SocialLearning

Social learning

defeated by the pandemic

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Following up from yesterday’s post — fix the networks — this presentation at XOXO Festival 2024, by Ed Yong tells the story about how the pandemic defeated him. Yong wrote many articles focused on making sense of the pandemic for The Atlantic from 2020. In 2021 Yong won the Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting. His first premise is that succeeding or failing to deal with a pandemic is a choice.

For me, just the fact that Yong wears a N95 respirator mask while presenting, makes this worth watching. It’s real leadership by example. With no previous journalistic experience, Yong set some rules for himself, especially after winning the Pulitzer. These are good rules for any writer.

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fix the networks

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Erin Kissane, in a presentation at XOXO Festival 2024, discusses how Twitter was instrumental in crowd-sourcing a wide variety of experts to understand what was happening early in the Covid pandemic. Twitter enabled many ‘rando’, or loose social connections which resulted in the Covid Tracking Project that was ahead of the CDC and other official sources of public health information. But as Kissane states, “It’s a mark of institutional failure to leave your public health crisis data in the hands of amateurs and volunteers.” That has been the ongoing state of affairs in most Western countries, Canada included.

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remembering nothing and failing

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In an article on the impact of AI on computer science education, the general conclusion is that all jobs will have a generative AI component and it will be necessary in most jobs to understand computer science. The piece opens with an experiment conducted by a professor with one of his computer science classes.

One group was allowed to use ChatGPT to solve the problem, the second group was told to use Meta’s Code Llama large language model (LLM), and the third group could only use Google. The group that used ChatGPT, predictably, solved the problem quickest, while it took the second group longer to solve it. It took the group using Google even longer, because they had to break the task down into components.

Then, the students were tested on how they solved the problem from memory, and the tables turned. The ChatGPT group “remembered nothing, and they all failed,” recalled Klopfer, a professor and director of the MIT Scheller Teacher Education Program and The Education Arcade.

Meanwhile, half of the Code Llama group passed the test. The group that used Google? Every student passed.

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keeping in front of change

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When the SARS-2 pandemic hit the global community, many organizations were able to quickly pivot to remote work, among other adaptations. This will likely not be the last pandemic and other crises will emerge that will require more adaptations to how work gets done. The AI tidal wave may even increase the pace of change. In these environments, learning and innovation have to be woven into the fabric of daily work.

“In a crisis, you should always deploy an innovation team alongside the business recovery teams … to capture the novel practices … put naive observers in alongside the incident team to capture the key learning points.” —Dave Snowden, Complexity Expert

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“it was 20 years ago today”

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Today marks the 20th anniversary of Jarche Consulting. There were several times when I thought that I would not make it this far. The roller coaster ride continues, having weathered the great recession and a pandemic. Who knows what the future will bring? For now, I am grateful to my friends, colleagues, and especially my repeat clients who continue to have confidence in my work. It has been a great pleasure.

Writing on this blog, after +19 years, continues to be a primary way that I make sense and connect with people around the globe. Here are some thoughts I shared along the way as I marked other anniversaries.

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“a pandemic of thoughtlessness”

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Christopher Lydon, host of Radio OpenSource, interviews two humanists on failing intelligence.

“Robert Pogue Harrison is our Dante scholar at Stanford, our professional humanist, and a West Coast friend in smart podcasting. We asked ChatGPT about his voice, and we got the instant answer that his voice “has a certain mellowness and introspection” that go with his ‘keen ear for language and a precise, articulate way of expressing his ideas’. He’s joined by Ana Ilievska, initials A.I. She is Robert’s colleague from Europe in humanistic studies at Stanford. Recently, in the podcast Entitled Opinions, they both defended AI as a wake-up call, maybe in the nick of time, to rescue humanity, human stewardship, human culture from its corrupted condition. They both said they expect their students to use AI and to learn from it.” —2023-05-04

Highlights

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diversity > learning > trust

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“What is dumbing so many people down?” asks Henry Mintzberg. His explanations 1 and 2 [quote below with my emphasis added] resonate with me, as I have promoted the idea that we need to connect our work, our communities, and our networks to make sense by engaging with people and ideas. The core of this is curiosity, especially about other people, as well as ourselves.
Be a curious learner — about ideas, people, and oneself

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start planting

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Social learning is a regular topic on this blog and I gave a presentation on the power of social learning earlier this year. The following quotes show how learning from and with each other is a critical part of human and societal development.

“Learning would be exceedingly laborious, not to mention hazardous, if people had to rely solely on the effects of their own actions to inform them what to do. Fortunately, most human behavior is learned observationally through modeling: from observing others one forms an idea of how new behaviors are performed, and on later occasions this coded information serves as a guide for action.” —Albert Bandura 1977

“As part of a social network, we transcend ourselves, for good or ill, and become a part of something much larger. We are connected.” —Katherine Giuffre 2010

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“the future cracked open”

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Race Bannon sees AI (or really machine learning) changing many jobs, such as technical writing, in the near future.

“I believe within 5-10 years much of technical documentation will be written by AI. Certainly, the basic procedural stuff (Step 1, Step 2, and so on) will be written by AI, but even the contextual stuff surrounding the procedural documentation (use cases, examples, and implementation tips) will be written by AI eventually too.” —The Future of Technical Writing

In The Atlantic, Derek Thompson thinks that creativity will not save our jobs from AI.

We may be in a “golden age” of AI, as many have claimed. But we are also in a golden age of grifters and Potemkin inventions and aphoristic nincompoops posing as techno-oracles. The dawn of generative AI that I envision will not necessarily come to pass. So far, this technology hasn’t replaced any journalists, or created any best-selling books or video games, or designed some sparkling-water advertisement, much less invented a horrible new form of cancer. But you don’t need a wild imagination to see that the future cracked open by these technologies is full of awful and awesome possibilities. —The Atlantic 2022-12-01

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revisiting self-determination theory

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Self-determination theory states that there are three universal human drivers — autonomy, competence, and relatedness. We need some control over our lives, we want to be good at something, and we want to feel that we can relate to other people. These three drivers are what make us do what we do. Skills are just one aspect of being engaged at work. Even highly competent skilled workers can be disengaged or aimless.

One effect of the network era, and its pervasive digital connections, is that networks are replacing or subverting more traditional hierarchies. Three aspects of this effect are — access to almost unlimited information, the ability for almost anyone to self-publish, and limitless opportunities for ridiculously easy group-forming.

Clay Shirky discussed this third aspect in Here Comes Everybody (2008).

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