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.
“I talk to educational leaders every day and for the most part, they are willing and in many cases excited to embrace the potential of Generative AI. When you consider its role in education, what are the specific elements that excite you and what are the aspects that give you pause?”
I commented:
“What excites me is how we can collaborate with AI to generate and iterate ‘with’ AI in ways that would never have been possible before. What gives me pause are when tools are used to make work easier, and the level of challenge becomes low. Different, challenging work is where we need to head, not just easier work, or work avoidance by using AI… so the work itself needs to be rethought, rather than just replaced with AI.”
Tomorrow I leave for Toronto for my dad’s memorial. It will be the first time in over 10 years that my parent’s grandchildren will all be together. All 8 cousins under the same roof. Growing up I got to spend a lot of time with my cousins, but my kids have not had that opportunity. Now they are all young adults, the last time they were together as a full group they were kids. It’s amazing how time flies.
It’s hard to say goodbye to a parent, but getting together as a family makes it a bit easier. In the end our children are our greatest legacy, and so are their kids. My grandfather used to call us, his grandkids, his ‘second crop’. He’d frequently say about his second crop, “If I knew they were going to be this much fun, I would have had them first.” 😂
In the coming days my parent’s first and second crops will all be together. I’m really looking forward to this celebration of life, and legacy.
I was at a dinner meeting and one of the group rode up in an electric unicycle, ‘a self-balancing personal transporter with a single wheel’. It looks like a lot of fun. A younger me would have loved to hop on it and give it a try… but that’s not me anymore.
I love adventure, I love trying new things, but I also like going to bed without being in agony. I enjoy when my back feels the same age as me and not like it’s 20 years older. And I know that one minor fall from an electric unicycle can launch me into a world of pain.
It’s not about lack of wanting to try, it’s self-preservation. I’ve learned (usually the hard way) that some activities have an expiry date on them. It’s not based on how old the activity is, it’s based on how old I am… And an electric unicycle’s expiry date went off about a decade ago. That’s a nope for me.
Living in the Vancouver Lower Mainland, I miss the rainy season in Barbados. When the rainy season hits on this tropical island, it meant a morning rainstorm with water droplets the size of coins soaking you in seconds, followed by the cloud cover passing you and the rain stopping almost instantly. After that there was 20-30 minutes of uncomfortable humidity as the hot sun evaporated the rainwater. Maybe this would happen again later, but often it wasn’t until the next day.
Occasionally you’d get a cloudy, cool day that lasted the whole day with intermittent rainfall, but there might only be 5-10 days like that the whole season. Maybe I’m underplaying it, after all I was 9 when I left, but I remember a rainy season I could easily handle.
Today was a reminder that BC rain is nothing like that. I spent over an hour outside in misty rain, putting our above ground pool away. It was damp, and there was a constant drizzle or mist. It was gloomy. There was hardly a time during the day that I could tell you where the sun was due to the heavy cloud cover… And the season is just starting.
The worst two months of weather here are usually November and February. But the gloominess starts now. I’ll make the most of the grey days to come, even heading to and from work in the dark. I’ll continue to take my Vitamin D, and I’ll use my sunlight desk lamp at school. But I have to admit that I’d take the rainy season in Barbados any time over the rainy season in Vancouver.
I find it interesting how the voice in our heads can be so loud. Sometimes it’s like we live two different lives, one in the 3-dimensional world and one in the ethereal space between our ears. Both lives playing out simultaneously and each distracting ourselves from the other.
Sometimes they sync and we become a singularly focused person… both lives becoming one in moments of joy, love, anger, or gratitude, as examples. But often those are high and low moments that draw our mutually focused attentions. Most of our lives they seem to be in minor conflict with each other, fighting for our full attention.
I like the moments when my internal dialogue is quiet, and more focused on being present in the physical world, but there are times when this seems impossible. There are times when the internal dialogue is a complete distraction from reality, in a full on battle for attention. When I’m in this space, the internal dialogue usually wins. These are times that I’m more comfortable being alone than in the presence of anyone. Yet, I don’t feel alone… I’ve got an internal voice keeping me company.
This is neither good nor bad, this is determined by context. If I’m thinking of something dark or gloomy, it can be a bad headspace to be in. But if I’m deep in thought and excited about some new learning or ideas, or if I’m creating or writing, then I could be in a fantastic headspace.
My internal dialogue is like a second world, a second life that lives inside my head, and can be on a continuum from fully engaged in the physical world to almost fully ignorant of my surroundings. Both extreme cases can be wonderful, but it seems I live most of my life balancing the two worlds as best as I can.
I love the ingenuity of students when it comes to avoiding work. I remember a student showing me how playing 3 French YouTube videos in different tabs simultaneously somehow fooled the Rosetta Stone language learning software to think he was responding to oral tests correctly. How on earth did he figure that out?
Here’s a video of a kid who, while doing an online math quiz for homework, figured out that if you go to the web browser’s developer ‘inspect element’ tool you can find out the correct answer. Just hover over the code of the multiple choice questions and it highlights the choices and the code tells you if that choice is true or false.
If there is an easy way to solve things, students will figure it out.
There isn’t an AI detector that can figure out with full certainty that someone cheated using a tool like Chat GPT. And if you find one, it probably would not detect it if the student also used an AI paraphrasing tool to rework the final product. It would be harder again if their prompt said something like, ‘Use grammar, sentence structure, and word choice that a Grade 10 student would use’.
So AI will be used for assignments. Students will go into the inspector code of a web page and find the right answers, and it’s probably already the case that shy students have trained an AI tool to speak with their voice so that they could submit oral (and even video) work without actually having to read anything aloud.
These tools are getting better and better, and thus much harder to detect.
I think tricks and tools like this invite educators to be more creative about what they do in class. We are seeing some of this already, but we are also seeing a lot of backwards sliding: School districts blocking AI tools, teachers giving tests on computers that are blocked from accessing the internet, and even teachers making students, who are used to working with computers, write paper tests.
Meanwhile other teachers are embracing the changes. Wes Fryer created AI Guidelines for students to tell them how to use these tools appropriately for school work. That seems far more enabling than locking tools down and blocking them. Besides, I think that if students are going to use these tools outside of school anyway, we should focus on teaching them appropriate use rather than creating a learning environment that is nothing like the real world.
All that said, if you send home online math quizzes, some students will find an easy way to avoid doing the work. If you have students write essays at home and aren’t actively having them revise that work in class, some will use AI. Basically, some students will cheat the system, and themselves of the learning experience, if they are given the opportunity to do so.
The difference is that innovative, creative teachers will use these tools to enhance learning, and they will be in position to learn along with students how to embrace these tools openly, rather than kids sneakily using them to avoid work, or to lessen the work they need to do… either way, kids are going to use these tools.
In a conversation with a friend today we were talking about healing and therapy. We came to the conclusion that if therapy prescribes a specific outcome then it’s probably unhealthy and unsustainable. But if it empowers you with more choice, and if it provides you with new and better choices, and better still, if it creates the conditions that make it easier for you to choose better choices… well then that’s good therapy.
It’s easier to point a finger outward than it is to point it inward.
It’s more comfortable to see the faults in others than to accept the faults of our own.
It’s less work to hold others accountable than to accept responsibility.
Accusations are not as scary as being vulnerable.
It’s simpler to rationalize than it is to be critically introspective.
Accepting responsibility rather than blaming is hard work. Owning your own shit is hard work. Making things right when things have gone wrong is hard work… especially since sometimes right just means better, and no matter what you do, you can’t get back to the way things used to be.
But when you play the blame game nothing gets better. In fact, things usually get worse. Most punishment and discipline is about blame. Being restorative means sharing the responsibility to make things better.
Accepting ownership of your own actions and consequences, that’s when personal growth happens. That’s when we get unstuck. That’s when we begin to create an empowered reality rather than a sense of victimization.
How do we make things better? That’s not always an easy question to ask, and it’s usually very hard to answer. But the answer is never blame.
This is a humorous ‘contrived platitude’ that I shared on Facebook 8 years ago. It came up as a memory and I wanted to share it again:
Things definitely do not always happen for a reason, but we are reason makers and sometimes we seek meaning where there is none. Belief systems are designed around the justification of reasons, around faith as opposed to evidence. So are things like tarot card readings, conspiracy theories, superstitious habits, and lucky charms and rituals. Truth is bent, patterns are found where there are no patterns, and narratives are created to justify and satisfy, and even ‘prove’ that coincidences are actually consequences and that reasons are founded in good reasoning.
Sometimes these fabricated reasons help us. “Everything happens for a reason” can help soften an unexpected tragedy… help us find meaning in a meaningless loss of health, life, or limb. We can muster strength and purpose in times of hardship. But other times it’s nothing more than ignorance. People follow doctrines and justify their beliefs even when they are harmful to others. This is somehow done in the name of love. “We are looking out for what’s best for you, for us, for our community”… A fabricated reason. A justification. A delusion.
There is a big difference between finding a reason and good reasoning. That doesn’t mean that seeking out a reason for something is necessarily bad, it just means that sometimes the reasons you think are important or useful may not be so. It’s easy for us to rationalize anything to fit our belief system, but if that’s what we are doing we really aren’t being rational… we are rationalizing not reasoning. There is a difference between making sense of the world and making things up to make sense of the world; a deference between making up reasons and using good reasoning skills. True wisdom is knowing the difference.
There is a saying that, ‘if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail’. We all see the world differently in different circumstances, but the same circumstances don’t always elicit the same reactions. Someone with a metaphorical hammer might see the world as nails… but another person might see the world as filled with fragile material and think the hammer is a tool of destruction. Another person with only a hammer, who sees the world as fragile, might be upset that they only have a hammer and feel helpless and limited.
In a world of hammers, while one person might see nails to be hammered in, another might see value in using the other end of the hammer to pull nails out… to remove them. Same hammer used to different ends (literally and metaphorically).
Moving from hammers to glasses. People really see the world through different coloured lenses. I think this is a good thing, but we shouldn’t be set on just one colour. We shouldn’t fixate on seeing the world in monochrome, but rather change our lenses frequently. A bad situation can be changed simply by changing our lens on the situation.
A traffic jam gives us more time to listen to an audio book. A miscommunication can lead to laughs. A mistake in an order can be a point of frustration or a moment to be gracefully corrected, or even an opportunity to try something new. What lens we choose determines our lived experience.
What saddens me is when people get stuck seeing the world through narrow, gloomy lenses. People victimize themselves, they see harm where no harm was intended. They feel the world is out to get them. They see the world through a lens of malice, hurt, and negative intent. They don’t see themselves as having a hammer, they see themselves as being nails. This isn’t a healthy way to live.
Still others get stuck seeing their past through just one lens. Trauma will do that to people. Recovery from an addiction becomes a lifelong battle, not something concurred, or replaced with new meaning. A moment in the past can define someone’s lenses in the future… limiting their future perspective.
How do we give ourselves more choice? How do we find more tools than just a hammer, and how do we see the world as not just nails? How do we change our lenses? Isn’t it interesting that we wear glasses to fix our focus, but not what we focus on… pick a good lens.
