Tag Archives: society

Lacking decorum

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I used to think, ‘I don’t understand how we got here?’ But I’m beginning to see a pattern.

Honour, respect, and decency are conventions. They are merely expectations, they are simply the way things are normally done in a caring culture. Decorum is upheld not by the roles of everyone, rather it is upheld by the usual lack of tolerance for people that don’t show decency. A key role for those with power and influence in a decent society is to demonstrate what’s acceptable, and when they don’t, conventions are not enough.

Conventions, decency , and decorum are expectations, not laws. To break them is not illegal, but rather just ugly. And sad.

Our collective tolerance has been too weak. The ‘paradox of intolerance’ is the problem on two fronts. First, in being too tolerant of the intolerant. But secondly and almost more importantly, because the tolerant are held to a higher standard. Those who hold decorum and decency within them expect of themselves to follow these conventions, and are upset but more tolerant of those who do not, in comparison to the expectations they place on themselves.

It’s a slippery slope because bad faith actors are given too much leeway to say and share things unbecoming of themselves and the roles they play in society. And so it takes a lot less effort to lack decency and decorum than it does to uphold it.

Who will get us there?

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Stephen Downes shared the following on LinkedIn:

“I was asked, “Please provide a brief abstract that summarises your views on the impact of AI on higher education.”

As far more than the language models that have captured the attention of the world over the last few years, artificial intelligence (AI) represents a significant increase in human capability, augmenting and sometimes exceeding our natural capacities to perceive, reason, create and remember. Ubiquitous access to these capabilities changes the definition of what it means to learn and to be educated. Skills once reserved to the domain of experts are now in the hands of everyday people, while most every discipline is devising new models, methods and pragmatics of work alongside, or teaming with, these new tools. This challenges educators along a number of fronts, impacting how they teach, what they teach, and even what it means to teach. Today’s educator in a world of AI is responsible for far more than passing along knowledge (indeed, the machine can do most of that). We will be responsible for challenging students both young and old to find new ways of seeing and creating, leading them through demonstration of dedication, resilience and passion, and modeling for them the best values of civil and social responsibility, contribution and care.

Thoughts?” ~ Stephen Downes

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Although my thoughts align with K-12 education as well as higher education, these thoughts come to me in the form of a question:

Who is going to get us there?

Who is the ‘We’ that Stephen is talking about when he says, “We will be responsible for challenging students both young and old to find new ways of seeing and creating, leading them through demonstration of dedication, resilience and passion, and modeling for them the best values of civil and social responsibility, contribution and care”?

Because I love this vision of what teaching can become, I just don’t see a clear path to take us there.

‘We’ won’t get there following the guidance of financially lucrative edu-tech business, products, and tools… their locked-in subscriptions will tout measures of success that don’t align with this vision, even when they say that they will.

‘We’ won’t get there like we did with Web2.0 tools in the late 2000’s and early 2010’s, on the backs of tech savvy educators leading the charge.

‘We’ won’t get there because of some governmental vision pushing a new AI enhanced curriculum, or even new guidelines that somehow redefine for teachers, “how they teach, what they teach, and even what it means to teach”.

I hope I’m not coming off as a pessimist. I’m excited about what’s possible. I just fear that ‘we’ aren’t going to get ‘there’ any time soon unless ‘We’ align philosophy, policy, and economic support for the transformation of schools into something different.

Short of that, I fear that ‘We’ will be having the same ‘20th century schools in a 21st century world’ conversation in another 10 years… which I’ve heard since getting into education in the late 1900’s.

Robots, robots, everywhere

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In the world of robots two things are happening at lightning speed:

  1. Capabilities – A year ago humanoid robots were clunky, unstable, and for lack of a better word, robotic.
  2. Production – A year ago if a company could produce 5,000 robots in a year, they were industry leaders.

Have a look at this video and you’ll see just how much farther along robots and their production have advanced: ‘China’s New AI Robots Shock Everyone With Impossible Skills’

It might be cliche to say, but the future has arrived. First in factories, then in homes! If one thing is certain about our future it is that humanoid robots will be all around us. We’ll have to wait and see how this impacts work, chores, and even social interactions, because there isn’t going to time to think of long term implications before they arrive… everywhere very quickly.

Tragedy Tourism

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I don’t know how widespread the use of this phrase is, but I heard it and to me it is exactly why I struggle to pay attention to the news. The phrase is ‘tragedy tourism’ and it refers to the constant onslaught of tragedy we ‘visit’ viewing current events in the news. The topics vary and change but message is the same:

Share a tragic event, share the outrage, sadness, and horror, briefly examine the details, discuss them, highlight the anger or controversy, and then move on… find a new tragedy and repeat. You don’t get to live too long with any one tragedy, you merely visit and move on.

Your attention can’t stay on any one thing, because the next tragedy is thrust upon you to provoke further outrage, to keep you distracted, triggered. And a mind that is consumed with tragedy is a controlled and manipulated mind. It’s a mind that is angry and distracted from rational thought, it’s a mind that easily forgets the last reason to be outraged because the new reason, the next distraction, fill your consciousness with yet another and another tragedy.

No time for clarity of thought, no time to examine the issues and nuances of the last tragedy you visited, you just move on to the next tragedy because that’s where the news cycle is now. You visit each new tragedy like you are on a vacation bus tour. In the same way that a bus stops to show you a touristy landmark just long enough to learn a few highlights and minor details, and take a picture, the news peppers you with the lowlights, the sadness of the tragedy before putting you back on the metaphorical bus to be dropped off at the next tragedy.

Tragedy tourism keeps you hopping from one tragedy to the next, filling you with new reasons to be angry and upset, but not leaving you long enough on any one tragedy to allow you to feel immersed. The stay at each tragic event too short to care enough to truly understand the tragedy or to meaningfully interact or think critically about it before moving on to the next one.

An angry mind doesn’t think critically. A divided attention doesn’t promote activism or action. A distracted population doesn’t do anything to upset the status quo… and the news pumps out a new tragedy for us to visit.

Keeping the faith

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Religions around the world are losing followers. But people are seekers, they want to believe in something. And while there are downsides to religion, including fanaticism and blind following of misguided faith leaders, there is also a warmth of community, a comfort of shared values, and a wonderful sense of belonging.

Atheism and often the path it can lead to nihilism don’t fill the voids a loss of religion can leave behind. And I think that’s why we see blind faith emerging that doesn’t seem to make sense to many.

Why on earth would someone in 2026 join a community of flat earthers who have to literally ignore volumes of data in order to believe what they believe? Maybe because the community is so inviting to anyone who believes?

Why would someone defend unnecessary violence, or even terrorism in the name of God or country? Maybe because they feel othered, or fear being othered. Maybe they feel hurt and seek vengeance? Maybe they feel the government is too heavy-handed or not heavy handed enough?

Why would someone follow a leader who does things they would previously have been upset about? Maybe there is one pillar that leader stands on that supports their beliefs more than any other transgression that leader might be accused of? Maybe they feel community, shared values, and a sense of belonging are all missing in their lives because their waning beliefs in a broken religion can no longer fulfill these needs.

When people can’t seem to hold onto their religious faith, where else do they put their faith?

It seems today that it goes to all the wrong places.

We need a new kind of religion, one that is inherent in most faiths already, but often masked by evangelical fervour, threats of secularism, misinterpreted scripture, literal interpretations of metaphors, among other reasons justifiable by the keepers of the faith. That inherent idea common to all faiths, the somehow lost idea, is that we are all the children of God, and that we should be kind, caring, and even loving to all God’s children.

If that was the underlying premise of ‘our belief systems’ (intentionally plural) then the best thing we could do is to keep the faith. But when religions and more specifically religious people, focus on differences, and when charismatic leaders decide that hate, separation, and false prophecies are the goal, well then our belief systems rise only to crumble.

This is the path we are on, not an increase in atheism, because atheism is not a belief system to swap another religion for. A thing to ‘not believing in’ is not a replacement for a faith. And so what we are seeing is a rise in people looking in all the wrong place to feel safe and then blindly, misguidedly keeping the faith.

Post Truth Era

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Never mind the ridiculous videos of Mr. Rogers chatting with Tupac Shakur or Bigfoot vlogging, these AI videos seem real enough while fully intending us to know they are AI. What we are seeing now is an indistinguishable bending of real and fake with videos that are completely altering our ability to know what is real and what isn’t.

Voice mimicking was already almost perfect. I saw a video post today from a man whose dad called him to ask what their shared bank account password was. One problem: His dad died last year, he just hadn’t taken his name off of the account yet. He said it sounded so real that had his father been alive, he probably would have shared the password, thinking his dad forgot.

Now AI videos are just as good as AI audio and the combination of the two truly are steering us into a post truth era. People are sharing AI videos completely unaware that they are fake. Even news stations are getting it wrong.

Soon web sites will become bastions of truth. Want to know what someone actually said? Go to ‘their name’ .com or .org and see the actual video shared there. Anything else will be questionable. And wherever else the video is shared must be watched with skepticism. Subtle or overt, very important changes in a message will occur as a result of someone, ultimately anyone taking the original video and making an AI version that gives their message instead of the intended message.

Following specific domains, and maybe a handful of legitimate news channels, are the only suggestions I have. Legislation won’t keep up, and the fakes are just getting better. Essentially, find reliable sites and distrust everything else. Intuition and common sense won’t be enough.

No Authenticity Without Sincerity

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I was listening to the Modern Wisdom podcast with Chris Williamson and he said something that really struck a chord with me,

“…society is obsessed with authenticity and terrified of sincerity.”

For me it’s the perfect vacation photo, but it took 20 minutes to take because that’s how long it took to have a split second of time when the scene doesn’t look over-crowded.

It’s the beauty advice from people with injection enhanced lips and inch long false eyelashes.

It’s the made-to-look-candid moments that are completely contrived.

It’s the ‘I’m an influencer’ entitlement.

It’s the beauty filters that remove wrinkles and age lines while enhancing complexion.

… I could go on. The point being all this happens with an air or attempt to share an authentic moment, a real, ‘this is me’ connection’, or a ‘I’ve got what you want’ attitude, all the while masquerading as sincere.

It’s conveyed as authentic, yet there is pretence, deceit, and/or hypocrisy. It’s the promise that you can have it all: the beauty, the physique, the wealth, the perfect significant other, the happy and fulfilled life.

‘If I can do it, you can too.’

Never mind genetics, forget about privilege, disregard the challenges that are proclaimed as easy or simple to overcome. Leave behind sincerity.

Real authenticity comes with vulnerability. But vulnerability is seen as weakness. So everyone’s afraid of sincerity because theky don’t want their message, and more importantly themselves, to appear vulnerable and weak.

What are we left with?

“…society is obsessed with authenticity and terrified of sincerity.”

What do we see?

False authenticity thinly vailed as sincere but really just an illusion. It’s performative rather than practical. And yet somehow it gains traction, and social media algorithms just feed us more. More vapid messages pretending to be genuine but never sincere enough to be truly authentic.

The upside down bell curve

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The bell curve, also known as a normal distribution, is a graph that depicts how values in a dataset are distributed. Most values cluster around the average with fewer values appearing at the extremes… those rare few that do very well or very poorly.

But there is a new curve evolving that matters more, the upside down bell curve where the ones on the extremes are where most of the data points are distributed. In an era of free and openly available information, this is the new learning curve. There is no more average majority, instead there are those that understand and those that do not. Those that participate and those that opt out. Those that engage and those that choose not to. Those that seek to learn and those that disengage.

The resources needed to do well are available. The access to information is there for all who want it. The opportunity to get that information in a format or delivery that makes sense to you is easy to find. The question is, are you willing to put the effort in?

If you learn how you best learn, then access to information is no longer a barrier and you will likely learn very well. You will be with the majority of people on the successful side of the distribution curve. If you decide it’s too hard, or choose not to engage, you will be with the other majority, ignorantly selecting the unsuccessful side of the distribution.

There will be anomalies, those that have learning challenges that are not met and struggle, and those that make no effort yet still find it easy to understand things. There will also be those few that just choose to squeak by, capable of more but neither excelling or struggling. But this is the era of extremes. This is a time when the ‘A’, the ‘Exceeding Expectations’, the ability to excel, is available to most… and yet will only be achieved by the ones who actually choose it.

The mathematical average of the curve might be the same, but the distribution will be starkly divided.

Fuelling my disillusionment

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A few months ago I wrote the following in response to a LinkedIn post, and then saved it in my drafts. The problem is, I didn’t copy the link to the original post properly. Furthermore, if I recall, it didn’t really answer the question that was posed. It was tangentially connected but not completely on topic.

I’ve edited my comment slightly, and I want to share it since I’m wonder if ‘it’s just me’ feeling this way?

~~~ ~~~ ~~~

It’s the doing more with less that fuels my disillusionment.

  • Greater and often unrealistic expectations of parents and universities.
  • Greater student social-emotional as well as educational needs.
  • Greater demands to prevent litigation (more documentation, more protection of data, more health & safety requirements… all ‘necessary’, but time consuming.)
  • Greater demands and expectations from the Ministry of Education, and Worksafe BC.
  • Greater costs – pay hikes, heating costs, perishable supplies. Even with no cuts to education, less money gets to the classroom.
    I could go on. I’ve watched my role shift from educational leader to middle manager of an educational machine. I feel like a shield trying to redirect and manage the above impacts away from teachers so that they, rather than we, can do great things with kids.

Still an important role but a lot less personally rewarding.

Am I the only principal feeling this?

Knowledge Keepers

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For generations we have looked to our elders as the knowledge keepers. Now knowledge is stored in bits and bytes, and shared in video format. A boy doesn’t look to dad or granddad to learn how to shave, he learns on YouTube. A girl learns to apply foundation and makeup from Instagram Reels or TickTock. Changing a headlight on your car? There’s a YouTube video with your exact make and model showing you every step. Cooking, traveling, losing weight, gaining muscle, putting contact lenses in, or beating a level on your favourite video game? You are probably going to search for how to do it online before you ask someone for help.

Something to recognize is that many knowledge keepers are the ones sharing and creating the videos we seek, so in a way, their knowledge is still being transferred. Just like people before the internet looked to books for wisdom and insight, seeking a video of someone doing the exact task you are going to do is a very useful way to learn. This isn’t an issue of knowledge being lost, and in fact, is a useful way to store and share information. The question is, what is being lost?

What social interactions between generations are being left out of the YouTube ‘How To’ era? Is there a kind of wisdom being lost, or is it just a loss of connection?

I’m conflicted when thinking about this. Part of me thinks that we are disconnecting from our knowledge keepers, our elders, our storytellers, and that we are missing out in a shared, personal experience. And yet I also think of a kid in a remote town without a library learning about our universe online from physicist Brian Cox. Or a child of a single parent who works two jobs getting an online tutorial on a topic their busy parent has no time to give them. How lucky are they to have the internet fill the knowledge gap?

We can access our knowledge keepers online as well as face-to-face, it’s not an either/or situation… but I guess that what I’m wondering is if we haven’t forgotten that there is a richness to learning in-person from our knowledge keepers? Are we too quick to use Google or Chat GPT to seek quick answers and missing out on a story, an interaction that builds a core memory? Are we losing a richness of experience that comes with sitting with our elders and learning from them?