Tuesday, April 30, 2024

AI Screening Literacy

 

It is ever so predictable. You read a couple of first lines from a tired college student who resorted to ChatGPT to write the answer to a question.

It looks like this:

General paragraph of introduction, which usually regurgitates the original question.

Balanced, ever so perfectly balanced paragraphs. Maybe a listicle with numbering, if appropriate.

At the conclusion you can expect a wreath of lines totally aligned with the introduction. It says nothing you did not know before asking.

Boring. Plain boring.

Amazingly enough, tired students still resort to it. Being tired is probably the number one threat to creativity. So much so, that you cannot judge how predictable AI can be. So you rinse, wash and repeat. Copy&paste.

Time magazine said it plainly: mediocrity.

The real danger to human creativity that these tools represent is the mechanization of human innovation. Relying on these tools will discourage us from looking beyond what has been done before, and further reduce innovation into no more than imitative remixing. 

Sometimes when I open up my blog editor I wonder whether I am being original. Perhaps someone else has discussed the blog entry topic before. Yet, that is not the point. Even if my thoughts are not original, the wording, the particular filter my collection of learning experiences will reflect and project on it is bound to be unique.

I just hope I always keep writing in a way that no verifying or captcha system is needed to prove this post has been written by a human.

There is more to chew on in that article:

Can we recognize the loss of creativity caused by AI as it’s happening? Do we know there is less that is truly new in the world, and fewer avenues for personal expression? Many of us may not. Absence of choice is hard to sense, and mechanization’s real innovation is in creating a complacent buyer with reduced expectations. Once you’ve done that, you can sell them whatever you want. What is being mechanized by AI is our tastes—our ability to discern quality (or originality) at all.

That is the description of a  new, I would call AI Screening Literacy we need from now on. That tired student of mine needs to know they are sending a loser piece. They should be able to tell the difference instantly. 

How do I teach my students that? So far, when I hand the work back, what I do is to make a brief general comment pointing out that the writing voice lacks personal engagement. The operative word is engagement (a.k.a passion), as opposed to compliance (i.e., getting it done willy-nilly). No one writes back to ask me how they could improve it next time. That's a hint. I guess they understood. 

There is no intelligence in AI. The "artificial" bit overrides centuries of passionate evolution in human intelligence. 

It's about time we found a new, more accurate name for it. We never called a calculator "intelligent". The term "intelligent" would be delusionary. How about a plain descriptive term such as, artificial language editor, ALE?

"Intelligence" entails learning. "Learning" entails passion. Humanness entails "unpredictability".

 That's the beauty AI still lacks. 


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Sunday, September 02, 2012

My answer


The question is: Why are you not blogging?

I read, I agree with some points:
-blogging is part of my thinking process.
-sometimes ideas make you feel so full you need them out.

I disagree with other points and wonder lots about the rest.

I wouldn't say my blog is a diary and yet, it is not a conversation. Not always. To begin with, I think there are few readers of this blog. At least when I am writing, I cannot always picture a wide audience. Maybe a few friends. I don't think I write to say aloud what I am thinking and probably start a conversation. I write because I may choke if I don't. I may feel overwhelmed by a well written post. I cannot just nod. I need to make contact with my own perspective.

I do lots of revisions of what I write. Prior to that, I allow myself to write as fast as I can. I leave grammar in stand-by. I even invent words or dig them up from a long-time-I-haven't-seen-it landscape, so I need to check whether they exist in English or Spanish or neither. Most of the time I am pleasantly surprised to find they do exist and they are even more precise and apropriate to the situation than I had thought. This is intriguing. I believe it's part of the thinking process. A linking from the present to whatever you may have learnt before.

Writing here on the blog is miles away from writing an email -in my experience. My emails, I mean my work emails, tend to be three lines, maybe four. Maybe less if they are to arrange a Skype call or meeting. I am far more talkative here and, no doubt, wordier. Emails are more like talking fast; blogging is more like slow-motion thinking. It's about going down and further down into deep waters, challenging my diving skills. Success is not guaranteed: I may not get anywhere with my ideas. I many times feel as if I were drowning. Writing is a half-pleasurable sensation. I struggle to discover how I truly think about an issue as well as how to say what I mean. Stopping writing means not thinking it through. Not to dare think it through. That's not an option.

I cannot think my post over before on the bus, or while preparing breakfast and then sit down and write it out. That would be too late. A good wording, a sensible ordering of ideas may be lost forever in those precious minutes. If right now my browser crashed and this had not been saved, two things would most certainly happen:
a) I would never be able to write this again. It would sound rehearsed in the re-rewrite, perhaps, lose effectiveness.
b) I may have clarified it in my mind already half-way down my writing and then it would not make any sense to write it again. I would lose motivation to do so.

You say, what about sharing?

You see, I am selfish, I blog for myself. I do not desperately need you to agree. I will not be any happier or sadder if you don't. Feel free because I am. I may be ashamed at my grammar mistakes or spelling mistakes and that's as far as I will give room to those limiting feelings. I have more important things to do.

While I write, I have to dedicate my undivided attention to learning to swim in a new tide. After I review this and publish it, you may even be misguided into believing it a fully planned paper. Far from it. The truth is I know where I start the post; I have no idea where or how it will end.

I do know how I feel when I start: I get a sense that the idea is important and a certainty that someone out there will also find it important. I know how the post ends: with a feeling I have surficed something that would not otherwise have come to the surface from my dark sea of thoughts. It's hard to describe. It probably feels like a hunch or an pang of intuition. It just feels that it is well said, well expressed. Not that I have arrived to the absolute truth. I have simply arrived to a peace of mind I get from being more accurate and honest about how I think. It kind of feels safe to read other people's blogs again.

Then, the job. Review, polish, decorate with photo or not and press publish. All of this should be done at a sitting for me. Reviewing on a next day is something I would do if I feel that the issue is sensitive and I fear I may hurt someone. I know that when I feel it is my truth, I may sound too final and not leave much room for conversation. Not my nicest side, you see.

In all honesty, I can hardly say I feel I contribute to the world. If I do, it's so much less than what I have learnt surfing the Internet. Anyway, here's my drop in the ocean.

I have no control over you and what you'll do with these words. Quote them, ignore them, learn a line by heart. Comment, no comments: it's none of my concern while I write. It would interrupt me to imagine your reaction. As much as you will be welcome if you show some form of published reaction to these thoughts, the value of this post for me does not depend on you.

The question of time to blog.
I can relate to the idea that we make time for the things that are important to us. Because this kind of writing is important, I like doing it with time -free from the deadline imposed by the next commitment. Because , in my experience, blogging doesn't have any planned result as an email does; because it is the process of thinking I am sharing and not some final result I discovered to retell ten minutes later, I need to make sure I will have time to end it or risk it to drown under a pile of drafts. Blogging takes quality time.

Should everybody, i.e. teachers, do this?
Probably not.

Should everybody try to experiment to discover what writing and publishing does to their minds?
Most certainly.

What's next? What if they like my blogging voice? I imagine a newbie asking.

It doesn't mean you need to marry the outcome. You may shift to photography, drawing, telling stories of your own to your children and podcast them...

You may hear people would like you to continue blogging, you may hear others who do not blog tell you their projections of what they would do with that literacy.

So sorry. My blog is simply about my thoughts in the making. It is not about taking over the world or apologising. Least of all pleasing people. I'll write it as long as it makes sense writing it. This is the only diary-like aspect I find in it.

However, if you discover in your blogging experiment that you grow by writing, getting tired of it will be hard. A hiatus may be necessary. Abandoning a learning path for good will feel awful.

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Tuesday, June 19, 2012

Identity: Re-inventing yourself one post at a time

Hiatus over. Sometimes you need to stop the inertia that keeps you going without questioning. What I've been up to and, most importantly, what triggered it is subject for another post. Here I just want to say that coming back from the hiatus is easier when your friends unite in conversation about a topic that interests me a lot: identity.

The virtual meeting is at David Truss' blog post: Blurred Identity Lines. The words that trigger my thinking have to do with something I know David believes, since he had many times expressed so in tweets. Something along the lines that meeting f2f or seeing each other's portrait is not a condition to build these connections. It has not been our case, at least.
I tried to summerize that idea in my comment on his blog.
"David, you’re probably the closest person to my thinking that meeting f2f is something that needn’t happen to make connections. I would like to extend that thought. I think that it would be rather limiting to think that the only meaningful connections to our learning and weaving the fabric of our beings are the ones who we might meet f2f one day. The world is too large to leave so many people and their uniqueness outside."
The expression "the fabric of our beings" is David's. Isn't that plain beautiful? (Warning: I suffer from an instant adoption of that expression). We are weaving a fabric one post at a time. It doesn't matter where, it could well be face to face. The point is that learners like us are into building that fabric, which needs the connections to happen.

An aside to these thoughts. Perhaps a word of warning. I'm not saying meeting f2f is not necessary or not as valuable as it is. I'm saying that online encounters for people who are committed to learning is revealing new aspects of identity building I would not have associated with Internet before. I mean, to the vast majority of f2f people and friends not connected to my profession leaving all or most of our interactions to online spaces or text messages is a sign not to overlook. When meeting f2f or a phone call has a local cost, not doing so is a red flag that tells me we are not that close friends. If I think about my adolescent students, their constant distractions with the mobile phones in class, the overload of importance (and amount of thinking) given to a text message from a significant other can make me shudder. However, this post is about people committed to keep in touch, not merely relying on lazy forms of near synchronous communication. It's about making a large word smaller. It's about drawing materials for the fabric of our identity with a far wider freedom of sources. That's what's new; that's what we have never been able to do before in the days prior to the Internet. I think it's worth exploring what it entails and enables.

Now, I believe David Truss and Alan Levine are attracted to another twist of the same topic: being one, being yourself, no matter where the connection is made. Alan would say (see his comment) he is one Alan everywhere. Of course not all of Alan goes online. Privacy always exist, but he has been able to do away with pre-conceptions that being whoever you are depends on context -offline or online as if it were another place.

For me, "going online" has been somewhat similar to becoming a citizen of another country. Not a new place, but a country -or more precisely a culture- I had been studying for years while becoming a teacher of English. College does not guarantee you'll get some aspects of a culture blended into the fabric of your being. Many teachers of English I know would never "feel" the language in the same way as your mother tongue. But for me, I started having a voice online in English; it was much later that I started blogging in Spanish. I do change the topics I blog about when I shift languages. If you think translating them is easy since I am the writer as well as translator, you might as well delude yourself. Nothing is as difficult as translating words passionately written. A language is not a tool. Translation has limiting effects; there are what we call degrees of translatability and localization of the message to a different culture in an audience. Just as in friendship, are you sharing and being in exaclty the same way with each and everyone of your friends? See? Those are translated versions of yourself at work.

A language change is to your identity development something quite close to choosing connections which are outside your echo chamber. A comfort stretch exercise. Do it or not, it's your own choice and peril. Once you "speak" that new language from your heart, you need interlocutors. Isolation of important aspects of who you are, and what you believe in is death to the development of that richness within you. In a nutshell, don't try to learn a language if you are not going to have significant people around who would interact in it as a preferred means of communication. Same goes for ideas about education: you need context and people to make them flourish, people who share your learning direction, not the findings. Even if you don't do a project together, even if you never meet face to face these people are very important. I can say no one in my staffroom except Gabriela Sellart understood fully what my blog writing implies. I could have never become so clear about what I believe without interlocutors who take me further. That's the value of blogging and connecting to me. The essence is in those shared values and directions, not in meeting face to face.

I know it sounds harsh when I say it so bluntly. Allow me to go back to the word of warning above and extend that idea. Think of this scenario: your daughter has a boyfriend who only texts her, but doesn't see her much. Wouldn't you clearly see something is not committed there? Wouldn't you feel like advising your daughter there is so much more imaginary stuff than a real thing potential in that relationship? Sounds like short lasted, right? You'd probably agree with me that text, chat or other forms of communication are a nice I've-been-thinking-about-you message to support a well founded f2f relationship.

I argue that the opposite happens online for committed learners. Why is that possible? Because in the day-to-day flow of so many bureocratic aspects of teaching, complying with syllabuses and the like, we have lost the disposition to have reflective conversations in the staffroom, which has turned into quick plastic cup coffee places and the odd catharsis about being occassionaly feeling overwhelmed by the profession and parent's or manager's misunderstanding of our job. We make friends out of sharing some circumstances, but not out of shaping together our most valued beliefs. Blogs are not immune to trivia exposing, but let's be realistic: who would spend time writing, transcribing those mundane staffroom conversations or let alone reading them? We are too lazy to create that noise online. Besides, writing is permanent. People may quote you. So when teachers write, we tend to have something to say or we go hiatus.

To build relationships over online spaces as a primary means of communication takes time. I don't know if more or less than physical spaces (I can't bring myself to use the word "real" spaces). I think it might take as much time because it is more relative to how aware you are about what you are after, how much you know yourself and how much meaning you ascribe to isolated words as opposed to words supported by consistency of previous blog posts, transparency about how you got there, etc. Writing about learning as a profession complicates it, because our "business" is change, innovate, then expand and change a bit more. In my case, dedicating so much effort to sharing my self teaching photography and dealing with issues of identity now has made me shift the topics in my writing and it most definitely made me lose contact with teachers who want fun activities or ideas for their lessons. Everything has a price, right?

If you are more "practically minded", I mean, if you set out to write a blog to make connections who might end up collecting partners around a f2f project or collaborate from a distance on a regular basis, then of course, all my talk about thinking and reflecting with online friends sounds too much bohemia to spend your time on. But with that criteria, why ask your students to read a short story by an author who is dead and will never interact with your students via Skype when there are so many authors alive? I wouldn't miss reading Shakespeare because I need a translation of bits of his language, understand his composition and poetic rules and know some historical facts to fully appreciate what I am reading. How could I say diversity is important in front of a student if I am not willing to go the distance to Shakespeare's context? How can we say our blogs are global just because they are online?

Speed of connections as well as instant publications make you think you can get wherever you need and learn instantly all the time or make a thousand friendships with so many followers on Twitter. Mind you, important learning, great ideas and good relationships still take a lot of time. Internet hasn't changed things much there.

I'll remind myself to do the hiatus again sometime. It's a sanity check of my ideas, of myself. I once was told I should care about my online "reputation" and post more often. For those who blog on as if they ran a business or promote it, as if they sold themselves to be called to presentations and build a reputation, it will be hard to grasp what I am trying to say about forging and identity, a presence and from there, build your relationships to end up with a nice fabric of ideas you can rely on. I don't expect to do this with thousands of people. A number that would seat around a good Argentinean coffee table will suffice for me.

Lectura
Photo by me, at a café in Monserrat neighbourhood http://www.flickr.com/photos/yet-one-more-pic/5351561825/

If you get the habit of speaking, shaping your thoughts and revealing the process online as a natural thing to do (i.e you blog), then, only then, I think something magical happens. There is a you that exists (or was born) online and that not all of the people in your face to face world know about. More dramatically put, they wouldn't care to know about. In a previous post on identity I framed the question in a way my friends Alan and David have considered significant.
"Let me ask you once again: Who are you when you write online? Think of it conversely. The offline-only people in your lives who have never ever cared to read what you passionately write about, who do they actually know?"
Don't get me wrong. Don't rule out the f2f people who would not read your blog! Go inwards and ask yourself where you choose to reveal what and how to imbue each space you live in with the nature you've acquired in the other.

There you have some learning exercise to spend a lifetime to master.

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Thursday, October 20, 2011

Why I Write

I cannot resist the temptation to write about this. It's the national writing day in another country, but when online, those boundaries are blur. I'll join the celebration. Here are my thoughts on why I write.

I write to be and become a self that is nowhere else found.

When my mind thinks in 'writing mode', I become a more organized and hopeful self.

I write to make sense. I write because if I don't, bits and pieces of varied, so far unconnected dots, come to overwhelm me and intrude with every new idea. They have been waiting in line and look forward to coming into the light, shining and giving me a sense of peace and balance.

I write because it's a read write web. The gems I find in my RSS create an anxiety or positive stress that urges me to write or let it die unsaid.

I write in the here and now. I write in a way that cannot be left for later. Just like a landscape will yield a different mood and tone if photographed at different hours of the day, when I blog, I need to be an impressionist.

As much as I write to reach out and connect to others with my links, I also write to shut out all the other voices and be in contact with me. No music in my room, no peeping into the Twitter stream. In my silence I write in the hope of being genuine.

I write for my own selfish reasons. If they touch your own, if they erode a sinew of yours, then go on and leave a comment, o RT or write in your own blog about it (I'd much rather you did that). Otherwise, move on: it's all right.

I write because, whether it ends up online or not, I cannot not write. (Believe me I keep as many drafts as you do, or more).

I write to know where my mind is at and also, most importantly, where it is going. I write to know where my mind is before (before is the operative word) I read someone I admire, because, sadly, that could corrupt my own thoughts. It's a shame not to think for yourself. It's a shame to read somebody jotted down what you merely -lazily- thought about or hinted at. It's OK to find that somebody can articulate it better. I'd much rather comment "well said" than "I agree".

I write because if I left this post for later, you may never see the like of it again. I write and publish to make sure that words will not be marred by my over thinking and prevent me from being faithful to my draft conversation style with you, dear readers, as I do now and today.





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Sunday, September 18, 2011

Writing Phantoms

"It is impossible to say just what I mean!
But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen..."


Expressing yourself. Online. Making connections. Learning all along. That's the common denominator of what we are doing here.

But there are differences. Huge.

Daily Homework

What I enjoy about writing my thoughts online is that these posts give closure to a string of ideas and free me to turn onto things I had not considered before. Sometimes they are like a soup -cooking slowly and mingling what were merely ingredients, spin off ideas read in blog posts. This post has a network of ingredients.

My last post on identity made me realise that I write with a premise -or an illusion- of being understood. Actually it was Graham Wegner's comment that painted it quite clearly to me:

"Claudia, I'm never quite that confident that I have understood your intent in your blog posts, but I am confident enough to know that any written content is open to interpretation from the reader's perspective. Even text that is interpreted differently from the author's intent is valuable and pushes the reader to consider things from a new angle. And if they present those conclusions or ideas back to the original writer, it can open up new insight that wasn't originally considered. If all your readers understand perfectly what you are trying to say, then they may have nothing useful to add to the conversation!"

Interpretation is open source by nature. While my illusion of being understood probably springs from a genuine need, in a networked world, being misunderstood matters most.

Graham says more,

"Maybe in the online connected environment, we can bypass what is considered essential personal detail trading in the face-to-face world, and get down to the emptying of one's still embryonic concepts out to an unknown but open minded audience."

Hopefully someone will 'misunderstand' and leave thoughtful comments like these! And yet, we still long for those details. The unimportant things that make us human.

While slowly mentally drafting this post, making sense of my own need to be understood, David Truss alerted me of Amalia's post, Voice Found. Now What?.

There you have a voice struggling beyond whatever may be a stumbling block for me; for when I write, I completely trust a connection will be made. I simply don't see how it cannot. Unless I change my style to how-to manual writing mode. There's you out there. I know that for sure.

Amalia says,

"So, instead of saying that I’ve found my voice, the bigger truth is that I trust my voice. I know when I’m going wrong. My bones tell me. And if I can stay true to that, then I’ve done something. The problem now is choosing what to say. There are so many things I’m passionate about..."

Her need is different from mine,

"This blog is forcing me to choose. Well, let me put it this way. For the sake of a sense of community around my blog, I want to focus a bit more. Even if it’s only me and two other people, I want us to chew on some common topic together. (...) Show me what You want me to do with this voice. I want to be useful, I want to harmonize, I want to connect."

The post left me wondering and with a strange sense of sadness. I think it's important to find a voice, but it's not enough. Now I see it differently. I'm afraid I disagree with Amalia. The problem is not choosing what to say. The problem is trusting yourself enough to stand at the edge of the writing cliff and make a bungee-jumping leap of faith. Trust your voice to be neither right nor wrong. Connections? That's the easy part: they are the inevitable consequence of sharing your-self.

I am reminded of a lecture by Virginia Woolf: Professions for Women. Fifteen years ago, I would read that lecture voraciously.

Flashback. I remember a bicycle going by in front of Cambridge University on a cold January, sunset, organs playing -one clear, another one fading-, the walls looking like sepia-toned photographs. Me, walking and holding a copy of A Room of One's Own next to my heart. I was planning to buy a flat of my own in Buenos Aires, to be free of paying a rent forever. Maybe write. The Internet was not a dream yet.

I hear Virginia again. (Are you still reading me, Amanda?).

"While I was writing this review, I discovered that if I were going to review books I should need to do battle with a certain phantom. And the phantom was a woman, and when I came to know her better I called her after the heroine of a famous poem, The Angel in the House. It was she who used to come between me and my paper when I was writing reviews. It was she who bothered me and wasted my time and so tormented me that at last I killed her. You who come of a younger and happier generation may not have heard of her--you may not know what I mean by the Angel in the House. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily (...)

I turned upon her and caught her by the throat. I did my best to kill her. My excuse, if I were to be had up in a court of law, would be that I acted in self-defence. Had I not killed her she would have killed me. She would have plucked the heart out of my writing. For, as I found, directly I put pen to paper, you cannot review even a novel without having a mind of your own, without expressing what you think to be the truth about human relations, morality, sex."(...)

Thus, whenever I felt the shadow of her wing or the radiance of her halo upon my page, I took up the inkpot and flung it at her. She died hard. Her fictitious nature was of great assistance to her. It is far harder to kill a phantom than a reality. She was always creeping back when I thought I had despatched her. Though I flatter myself that I killed her in the end, the struggle was severe; it took much time that had better have been spent upon learning Greek grammar; or in roaming the world in search of adventures. But it was a real experience; it was an experience that was bound to befall all women writers at that time."

At that time? The lecture was written in 1931. The phantom was the impediment to say exactly what you think while being a woman in a man-writer's world. I could harry to say that the 21st century is different, that there are no such gender differences; however, I think we do have phantoms lurking.

I still see it is more likely for women to take care of the home than become prolific bloggers. I still find men more straightforward and less puzzled by dichotomies of online vs offline identity. Less concerned with having to open different blogs because they found new topics of conversation, which may cause worries about losing audience or clicks. I may well be over-generalizing, but men are more likely to be beyond all that. They would probably not write a post like this one. Or take as long as I take to write it!

I had a Skype call with my friend Alan Levine recently. A first synchronous talk after years of connecting online. I remember Alan told me about how he writes. He needs to get it said and published. He is fluent about blogging. I don't imagine too many drafts sleeping in his blog editor.

Alan left this comment on my previous post,

"We talk about 'going' online like it is a place, we never talk about other media like that. And given the way mobile connectivity enabled the communication, I hardly see my online and not online modes as being so cleanly split.

I exist as one Alan: there are things I don't put online but I do not see a neat division."

Perfect.

We are all sharing, connecting, learning. There are interesting differences, though. Amanda is struggling with the phantom of connecting; I am struggling with one of elusive expression. Meanwhile, Alan is being himself.

You need to find your voice and your purpose. And then, not to be tongue-trapped by anything. There's some learning job, if you are patient. After that, there is the most difficult of all. To react genuinely to every single blog post that stirs your mind, to every agreement or deep disagreement with the closest people in your network. For that, you'll probably have to learn to kill a few phantoms. Even when you think you have mastered that exercise, it would not be surprising to find yourself again back to square one in the network game.

Note to Self
Remember the basics: never ever assume you're that connected, well- expressed or understood.

Now make that as big or small as you want.

Carry on.





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Thursday, September 01, 2011

Some thoughts on identity -particularly mine


I have never written posts like this or this. Come to think of it, I wonder what people think of me when they probably have little data about my offline life and self. It sometimes feels unbalanced that I know so much about them.

Who are we when we are online?

Maybe a better question could be,

What is it about you that surfaces in an online environment and would not come up anywhere else?

Things change depending on how you frame the question, don't you think? The first question seems to call for a battle of opposites between virtual and real. The second question could well ignore superficial dualities and deal with more important things, in my opinion.

I think it is not possible to hide who you are after having written for, say, four years online. If you pretend, I think you may fool a beginner, someone who goes for convenient quotables in your posts instead of consistency. Because reading, after all, is a choice between what you would like it to mean and what it actually means, seasoned with lots of tolerance for what you cannot tell clearly yet.

I think I need uncle Whitman to help me express what I mean,

"All truths wait in all things,
They neither hasten their own delivery nor resist it,
They do not need the obstetric forceps of the surgeon,
The insignificant is as big to me as any,
(What is less or more than a touch)..."#1

Things are there, if you want to read them. That simple.

Those who have been reading my tweets or listened to my mini-podcasts know that I love poetry and poetic prose fragments. You may find the most varied kind of poems there in English and in Spanish, but I know that there is an underlying theme in my choices. My search, my drive in finding them is an exploration of how different voices have managed the struggle of making sense of the world, while living in touch with the mysterious interstices between fantasy and reality.

So, for instance, for Borges, reality and dreams are really hard to tell from each other. His point of view is that of Leo Di Caprio's in Inception. (By the way, I learnt that the film director read a lot from Borges before writing the script).

Cortázar, far from the academic and classical allusions so typical in Borges, made his point speaking of objects that surround us everyday. Listen to him,

"Now I write birds.
I do not see them come, I do not choose them.
They are suddenly there, they are this.
A swarm of words
perching
one
by
one
in the barbed wire of the page,
screeching, pecking, rain of wings
and me, without any bread left to give them, just
letting them come. Maybe
that's a tree
or perhaps
love." #2

Cortázar is an ordinary man with an extraordinary predisposition to weave poetry with whatever signals he comes across. He is a feeler, a noticer, a dailyshooter.

When asked about where he drew the line between reality and 'the fantastic', as the genre he wrote in is called, he said:
"I don't. The fantastic is my reality."#3

Try it.

Juan José Saer, who would have probably argued with Borges, solved the reality versus fictional aspect of literature quite simply:
"By its mere existence, every story is real". #4

On a TV interview #5, Saer was asked to talk about the power of books, their relationship to life; he interrupted the interviewer and said:
"Books ARE life."

Those words go deep in the vinyl of my brain.

We are, we live, we can understand based on the many stories that were read to us, and the countless stories we have told ourselves of who we are.

Think of this.

When you write, and you try to be transparent about how each fledgeling thought of yours is tied to the words that another blogger has said, and you become aware of the hyperlinks between their experiences and your own life story, isn't that as real as it gets?

Right. No. How about close-up enough then?

How can I hide who I am in my choice of subjects for a photo, in my foreign tone of voice when I read a poem, in the rhythm of my sentences or the list of subjects that never ever get an account of in my blog? Something real and undeniable underpins the chaos of it all.

But.

You do not have my portrait. You hardly have a clue of how old I am. You cannot read my very own poems sleeping in a cardboard box on the bottom shelf. Most importantly, you do not know who I'd be ready to kill or die for.

I have long ago decided all that is my privacy.

And yet, I like to think that if you, keen reader of my online footprints, met me face to face, you would confirm you already know me. You would, perhaps, just add more accurate sources to this long quote of myself, which is my blog.

Let me ask you once again:
Who are you when you write online?

Think of it conversely. The offline-only people in your lives who have never ever cared to read what you passionately write about, who do they actually know?

I feel I could carry on writing like this, but this post is long enough and I need some sleep.


Notes:
#1 Whitman in Songs of Myself.

#2 Cortazar's fragment is from the poem "Cinco últimos poemas para Cris". The translation is mine.

I
Ahora escribo pájaros.
No los veo venir, no los elijo,
de golpe están ahí, son esto,
una bandada de palabras
posándose
una
a
una
en los alambres de la página,
chirriando, picoteando, lluvia de alas
y yo sin pan que darles, solamente
dejándolos venir. Tal vez
sea eso un árbol
o tal vez
el amor.

#3 My best recall of what Cortázar says in this long interview.
#4 Juan José Saer in his novel, La pesquisa (The Inquiry). I read a taste of it here.
#5 How I wish that existed somewhere online! It was in Channel 7 in early 2001.




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Sunday, May 09, 2010

An Aside

Day: Friday evening, May 7th 2010.
Place: Colegio Las Cumbres, downtown Buenos Aires, Argentina.
Scene: Stephen Downes had just finished his informal talk with teachers. Everyone is walking about the room.

I just wanted to say thank you when a small talk started. The fueling ideas after attending the morning presentation, the engagement of the teachers debating how far to guide students was all there. Stephen said something about noticing the enthusiasm among us. He added it would be even more interesting if people disagreed with him at times.

I deliberately took that as an invitation to voice disagreement. I found myself unable to do so, though. My own mind was a bit clouded with so much f2f blog talk. I tried to explain to Stephen why I could not disagree yet. This is my best recall of what I said mixed with what I meant.

When I hear an idea explained concisely, articulately organized and backed up by effective domestic examples, I find it hard to disagree immediately. I simply know that I will have questions. Eventually, at a later moment of the day, or perhaps some other day, I will find the points where inconsistencies with my own thoughts will provoke a need to challenge both his message and my previous way of thinking. I cannot help needing more time for disagreement to happen.

There were underlying assumptions to why I felt a need to explain this to Stephen. I believe that Stephen is an expert blogger who does not share these thinking or writing time limitations. He has learned a kind of fluency of expression regardless of the writing conditions. He can protect his mind from a hectic airport and decide to write like this. I admire that capacity. Yet, that kind of admiration is something I will need to question. Particularly if I find myself using it as an excuse to limit my own writing capabilities.

I said to Stephen that today I listen to him and give him the benefit of the doubt. For now, I am just taking my mind on a ride towards the message. Then, I'll take a few steps back to think further. I will try to post reflections or questions here in my blog. Sometimes, I need to write my mind out before meeting the lecturer. I find it is a blogger's advantage to do so. To write the here and now of my thoughts saves them from being taken ashtray or buried forever by a new glittering idea. I think I write to save my personal fledgeling thoughts. What I do not write today, I will never write again. Ever.

By then, a few teachers had gathered to listen to this. Stephen looked at them and concluded: "This is what we do when we blog".

Since last Friday, the personal pronoun 'we' has taken on a new meaning.


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Friday, September 11, 2009

RSS Reading Habit

This seems to be my current RSS reading habit:

1.Sift for posts
2.Star them
3.Mark the rest as read
4.Focus on the stars

Now each step of the way probably involves more complex processes that I am able to spot or describe. I find that these steps may apply whether you tend to subscribe selectively or just one interesting post compels you to subscribe to many new bloggers for a while. I like to think that even if you subscribe to 100 feeds, it would be important to develop reading habits as if they were 1000. Scalable tools probably require scalable skills to keep up.

Now in more detail, this is how I intuitively think or explain what is going on when I am reading.

1. Sifting
It's a kind of treasure hunt. At times I want to be informed. More often than not, I want to be inspired or challenged by the ideas. Definitely sifting through posts is a skill that ranks top for me. Much more than any tool playing/tweaking ability. Why? Because I think it is the antidote to being overwhelmed by the task.

What does sifting entail? These words from Howard Rheingold explaining mindful infotention resonate with me here:
Knowing what to pay attention to is a cognitive skill that steers and focuses the technical knowledge of how to find information worth your attention. More and more, knowing where to direct your attention involves a third element, together with your own attentional discipline and use of online power tools - other people. Increasingly, most of the recommendations that make it possible to find fresh and useful signals amid the overwhelming noise of the Internet are social media - online networks that make possible social exchange and relationship. Tuning and feeding our personal learning networks is where the internal and the technological meet the social.
2. Starring
The advantage of starring is its quickness (one click, no reloading page to get it done). This quickness matches the sifting speed you get after using RSS for a while. It's a smooth decision-action cycle. Google Reader now allows you a range of instant posting features, but at this stage, classifying or deciding who and where to share it with needs a time that doesn't match the priorities involved at the sifting phase. I prefer not to shift focus and keep on spotting my selected readings for my own selfish reasons.

However, sharing within Google Reader or Twitter generally happens at this stage. Yet I think sometimes I do not stop to consider the consequences of sharing it. I may simply grab the tool at hand to satisfy my impulse to share the reading happiness; but well, you know that I do not think passion does it all. Sometimes it is wiser to stop and decide where, when and what for to share. Another drawback for me is that after microblogging it I might not blog it in more detail later. Sadly because it's a read/write web after all.

3. Mark All as Read
This is a crucial step. The prerequisite of hitting the button is keeping your inner voices quiet. Mine tend to say things like: "Maybe I missed something important". Some anxiety management might help. Drop a read-now-or-never attitude. Reading past posts is not like reading yesterday newspaper. You'll learn in your time and mode, your learning receptive time. Besides, you are not alone reading. You are doing this in a networked way. If it is important, someone will tweet it or RT it, bookmark it with a tag you have subscribed to and content will come back to you. So the antidote is being networked and staying tuned.

Reading it all or feeding yourself less to avoid choking is not a valid alternative for me. That is the old way. The new way is perfecting steps 1 and 2. We have all at some point posted our dissatisfaction about the unread feeds on Twitter. What to do? Stop needing to catch up so much. Expect cross postings and repeated information. Accept not to have the satisfaction of the task completely done. This also involves giving up illusions of knowledge waiting somewhere for you to discover and seize. Who cares what you haven't read? The blogosphere is less for that post you haven't written.

So far for what and how I read. Now it's the turn to explain when and where I could read.

Steps 1, 2 and 3 could well be done in any place -bus ride, airport waiting time or the quiet of your home. I feel it is possible to go through them in a multitasking mode full of interruptions. Periods of short attention span are enough.

4. Focusing on the stars
Beware the stars. I've discovered that to read certain bloggers I need time enough to draft something quickly before their thinking puzzles or thrills me beyond articulation. Sometimes it is good to jot down notes before finishing reading the post. Even if you are not going to publish that yet or ever. Writing to me is a way of keeping track of the way I think, not just the resulting ideas.

When your aim is reflection, the reading skills involved entail the time they require, not necessarily the time you have. The context of the blogger I am reading is generally completely different from my own. Personally I choose to find a quiet hour. (Lucky me when I do.) A hour far from the quick sifting moments that leave me as if I have been running a race. I need a shift of pace. Another mind wave to go into enjoyable learning mode. A quiet moment with perspective. Simply stop. Allow myself to be inspired at the site of a blank post in the editor. For that, I may close my eyes to recreate the feeling of being in my home family garden. I might even succeed seeing this picture of a tweet by @bgblogging (11:49 AM Sep 4th). Try it yourself.
From words to images and words again. Write. Post.


Paying attention, having time, overwhelming effect management are intertwined concepts. You need all three functioning fluently to profit from online learning experiences. You also need powerful tools. As the tools evolve facilitating the tweaking that pipes content to you, my four steps today will be a thing of the past soon. Understanding how we pay attention and manage overload will always be the poser.

This is a related post about how I read in 2007. Let's see how I am reading in a years' time.





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Thursday, March 26, 2009

Writing in the 21st Century

As it would happen, I got a tweet incidental alert on March 19th that Will Richardson was live streaming a presentation from his Australia tour.

These are notes I took on paper and transcribe here now. Why paper? Because video consumes most of my bandwidth and you know, he who listens well takes notes, or takes part in the chat room, or a bit of both.

Then re-shares.

Just raw notes through my filter. Perhaps nothing new. However, Will has a way of presenting that engages us to rethink what we take for granted. So here it goes.

-----------------------------------------------------------------
What does change look like?

-Have some people in your network who disagree with you.

Downes. Diversity in the composition of your network.
See slide #26 on this PLE presentation.

Connected writing
We write not simply to communicate, but to connect. Writing is a means, a node that needs to start a conversation. It is a draft. There is no real final copy. What happens after publishing is the more important. We are seeking to engage in conversation -purpose of publishing.

Writing not for a contrived (had to look it up) purpose, but for a real audience.

Writing
starts with: SHARE
moves to: COLLABORATION
goes on to: COLLECTIVE ACTION i.e. doing things together to change the world.

Writing for a real audience, how can we make it?

NCTE- National Council of Teachers of English is trying to redefine literacy.
Writing in the 21st Century (links to pdf)

Literacy
build relationships
pose and solve problems collaboratively and cross-culturally.

Classrooms
Thinly walled.
Literacy is about going outside the classroom.

What's the assignment?
Number of words or self-sponsored writing.

Sir Ken Robinson
on TED
The Element
Personalization of 21st Century learning

Self-directed writing: own passion.

Q for students:
What do you want to learn most about in this world? What would you write about? Not because they want to get a grade.
What do you want to tell the world about your topic?
Become a reporter, an expert

This cannot be taught in a sequence.

Visuals in writing.

You are a literacy teacher.
Writing is ubiquitous; not just for a particular purpose.
Writing starts with reading: RSS

RSS
Refine your reading.
Learn how to sift through 50 things to get 10.
George Siemens: recognize patterns of information, synthesize. That is when blogging comes in.
Links are the keys to network. Writing without links is not writing to connect.

Links add value to the post and context. Reader chooses to click on some of them. Are you teaching how to read in a hyperlinked environment? Different from reading a book or essay because it is not a linear experience.

There is a process, a reading skill to reading links.
Short attention span theory.

Trackbacks. Comments on other people's blogs. A distributed conversation.
So publishing is not the end. It's the beginning. We wait. No comment? Go to the blogs and say hey! Here's my post reaction.

Who cares on what I have to say?
Find communities.

Be clickable and googleable

Once you publish, don't take it down on second thoughts.
There is private blogging in Blogger, but there is no private RSS. (which reminds me of my post)
Better update. I trust you more if you are transparent.

Chat in Diigo
Critical thinking and analysis
You can RSS Diigo annotations
You cannot do that on paper

How to
Do it first for yourself, then for the students. Help them create theirs.

Digital footprint or portfolio

Some tools mentioned:
Online notebooks
Google Notebook -stopped developing.
Zotero -citation saved
Zoho

Cloud computing- everything done online
Livescribe pen
Rethink writing: transparent, connectable, googleable.
Writing is happening in audio as well.

Screencasting software. Jingproject.com



--------------------------------------------------

Side note on RSS management.
I understand Will advises to keep a well trimmed RSS. Reason being to favour focus and attention span. So if you have sift 50 items to get only 1 of value, you should take the feed out of your RSS, for example.

Question for Will Richardson
How does that RSS policy balance with the idea of a distributed network mentioned by Stephen Downes?
The network speaks to you via trackbacks and links, I guess. But if you are new to the network, how do you build a PLE without reaching out and tolerating a bit of noise in your RSS?

What I am doing with my RSS now.
RSS because I am interested in the content or the person. Then create a folder of the readings that matter to me now. Deal with that first. Ignore the unread count.
The Friends shared items in Google reader are also a source to reach out to other important readings within my area of interest, but I understand it is still an inner-circle.

OK. Post.
And now to reflect and design ways in which all of this can apply to writing in my EFL classroom.

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Tuesday, August 07, 2007

The EFL Course Wiki as a Writers Community

The EFL Course Wiki as a Writers Community

A Paperless Classroom
When students just hand in papers to teachers they simply lose touch with the writer's reality: you belong to a community of writers, bloggers, learners. Focus on certification exams used to make my students a bit of islands to themselves. My students this year are intrigued about the people who were in my class last year. They know their writings, which appear in the FCE blog. They use those writings as study materials or examples to build upon. They comment on them, reflect on their skills to solve writing problems, filter and write differently -paving the road with corpora for future students.

Writing, reviewing, reflecting
I am not fully exploiting the possibilities of a wiki yet, such as collaboration with other classrooms. I am taking time to learn and see how students receive the innovation, the adoption and resistance game. However, I have never had a class so willing to review and re-write a piece without my request. Students come back to an assignment even weeks after finishing it. They are experiencing what writing is really about. Nor have I heard students voicing in class so much reflection on the process. The wiki history is revealing of the revision steps; but not the feelings around those alterations. The moments when words just do not come, the haunting idea that it all sounds too simple or foreign. Students learn a lot by voicing and sharing these doubts as well as the documented results on the wiki page.

Network collaboration
As a teacher, I am also going through an analogous learning path. I read educational blogs daily, comment and jot down ideas to publish in this professional development blog. Twitter -a microblogging tool- has allowed a closer contact and much more interconnectedness with nodes in my network. It is a place where trivia appears interleaved with questions or simply thinking aloud while you plan lessons or do your job.

A matter of collocations
This afternoon I read a question from Gardner Campbell, a professor of English in Virginia, United States. He needed a verb to collocate with a specific noun. A daily question for those who teach or translate from English. Collocations are the toughest points to learn at an advanced level. Dictionaries guide, but they do not always close the debate. We tend to have long conversations about how to learn them in class.

Gardner records in his blog how my answer triggered off thoughts and another quest for learning. To my surprise, Gardner's curiosity took him right to corpus linguistics and to the notion of collocation. His reflections on the teaching and learning implications could not have come closer to the idea underpinning my class wiki project.

Shared, published and shared again
To make things even more interesting, roughly at the same time Gardner was writing his post, I was in class answering a question: What does the university do with all the exams they collect from students every year? (about 200,000 from all round the world). They do not come back to students. They belong to the university. They are certainly the basis for corpora creation, future modifications of the exam and course books as well as dictionaries for them. But they are private and we cannot have access.

Then I explained why our class wiki is called Corpus and why we are sharing with the world our samples of "English as a foreign language". Back home in the evening, I find that Gardner's post is a good synthesis that my students could understand. I automatically decided to write this 'answer' post.

Gardner shared a thought on the concept of collocation: “what a great way to start a conversation about language with native speakers.” That reminded me of my students when they say 'I heard this or that in a film'. It would be most helpful to have some podcast from native speakers discussing why a combination of words sounds funny or right and start a discussion in class. It had not occurred to me a native speaker would consider it so interesting. This exchange with my network has helped me to see alternatives to plan how to connect dialogues with native speakers and the curricular needs of my course. Minimal exchange, yet so significant.

Technology enabled learning
Learning is quite unexpected. It is an experience not always subject to schedule. Different tools combined can make the here and now a classroom. A collaborative attitude in front of the screen, a will to share and let other people's thoughts be the vehicle for learning are base requirements. Lifelong learning has to do with paying attention to those teachable moments that pull our minds instead of relying only on artificially recreated -'walled'- learning.

Gardner says,

Education should prepare us to notice and enjoy longer and longer trains of thought. That’s another way of talking about connections, yes, but in this case the connections came unexpectedly, within a personal exchange, and using a medium (Twitter) that seems amorphous and aimless, at least at first. And the catalyst was a moment of shared inquiry that spread far beyond the walls of this “classroom.” Not a bad model for education. We need more in-the-moment connectedness as well as more opportunities for shared reflection out of the moment. For me, teaching and learning technologies give us the richest set of possibilities, for both. That was certainly part of the dream of the early pioneers in this field.

The learning place is the ever shifting node in our network. From there, you build knowledge and create content to share. The tools are simply the media to facilitate everlasting venues for conversation. The classroom is a place where teachers can make students come closer to a connected world experience. A place where lifelong learning is modeled by teachers who can enter the classroom energised by a recent exchange with their own community of practice and not just share lessons learnt in their college days.

Conclusions
I think it is very important for future students to get in touch with the online artifacts created by the previous class. These previous steps not only give them an idea of what is expected at a given learning stage, but also makes them see themselves as part of a community of writers where they belong. No writer in real life is born out of nothing. You need to read others to find your own voice. Then you go out again and try to meet other voices to learn collaboration in a flat world.

It is hard to envision those changes in a classroom if teachers do not assign time to their own self-guided learning journeys. Time to read, comment and publish their reflections in blogs. Time to be online and available for a serendipitous exchange. Students can grasp better this kind of education when teachers are having similar learning experiences in their own professional development efforts.

Tools per se do not distill learning. It is technology coupled with inquiry-driven minds; curious, connected passionate people, able to make anytime, anywhere an optimal learning environment.

So much to learn yet. I feel I am just standing at the threshold of the idea of a 'wikified' class.

(Edited on 2 September 2007)

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Saturday, March 03, 2007

Writing Tools

Reflections on Some Technical Aspects of my Blog Writing Process

Suddenly my writings come to a halt. It becomes quite difficult to produce a written piece as naturally as I keep up with the RSS information overload and my mind processing it.
I have solved the issue of information access. Not the RSS reading management yet. (I mean this). However, I can handle it. I can read, process, react, reflect. All smooth. But then, there comes the choice of tool I need to process my writing with . Not just process in a polished form to upload to blogger, but a tool that can match the way I work, the way ideas to write come to my mind and take shape. That is when all the seamless integration of read-reflect-write and post is lost for me.

Writing processor options
In my search for the ideal tool to draft my posts, I have tried all of these:

1-Microsoft word
2-Blogger edit mode
3-Google docs
4-Flock browser

Last but not least...
5- And now I am drafting this post in Google Notebook. I think that if this not ideal, at least it serves the overall purpose. Far from perfect, though. I wish I could do more!

My new writing needs
Let's say that I used to write college papers and activities with rubrics for my students. All instances of a somewhat formal writing or, at least, structured formats. No one word sentences, no dangling participles, etc. Word for Windows had always been my tool.

Now I'm blogging and a new writing experience has emerged. I am neither as formal as in my university papers nor as informal as when I email friends in English. This is a blend where I choose everytime which side of the scale will be heavier depending on content, purpose and originally intended reader or audience.

Blogging is a tool to unearth deep thoughts. When I read and my mind gets ticking, I'd better write it out or risk the loss of an idea. Capturing the moment when something made me reflect and not just the reflection is probably the blood that will inspire others to read and get blogging/conversing on. So I would like to write in an impressionistic way -so to speak- capturing that unique light that changes the wheat fields into a one-time view only.

I think that way of writing makes sense in a blog format with day and time as frames for your thoughts.

Needless to say, I write this for pleasure and I expect to enjoy the process. Different writing tools may contribute to or simply ruin my pleasure.

Let me analyse each of my available options in the light of my new needs:
1. Microsoft word.
Advantages:
-Lot's you can do there. You can post directly to blogger (with the help of an add-on).
Disadvantages:
-Too much you can do there.
I do not need the full functionality of the system. Most importantly, it is an indoors document that I cannot access automatically from any browser, anywhere. I must remember -and have time- to put it my pendrive. I change working places during the day, so access is paramount to me.
-It is an application outside your browser. Slows down the machine (depending on what's open in your browser. In mine, usually no less than five tabs). Too many clicks to go from something I am reading to a page to write. Back to consult, back to the page. Frozen windows. Aghrrr.

2. Blogger edit mode
Pros: Whatever you do is already there where you will finally need it.
Cons: By the time I sign in, click on the desired blog (I have more than one -mind you) and create a new post, the original thought I had has made two thousand twists in my head and I get this uncomfortable feeling what I am actually writing is a shadow of a post I meant. Sort of second best.
Blogger edit mode is definetely the last step for me.

3- Google docs
These are great. Not for my posts, though. They do not have the full functionality of the Office Suite, but who needs all that all the time. They allow for quick copy as a pdf or html, share, print, email, publish as webpage, post to blog.
Main advantage are
-anywhere access
-you do not need to leave your browser to work.
Still I find them slow. If only I could write inside the page I am seeing and reflecting upon! I think this need arises as a consequence of using wikis.

4- Flock browser
Flock could be the solution for quick posts that you do not need to save and review later. My reality is that I start working on something one day, then I want to read a bit more on the subject. Next, get pieces of notes together in a post. And I use Firefox. So, nope.

5- Google Notebook
And the winner is Google Notebook. Because it is possible to access anywhere to all your stored notes. There is an add-on for your Firefox that allows you to open a tiny window to work on. Easy to browse your various notes. It automatically creates a link to the page you are on.

And it is just that: notes. Then you drag and drop in the order you would present them and finish them up in blogger edit mode. Press publish. You're done! We'll see if it works for my diverse blogging purposes and composition.

Yes, I am not generally writing fully extended pieces, but notes. There are those times when I have read a lot and the lines flow towards a fully fledged post. Yet, for a more informal approach to learning, getting informed and writing about it all, therefore blog, it is best to find a tool that matches the purpose of what you are doing. The purpose and the nature. A highly structured writing environment will not produced spontaneous, thought provoking lines.

Hmmm

And I suppose the same applies when we choose among a spectrum of ICT options for our students -to be accessible in and outside the class. But that's subject for another post.


Follow-up on this:
Del.icio.us search: writing+tool

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