12. Interest-Driven Learning

Key Takeaways

Today we're going to talk about peerguided learning at scale. Um the thing I asked you to do for today was to write a little bit in your learning journal about um one of your hobbies that you use online resources to learn from. Um, so just get in groups of three, um, and spend the first few minutes talking to each other about what kinds of, uh, hobbies you have and what kind of online learning you do in those hobbies. Does that make sense? Ready? Go. All right, come on back. Great condition. So, first of all, Omar should show us his camera. Do you want to talk about um, so I I I talked about photography? Like I spend an unhealthy amount of time on YouTube like with photography tutorials. And so this camera is a 50-y old camera and I had no idea um how to even begin looking for one. And like these last three weeks I've been looking because I want to run a CPW event um for uh admits on how to use an SLR camera. Isn't that cool? So I don't know like this is in really great condition and I was like on eBay for hours but I you know watched YouTube tutorials was reading on like Reddit forums, photography forums, DP review, pedopixel like on what to look out for and before that like learning how to actually take photos. Um was all done through YouTube. It was selftaught. I started off with a phone and then I slowly built up um my toolbox once I had the knowledge and yeah now I'm like the photo editor for the tech. I stuff for yearbook and now I do a lot of stuff for photography and now I'm actually teaching others. Um I recently actually just interviewed up here this I interviewed for to teach a digital photography course although due to time conflicts I won't be able to do that. Um but I did interview and I um was about to go on the other side of that um learning experience. Camera's rad. I just got it um before my last class. So like I need to go to a camera shop just to make sure it works. um which I'll be doing after this class. A photo of that. I want a photo a photo of Omar with his new camera taken with a contemporary. Yeah. I I I mean those Polaroid cameras became much more widely accessible probably when I was in grade school. Like they were pretty common and then and then there was sort of a revival in the last few years. So like my daughter has a Polaroid camera. I don't think it's called. We call them Polaroid cameras because they probably have some different term now of instant camera or something like that. Um, anybody have a completely different hobby from Omar where you could tell a very similar kind of story about learning or I guess like you know similar sort of story of learning is like you know through YouTube right like I want to or I'm like starting to learn how to like play guitar and bass and stuff. Um, but the thing with YouTube is it's like we talk about like algorithm guided learning or whatever, but like it kind of almost feels like YouTube's sort of an algorithm kind of guided learning in a way or like I feel like the YouTube algorithm really sort of drives my interests or like diverts my interests into different things at different periods of time. Like on a weekby- week beek basis, I can be interested in something completely different than what I was interested in last week. So, it feels like I like I'm just sort of moving through a bunch of like different hobbies and because I feel like I'm at the whim of the YouTube algorithm sometimes. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. People Yeah. Yeah. No, I think people feel that way with lots of uh kind of technologies that do some kind of aggregation. Pinterest for people who do crafty kinds of things. Tik Tok for people who follow media and stuff like that. Yeah. Good. What other what other hobbies do you talk about or what other sort of learn like informal learning strategies seem important and interesting or things that you were talking about in your groups? Yeah. Awesome. I'll say like on a less I guess handson like level. Um, I like use like similar resources like YouTube and stuff like that for like a lot of like collecting knowledge for like things that I'm interested in like fashion for example because a lot of a lot of it is like you know like like in New York fashion week for example it's like these very condensed times right where like it's all happening and a lot of people follow very closely but if you're an MIT student you're probably like I can't feeling But like then you can like watch highlights from it and like actual like critics commentary on them and like kind of see like what that's doing both socially and also like from an artistic sense. Yeah. Do you use Pinterest or anything for sort of collecting your um I'm I've I had a social media problem YouTube so now I've kind of just continued into YouTube and stuff but I I do get to I guess reflect on it because I'm doing costume designs and stuff. Oh, cool. Yeah. My my my daughter is big into aesthetics of various kinds, craft things or design things. And Pinterest is like a big part of how she like she does the same kind of combing that you does, but she's deliberate about taking things that she likes and storing them and categorizing them and trying to make sense of them and things like that. Yeah. Dana. And then I was just going to say like just like another medium outside of like watching videos is just like online like so mine is like cooking. So like recipes and just like articles. Um, and then also like mine was like a little bit of TikTok just in like the one minute video of like you can cook this and it like isn't a professional chef showing you how to do it was cool to see that like oh like I can relate to that person so I can do it. Um, what what what are your favorite sort of recipe media or cooking media? Like how do you So I've only perfected one singular dish. Um, and it's scallops. Um, which is like a relatively hard thing, but like I'm scared to cook a chicken because I'm gonna give myself salmonilla a scallop. Yeah. So, my family joke is you only going to eat scallops for this. You're like, "Yeah, they're pretty good. They're healthy. Might be too many heavy metals if you do that your whole life or something like that." But yeah. Yeah. I don't know if bottom feeders are what you should do for your whole life, but that seems like seems like a good start. How about you, Armon? Uh I do mention this in our group but what came out from people talking like a lot of people relate is number file uh stream blue one brown this video I just put them in what is this it's a maths video they just tell you cool math stuff it's called number file number file street blue on brown those kind of videos so sometimes you learn that there is fractional dimension and you just be watching what that means And I watch those, too. So, they're really interested. Um, yeah. Who's who's the guy who came here a couple years ago for a graduation or convocation or something? Mark. Hm. Mark Robber. Mark Robber. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. He's sort of science YouTuber. Guy named Veritasium does uh does things like that too. Yeah. Yeah. Enormously uh popular and successful and things like that. Um I play a lot of computer games and I my life sort of overlaps. I don't know. computer games are like a couple of years older than me, but not by much. I mean, definitely some of my earliest memories are um games that would have been played off of like a cassette reel rather than any kind of rotary disc or or something like that. Um but another distinctive memory is that uh one of the first categories of games were these textbased games where you had to sort of enter prompts into a parser like open mailbox, go left, go right, walk in, you know, pick up key, put key and lock, those kinds of things. So, a lot of what you're doing Yeah. Come on in. um was kind of guessing like uh you know what what was the what was the right key term to put in to um to engage things and so actually a lot of these games Infocom was a company that sold a lot of them. Um the game companies would also publish a book and the book would have uh the answers to a whole bunch of things or like solution sets in invisible ink and so you had like a little uh um pen that came with it. And so when you decided that you had given up trying for yourself, you would uh you would cover the invisible ink with this pen that would reveal the sort of next clue and help you go on and so forth. Um and uh but now you know essentially every video game it like they almost instantly are created with a wiki that has you know every item in the game and what they do and where they go. Um a Reddit forum for conversation. um more recently Discord um pages, you know, that actually, you know, for smaller games can be kind of surprisingly intimate where you, you know, you really do feel like you're just like chatting with the guy who made the game. Um even if you know, there may not be responding to you directly, but they're certainly like responding to people that are there around with you and things like that, YouTube channels or all these kinds of things. Um yeah, I think there I think there's all kinds of ways. There ve there are very few people I think left in theorked world who don't have some kind of encounter with this sort of informal learning. Um I I I think you know just an enormous number of people in a very short period of time. I mean obviously there have always been people who do DIY kinds of things and stuff like that but the degree to which online resources has shaped those learning interactions um is a profound change over the last uh decade or two. The uh um and I think it I think it reminds us to do a few things that are useful. One is to um is to conceptualize learning really broadly. Um, you know, a lot of times that we think of learning, we sort of we pin it down in education, K12 education, college, things like that, but that's that's a relatively small part of people's lives. Um, people are learning all throughout their lives all the time. Um, people are developing new skills for work. They're developing new skills around their interests. They're they're they're pursuing passions. They're doing whatever else. And so think I think it's very helpful when thinking about online learning to be really open um to all these kinds of things. And then you know I I would say if there's a core argument in peerg guided learning at scale it's that these technologies have been so profound in changing the ways that we pursue learning outside of school and schools have proven to be institutions that are just remarkably resistant um to these forms of learning as well. Well, my hunch is most of you don't have an experience where you feel like, yeah, the kind of learning that I did in my eighth grade physics class was really just like the kind of learning that I did to learn photography or something like that. Um, there's something about schools um and the design and organization of schools that makes it really hard for these kinds of learning environments to make their way in. Um, I think a lot of what I want to share with you today are some of the most substantial efforts particularly in higher education to figure out how some of these approaches to um peer-guided learning at scale could make their way into formal institutions. Um I the ideas that I am presenting to you when I you know if I was talking about them 10 years ago I would have positioned them more as these are very viable ways in which at least higher education maybe a number of forms of education might substantially change in the next five or 10 years. Um and I think I will I'm more likely to present you them today as an interesting dead end. um as a set of things that people were trying putting a lot of effort behind putting a lot of design behind and and really didn't have um much impact in how especially higher education Kate in how in how formal education of all kinds are organized um you know studying things that flop is is good we're going to come back to this a few different times studying things that flop is really important to figure out um why things work if you just study uh things that work um you actually don't know why they work you know the characteristics I have, but but there's lots of things that are in common between things that work and things that don't work. Um, and so that's what we'll uh we'll delve into some today. Um, maybe I'll talk for a little bit and then see what kind of thoughts you have. All right, so we are I think we did the Rainbow Loom story. We talked about this the other the other day. This is, you know, one I think iconic moment of, you know, the creation of a new craft generates um these these new kinds of communities. Um, this was from 2013. You know, low tech but high in creativity. The Rainbow Loom has kids hooked, spending hours after school and on weekends making bracelets, weaving together small, colorful rubber bands on a simple plastic loom. Um, and all of the um the narrative around Rainbow Loom was, man, look, we finally got kids off their phones. Like, we finally got kids in the real world connecting to one another. You know, this is I think 2013 that this is published right before Christmas. Um, but of course the kids were were on their phones the whole time that they were playing with Rainbow Loom. And so this is Ashley and Steph um who are these two girls, you know, who have 200, you know, a quarter of a million people subscribed to. Oh, this is Yeah. How to make a Rainbow Loom Starburst bracelet. When whenever I recorded this um 30 million views, um probably 10 times as many that were on the official Rainbow Loom um Starburst page that somehow these uh these two kids had um captivated. I I don't know. It's hard to say that it was millions of people because it actually could have been like a couple hundred thousand people each watch this like 10 or 20 times because it's super hard to make one of these bracelets. Um but uh um you know I think a a compelling example of how network learning was you know and and and something like this if you're my age you know looking at this in 2013 it's it's really hard to imagine something similar happening in 1990 or something like that. Like if someone had invented a new kind of craft you would have like had to go to a craft store. You would have had to join a club. be able to go to classes. There have to be a college club or something like that. Um there wouldn't, you know, I I mean, you know, maybe PBS would put on a television show about it. You'd have, you know, you could imagine like the Bob Ross of Rainbow Loom or something like that. Um but uh you know, um very hard to imagine the same kind of highly decentralized um uh mechanism by which learners connect themselves to each other. I think one of the things I'm going to ask you to um read for an upcoming week, I can't remember, it's next week. Um uh but this uh piece by Ivon Illich called Deschooling Society um I think it's written in the 1960s. Um and he he almost exactly with like the very dawn of computing and he predicts learning networks that that emerge like this. Um he says you know one day I mean he has a funny way of describing he says well you know one day there's going to be a bunch of learners um who write down the things they're interested in learning on punch cards because that's what computers at the time and there's going to be a bunch of experts who share their interests on punch cards and the computers are going to connect these punch cards together um and get people teaching and learning from one another and like we it turned out we had YouTube rather than punch cards but um it was a pretty similar kind of phenomenon um there are you know in in the in the 20 in the early 2010s, there were some people who were particularly enthusiastic about the fact, you know, so one thing about Rainbow Loom you could say is something like, well, all right, so some kids figured out how to make plastic bracelets. That's okay. Um, but there are people who achieve like elite levels of performance in a variety of different disciplines and domains by following the same kinds of practices that the Rainbow Kids, Rainbow Kids were using. So, this is a guy named Julius Jgo who, as I recall, won a silver medal in the Olympics. Um, he was from Kenya and he was a javelin thrower. There are no field athletes in Kenya. They're all track runners. Um, and for whatever reason, Julius Diego got it in his head like, I'm going to be a javelin thrower. Um, and uh, you know, I mean, here, you know, my coach is me and the YouTube videos. Um, and he became an elite, you know, globally recognized ath. I mean, there's a there's a there's a moment where this tips. there's a moment where he goes to um a track and field competition um you know he doesn't really have a coach and he throws a javelin pretty far and some people notice him and kind of take him under his wing and stuff like that. So it's not you know it's it's not just YouTube videos that get you entirely to um being the second best javelin thrower in the world. Um but uh but going quite a long way you know there's there's echoes of this of the story that I told you before of uh um Batush the boy genius of Ulan Batar the the kid who sort of discovered in Mongolia um through MITx and things like this the idea that these could have these profound democratizing effects like you don't you know you don't have to be um in in a country that has a really big track and field infrastructure um to be able to become a great athlete. You can do it anywhere because we have YouTube now. Um, so in I I was working for Harvard X in 2013. Um, uh, maybe I, you know, maybe I'll pause to tell this story, too. Well, I don't know what the right order is now that I'm inspired by it, but um there was this term massive open online courses and it actually was not originally applied to the courses that came out of Corsera um and edex and MITx and Udacity and things like that. There were a group of Canadian educators who 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011 started building theseworked courses. Um, some of the I'll go more into the details of the network courses, but you would basically kind of create an online learning environment, have people create blogs, connect on Twitter, form social network connections with one another and sort of all be studying the same thing at the same time. Sometimes some of the people would be getting credit from some institution and other people would not be getting credit. They were all kind of openly being involved. You know, a few thousand people, probably the largest of these, um, signing up. And so there was actually a reporter who when um Edex and Corsera got started was trying to figure out what these things should be called. Um and somebody said like well these Canadian guys have these things called massive open online courses. Um and the name stuck but it stuck to describe something very very different. Um, one of the things that we recognized early on is that is that in the early days of people doing the massive open online courses that came out of Harvard and MIT is many of them were not just using the course materials that were being provided on these platforms, but they were using all kinds of other things. So, you'd ask people and they're like, you know, um, yeah, well, we're searching for all kinds of things that show up. We're reading like the Wikipedia entries about the things that show up in these classes. We're buying additional books that are around them. Um, we're looking for those books on Google books. We're joining Facebook groups of people who are studying these courses together and things like that. Um, and so the the the the barriers between these sort of instructorg guided learning at scale, these like highly structured learning management system kinds of things and the sort of informal world of people messing around on YouTube learning about stuff um sort of uh smooshed together. probably a bunch of you have some kind of experience of that in your classes too. I mean presumably all of you like are like when you don't understand something in class you're looking up online videos about it or you don't like the lecture and you know probably mostly in your technical classes you watch it from some other place. I don't know do any of you join groups or like find communities of people who are good at at solving problems and the things that you're interested in. One thing about being an MIT student is you can go on OCW if you miss a lecture or you don't understand the lecture you want to explain in a different way from a different professor just watch that same lecture which I've done before for some of my more technical classes. Yep. So yeah, so you can rewatch sort of past things. Some professors are sort of pretty explicit about that. You know, they'll be like, "Well, this is my lecture, but like somebody else filmed, you know, roughly the same course four years ago, and so you can watch all those things." Um, how many of your classes still use Piaza or some kind of discussion forum sort of things? Um, are the are the Piaza forms ever insufficient and then you go to Stack Overflow or to some other kind of maybe for your coding classes and things like that? I would say Piaza has like a weird social dynamic in itself. No, I want that now. Tell me more. I think it's like um I mean like obviously you can both do like anonymous questions and non-anmous question but usually it seems like you know it it really depends on a little bit on like who's really using it and also how responsive the faculty and stuff are and how they choose to respond because that I have been in a in quite a few classes where like log on and then it's like yes I had that question and they're like oh sorry we boarded the question weird but then I've also been quite a few classes where it's like they're asking this like super highlevel question about the lecture and then it kind of sets that expectation for the class especially if it's a larger class of like oh like my like quotequote dumb questions not going to be answered yeah it's not going to be kind of respected or things like that yeah you know And um I mean because these things are social in nature, I bet a lot of those things can be determined pretty early on by the actions of a couple of people. Um when we were studying Massive Women online courses, one of the things we found in the discussion forums, the largest threads, the most upvoted kinds of things were almost always amongst the very first topics cho like posted. So, so it wasn't like the forums were surfacing um like it wasn't like there was lots of ideas and the most interesting or important of those ideas were surfacing at the top. It was like somebody jumped in there first and then people started talking about those things, you know. Um and you could imagine you could imagine an alternate timeline of the exact same course you're in where the first two people to co post happen to just be people who are like I don't understand this really basic thing. Will someone explain it again? And the forums have sort of a whole different uh character to them. I mean to some extent I think of computer programming in particular as a field that depends upon this kind of informal learning that b like that basically no one knows enough about programming languages and how they operate and how they solve problems and so you you essentially can't do that profession if you can't figure out how to navigate all the online resources all online communities and things like that. And unusually um you can you can be pro be promoted and thrive in those communities through your participation in some of these kind of informal learning networks. You know you can be really active I mean in creating open source projects or just be a really active contributor to Stack Overflow or other kinds of communities like that get recognized for your contributions and have that translate into other kinds of opportunities. So um the boundaries between um there there are ways that I think these informal learning environments and formal learning environments the boundaries can permeate even if as we'll keep talking about like just trying to take the whole informal peer guided learning infrastructure and bring it into schools seems not to to work pretty well. Um uh you know I think one of the actually one of the most compelling reasons for integrating technology into people's school learning at all is the idea that actually for most of your lives the kind of learning that you do will look more like the learning around your hobbies than it does look like the learning in your classes. You know in in the next couple of years some of you will keep taking classes for a long long time but most of you will probably stop um or take them only infrequently. You will probably however continue um to participate in these online learning communities. To me it raises really interesting questions like you know what responsibility does a school have for helping people become really good um you know at learning cooking through playing with recipes the way Dana described or or learning photography um through online forums or music through uh online videos in the way that that Jiren and Omar described. like what what would what would a K12 education look like if someone left school and they were like, I'm totally prepared to teach myself stuff by engaging these online communities because I've had a bunch of practice in those sorts of things. What would a what would a college education look like if it was good at that? I feel like that's like such an interesting point because I like think back to a conversation I had with my mom where she like grew up and was out of college or out of high school like right before the like really dawn of like computer classes in high school and middle school and like in middle school so like rudimentary to us we like learn how to use an Excel sheet and like just learn how to like Google things um and like a lot of just like the super basic skills like how to type on a computer a computer like keyboard that she doesn't know how to do and it almost seems like the next generation will like leave computer classes like knowing how to navigate these sites and like then all the stuff that I had to learn on my own like maybe I'm asking my kids like where did you learn that and they're just like in school. Um there was a phrase that was used for a number of years that was called digital native. Um the idea maybe maybe a more common you know phrase that you'll hear probably in the next few years will be something like AI native. um the idea that like what's the difference between having to learn something by by having it come into you into your into your life versus like having it be something that you kind of grow up with all the time. There's actually a bunch of good evidence that in fact that digital natives that young people are actually not that much better at using technology especially learning things than older folks. Um you know young people in schools are usually pretty good at doing certain kinds of technology mediated things but the things that are most helpful for learning they're often no better at than sort of anybody else. Um although I' I've always liked the idea you know one of the things that comes along with the idea of immigration of digital natives and so digital immigrants and digital natives is that uh um you know second generation immigrants are always taking on new responsibilities for teaching their first generation parents about things you know you like you you grow up in a country and you learn the language you learn the culture you know other kinds of things that you sort of have to explain to your parents so there's something kind of nice about um that metaphor carrying over um something that I know state of Massachusetts is doing is um I don't know if I completely agree with it um blending computer science and computer literacy together. I do think that teaching computer literacy is of utmost importance. Um I credit a lot of my um computer literacy to my seventh grade seventh and eighth grade technology teacher. Um you know the link that I use now was created back in seventh grade. use is the very same account and he was the one who got me um I think I mentioned the typing lessons like the beginning of the class that's where I learned how to type um that's where I learned how to um create a portfolio create an online website um do like individual kind of research and like create a project on something that I'm interested about um and I think creating projects on something that's is like personal to someone within a K through 12 um lesson is really important for teaching them how to like conduct research take notes and uh come up with conclusions on what they've um gone up and looked for online. And a constant challenge educators have is what new things are actually worth investing additional discretionary time in. I mean, there were, you know, plenty of folks 10 years ago who said, man, it's incredibly important. Every high schooler should complete a MOO. MOUKs are going to be absolutely essential to how people learn and finish higher education in the future. If you can't do a MOO, you're really going to be left out. It's like, well, maybe not so much. turned like a LinkedIn profile however many years later still seems like a pretty handy thing to have. There is no reason 10 years ago that you could it's very easy to imagine a world where LinkedIn got replaced by something else entirely and mukes were super important like in 2013 the success paths of those things were not at all predictable. Um uh educators are super anxious about I I just gave it Aaron came to this conference with me. I gave a talk to a bunch of educators about AI and education on Monday. Um and there's a ton of anxiety about like how important are these things? What what do we not need? Does it make sense to teach kids the same way to search anymore? If you know, AI agents are just going to answer our questions for us or do we is it more important to be able to do that because the AI agents are going to say nonsense to us? Um all these all these kinds of things. Yeah. Ty, in that Oh, sorry. In that regard, like do you consider AI a form of like peer learning because it's been trained on pure community like stack overflow, all these other things. Question. Oh, so my first thing about AI um uh I was giving a talk with Jim Waldo um who's the who was the chief technical officer at Harvard. He's a neat guy um because he got he got a PhD in philosophy about 40 years ago then went and worked at Oracle, helped write Java. If you have an Android phone, you're probably running his code on it. Um and then he came back um and now he does policy stuff and he's sort of a philosopher again, but he's like AI what do you AI is what we call computing technologies that are new and we don't understand very well. Um, and 10 years from now, they won't be called AI anymore. Um, and so, uh, you know, like are generative pre-trained transformers peer communication? Well, you know, maybe, um, you know, if like what do I, what do I think? What do I think a peer-guided network is? Um, a learner enters a network with a wide range of learning resources that are generated by previously all human agents. Um, could an a, you know, could a generative pre-trained transformer generate a useful learning sequence? Seems plausible. Um, you know, I I I remain not entirely convinced. I I actually what somebody came up to me and was like like we're like we have a startup where we're creating online classes by having AI create the classes. And I was like, that just sounds like a terrible idea. In part because there's just such a huge surfet of classes. Like there's so many things out there and they're really not unfortunately that expensive to develop. Um like why do you mean machines to do them? Um uh I have a I have a colleague uh um Carolyn Ros who worked with chat bots for decades. Um uh and and she actually she's has convinced me to be very skeptical of interactions of individuals with chat bots. Um like I don't know how many of you in the last week spent more than an hour talking to a chatbot. Zero, maybe one. Um I just don't think people like it that much. Um she really thought that where they could be powerful is jumping in in the conversations between two people. Um that you just have peers talking to each other. So you're on this discussion forum and you're going back and forth or other things like that and then a bot comes in and sort of helps you um ask an interesting question. Get like oh look somebody over here has a different perspective on that. Let me connect you to that. and so you can talk and things like that. Um, but yeah, it totally I I think I think it totally seems plausible that a peer guided learning environment could include, you know, artificial agents that are doing things that humans had previously been doing. Yeah, I guess to like both your points of like a interaction, I I would say um um an interesting aspect of that especially in terms of like what can be a credible source for learning and stuff like that. So, I think in California, or at least the the the part of California I was in for a while, we did have like a middle school little like a week-l long program that every kid had to do that was like, "Oh, you're 13. Here, make an email and here's how you Google stuff." Um, and like recently with um the new Google AI feature that kind of summarizes answers for you. Now, I was like thinking about like um how does that change kind of those levels of instructions? Because sometimes I look up things and I see the summary and I'm like I don't know what the answer is but I know it's not that and I and I go deeper. But like let's say if I'm a middle schooler and it's like well I don't learn this or I'm a high schooler that took that class in middle school and it's like well now I'm not sure or I take Bard's word for good. Yeah. Yeah. No, a hu a huge problem with GPT generated text is that it's probably much more useful for experts than for noviceses. Um, so if you're an if you know you ask a GPT to make eight things and and two of them are cool and six of them are nonsense or the opposite, an expert can tell the difference and be like, "Oh, that was an idea I didn't have before." But a novice can't. A novice just looks and be like, "Okay, these are eight ideas. They all seem plausible and they're confidently stated and things like that." It's a huge problem that educators are going to have to wrestle with um in the in the years ahead. Um it's, you know, the kind of class that you're describing, um if if it were to be taught 10 years ago, a big thing that educators were thinking about at the time was how are people going to navigate a social web? Um so, um when when the web was first developed, we'll get into this a little bit more, it was pretty hard for people to contribute to it. Um you had to know a little bit about FTP, you had to know a little bit about HTML, a couple other things like that. They weren't like super hard, but there was a relatively small portion of the population that added content to the internet. Um, and there were suite of technologies that got bundled and called web 2.0. Um, which said, okay, we're going to make it much easier for anybody to type things online. You can all start a blog. You can all start a micro blog. You can all make a simple website. You don't have to know how to code to do any of these things. Um, we're gonna we're going to use user interfaces to take away all that sort of programming expertise that's necessary. And so people thought, "Wow, you know, I bet our lives are going to and you know, young people's lives." If you, you know, if you were teaching 11 year olds, 12 year olds in 2013, you thought, man, a major thing they're going to have to do is how to connect and network with each other. We have to have them create their LinkedIn page um so that they know how to social network with each other. We have to have them um, you know, participate in online dialogues. We have to have them think about what are responsible ways of representing themselves. Um people talk a lot about their digital footprint um and other kinds of things like that. Um you know today a 13-year-old is entering a web environment in which there are lots of parts of social media which are collapsing. Um that uh um you know just as an example actually I was I went to the guy who ran this conference on Monday and well it was kind of so there were usually this conference get 100 or 150 people show up. It was about AI. They had 240 people show up and 70 folks were on the wait list. Um, tons and tons of interest from educators. And I and I went to the guy who runs it, Tom Driscoll, and says, "What do you think these teachers are interested in? Like what are you like, what do they want to know? Why are they here?" Um, and he's like, "You know what? I don't know." Um, 10 years ago, they would have had blogs. They would have, you know, participated in forums. They would have joined Facebook groups. they would have sort of like um uh they had there were many many more ways that educators were proactively um contributing their ideas to the web. Maybe not all of them. Maybe it was you know 10% of them or 20% of the time but enough of them that you could kind of get the pulse of a whole community. Um which he felt like and I agree you really can't do anymore. Um some of that is that there was there was a moment in web 2.0 know in which people believed that the infrastructure of the web might be really quite open and quite owned um or controlled by individual people um that there could be a world where people create their own websites, they create their own blogs, they host their own accounts and things like that. Um and uh you know I don't know when some of these things starting around 2015 2016 people started describing um the web we lost a kind of a kind of moment in which social media took a turn um uh you know so these are the kinds of things that like I don't know I was playing around with in 2004 2007 any of you have a live journal blog as one of the early sort of blogging sites people like create their own space and hosting it this was a wordpress.com blog of my wife and I you know, writing little stories about us, going on adventures and things like that. Um, posting pictures, hosting it ourselves. Um, and essentially Facebook came and sort of demolished all this. Um, and said, you know what, like you don't need to host your own blog. You don't need to um, you know, you don't need to like figure out an FTP server to upload your own pictures or use a picture interface. Like we're going to create an interface there. people participate in a lot of the same kind of practices on Facebook of writing little stories on the trips they do and posting pictures and stuff like that. But all of a sudden it was all controlled by Mark Zuckerberg. Um this was a quote from David Weinberger. In many ways Facebook fulfilled the dream of blogging but like not exactly like like everybody was online but they weren't in spaces that they owned, had control over, had some familiarity with. Um and then um we'll talk about some of this as it goes along. Um, I think there was a there was a moment in which participation in a broad online life felt much less toxic and draining and vulnerability inspiring as it does right now. Um uh you know I mean if if there are there if you're a teacher who's working in a state which has recently passed a divisive concepts law um or other things like that regulating the kinds of topics you can talk about and things like that like all of that has a sort of chilling effect um you know not I mean not to mention just the the ways in which you know the social media services Facebook Twitter other kinds of things we use have sort of degraded um in their conversations over time um uh you This is what David Weinberger said. The bloggers field did not scale. Um like like there you know some people created their own blogs but not everyone. Um and then Facebook came in and many people who created blogs like I'll just post to Facebook. A lot of those people have like moved over to Substack now or other kinds of things like that but but systems that they don't control. Um there is I think a parallel to that story that happened in higher education. Um so in the early days um when the web was first made available broadly to schools which also h you know happens to overlap with my life. So I I think in 1993 Dartmouth College is the first college to give um every incoming student an email address. I think in 1994 very quickly many many other colleges had done that. By the time I graduated high school but certainly by the time I was into college in 1996 um I had an email address. everybody else would have had an email address. That would have been, you know, um pretty pretty universal and standard. Um but this is what university web pages looked like at the time. Um MIT still has some of these kinds of things. Has anybody ever been to somebody's tilda space? You know, www.mmit.eduilda jri or something like that. Who do you um Oh man, the 1806 professor. What's what's his forgetting? Um the one who just retired Gil String. Good. Perfect. Great. Others that people can think of who have these things? So, um um so some things that you'll notice about the Well, I don't know. What do you just looking at these pictures? What do you notice about these things? What strikes you about them? There were some giggles before, which I think is appropriate. Like everything is okay. So, you know, not a lot of font diversity. What else? There's no advertisements. Yeah. Good. No, these are so so these were not created like with Wix or something like that where in exchange for making a website you have to put a bar of advertisements at the bottom or something like that. So somebody actually made these pages. They're all personal homepages. Other things that strike you? The backgrounds. What about the backgrounds? Um it's certainly of like I don't know. I I feel like I I personally associate them with a very specific time period. Okay, good. It's like this is natural. They they have they have a '9s aesthetic to them. Yeah. I would say maybe it is like partially just like the quality of like like let's say a pattern or something you can put on or like now we have a lot of templates that make sure it's like aesthetically consistent. This is pre-CAva. We're not we're not uh Ken, what were you going to observe? Oh, I was about to say about the templates like they're not all using the exact same uh template and similar formatting. They're not all using the exact same template in similar formatting. I think that that is actually quite important. Um there are some good things that templates do of make things looking um uh aesthetic. Um but they standardize in a way. They they put things in the same way. People at universities do really really different kinds of things. That might be important. Other observations about these? It's very speromorphic. Um, like there's buttons on the the bottom left one with like icons that you don't see as often. And I want to say the background, especially the bottom left, reminds me of a a physical wallpaper. Uhhuh. Um, which is like a principle. Do you want to define skuorphism for us? Skeorphism is like the most famous example. It's probably like iOS 6 where you have all these buttons and like reflections that sort of try to mimic real life. And that's like what skuomorphism is trying to mimic real life. And then when we transition to iOS 7, you removed a lot of that dimension and it became a lot more simplistic and and symbolic. A lot of the early note-taking apps would have a background like a yellow legal pad or or like a spiral binding on the side or something like that and you're like, "Brother, we could put the we don't need the lines. Like the cursor will do that for you." Um but um people wanted to make some kind of connection between what they saw be you know what they saw in the physical world and what this new digital thing was trying to do. Skeumorphism shows up in that book somewhere. I can't remember now where I wrote about it but um um yeah I mean obviously these pictures are just outstanding. Um uh just like people had kind of like a cool idiosyncratic um personalized kind of a bane in the butt to organize sort of blogosphere that existed that Facebook just came and sort of demolished and homogenized and standardized and pulled out of the control of individual people's spaces and into this sort of corporate space. Um, you could say that Blackboard did something very very similar to campus web pages. Um, that learning management systems came along um and they said, "We're gonna standardize it all." Um, you you don't have you don't have to create your own page anymore. Like Blackboard will create your own faculty page, create your own course page. Um, and that's going to come with some kind of benefits of standardization. It's going to make it a lot easier for people, but it's but it's also going to get rid of um some of the kind of wonderful idiosyncrasies um of these things. And it's going to mean that there's a corporate entity who is who is not accountable who's accountable to their shareholders and not accountable to the same values that we might have as a university, which is deciding what those things look like. Much like when we move all of our blogs onto Facebook, um you don't even you're not even accountable to shareholders. are just accountable to whatever Mark thinks you know people should be doing in Facebook. Um yeah, in many ways Blackboard fulfilled the dream of the university till the spaces did not scale. I believe the problem could have been solved but then Blackboard happened. Um why would Blackboard happen? Um these are the instructions for Sunni onion about how you would go about creating one of your tilda space pages. you know, log into AAD, create a directory, change to this directory, create HTML documents, um, HTML developers jumpstation, you know, set pro equals w file namex. You can like you read about a page of this stuff and you're like, "Yeah, I can see why a lot of people, you know, like why launching a Blackboard page might be uh might be fine." Um, uh, uh, this is what the um, what is this blackboard? I don't I don't remember what uh learning management system this was. Maybe it's Canvas. It's not Canvas. I don't I can't remember what it is now. This is the this is the very first version of a sort of a version of this course um that I taught 10 years ago. Um and this is the this is the page that the that the system generated for me um when I first created the class. So it comes with a bunch of these sort of st not not this stuff that I added but syllabus class sessions other resources assignments collaborate information reserves list search this site lecture video um it makes a set of assumptions about what my course is um it says you know this is what the standard format of this learning experience should be um but maybe that's not at all what I want it certainly doesn't make a lot you know if I had if I had taught this class about this was in an education school if I had made this class about education technology ology about um the experience of indigenous kids learning on reservations about um I don't know the uh um global education policy um intermediate statistics it all would have been the exact same format um they would have given the same sort of standardized creation for this which just in lots of you know it makes sense in some kind of ways and it's bonkers in other kinds of ways our courses are super different why should all of our courses have the same template why should we all be sort of subtly invisibly squished into teaching our courses the same way um by by these kinds of structures. Um and of course there's all kinds of physical analoges to this too. Um the the way we design environments shapes the learning experiences um that happen in the I just read a beautiful sentence of this which is you know something like um it was something like buildings have agenda for their occupants. um the way that spaces are created, like it doesn't tell you what to do, but it certainly guides you. You know, you walk into a room like this um and you have some thoughts about the kind of learning that's going to happen in that space. Like, well, you're all going to be facing in the same direction. Probably not going to be talking to a whole each other a whole lot um in that space. There's some, you know, you're going to be writing with certain kinds of physical materials. If you try to use a laptop on those, uh, you know, square square tables, you'll have a hard time, you know, there's no room for power cords or other kinds of things like this. Um this is actually one of the most famous examples in elite private education in the United States. Um which is uh um there were um uh donors to the the Philips exit school who were really concerned um that that essentially there's too much instructionism and not enough constructionism. They wouldn't have said it the exact same way, but they would have said something along those lines. Too much sitting passive listening, not enough sort of engaged conversation. Um and so a a bunch of donors uh got together um and they said in every classroom we're going to pull out all of the chairs that look like this and we're going to put in these tables called Harkness tables. Um some of the features of Harkness tables are that you need to be able to fit everybody in the class sort of in an oval around the table. Um the tables are so large that they usually have to be like built in different pieces and then shipped into the room and t