Month: December 2024

Pedagogy of the Depressed

December 5, 2024 / Troy / 0 Comments

Quite the interesting article: Pedagogy of the Depressed.

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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

December 5, 2024 / Troy / 0 Comments

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

December 3, 2024 / Troy / 0 Comments

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.