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from NomadWarMachine
How to tell a story flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0) license
Who am I to tell you how to tell your story?
You might start at the beginning
Or in the middle, or at the end
If the story wants to be told, it will leap from your mind onto the page
And then, from those pages, it will jump into mine.
A poem for today’s Daily Create.
from NomadWarMachine
Today’s Daily Create asks us to visit Kevin’s blog and make a poem out of the anti-spam words that you need to enter in order to post a comment.
Amusingly, Kevin has moved his blog to a new home over the last few days, and the new blog doesn’t ask for these words. So I stayed with the old one and refreshed the page a few times to get this:
Felt chop?
Pleats do.
Bidder ha?
Shrews mew
Well, that’s better than some of my own attempts to rhyme!
from Open World
It’s become a bit of a tradition for me to share an end of year reflection in January, I always intend to do this in December, but it never happens, so January it is. I’ve been in two minds whether to write one this year though because 2024 did not go as expected.
View from the ward
At the beginning of the year I woke up one morning and couldn’t feel my hands properly. That was the start of the rapid onset of a bewildering and debilitating range of symptoms. After numerous scans, tests, and two hospital admissions, I was eventually diagnosed with a rare autoimmune disease. It’s not curable, but it is treatable, with a lot of medication and mixed success. I’ve been lucky to be more or less fit and healthy for most of my life, so to suddenly lose the ability to do so many things that I previously took for granted has been challenging to say the least. I can no longer dance, sew, or wear my fancy shoes, writing is a challenge, walking is slooooow some days, and traveling any distance without assistance is difficult. Having to slow down has forced me to recenter and I’m still trying to figure out what life will be like from this point on, who I’ll be when I can no longer do so many of the things that make me who I am. There’s very little data about how this condition is likely to progress, hopefully things will improve once we get the medication right, but who knows? I’m just trying to take it as it comes.
Despite all of the above, I’m still working with the OER Service at the University of Edinburgh. I’m immensely grateful to my colleagues for their support, and to my managers who have put adjustments in place to enable me to keep working from home. I really miss going over to the office in Edinburgh, but the four hour round trip is beyond me for the time being. I never thought I’d miss that Scotrail commute but here we are.
MTU Cork
At the beginning of the year, before things took a turn for the worse, I went to the OER24 Conference in Cork with our OER Service intern Mayu Ishimoto, to present a paper on Empowering Student Engagement with Open Education. It was great to be there with Mayu and there was a lot of interest in her experience as a student working with the OER Service. The highlight of the conference for me was undoubtedly Catherine Cronin and Laura Czerniewicz’s inspiring keynote, The future isn’t what it used to be: Open education at the crossroads, which explored their own lives and experiences as open educators and the possibilities generated by their profound and timely Higher Education for Good. You can read my reflection on the the conference here OER24: Gathering Courage. Also! MTU has some really interesting architecture.
Their Finest Hour project came to an end in June with the launch of the University of Oxford’s online archive of 25,000 new stories and artefacts from the Second World War, all of which have been shared under open licence. I’m very proud that our Edinburgh collection day gathered and contributed 50 stories and many hundreds of photographs, thanks to the incredible work of project intern Eden Swimer. You can read Eden’s thoughtful reflection on his internship here Reflections on ‘Their Finest Hour’. I nominated Eden for an ISG Recognition Award in September and was delighted that he won the award for Student Staff Member of the Year.
A fair chunk of my time last year was taken up with setting up and acting as business lead for a new learning analytics project. As part of the university’s VLE Excellence programme, the project aims to identify the learning analytics data available in Learn and other centrally supported learning technology applications, and enable staff and students to access and use it to support their teaching and learning. It’s a long time since I’ve been involved in anything related to learning analytics so it’s been interesting to get my head back into this space again, particularly as the project is focused on empowering staff and students to access their own learning analytics data..
In October we had a small restructuring at work and my team moved from Educational Design and Engagement (EDE) into a new section, Digital Skills, Design and Training (DSDT). I’ve really enjoyed working in EDE over the last 5 years, and we’ll continue working closely with many of the services there, but I’m also excited about the opportunities the new section will bring. I’m particularly looking forward to working with our Wikimedian in Residence again and exploring new open textbook projects with our Graphic Design Team.
I’ve been dipping my toes back into the murky waters of ethics, AI and the commons and have written a couple of blog posts on the ethics of AI in relation to OER and contested museum collections.
Because my health has been so ropey, I’ve had to step back, hopefully temporarily, from most of the additional voluntary work I do, including assessing CMALT, sitting on award panels, contributing to City University of London’s MSc in Digital Literacies and Open Practice, and attending policy events. I really miss the connections these activities used to bring so I’ve been trying to focus more on reconnecting through social media networks….
…which has been “interesting” given the hellscape of most social media platforms these days. I’ve barely used facebook for over a decade, though I still have an account there, primarily for finding last cats (long story). Twitter was always my main social media channel, I’ve had an account there since 2007, and it’s where I found my open education community. Seeing twitter degenerate into a fascist quagmire has made me so angry, however it was still a wrench to leave. In March we mothballed the femedtech account, I stepped back from my own account later in the year, before finally deleting it. This was one of my last retweets. It seems fitting.
I’ve been slowly migrating to Bluesky and Mastodon over the course of the year and it’s been great to start building new and old communities there. I like the different pace of the two platforms. Bluesky feels like the place to keep up to date with news and events, while Mastodon provides space for slower, quieter, thoughtful conversations.
This enforced slowing down, together with the changing social media landscape, has also prompted me to start blogging again. I hadn’t abandoned this blog completely but I’d definitely got out of the habit of writing here regularly. It’s been good to take the time to think and reflect again, and to try and express some of that reflection in words. At the end of the year I wrote a post about Slowing Down which really seemed to strike a chord with people. Across all these different spaces, it feels like little dormant shoots of community are reemerging. We need these human connections now more than ever.
On a personal level September was a month of beginnings and endings. My daughter went off to university and it’s been great to see her stretch her wings and find her people. It’s also been illuminating to see the university’s systems from the student side.
In September we had to say goodbye to our beloved cat Josh. He was magnificent, and he was my best boy, despite his habit of going round the neighbourhood scrounging for food and pretending to be a stray. He turned up twice on a local lost cats facebook group. The shame. I miss him terribly.
Josh 2014 – 2024
I also had to say goodbye to our family home in Carriegreich on the Isle of Harris. This was my grandparents and then my father’s home and I spent a lot of time here during my childhood. This is where I learned how to cast a line, set an (illegal) net and row a boat, collect the eggs and feed the sheep, tell a guillemot from a razorbill, pick up Russian klondykers on the ancient shortwave radio, and keep an eye out for the grey fishery protection vessels sliding out of the mist. It’s where I spent hours wandering over the croft and the shore lost in other worlds. I very rarely remember dreams, but I still dream about this house and this shore. We had hoped to visit the house one last time, but sadly that wasn’t possible because Josh was so unwell. We said goodbye to Josh and to Carriegreich within the week.
Carriegreich
To try and make some sense of where I am now, I’ve been re-reading Ursula Le Guin’s Tehanu. It’s always been one of my favourite Le Guin books, I love the writing and the pacing and the fact that it centres the experiences of an older woman finding her place and her power in a changing world through the different phases of her life.
“Tenar sighed. There was nothing she could do, but there was always the next thing to be done.”
I’m not sure what I’ll be doing next, but I am sure there will always be something to be done.
from NomadWarMachine
“Question postcards” flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license
I’m a Scot (now), but I’m English (born)
I’m PhD Education, but I’m a Philosopher at heart (20 years teaching, I miss it at times)
I’m on a professional services contract, but I feel like an academic (developer)
I’m a reluctant, grieving matriarch with two cats (who I adore)
I’m an awful uke player, a lapsed pianist, an ex-coloratura soprano
I’m an avid knitter, an intermittent gardener
I’m a remixer, a tinkerer, a bricoleur
I’m a would-be poet who doodles in meetings
And I’m counting down to retirement, because I am tired to my bones.
from Open World
I’ve been dipping my toes back into the debate about open education and AI over the last few weeks. I stepped back from this space earlier in the year both for personal reasons and because I was getting a bit dispirited by the signal to noise ratio. It’s still a very noisy space, more so if anything, but there are some weel-kent voices emerging that are hard to ignore.
David Wiley laid out his stall last month in the webinar Why Open Education Will Become Generative AI Education, and his views have been predictably polarising. There have already been several thoughtful response to David, which I can highly recommend reading:
I don’t want to repeat the very pertinent points that have already been made, but I do want to add my concerns about the staring point of David’s argument which is
“the primary goal of the open education movement has been to increase access to educational opportunities. The primary strategy for accomplishing this goal has been to increase access to educational materials. And the primary tactic for implementing this strategy has been to create and share OER.”
~ Why Generative AI Is More Effective at Increasing Access to Educational Opportunity than OER
This is certainly one view of the open education movement, (which is by no means a homogenous entity), but open education isn’t just about goals, strategies and tactics, there are other perspectives that need to be taken into consideration. I find this content centric view of open education a bit simplistic and reductive and I had hoped that we’d moved on from this by now. I would suggest that the primary purpose of open education is to improve knowledge equity, support social justice, and increase diversity and inclusion. While content and OER have an important role to play, the way to do this is by sharing open practice.
This slide in particular made me pause…
Leaving aside the use of the Two Concepts of Liberty, which is not unproblematic, I’m presuming “users” equates here to teachers and learners, which is a whole other topic of debate. It’s certainly true that open licences alone don’t grant the skills and expertise needed to engage in “high-demand revise and remix activities”, but I’m not sure anyone ever claimed they did? And yes GenAI could be a way to provide users with these skills, but at what cost? There’s little discussion here about the ethical issues of copyright theft, algorithmic bias, exploitation of labour, and the catastrophic environmental impact of AI. Surely a more responsible and sustainable way to gain these skills and expertise is to connect with other teachers and learners, other human beings, and by sharing our pedagogy and practice? While there’s a certain logic to David’s hypothesis, it doesn’t take into account the diversity of practice that can make open education so empowering.
Aside from the prediction that Generative AI Education will save / replace / supersede OER, I couldn’t help feeling that there is still an underlying assumption that OER = open textbooks. (This was also an issue I had with one of the keynotes at this year’s OER24 Conference) It shouldn’t need saying, but there are myriad kinds of open resources above and beyond open textbooks. What about student co-created OER for example? It’s through the process of creation, of gathering information, of developing digital and copyright literacy skills, of formulating knowledge and understanding, that learning takes place. The OER, the content created, is a valuable tangible output of that process, but it’s not the most important thing. If we ask GenAI to produce our OER, what happens to the process of learning by doing, creating and connecting with other human beings?
This issue was touched on by Maren Deepwell and Audrey Watters in the most recent episode of Maren’s brilliant Leading Virtual Teams podcast. It’s been really inspiring to see Audrey re-enter the fray of education technology criticism. We need her clear incisive voice and fearless critique now more than ever.
Touching on the language we use to talk about AI, Audrey reminded us that “Human memory and computer memory are not the same thing.” And in her The Extra Mile newsletter she says:
“I do not believe that the machine is or can be “intelligent” in the way that a human can. I don’t think that generative AI and LLMs work the same way my mind does.”
This very much called to mind Helen Beetham’s thoughtful perspective on ethics and AI at the ALT Winter Summit last year where she said that “generative”, “intelligence”, and “artificial” are all deeply problematic concepts.
“Every definition is an abstraction made from an engineering perspective, while neglecting other aspects of human intelligence.”
Towards the end of the podcast, Maren and Audrey talked about the importance of the embodied nature of being and learning, how we tap into such a deep well of embodied knowledge when we learn. It’s unthinkable to outsource this to AI, for the simple reason that AI is stupid.
The embodied human nature of learning was also the theme of Marjorie Lotfi’s beautiful six-part poem, Interrogating Learning, commissioned by Edinburgh Futures Institute for the inaugural event of their Learning Curves Future of Education series. Marjorie weaves together the voices of displaced women and, I believe, speaks more deeply about what it means to learn than any disembodied “artificial intelligence” ever could.
What have you learned?
When asked this question how will a woman answer?
For a moment she’s back in her mother’s belly
a heart beating out a rush of cortisol
or a warm dream of sleep listening through a barrier of skin and blood
before even her own first breath.
And then the day she’s born
blinking at the bright of daylight, candle, bulb,
hearing the low buzz of electric
and the sudden clarity of a voice she knows already.
Learning it again.
There have been a thousand things to learn in every day I’ve been alive,
the woman thinks,
and I am 53 this year.
from NomadWarMachine
Today’s Daily Create asks us to “write a poem formatted like computer code about natural networks”. As I started to think about how to do this, I wondered if a GenAI programme might help with philosophical logic, so I asked ChatGPT to give me an example of predicate calculus. Having ascertained that it could provide something meaningful, I asked it to:
“Please write the following in predicate calculus: bees drink the nectar from the flowers”
Here’s the answer
“Bees drink the nectar from the flowers” in predicate calculus, we need to define some predicates and structure the sentence properly.
This means “For all x, y, and z, if x is a bee, y is a flower, and z is the nectar of y, then drinks z.”
This formalizes the idea that bees (represented by x) drink nectar (represented by z) from flowers (represented by y).
That’s poetry to me.
from NomadWarMachine
Today’s Daily Create asks for a poem about weather forecasts. I look at many weather maps of Scotland, then write a haiku.
October forecast:
Rain, followed by rain, then rain
Good weather for ducks
“Ducks” flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license
from NomadWarMachine
Today’s Daily Create asks us to
Look out of your actual window and then open a nature webcam from somewhere in the world. (here is the home of nature webcams via the US National Park Service) Write a poem that bridges these two views, exploring the connection between your local environment and a distant ecosystem.
I chose the Bald Eagle cam at Sauces Canyon Nest.
“Sauces Canyon Bald Eagle Nest” flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license
And contrasted it with a recent view of the birdfeeder in our garden
“276 Collared Doves” flickr photo by NomadWarMachine shared under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-SA) license
Small birds visit our garden,
Robins, tits and doves,
Dropping in for a daily feed,
Safe from the bald eagles resting in their nest across the globe
from NomadWarMachine
Today’s Daily Create is to write an ode to Father Time
O silent keeper of all things,
You move unseen through shadows cast,
With footsteps soft, yet never still.
The stars align, the tides obey,
All yield to you—relentless, vast.
Your hands are weathered, old as stone,
Yet you are ageless, ever new.
You mend, you break, you heal, you mar,
A sculptor’s chisel, carving through,
Unveiling lives in cycles far.
A child’s first cry, an elder’s sigh,
The bloom of youth, the winter’s breath—
You’re there, a witness to our change,
A fleeting gift, a final debt,
Each heartbeat passing in your range.
Unseen you turn the seasons’ wheel,
And all our clocks are but your play.
What power lies in your domain,
For all we are, and all we’ll be,
Is woven in your endless skein.
And though we chase, and though we flee,
There is no place to hide, to wait,
For when you call, we go as one—
Forever caught within your fate,
Eternal father of the sun.
from NomadWarMachine
“Take something to remind you of her”, they suggest.
“I already have”, I say.
In the cookbooks you gave me, the marks of my cooking throughout their pages,
In the jugs and vases dotted around the house, the result of many years happy scavenging together,
In the poetry books on my shelves, purloined from yours over the years,
In the pictures on my walls, presents from you to remind me of home.
I don’t need objects to remind me of you.
But everywhere I look I can see your love.