celebration is stark, and an important reminder to appreciate all that we have, while we still have it.
I’m also days away from my 27th anniversary of being an educator. And here too is a similar contrast, as I plan for this to be my last year before I retire. I don’t leave counting the days, I leave feeling like there is still more work to be done. I leave with a reminder that I’m going to miss this as much as I’m looking forward to the freedom of not working daily.
How did I get to two milestones of 27 years and still feel like things have only just begun? How does time go so quickly? How am I the parent of two adults in their 20’s? My oldest daughter is a quarter of a century old. My young wife and I are both in our late 50’s. She has been an amazing educator for over 30 years. Those just don’t feel like our statistics, those are the stats of older people. I saw a T-shirt on an older man, who rode past me a few days ago, and the message on his shirt said: “It’s weird being the same age as old people.” I haven’t connected so quickly to a T-shirt slogan in a long time.
All that said, today is a day of celebration. The past 27 years have not necessarily been easy, but they certainly have been rewarding and memorable… and I look forward to the next 27 years of finding joy, showing appreciation for what I have, and feeling younger than I am.
“The majority of U.S. professionals (58%) believe they have a wide range of skills that are being underutilized in their current roles, according to LinkedIn’s latest Workforce Confidence survey.
This sense of untapped potential is especially strong in certain fields: Nearly two-thirds of workers in the administrative and support services industry (65%) say they’re being underutilized, along by 63% of those in retail and 62% of those in transportation. Education and oil, gas and mining follow, both at 60%.”
To me this isn’t an employee but rather an employer issue. It’s not a worker issue to resolve but rather a leadership issue. I think in many cases the enthusiasm of a worker to be innovative and try new things, which magnify strengths and utilizes untapped skills, are quelled by a drive for consistency and minimum competence. Instead of promoting opportunities for innovation, large companies want to minimize uniqueness for the safety of not taking risks and making mistakes.
‘If I let this employee try this unique approach, other employees will try less effective approaches’. Or, ‘I can approve this additional cost request for one employee, but if others ask it will be unsustainable, so it’s better not to try and end up with cost overruns’. Or, ‘If it fails it will make us look bad’… Or, or, or… it’s always easier to turn down differentiation than to allow unknowns that are not a guaranteed success.
So, innovation is deemed too costly, or too much of a risk, and employees feel like the potential they have is underutilized.
We need to create an environment where ‘Yes is the default‘. Where innovation and failing forward is seen as opportunities to grow… and where those we work with feel like they are being better utilized.
And in a concluding post I said that I was going to share 7 virtues. I haven’t done that yet, maybe one day I will. The virtues I chose at that time were:
Love (including Chastity and Loyalty)
Discipline (including Patience, not just Diligence or Temperance)
Empathy (including Compassion)
Integrity (including Honour and Courage)
Kindness (including Charity),
Humility
Forgiveness
I remember intentionally putting Forgiveness last because I wanted to end with the noblest of virtues. I put Forgiveness on this pedestal because I think you can ‘go through the motions’ of the other virtues, but not forgiveness. You can virtue signal, intentionally or unintentionally, with the other virtues and have those virtues develop, but when it comes to forgiveness there simply isn’t an easy way to act it and have it grow. For example, you can do loving things towards someone, and eventually develop a love for that person. You can fake discipline and after a while that practice become disciplined. But if you aren’t truly forgiving, if you have hesitations, then they will be revealed… You can’t fake forgiveness. It doesn’t grow with time. You are either open to it, or you aren’t. You can half love someone, you can’t half forgive someone.
That said, I’ll hold off on discussing other virtues for a future date. Right now I am looking at a world where forgiveness is a lost art. Vengeance is everywhere. People want to say, ‘I told you so’. Social media is all over FAFO. Changing your mind (especially in US politics) isn’t met with compassion, nor forgiveness, but rather finger-waving and anger. The amount of variations of, “Oh sure, you only realize now that it affects your life”, that I’ve heard on social media posts is disconcerting. There is no room for forgiveness.
I understand why. Forgiveness is the ultimate virtue and not easy to attain. It requires love, empathy, and kindness. It is an affront to integrity, and the humility shared by those that did harm seldom seems like it’s enough to warrant forgiveness. Forgiveness is hard to fake and even harder to authentically give.
However, forgiveness is the best way to build a stronger bond than was there before. It is a place where real change can happen. The danger is that is also makes the forgiver more vulnerable to be hurt again. It requires trust. That’s what makes it so difficult to give.
Currently, I see a window of opportunity for real change to happen. I see hurt and disillusioned people openly admitting that they made a mistake. But I don’t see compassion. I don’t see forgiveness. I see hurt creating a gulf between the people who seek forgiveness and those who could, but do not forgive. And while I understand the hurt, while I see the fear of forgiving and being hurt again, I also see a golden opportunity being missed. Where there has been a great divide, there can be agreement. Where there has been opposing factions, there can be common ground. Where there has been arguments and yelling, there can be dialogue and discussion.
At this perilous time I have but one question: What if forgiveness prevailed?
Build it and they will Like, Follow, and Share… the newest craze to hit the internet is nothing more than a rehashing of old ideas in a new format. By now everyone has seen the Bigfoot videos where an AI Bigfoot is doing a selfie vlog and telling jokes as well as doing ridiculous antics. If you haven’t seen them, Google ‘Bigfoot Vlog’ and they will show up in droves. I’ve notice a few things. While a few of them are refreshingly funny, most of them rehash really old jokes, many of which are based on racism, sexism, or tropes that have all been done before. It’s literally just old jokes in a new format.
But they work. They get the click, likes, and shares. They are going viral. And they are creating copycats that are now doing the same thing, using AI, but with people rather than Bigfoot. Videos that are mostly 100% realistic and yet still sit somewhere in the uncanny valley of almost right, yet not fully. And again, just rehashing old content in a new format.
Expect a lot more of this. Also expect world crisis to be leveraged for the same attention. You’ll see bombing in the middle east that’s actually just AI video. You’ll hear government leaders and celebrities saying outlandish things, except it won’t really be them. You’ll see alien landings, meteor landings, and even plane crashes that didn’t happen but were rather prompted into video reality.
When we get tired of the jokes, we’ll just start to get fooled more and more by AI drama that is invented to draw our attention. But for now, the jokes will come. They will get more inappropriate and cross lines a person wouldn’t with a video of themselves. And as attention wanes they will get more extreme, more tasteless, and so abundant that we’ll just be tired of them… as I am already tiring of them.
When I wrote, ‘Google proof vs AI proof‘, I concluded, “We aren’t going to AI proof schoolwork.”
While we were successful in Google proofing assignments by creating questions that were not easily answerable using a Google search, we simply can’t make research based questions that will stump a Large Language Model artificial intelligence.
I’ve also previously said that ‘You can’t police it‘. In that post I stated,
“The first instinct with combating new technology is to ban and/or police it: No cell phones in class, leave them in your lockers; You can’t use Wikipedia as a source; Block Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok on the school wifi. These are all gut reactions to new technologies that frame the problem as policeable… Teachers are not teachers, they aren’t teaching, when they are being police.“
It comes down to a simple premise:
Focus on what we ‘should do’ with AI, not what we ‘shouldn’t do’.
Outside the classroom AI is getting used everywhere by almost everyone. From programming and creating scripts to reduce workload, to writing email responses, to planning vacations, to note taking in meetings, to creating recipes. So the question isn’t whether we should use AI in schools but what we should use it for?
The simple line that I see starts with the question I would ask about using an encyclopedia, a calculator, or a phone in the classroom, “How can I use this tool to foster or enhance thinking, rather than have the tool do the thinking for the student?‘
“A tool is just a tool!I can use a hammer to build a house and I can use the same hammer on a human skull.It’s not the tool, but how you use it that matters.”
Ultimately our focus needs to be on what we can and should use any tool for, and AI isn’t an exception.
This video probably has an ideal audience of less than a couple dozen people in the entire world. If you are reading this as a regular Daily-Ink reader, you might not spend much time thinking about 4D space and the structure of the universe… and you can just bypass this, or at least watch the second video I share as an introduction to what Joe Truss and I are talking about.
I came across this quote, but I’m struggling to find the original source.
Working out will make you feel weak, when it’s actually making you stronger. Learning new things will make you feel dumb, when it’s actually making you smarter. Investing in yourself will make you feel broke, when it’s actually making you rich. Facing your fears will make you feel terrified, when it’s actually making you braver. Never hold yourself back.
Strive to be better tomorrow than you were today. Thank yourself later.
If you want to be hard on yourself, do so for not trying when it’s hard. Be tough on yourself when procrastination wins and you skip an attempt to improve. But no matter how small the gains may appear, no matter how minimal yourattempt to be better seems successful, that is the journey you want to be on.
James Clear said,
Goals are for people who care about winning once.
Systems are for people who care about winning repeatedly.
You don’tset the right systems in place when you are looking for instant gratificationor results. You show up… Every. Single. Day… And you take solace in knowing that what you do today will pay dividends for days, months, and years ahead.Understanding this helps to relieve the stress of not seeing long term positive results, by trusting in the seemingly insignificantimprovements today will bring.
Today is fleeting, there are many tomorrows, many days that future you will appreciate the efforts you put in today. The original quote above ended with, “Strive to be better tomorrow than you were today. Thank yourself later.” I think that Iwouldadd, ‘Also remember to thank yourself today… you’re doing great!’
“Communication is about what is received, not what is intended. If there is a gap between what you are saying and what they are hearing, you have to find a new way to say it.” -@JamesClear
This quote reminds me of the NLP saying, ‘The meaning of your communication is the response that you get.’
When there is a gap between what your message is and what a person hears, it’s easy to assume that the mistake is on the receiving end, but in reality, that becomes a game of pointing fingers and blame. The better thing to consider is how to improve the message. How do you convey intentions more clearly, in a way that the listener can better hear?
This acceptance of responsibilityfor the message empowers the speaker. This responsibility to better express what was miscommunicated allows for clarity to prevail. But this doesn’t mean you speak louder. It’s not about enunciating words more clearly. No, it about understanding the perspective of the other person. It’s about having empathy for the viewpoints of the person you are communicating with.
The gap between what you say and what is heard is ultimately your responsibility, because if the message you say is not the message that’s heard then who miscommunicated? If you don’t take at least part of the responsibility, then you are not solving the problem.
I recognize this video is for a small audience, and I’m hoping to get some help. Joe and I are viewing the world as geometers, not physicists or mathematicians. If you know of someone smarter than us in these fields, we encourage dialogue and perspectives that challenge our thinking, please share.
Thank you!
There is no doubt that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is going to influence the way we do school in the very near future. I have been pondering what that influence will look like. What are the implications now and what will they be in just a few short years.
Now: AI is going to get messy. Unlike when Google and Wikipedia came out and we were dealing with plagiarism issues, AI writing is not Google-able, and there are two key issues with this: First, you can create assignments that are not Google-able, but you are much more limited in what you can create that is un-AI-able. That is to say, you can ask a question that isn’t easily answerable by Google search, but AI is quite imaginative and creative and can postulate things that a Google search can’t answer, and then share a coherent response. The second issue is that AI detectors are not evidence of cheating. If I find the exact source that was plagiarized, it’s easy to say that a student copied it, but if a detector says that something is 90% likely to be written by AI that doesn’t mean that it’s only 10% likely to be written by a person. For example, I could write that last sentence in 3 different ways and an AI detector would come up with 3 different percentages of likeliness that it is AI. Same sentence, different percentage of likelihood to be AI written, and all written by me.
So we are entering a messy stage of students choosing to use AI to do the work for them, or to help them do the work, or even to discuss that topic and argue with them so that they can come up with their own, better responses. We can all agree that the three uses I shared above are progressively ‘better’ use of AI, but again, all are using AI in some way. The question is, are we going to try to police this, or try to teach appropriate use at the appropriate time? And even when we do this, what do we do when we suspect misuse, but can’t prove it? Do we give full marks and move on? Do we challenge the student? What’s the best approach?
So we are in an era where it is more and more challenging to figure out when a student is misusing AI and we are further challenged with the burden of proof. Do we now start only marking things we see students do in supervised environments? That seems less than ideal. The obvious choice is to be explicit about expectations and to teach good use of AI, and not pretend like we can continue on and expect students not to use it.
The near future: I find the possible direction of use of AI in schools quite exciting to consider. Watch this short video of Sal Hahn and his son, Imran, working with an Open AI tool to solve a Math question without the AI giving away the answer.
When I see something like this video, made almost 6 month ago, I wonder, what’s going to be possible in another couple years? How much will an AI ‘know’ about a student’s approach to learning, about their challenges? About how best to entice learning specifically for each student? And then what is the teacher’s role?
I’m not worried about teachers being redundant, on the contrary, I’m excited about what’s possible in this now era. When 80% of the class is getting exactly the instruction they need to progress to a grade standard in a class on the required content, how much time does a teacher having during class time to meet with and support the other 20% of students who struggle? When a large part part of the curriculum is covered by AI, meeting and challenging students at their ideal points of challenge, and not a whole class moving at the class targeted needs, how much ‘extra’ time is available to do some really interesting experiments or projects? What can be done to take ideas from a course across multiple disciplines and to teach students how to make real-world connections with the work they are studying?
Students generally spend between 5 and 6 hours a day in class at school. If we are ‘covering’ what we need to with AI assistance in less than 3 hours, what does the rest of the time at school look like? Student directed inquiries based on their passions and interests? Real world community connections? Authentic leadership opportunities? Challenges and competitions that force them to be imaginative and creative? The options seem both exciting and endless.
The path from ‘now’ to ‘the near future’ is going to be messy. That said, I’m quite excited about seeing how the journey unfolds. While it won’t be a smooth ride, it will definitely be one that is both a great adventure and one that is headed to a pretty fantastic destination.
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Update: Inspired by my podcast conversation with Dean Shareski, here.
