Vic Work: notes on learning, technology and play

A short, matter-of-fact statement from this article about SMS apps hides something a bit more worrying: Although SMS remains the only way to be sure of reaching anyone with a mobile number, in any country, very few apps currently support it. That’s partly due to the age of the protocol, and partly to advancements by WhatsApp and other messaging apps. So, we're talking about "advancements" which give up on working for the majority of the population of this planet. The forward motion of the te...

This image was the winning entry in one of the categories for the Sony World Photography Awards this year. Producing it was a complex process, and it involved many stages - some of which relied on AI-generated imagery. This photography project was a result of one photographer's idea: send one 50-year-old camera and one roll of film to his photographer friends, one by one, and see what they come up with. Both of these processes fascinate me. The first process removes the need to "be there" comp...

In "Promiscuous Fictions", published over 15 years ago, Tyler Curtain neatly summarizes the fantastical fears and anxieties felt when thinking about bloggers and their blogs (a new-ish phenomenon by then): The nature of the threat's not known, but by many accounts the Blogosphere is a dark, murky ball; gazing into it for too long makes one lose a sense of self. It is better that the mass of humanity stop writing, creating and reconstructing in a form that creates and unmanageable or indescriba...

If we think of language as a virus, then we can think of the impending wave of machine-produced language as a pandemic. There's going to be a lot of this kind of language, it will be everywhere, it will be difficult to know if the language we're dealing with is "clean" or "infected" - and the effects of this wave of words on the way we live, think, speak and work won't be known until we've seen them in vivo. This is not bad news, and it's not good news either. You can catch good things through ...

Early 2002: freshman year. I've only got internet when I come back home for the weekends, or if one of the 6-7 ancient computers in the uni "computer room" is free (rarely). The library catalog and booking system is a tombola maze of index cards, paper forms, queues to the photocopy rooms, and convoluted reservation processes. It sucks, but it sucks for everyone. Early 2004: year three. Amazon kinda, sorta, sometimes ships books to Poland. Plus, there's a second-hand English bookshop in a neigh...

Rome's plebeian citizens tried "secessio plebis" many times: they left the city and refused to come back until their demands were met. The patricians, unable to get even the basic things to function on their own, yielded - on at least five occasions. Modern employees are trying this right now. There was the Great Resignation, there's the Conscious Quitting - and my favourite trend: getting others to watch you quit your job on social media. In many ways, this has always been the promise: you ta...

Your faculty would need four academic years to feel really confident in delivering online learning at all times. The post-pandemic pressure to return to face-to-face settings only gives them three. Your team would need 10 years of campaigns and engagement to build a perfectly working community on your social medium of choice. The medium enshittifies itself beyond repair throughout year seven, and you close your account. You and your partner are 6-8 months away from going 100% plant-based and s...

Rhystic Studies is a YouTube channel whose creator publishes video essays about my favourite trading card game. These have been consistently excellent. The latest one was 2-3 times the usual length. Without thinking, I sat down and watched all of it; it did not disappoint. FortNine is another YouTube channel - this one's devoted to motorcycle content. I no longer want a motorbike in my life. But I keep coming back to watch these videos, because they keep changing the way I drive my car and ride...

In 2016, Maciej Cegłowski delivered his talk on "The Moral Economy of Tech". The text version of his remarks is available here. It's a good read, even (especially?) seven years later. ...

This week's story in Wired is worth thinking about. "The Suspicion Machine" is an algorithm used by the city of Rotterdam to determine whether a person poses a risk of benefit fraud. To simplify: it's an automated decision-making process which takes into account several facts about a person, and then assigns a score to each of these facts. If the score reaches a certain level, that person may become the target of a fraud investigation. Earlier on in the week, the story made me furious. But it...

Here's a sentence I read on LinkedIn which made me chuckle: "AI already outperforms humans on many tasks - like chess..." I suck at chess. You don't need AI to outperform me at chess. If your fridge has a computer, I'd probably lose to your fridge at chess. But just this morning, I was excited at the thought of contacting a chess coach and booking some lessons with him. I had a warm, fuzzy feeling of finding a chess coach from my home town - and realizing he might have played with a friend o...

Open Space Technology allows participants to set their own agendas, organize their working teams, and raise issues they want to raise, in the way they want to raise them. Speed geeking allows your conference audience to get through more sessions than usual, and to get exposed to many different ideas. Triopticon is a sense-making ritual where roles, structure, and sequence play a vital part in trying to approach a topic from many points of view. We've gone from business as usual to being on mu...

The best moment to start building a metaverse might be in a few years' time, when Zuck's money moves on to pastures/distractions new, taking with it the snake oil salesmen, but leaving behind some key learnings + good ideas/hardware among the debris. The surprising trend I saw the other day in someone's Twitter statistics was that although their follower count and reach didn't increase, or even fell in some months, their clicks and impressions remained steady or started rising. This is not to j...

What would it be? If you decided that you're no longer happy for your work to live online, "in the cloud" - how would you spread it? What would you build on? Floppy disks? Cassette tapes? In a world where plastics are harmful and the internet is filling up with questionable content, the answer might be more pertinent - and more messy - than you think. And the formats which used to sound ridiculous, are now no longer dead and buried. 100% compostable DIY cassette tape kits, anyone? ...

I told her that I thought I got better at cycling over the winter, by trying to reduce moves and positions which leak energy instead of directing it to the pedals. She told me about someone she knows - a future Channel swimmer - whose measure of "becoming a better swimmer" was being able to shave 4 strokes off each 100m. We spoke about hemmorhaging effort. We geeked out over Katie Ledecky's freestyle kick: it looks like it isn't there. We thought about learning to do less, while learning to fe...

A few days ago, I started writing something which quickly got out of hand. I thought, there's no way this will end up on the blog. The ideas were there, and they were good, and I wanted to explore them further. But I saw this piece getting out of hand, and moving to places which one blog post could no longer handle. So I let it sit there, in my notes folder, and held it lightly in my mind. This morning, I logged onto my Mastodon feed and saw people discussing a few of the ideas I was ponderin...

My cheap supermarket coffee surprised me this morning. On the side of the bag, there's a really good set of instructions for brewing. Someone must have thought that one through, as it follows from start to finish by answering the most frequent rookie barista questions. How much coffee do I need? What do I do, and what are the timings? What if it doesn't 100% work the first time? The language is simple, the presentation confident. The otaku barista will know it by heart, and they'll also have ...

The most frequent approach to designing online learning goes like this: introduce the topic and outcomes - deliver a sequence of facts and a bunch of information - test how much of the facts and information got retained - conclude, move on to the next batch. The most frequent complaint about this approach goes like this: someone else, not the learner, makes a priori decisions about the "enoughness" of it all. They decide how much information is enough. They decide how much complexity is enough....

You can copy and paste the Wikipedia cheat sheet or you can pay several thousand dollars for a tailor-made course. You can play the summary of the book on YouTube, at 1.5x the speed, or you can keep listening to the audiobook and reading the print version at the same time until you're sure you know what it means. You can have an enthusiast friend explain the main points to you, or travel to the best-in-the-world expert and shadow them for a month. If it sounds obvious, consider: fifty years a...

We may not need more folks who code, after all. Here's what we're realising instead: we begin to need folks who ask good questions about the code. The article I linked to above admits as much between the lines. Many machine learning professionals won't offer you an explanation for why their product or prototype did what it did. Or they'll offer a bullshit explanation. We're about to have lots more conversations about AI, whether we like it or not. Journalists will talk to tech "experts". DevO...

Mia Brookes is 16 years old, and became the first woman snowboarder to land a 1440 trick in a competition - her first world championships, too. Here's what she had to say afterwards: I feel like I could cry, I’ve never been so happy in my life... My coach said ‘If you want to win, try the 14’. I knew it was possible. If you're teaching, or learning, or coaching, or building anything that teachers, learners, or coaches use - you could probably learn a lot from trying to decipher what went ri...

Over the years / decades / centuries, we've done a lot of work to figure out how we're wired inside. This knowledge evolves, and becomes more and more complex. Scientists can no longer seriously say that the shape of your skull predicts the kind of person you are (but they used to). But the energy, the drive to work this out, to notice patterns / mechanisms - that's always been there. Here's a relatively new thing, though: we didn't always spend so much time and effort on studying the "bad new...

Stop me if you've heard this one before. Tech startup gets their break and becomes a tech company Tech company makes lots of easy money Tech company wants more easy money Tech company buys tech startups and / or their patents Tech company makes lots more easy money from the startup ideas / solutions Tech company goes stale, and runs out of obvious ways of making more easy money Tech company fires thousands of people Thousands of fired people launch hundreds of tech startups Guess what happe...

"Innovating Pedagogy" is a series of reports published by the Open University, in collaboration with researchers from other institutions. It focuses on approaches, strategies and trends in teaching and learning. I am so happy I found this resource. The reports are all freely available in full. Many of the papers I already read are written with a wide audience in mind. This means it'll be of interest to veteran researchers and rookie learning designers alike. In addition, the "methods that work...

I started writing this post to explain what this site does and what it doesn't do. It quickly turned into a list of technical specs and features. Then I thought: there's another way of describing it all. Let's talk about what we get to do on this site - you as a reader, and I, the author. You get to read all these posts on a simple and secure site which loads fast and works on most devices. You get to choose how you want to receive the posts. The "subscribe" link takes you to an email subscri...

Anyone who tries to drive to our place gets fooled by the satnav. The house isn't where the machine thinks it is. We found this out on Day 1 - that was the only time when our team of movers was less than superhero-tier: "We're here." "No, you're not. I'm here, and here's not where you are." That was Lesson 1: the machine messed up. Our house needed alt text. All the time. Every week. Sometimes several times a week. There was the sign by the door, of course - the house number and the street ...

The hidden cost of relying on AI to create things for us is not just fewer jobs for humans; it's also fewer humans with the incentive to create things themselves. The unspoken, unprocessed harm of the enshittification of social media platforms is not just platform outages; it's also the sinking feeling of being forcibly sold stuff in a place which used to be social. When facing a behemoth search engine whose chatbot sidekicks no longer want users to end up on your site, the new endgame is no...

Three years ago, the powers-that-be at Pearson announced that they were moving to a "Netflix-like" subscription model for their textbook sales. This week, Pearson's CEO decided to use another tech-related term to describe his company's business model: Pearson's textbooks, he said, were going to be sold as NFTs. There are many reasons to doubt the shelf life of this statement - chief among them being the context of it: earnings calls, and CEO comments around their companies' financial results, a...

(Please, note: this post is not meant to advertise sales of C64 or any other computer. It's firmly tongue-in-cheek and written to illustrate general principles, not specific solutions. Your mileage will vary, I'm not your computer uncle, etc.) I turned 40 this year. You know who else did? This guy. Commodore C64 was the first computer I ever got. I never got to do interesting stuff on it - I was mainly into playing games, back then. But I did get to experience the clunky, 16-color magic of it ...

In preparing to write this post, I've done some online research. I've looked at posts and thought pieces titled "RSS is dying," or "In defence of RSS," or "Google/Facebook/Firefox is trying to kill RSS". They were all 10-12 years old. The news of RSS' demise were greatly exaggerated. The whole thing just won't die. But I feel it's not getting the love it deserves. Today, I'll try to list several reasons for thinking more kindly of RSS, and several ways of showing this venerable piece of web fu...