Category: Block 3 – Algorithmic Culture

This block will look at the ways in which large quantities of digital data, and the algorithms that operate across it, are informing contemporary culture within and beyond educational contexts. Ted Striphas defines ‘algorithmic culture’ as: ‘the ways in which computers, running complex mathematical formulae, engage in what’s often considered to be the traditional work of culture: the sorting, classifying, and hierarchizing of people, places, objects, and ideas.’ In this block we will consider this idea and its implications for digital education. You will also begin work on the final assignment in block 3. from http://edc17.education.ed.ac.uk/outline-of-content/

From Blogs: A post on Algorithms

I’m reading around algorithms for my digital essay, though the topic will include Plagiarism Detection or similar. I’m also reading over MSCEDC blogs. It’s a great experience. I found this post on Eli’s blog post about Algorithms to be very thought provoking. I wonder if students realise that their work submitted to turnitin is available almost in perpetuity, long after they, and probably their lecturer’s, have left academia…..

Pinned to #MSCDE on Pinterest

From Blogs: The singularity

[spoiler alert] If we combine algorithmic culture and cyberculture, we translate our own atoms in to light particles capable of faster than light travel. The singularity where machine learning happens so fast it is no longer possible to measure it… thanks to Matthew via Eli for that entertaining thought!

Don’t talk in front of robots? 5-min drama from @guardian, worth a watch: https://t.co/P3tw4dgUYz Probing re. ethics, us & the end. #mscedc

From Twitter: Big Data – Every keystroke indicates your mood?

From Twitter: Testing the algorithm on Google Play

Hipster algorithm? I wasn’t explicitly looking for Ghost in the Shell soundtrack, but the algorithm picked up on “trends” and presented it anyway. As it happened, it was also just the type of music I was looking for!

Another brick in the wall – My part II

Looking back over my blog, Nigel and I had an idea that the anthemic Pink Floyd Song “another brick in the wall part 2” might have relevance to the First Block of Education and Digital Cultures.

On review, I think it probably has more to say about Block 3. Not that I’m trying to shoe-horn this song in to my life stream, but I did grow up with Floyd.

If the metaphor is changed from thinking about student rebelion, to governmental control, as suggested in the blog post by Walter Benjamin it is much easier to look at the issues surrounding algorithms in education. Particularly with relevance to any perception of “loss” of teaching as a human-only skill, in favour of the AI, Microlearning, and adaptive pathways for students.

The sausage machine metaphor could readily sit with xMOOCs too.

From Twitter

Starbird sighed. “I used to be a techno-utopian. Now I can’t believe that I’m sitting here talking to you about all this.”

The depressing reality that people are people no matter what tools they use to express their humanity.

From Twitter- April Fool with an algorithmic twist

This April Fools from NVidia was very well done. It would be no surprise to hear that it pulled some people in. The thought that machines can play your game for (or against) you is nothing new. “Bots” have been in existence for years that would do just that, either as opponents in your game or even autoscripts to take on the more mundane tasks in video games or just play for you entirely. But this video suggests something very much more appealing. “Deep learning algorithms” which will even “talk or emote” on your behalf! It’s like you never left your seat… I wonder if NVIDIA will ever release the numbers of sign-ups they captured on that page…

Week 10 – Round Up

Week 10, and my final weekly round-up post, chronologically at least. I’m still missing at least one somewhere back a few weeks which I’ll take time to pick up along with the general tidying up of my lifestream blog that will take place in the next couple of weeks.

I’ve added a new category of posts this week entitled “Algorithmic Culture and Turnitin“. I had intended to use these to record my activity toward my digital essay, but as I pause to reflect over the task at hand in preparation of this blog for submission, I’m not sure if that’s actually advisable. I may have to pick up my own blog somewhere else to continue with this.

This week was also one of the busiest periods of the year at my work, with the Multilingual Debate 2017 happening on-campus (Heriot-Watt University) and streamed online. The afternoon debate was around the subject of robots, so there was plenty of discussion coming up that I saw as relevant to the #MSCEDC which I combined with #MLD2017 (the event hashtag).

This was also the week of the final Hangouts session, for which I managed to use a chroma key filter to create a backdrop of a selection of images I used for my Block 1 Artefact. This went down well, but the novelty did not detract from an excellent discussion with the class, though it may have etched a resilient memory in the minds of some. I thoroughly enjoyed this session, and took a lot of notes that will be most useful in my Digital Essay.

This was also the week to reflect on the analysis conducted on the tweetorial. My official response is written, as requested. I also put together some thoughts to help me get started writing using video.

 

p.s. The idea of an EDC playlist still entices.

 

 

Tweetorial and TweetArchivist – my thoughts

How has the Twitter archive represented our Tweetorial?

TweetArchivist has represented our “intensive tweeting” period as a series of graphs, tables and word clouds. It has used quantitative measurements such as a sum (e.g. total number of tweets per user), averages (e.g. word clouds) and counts (e.g. number of hashtags used). It has done so with a tool that is not specifically designed to offer learning analytics. Not say that fact precludes its presentation from being used in such a manner, which I’ll get to later in this post.

Continue reading “Tweetorial and TweetArchivist – my thoughts”

Some thoughts down on video ahead of my tweetorial write-up

Never sure how to get video to embed properly in this blog from the media service, and I’m out of time, so here are a couple of links to the same thing:

https://media.ed.ac.uk/media/Week+10+-+some+commentary+around+the+tweetorial+exercise/1_pf9xf2ig

https://media.ed.ac.uk/id/1_pf9xf2ig

From Twitter – If you ever need an example of the need for thorough preparation…

And here’s the image in question:

From Twitter – Multilingual Debate 2017

“This house believes that robots will soon be a positive and defining feature of our daily lives”.

I was part of the organising committee for a large event the Multilingual Debate 2017 which happens every year. It’s actually TWO events morning and afternoon, both on-campus and streamed online. Our students simultaneously interpret the entire debate in to multiple languages (including British Sign Language). Capturing this online is no mean feat, and we used a variety of social media to try to engage our online viewers, including Twitter.

From Twitter

Robots, AI and algorithms are heavily intertwined. The use of education has been discussed, but someone brought up the implication of using advanced technology in war. Thsi is harking back to the dystopian future revealed in Terminator and other such movies, but is becoming a very real concept, so much so that it’s brought up during a debate where the audience on-campus consists mainly of high-school aged children. It’s hard to imagine what sort of world our sons and daughters will grow in to. Certainly I doubt my parents would have imagined anything like we have now.

Week 9 – Round Up

All of my life-stream posts this week came from Twitter. I need to get some space from the discussion, to see how much contextualization is required for each post. Not every post I made is covered in the life-stream, at least.

The Twitter Tutorial was surprisingly taxing. Keeping track of multiple threads of discussion; trying to get across your point of view in just 140 characters, or far fewer when factoring in the Twitter furniture than comes with every post. This reminds of why I have previously decided not to use Twitter.

Examples of the themes that I picked up on during the tutorial are:

I felt the benefits of discussing my ideas with the class. Their feedback was helpful. There’s plenty to digest and consider. I haven’t reeled it all in as much as I would like. Having installed Twitter on my mobile phone, I do find that it’s quite invasive, so maybe something will pop up that I’m hard pressed to ignore. I would like to spend a bit of time reflecting on the themes raised during the tutorial and pulling in some images and videos.

Also, I have decided to pursue the use of Turnitin, similarity and plagiarism as my piece of assessment. Some form of video as suggested by James in last week’s feedback. Perhaps a mini-documentary of sorts.