Tag Archives: data

Playing with Bing copilot

I asked Bing copilot about myself:

What does David Truss write about on http://davidtruss.com

The response:

David Truss writes about various topics related to education, learning, and technology on his website http://davidtruss.com. He shares his thoughts, experiences, and reflections as an educator, a student, a thinker, and a dreamer. He also showcases his presentations, podcasts, resources, and projects that he has created or contributed to. Some of the themes that he explores on his website are:

  • Inquiry-based learning and teaching
  • Blended learning and distributed learning
  • Leadership and innovation
  • Student voice and choice
  • Global citizenship and social responsibility
  • Personalized learning and professional growth

You can find more information about David Truss and his work on his website 1 or on his blog Pair-a-Dimes for Your Thoughts.

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I followed up more specifically with my daily blog:

What does David Truss write about on http://daily-ink.davidtruss.com?

The response:

David Truss writes about his personal and professional experiences, reflections, and insights on his daily blog Daily-Ink. He describes his writing as his artistic expression, and his keyboard as his brush. He commits to writing daily to feel like an artist. He covers various topics related to education, learning, technology, leadership, innovation, global citizenship, and more. Some of his recent posts are:

  • Rewind: He looks back at the past year of the pandemic and how it changed his life and work. He also rewinds to previous years and how different decisions and events shaped his career and family. He wonders how he will look at February 2021 a decade from now.
  • Headspace: He shares his thoughts on meditation and mindfulness, and how they help him cope with stress and anxiety. He recommends some apps and podcasts that he uses to practice meditation and mindfulness.
  • Cruise ships and education: He draws an analogy between cruise ships and education systems, and how they both need to adapt to the changing needs and expectations of their customers and stakeholders. He argues that education needs to be more personalized, flexible, and relevant for the learners of today and tomorrow.

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I had to update the links to the posts because they all went to my blog’s home page, but those were correct post titles. Also the ‘Headspace’ post made no mention of meditation and mindfulness, though I do mention those frequently in other posts… and that particular post isn’t really typical of the things I write about.

I then switched from asking questions to clicking on Bing’s copilot suggested questions. The first one was:

What is David Truss’s background?

The response:

David Truss is a Canadian educator and administrator who is currently the principal of three programs in Coquitlam, BC: Coquitlam Open Learning, Inquiry Hub Secondary School, and Suwa’lkh Learning Centre. He has a background in inquiry-based learning, blended learning, distributed learning, leadership, innovation, global citizenship, and social responsibility. He is also a blogger, podcaster, author, and speaker who shares his thoughts and experiences on education, learning, and technology. He has a website Pair-a-Dimes where he showcases his work and resources. He also wrote an eBook called Twitter Edu where he shares his tips and tricks on using Twitter for professional learning and networking.

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This time I didn’t change the links… because I think it’s valuable to mention how wrong they are. The link to my blog, Pair-a-Dimes, above actually goes to a Barbara Bray podcast about me, and the link to my Twitter book actually goes to the Encyclopedia Britannica page for Liz Truss, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. The rest of the data is quite accurate (other than I no longer run Suwa’lkh), but it seems copilot has a linking issue.

The next suggested question:

Can you show me some of his projects?

Sure, I can show you some of his projects that he has created or contributed to. Here are some examples:

  • Inquiry Hub Secondary School: This is a high school in Coquitlam, BC, Canada that focuses on independent learning and inquiry-based projects. David Truss is the principal of this school and one of the founders. He also shares his experiences and insights on leading and learning in this innovative environment. You can learn more about this school on its website 1 or on Wikipedia 2.
  • 10 Truss Houses That Brilliantly Blend Architecture With Engineering: This is an article that David Truss wrote for Architizer Journal, where he showcases 10 residential projects that use trusses as a major design element. He explores how these structural systems frame spatial experiences and respond to diverse landscapes. You can read his article here 3.
  • Twitter Edu: This is an eBook that David Truss co-authored with Eric Sheninger, where they share their tips and tricks on using Twitter for professional learning and networking. They explain how to create a personal learning network, find and share resources, and connect with other educators around the world. You can download their eBook here .

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The middle point is not remotely about me, and the last one didn’t link to my e-book. This request was the first one that really deviated from my profile with the Architecture article about truss supports. I had to do a search to find this article, since it wasn’t linked, and the link that it goes to above in the search results is an article about Liz Truss.

I followed one more copilot suggested question:

What is David Truss’s Twitter handle?

This was the response:

David Truss’s Twitter handle is @datruss. He is a Canadian educator, administrator, blogger, podcaster, author, and speaker. He tweets about education, learning, technology, leadership, innovation, global citizenship, and more. He has over 18.5K followers and follows over 10.6K accounts. He joined Twitter in March 2008 and has posted over 55.6K tweets as of April 2023. You can follow him on Twitter to get his latest updates and insights

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Once again the links went to articles about Liz, but the information was correct other than totals for my follows/following, which are both around 13K.

Overall, I’m impressed by the accuracy of copilot, and disappointed by the lack of reliable links. I think of Bing copilot a bit like I think of Wikipedia, it’s a great place to start your research, but not a definitive source to base any answers on. It’s a copilot when you are taking off on a search but once you are in the air, you need to take over the steering and guide the search plane to more credible or primary sources of information.

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One final thought: The html code that pasted onto my blog from copilot was very messy. I’d suggest pasting without formatting and adding the correct links after you have pasted everything… lesson learned!

Keeper of your digital history

When I lived in China, I had a hard time communicating on any social media. I connected to this blog using Posterous, which let me post easily from an App on my phone, before WordPress had an App. When Posterous went defunct all the images I posted through their App were not saved on WordPress and so those images were lost. So I have old posts like this, where I only have a dead link where a photo used to be:

This isn’t the only social media company that has gone defunct, taking the history of my work with it. I loved using the Ning Network communites like Classroom 2.0, I had a student project with over a 100,000 visits on Wikispaces, this video had close to 100,000 views on BlipTV, and I had great conversations archived on coComment. My original blog was on ELGG, where I had a great community of bloggers to learn from, then it switched to Eduspaces which was less friendly and forced me to do the smart thing and self-host on DavidTruss.com. Delicious, Diigo, and Scribed were communities but now they’ve changed and are just ‘places’ that I used to visit and use. And there are plenty of other tools that have come and gone and when they are gone, so is a record of everything I did in those spaces.

One social media tool that I have used more than any other is Twitter. I was such a fan, I even wrote an ebook about how to get started on Twitter, then gave it away for free. I have Tweeted 33,800+ times since I started Twitter in 2007. Today I decided to request an archive of all my tweets.

I’ve lost too many great conversations and archives of data because of social media services either transforming to something different, suddenly requiring fees that are beyond what I’m willing to pay, or just going defunct… and with so much happening to Twitter right now, I just figured I’d request my data and store it myself for safe keeping. If anything happens to Twitter, I want a record of what I did in this social media space. I’m not predicting that Twitter will go the way of the dodo bird, but I’m just not confident it will look the same at the end of 2023, now that it is privately owned and operated. I want a backup of my data… just in case.

Are our apps over-sharing our data?

My guess is, yes. I know that when I google search a product, I will likely see an ad for that item on Facebook. I know that information is being shared. But I’ve been listening to The Quantum Moment on my Audible App and today on my 30 minutes of TikTok (my time limit on weekdays) I ended up seeing 4 videos on: the Space-Time continuum (x2), an Einstein thought experiment, and the physics of light and heat vs dark and cold.

Now before reading this book, I did have a few science videos as part of my algorithm, but mostly related to space and the James Webb telescope. Now, from ‘out of nowhere’, I’m getting physics videos, after I start listening to a book about physics on a totally different app.

Part of me thinks this is great, after all I did enjoy the videos and found them interesting. That’s why I like TikTok, it feeds me more interesting content than any 30 minute show I could possibly find on TV. But part of me wonders, what other data is being shared? How much do my apps know about what I do on other apps? How targeted is the advertising I see? What about when I google medication, or symptoms? What about the health apps I use?

Is anything private anymore, or when I agree to use an app, am I agreeing to share my whole life? I might have enjoyed the videos, but I don’t think TikTok should know what books I’m listening to, unless I’ve explicitly permitted it to.

More Cowbell: Signal-to-noise

Signal-to-noise ratio (SNR or S/N) is a measure used in science and engineering that compares the level of a desired signal to the level of background noise. SNR is defined as the ratio of signal power to the noise power, often expressed in decibels. A ratio higher than 1:1 (greater than 0 dB) indicates more signal than noise. Wikipedia

This is a scientific term that relates to how much background noise there is interfering with the data or information you are trying to receive. A simple way to think about this is having a conversation in a party. If the noise of the party is too loud, you can’t pick up the signal (what the other person is saying). There is a point at which the noise does not interfere and the signal/communication is easy to hear, then moving along the scale the noise can interfere a little or a lot.

With machines this ratio is easy to calculate. With humans it’s a lot harder. It isn’t always about the quality of the signal, it’s also about the the willingness of the receiver to receive the signal. Sometimes people are not ready to receive the signal no matter how clear it is. Sometimes people choose to listen to the noise. Sometimes the noise is in their own head, not just coming from outside.

We are currently living in a world where a large number of people pay attention to the noise and are missing the signal altogether. A world where the noise is intentionally being spread. A world where the signal is considered noise. But humans aren’t machines, and so the noise isn’t easily calibrated and removed.

Social media used to amplify the signal, now it amplifies the noise. News used to amplify the signal, now it constantly reports about the problem of the noise, thus highlighting the noise and bringing it to everyone’s attention… not always in a negative light… or putting the signal and the noise on an equal footing as if to say here are two equal signals to be weighed and considered. As a result, communities, families, and friendships are being torn apart as they argue about what is signal and what is noise.

I’m reminded of the ‘More Cowbell’ skit on Saturday Night Live.

https://vimeo.com/257364428

The noise is becoming too loud to receive the signal in any meaningful way. We need to simultaneously turn up the signal and turn down the noise. If not, we better get used to the cow bell.

Making history

We are living through one of the biggest social experiments in history. We are getting thousands of data points all over the world that show us what the Delta variant is doing…

In Florida:


And in India:

In comparison to Iceland and the UK:

The difference in deaths is directly related to the number of people in less and more vaccinated areas.

And in Mississippi and Louisiana:


Want to guess what the death rate will look like in these highly unvaccinated areas?

Where does the social experiment come in? India didn’t have ready access to vaccines, Florida, Mississippi, and Louisiana all did. Meanwhile, the Florida Governor has an order against mask mandates in schools. Over the coming months we get to see large scale data sets on how decisions like this affect the lives and deaths of people in different places. We get to see what happens when people put themselves before their communities, and what fear can do to undermine society.

Decades from now there will be case studies in textbooks that will discuss the differences in preventable deaths. There will be questions about how to prevent this in a future pandemic. There will be models to show how devastating this kind of response would be if the same pandemic response happened with a virus that is 3, 10, or 20 times more contagious and/or deadly.

The Delta variant, which is affecting younger people more indiscriminately than the original variant, is quickly becoming the great un-equalizer. It is quickly revealing how a good response to the pandemic fairs so much better than a bad response. The sad part is that it’s doing this with hospitalization and deaths.

Equally as sad is that many younger kids and immune compromised people that do not have a choice to get a vaccine will suffer because of people who are able to take an available vaccine and choose not to. The unvaccinated, that are so by choice, are creating a giant social experiment where they are playing with people’s lives, and the data that’s coming out is proving this.

The worse part is that they are basing this choice on fear and misinformation. And as a PSA, the vaccine makes us safer, not safe.

Wear a mask. Practice social distancing. Stay safe.

Data, Tales, and Tools

I love this quote by James Clear,

“The two skills of modern business: Storytelling and spreadsheets. 

Know the numbers. Craft the narrative.”

But it made me think of a third skill: understanding the technology we use.

It’s not enough to know the numbers, you have to know what to do with the numbers. It’s one thing to be able to look at an excel spreadsheet, it’s yet another to know how to use pivot tables and macros in order to make those numbers really useful to you.

It’s not enough to craft the narrative unless you know how to use the advertising, social, and search tools to deliver that message. It’s one thing to craft a narrative, it’s yet another to get that story or message to the people who need to hear it.

Too often we understand the basics of using tools, but we don’t know how to harness all the features and benefits of our tools. Excel can help manipulate and make sense of data far more than I’m capable of using this powerful tool. Zoom allows breakout rooms and surveys that most people don’t use. PowerPoint can record, and translate, and follow different paths depending on responses to questions. Twitter is more powerful if you understand hashtags. Website analytics can tell you where people are visiting your site from, what they click, and what pages they leave your site from.

Yes, we need to know the numbers, and be able to craft a narrative, but we also need to know how to harness the power of the tools we use to make sense of our numbers, and to transmit and share our narrative to its intended audience.

Data hoarders

I have thousands of photos on a computer that I can’t turn on. I have files on floppy discs. I still have tape cassettes, records, and CD’s. I have videos of my kids on digital tapes that I can only play on the camera I filmed them on, although I’m sure I can still get them on to my computer if I tried.

And I have thousands and thousands of digital photos that will never make it into a frame. They will never see ‘the light of day’, and many of them might not even be seen by me again.

Talking with my buddy, Dave Sands, he mentioned that we have become data hoarders. But unlike those TV shows about outlier people that hoard physical things and clutter their homes and lives, we are all becoming digital hoarders!

Our phones used to be fancy if they could take half-MB images and now some phones are approaching 10MB. My first computer was a Commodore Vic 20 with 20k of memory (and I was excited to buy the 16k adaptor to get me to 36k), and now I wouldn’t buy a computer with less that 350G. We used to buy 250MB backup drives, now we are buying multiple Terabyte backup drives.

But will these drives be easily retrievable in 30 years? Or will we be searching for an equivalent to a tape cassette recorder, or an 8-track player, to somehow get our data back? Or, how easy will it be for others to access this data as we share more and more of it in the cloud?

Beyond the fear of others getting access, will we even want this data? When was the last time you looked at a backup file or drive that has data you no longer have on your computer or phone?

We have become digital hoarders, all of us. What implications does this have for us, or more specifically, for our future selves?