Welcome back from what was hopefully a refreshing long labor day weekend!
First of all, thank you to everyone who attended my Lunch & Learn YouTube premiere on Wednesday last week! It’s my first 20 minute video essay, where I was focusing on the specifics of why ChatGPT’s new “Study Mode” is still nowhere near enough for learning. You can now watch the video here if you still haven’t.
This newsletter is the beginning of a new publishing schedule, where I will distill my weekly learnings about learning with technology. (Things gon’ get meta folks!)
I’ve tried so many times to sustain a newsletter without a schedule and without a coherent theme, but it always result in spurts of productivity followed by long periods of silence. Instead I’m going to take a page out of a book I read earlier this year called Tiny Experiments by Anne-Laure Le Cunff. Her tiny experiments come with an excellent structure:
I will [action] for [duration]
The best thing is the “for [duration]” part, as a lot of habit forming advice is often not so prescriptive about limiting time, but it’s a critical step for reassessment… and learning!
So here’s mine:
I will post a weekly newsletter on Tuesdays summarizing 3 articles that inspired something about learning for the month of September.
I’ll reassess at the end of the month and see whether the cadence was too much and how hard it is to keep track of what I’m reading.
Let’s dive in with the first issue. As always, you can simply reply to this email to reach me with anything you’d like to share, questions, or discussion!
Human literacy
Reading Eryk Salvaggio’s “Human Literacy“, I found myself wondering why it’s so hard to articulate the discomfort that comes from learning with AI. Though I don’t have a formal answer yet, I’m beginning to think a lot of it comes down to how AI challenges our shared understanding of what “meaning” is. Eryk shares a personal story of how a door sign had a profound impact on him despite the sign itself not having sentience. He explains:
[the door sign’s message] need not come from any capacity for intelligence behind those words. Instead, meaning is a power in how we read, deeply influenced by the experience we are having when words come to our attention. That is Human Literacy: to know why the things that have meaning to you have meaning at all.
I love this idea, that human literacy could be about deriving meaning, whereas AI literacy could be the simple task of generating words that are meaningless (even if they are syntactically correct).
Share your teacher AI policies
As the school year starts, I’m inspired by Marc Watkins’s idea of writing a personal AI policy to share with his students which he justifies beautifully by saying: “For me, the reason why I won’t be automating those [email and grading] tasks boils down to the fact that I value those relationships I have with flesh and bone humans and don’t want to cede that to a machine.” It brings to mind Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman’s latest warning about Seemingly Conscious AI (SCAI) and how “we must build AI for people; not to be a person.” I do appreciate someone with his power stepping up and publicly proclaiming such messages, but we’re still seeing nonstop nonsense about replacing teachers with AI!
Take the guided museum tour
You can find teaching inspiration everywhere when you decide to think of everyday life as a school. One unexpected place came from the incredible new Berthe Weill exhibit at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (and if you’re in Montreal please go see it before it closes Sept. 7th). I was lucky to show up just as a free guided tour was starting, and the guide gave so much more context than any of the little plaques and printed stories on the walls. At first I thought this was yet further proof that plaques at the museum exist solely to make me feel stupid. Then I started to realize that in fact I am experiencing two different modes of learning.
A guided museum tour gives a lot more context, but it also plants ideas in your mind of what to make of the works in front of you. Meanwhile an unguided tour with confusing plaques is an opportunity for you to form your own opinions. Perhaps an ideal approach would be to see an exhibit once then go on a guided tour and compare notes! This idea was reinforced by Austin Kleon’s wonderful explanation of why his house is a library. In it he compares learning modes in a library vs. a school with the former having “opening hours” rather than “bells and schedule”, and being “learner-led” rather than “teacher-led.” Both can be good, but each has a different purpose, like an open exhibit vs. a guided tour!
I hope you all have a wonderfully fresh start to the new academic year, and I’ll see you in my next post!
Cheers,
Charlie
