Troy Patterson

Educator, Thinker, Consultant

52Frames

Well, I did it. I completed the 52Frames challenge for 2024.

You can check out all of the photos that I submitted in one go. Some of the photos were definitely less, er, considered, than others. Still, I’m kind of proud that I was able to submit a photo every week. I did learn a good bit on the journey.

I think that I’ll do the 52Frames challenge again this year. I may not meet every week’s challenge this year, but I think I’ll do it again.

I did find the challenges very helpful in getting out to take pictures. Plus, some of the challenges required me to do some research on exactly what the challenge was. Thus, I learned some language, styles, techniques, and processes.

A Few Articles of Interest

Links of Interest

4 Things to Know About the Literacy Lawsuit Targeting Lucy Calkins and Fountas & Pinnell

This is a great explainer of the landscape around the science of reading. You may be familiar with the science of reading from Sold a Story Podcast.

The article breaks down the lawsuit.

As always, be wary of the perspective, but I found the summary useful.

https://archive.md/t8JLM

Limits of Data

Educators love to talk about data. All right, some educators love to talk about data. Data is an important aspect in education right now. This is a great article on data. Specifically, this article addresses the limits of data. Humans are currently driven by data. However, data doesn’t always do what we think it does. (I’m reminded at this point of an article about how only 25% of federally funded education innovations benefit students and an article about what counts as “success” in educational research hint, researchers frequently get to decide). How about a bonus article on How Khan Academy (and others) Fudged their Reseach – throwing out 95% of the participants can be, er, helpful?

Let’s get back to the data article though. The Limits of Data covers lots of ground. Topics covered include things like contingencies of social bias, decontextualization, quantification, transparency, the politics of classification, metrics and values, and more. Here are a few quotes to get you going:

I once sat in a room with a bunch of machine learning folks who were developing creative artificial intelligence to make “good art.” I asked one researcher about the training data. How did they choose to operationalize “good art”? Their reply: they used Netflix data about engagement hours.

The problem is that engagement hours are not the same as good art….

It’s easier to justify health care decisions in terms of measurable outcomes: increased average longevity or increased numbers of lives saved in emergency room visits, for example. But there are so many important factors that are far harder to measure: happiness, community, tradition, beauty, comfort, and all the oddities that go into “quality of life.”

So here is the first principle of data: collecting data involves a trade-off. We gain portability and aggregability at the price of context-sensitivity and nuance. What’s missing from data? Data is designed to be usable and comprehensible by very different people from very different contexts and backgrounds.

A lengthy article, but well worth the read.


https://issues.org/limits-of-data-nguyen/

Pedagogy of the Depressed

Quite the interesting article: Pedagogy of the Depressed.

Hello! Are you an educator who’s interested in using AI but unsure of which online “AI for educators” course to take? Not to worry, Cognitive Resonance has you covered! We’ve completed the offerings from OpenAI (in partnership with Common Sense Media), Google, and AI for Education, all of which take an eerily similar approach to explaining what AI is and why you need to be using it in your classroom.

We are now pleased to share with you this illustrated guide to what these courses cover—consider this an early holiday present!

The article makes some interesting points. There are several notes about AI “learning” (it doesn’t learn), “making decisions” (again, AI is not sentient), and “figuring out“. They also note that the trainings point out individualizing instruction without doing any individualization.

AI can do some really interesting things for the classroom teacher. However, there are tons of caution that need to go along with what AI can do.

Pedagogy of the Depressed](https://buildcognitiveresonance.substack.com/p/pedagogy-of-the-depressed) was an interesting read.

What I Miss

I was sitting in a meeting the other day waiting for a meeting to start. A middle School principal asked me what I missed about being a principal. I didn’t have to think long.

The messiness. I miss the messiness of working with staff and students in the learning and growing process.

I miss how I messed up working with an autistic student (really could’ve helped more if I knew then what I know now). The funny thing is that the student’s mom was the sister of a friend of mine (I didn’t know the connection until toward the end of the student’s time with us). By the way, it’s not that I or we did anything really wrong, we just could’ve done a lot of things much, much better.

I miss helping a family navigate dealing with a seizure disorder. The family was going through some other trials and tribulations at the same time.

I miss working with students who were phenomenally smart but needed confidence that they could do great things. Many of our kids ended up going to college. Several went to Ivy League schools. Many went to the University of Michigan (Go Blue!), which in many cases were as far away as they were allowed to go.

I miss two parents learning from each other. In one case, we had a parent (Parent One) who also happened to be a FedEx driver with my school on his route. He was passionate about how African Americans were treated. There was an incident with another parent who was, well, let’s say a bit biased. Parent One happened to be delivering something when his child and the child of Parent Two were in a room in the office due to an issue. Parent Two arrived in the office. Generally, we wouldn’t have parents talk at this point (too many unknowns and we definitely didn’t want kids to see parents behaving badly). However, both parents wanted to chat. Parent One was extremely thoughtful, kind, and effective in clearing up many issues for Parent Two. It was a beautiful thing to watch.

Most of all, I miss the excitement and unpredictable nature of middle school. Our staff did amazing work with kids. I miss being a part of that.

Social Media Thoughts

I was an early user of Twitter. I joined in June 2008. At first, I used Twitter to connect and share at conferences. I connected with a wide variety of educators. I found a bunch of interesting thoughts and links from educators on Twitter.

Mastodon

In 2018, I really tried to move to Mastodon. I loved the open-source nature of it. I briefly considered spinning up an instance specifically for educators. Mastodon was a bit too abstracted in user interface. Quite frankly, it took a bit too much work to understand. For techies, it was (and is) a phenomenal choice. There are also some really good applications to interface with Mastodon now. Ice Cubes is one that I use.

I really left Twitter for good once it was purchased by Elon Musk. I moved over to Mastodon and have been happy there. There are still some things that could be improved, but Mastodon has many features that I love. For example, I can easily post on my website and allow that post to go to Mastodon. This means that I own the material and have the “original”. I love the bookmarking feature in Mastodon. I use this regularly. The “heart” or like feature is a great way to send some “love” back to the poster without sending it your followers. The “Boost” feature (repost) is great to share the post with others. Of course there is also a reply feature. There is also a “Direct Message” feature (though it isn’t as obvious as it should be).

Mastodon also makes it very easy to share a post. Each post can be easily be embedded into a web page. Heck, you can even use an RSS Reader to follow Mastodon.

There is also an easy way to Block or Report accounts.

BlueSky

BlueSky is having a moment. There has been a ton of positive press about BlueSky. More importantly to me, Educators seem to be moving to BlueSky en masse.

I still have concerns about BlueSky. Although they have promised federation, they are still developing the ATProto federation protocol.

Federation:
What is federation and why is it important?
Federation allows for more than one person/company/billionaire to host the material. This means that the control is not limited to that one person/company/billionaire.

BlueSky is centralized at this point. In fact, BlueSky has raised money through a Series A round of investing. The investors are heavily weighted with crypto-focused cash. The thing with investors is that they are going to want their money back (and then some) at the end of the day. This may be fine. It is, after all, the American way. But as we have seen, this can also lead to the abuse of users. (See Cory Doctorow’s Enshitification post).

The concern is that a bunch of users are leaving one really bad experience for the potential of another.

On the other hand, there is a growing and vibrant educator community on BlueSky. Plus, I have found a pathway to write up a post, like this one, and post it immediately to both Mastodon and BlueSky.

POSSE

In the meantime, I’ve learned the value of POSSE (Post on your Own Server, Syndicate Everywhere). I’ve learned that having all “my stuff” somewhere I control is valuable. (I can’t tell you how many times present me has applauded past me for writing something up and putting it on my blog).

Twitter, er, X now has a lawsuit going where they claim that X, the company, owns all accounts. This means that they can control who has access to those accounts, and ultimately, what that account has published. (This is why all of these companies can sell posts to AI companies for training.)

Conclusion

I’ll keep posting on my blog and let these posts flow to other sites. I’m encouraged by BlueSky and the interactions there. I also enjoy the community of Mastodon. I’ll follow and interact with conversations on both, but I’ll keep control over the things I write.

Thoughts from: Hold Still A Memoir with Photographs

Hold Still A Memoir with Photographs by Sally Mann was the most recent book that I read. I have a write-up on my Book page.

One thing that struck me was that there was a bit about whether her Dad loved her. She states that her Dad didn’t share much affection. She also came to the conclusion that her Dad did love her. But that got me thinking. How will my kids remember me? Have I done enough for them to be absolutely sure that I love them?

I grew up in a pretty typical lower-middle-class family. My Dad worked as a machine repairman for General Motors. He worked long hours, and frequently afternoons.

I grew up with very traditional role expectations. When I became a Dad, I tried to be more involved with the kids. There were certainly many times that I deferred to my wife, but I tried to be fully present and participatory in my kids’ lives.

This led me to wonder if I made any difference as a middle school principal. That one I’ll probably never know. I do think back to situations that I wish I had handled differently.

I do truly hope that when I leave this mortal plane, my kids will know how much I love them.

A Different View on AI in Education

I found this post by Emily (I don’t know Emily, but apparently Emily Bender is a linguist professor) interesting:

ChatGPT Has No Place in the Classroom

If we value education, educators, and students, we shouldn’t look to technologists (and especially not techo-solutionists) to frame and solve problems. And we certainly shouldn’t redirect resources away from teachers to tech giants.

Are we going to end up pushing valuable resources and actual dollars to AI companies (i.e. tech giants)?

If we value information literacy and cultivating in students the ability to think critically about information sources and how they relate to each other, we shouldn’t use systems that not only rupture the relationship between reader and information source,

This is a crucial point. Teaching kids to think critically is our biggest challenge. I fear that we haven’t been extremely successful in that of late. However, AI tools are also coming. Those tools will be part of the landscape.

If we value inclusivity, both in terms of making sure all students feel welcome in the classroom and in terms of all students learning to see each other as fully human, we shouldn’t use software known to amplify biases,

This is a tough one. Bias is everywhere. We are biased. We can’t get away from biases, but we do need to be aware of them. We also need to teach about them.

Anyway, I found the post interesting. I don’t agree with everything in it, but I do think that we need to be critical thinkers ourselves.

Moderator Mayhem

Moderator Mayhem is a great exercise/experience in what moderation is like.

We hope Moderator Mayhem helps players understand these realities of content moderation and demonstrates what’s really at stake when policymakers propose legislation that would govern how Internet companies can host and moderate user content.

I would love to use this experience for middle school students, alas, the content is not middle school friendly. They are very upfront about this, there is a warning that the content is designed for 18 and up.

However, I believe a similar experience would be wonderful for middle school students. Naturally, it would be challenging to write those scenarios, but the concept of making judgments is important for kids.

I’m thinking of using Moderator Mayhem is an inspiration for creating a game of decision making in H5P. It probably wouldn’t end up being anything like Moderator Mayhem, but the inspiration would be there.

I would need to identify a similar set of decision-making options for kids. I could use the Branching Scenario or maybe Game Map.

Framadate for the Win

An issue came up where an Athletic Director needed kids to be able to “book” a bus. The AD started out using Google Forms, but this quickly became onerous. Too much information to collect. Too many days to cover.

After describing what was actually needed, I suggested using Framadate. This is a really neat site that is privacy positive.

Framasoft will not use your personal data, except for statistical purposes (anonymized) or to notify you of a significant change in the service;
Framasoft will not transmit or resell your personal data (your privacy is – really – important to us) ;

So, I set up an example and shared it with the AD. Since the “time” field is just a text field, I was able to add additional information (basically the location). This creates a view where the parent can enter the kid’s name and then pick the dates they want to use transportation.

The Admin gets a full list of the responses AND can download a spreadsheet if needed.

There are several settings available as well.

  • Password can be added
  • Full description can be added (with links to schedules and more information)
  • “Voter” can be allowed to modify (see below)
    • Nothing
    • Their own “vote”
    • Any vote (definitely would not want this on for this use case)
  • There is a Print button, but it doesn’t print the response, just the form

This allows users to “change their mind” as plans change.

Potential Issues:

  • The word “Votes” is odd in this setting.

While Framadate was not truly designed to be used in exactly this use case, it does work really well. It is a great resource.

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