Telling your Ai Stories

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Introduction

This post is a redraft from 30 July 2024. I’m going to describe the workshop that I facilitated. The title – “Ai Literacy: Telling your Ai Stories”. The workshop was part of the Serious Games Symposium held on the 17 September 2024.

The starting point for the morning’s session was an etherpad, a “synchronized notepad” that would be used for note-taking and collaboration. I first wanted to give workshop participants the experience of a structured conversation. Unlike Zoom chat, website chatbots or Generative Pretrained Transformers (Chat GPT), where a machine or a moderator determines what is seen or said. I wanted people to be free to understand and respond to questions. To use the etherpad to make their thinking visible.

I also explained that I would be wearing two hats. My authentic “Parisian Beret”, worn by hipsters and revolutionaries. Or my local 100% wool beret. Sold by Woolworths.

Participants were invited to create and tell two stories on a blog. One story would be Ai generated, while the other would be their authentic voice. I hoped to allow participants the opportunity to converse about and understand the many (dis)functions that come with “autonomous systems” especially when doing digital teaching. Ask questions as to whether ed-tech does deliver? And perhaps let us collectively gather our thoughts with conceptual tools that allow everyone to take agency, act and tell their own authentic story.

Derek Moore – Workshop Facilitator

Ai is contested territory, and some people sometimes get quite upset when Ai is discussed. We all agreed to a simple Code of Conduct that foregrounded our interaction.

  • Kindness
  • Intentional use of Resources
  • Fediverse First
  • Fellowship

Ai Literacy Task: Telling Two stories

My workshop began suddenly. The opening speaker did not pitch. I leapt in willingly, and introduce participants to the performance task. I asked them to tell two stories about Ai on a blogging platform.
The one story would be generated by Ai
The other story would be told directly by the narrator.
The workshop would be performative. Participants could tell their Ai stories on their own blogging infrastructure.Those who complete their two stories on their a blog could also submit their Ai story to the Journal of ExoTechnology and Education!

10 Steps to your own blog

10 Steps to your very own blog (Posted on my Instagram account)

Literacy once meant the ability to read and write. But with the emergence of new forms of media and platforms (like blogs), some have found it difficult to draw lines between reading, speaking, watching and writing (Korhonen, 2010) and thought an expanded understanding of “literacies” was needed.

I decided to begin our exploration of the topic of “Ai Literacy” in San Franciso. We tuned into Sophia Tung‘s “Self Driving Taxi Depot Shenanigans” video stream and the Waymo Honking story in a San Francisco charging lot.

@curiosior @Waymo robots gather together at 4 AM every morning in front of my apartment and honk their horns at each other. This absurdity happens most of the day. #robot #car #cars #carsoftiktok #fyp #selfdriving ♬ Comedy Scenes – Comical, stupid, odd, lovely (Drumless)(1441321) – Ponetto

There we saw an autonomous system that was interacting with the environment and learning through reinforcement. This allows them to complete an extended sequence of maneuvers. We also saw how these systems were disturbing the peace. Systems that were opaque, uncertain and emergent. On the ether pad I posted links to Sophia Tung’s video stream. And asked participants to answer the following three questions.

  1. What’s going on?
  2. Are self driving cars going to work?
  3. You’ve had a seed of doubt or you might be wondering about?

Chat conversation was fabulous and comments were both funny and insightful and we laughed a lot. My favourite one was about Steve from Boksburg. Who decided to service his own self driving car and the chaos that might ensue.

I hoped that participants would begin thinking practically about Ai literacy, its purposes and the circumstances where it was important. I pointed out that Sophia Tung had been articulate and digitally literate to highlight that Waymo Cars (Google’s autonomous car system) was not working in her environment. She demonstrated her literacy on her Youtube livestream and community chat (the above TikTok is one of the reactions to her self driving cars stream).

When it comes to education and technology, I also think that we need to be critical about all autonomous systems. I adopt the following perspective…

“there is absolutely no inevitability as long as there is a willingness to contemplate what is happening”

— Marshall McLuhan, The Medium is the Massage

We then switched our focus from the future of driving (automated cars), to the future of teaching (education technologies). I asked participants to think about some grand technological visions. Like MOOCS, the 4IR or Ai in Education. Ask ourselves similar questions.

  1. What’s going on?
  2. Is education technology going to work?
  3. You’ve had a seed of doubt or you might be wondering about?

You the StoryTeller

Our ether pad conversation then shifted then from self driving cars, education technology and onto ourselves, who would be telling our stories. I asked participants to describe themselves on the etherpad and how they pointed towards their digital selves. I asked a few questions and again we had some interesting replies.

  1. What seven words would you use to introduce yourself as an academic to ANOTHER academic in an online space
  2. If you had to create a sign post to your corner of the web? What would you write on the signpost
  3. If someone asked you “Isn’t it narcism to put out your profile on the web?”, how would you answer them?

We also began to think about complicated words we use. Like “artificial intelligence”, “machine learning” or hallucinations. I suggested that we don’t always think about what these words mean and the implications behind those terms in our understanding of technology.

Our conversation was rich and engaging. And during this time I had been wearing my authentic french beret. But now it was time to look at our other story and put on my Woolworths beret.

1 | STOP – Ai should have a health warning

Just like many people once smoked, and didn’t consider the damage that was being done to their lungs or the people around them. I think that AI also should also have a health warning. Being knowledgeable requires time to combine words and language. We do research, add our experience and develop the capacity to articulate our thoughts. We become literate with pictures, words language and numbers. Becoming literate is hard hard work. Technologies have a history of making us seem both knowledgeable and knowledge-able. These tools and artifacts are helpful, but are also more than neutral things. They shape what we write, read and think. Impact what we perceive and do. Have a history. As we pursue the good life, we are being shaped by tools and technologies that have the capacity to do harm or negatively affect or benefit.

2 | INVESTIGATE – What Ai is and Ai n’t ….

(Credit: A Digital Learning and Inquiry experience brought to you by Middlebury College under a CC BY-NC 4.0 license).

Technical glitches, Wifi connectivity and my ad hoc teaching methods, meant that we did not explore or investigate any of these themes properly. And so I felt that I did not get round to showing some of these excellent constructionist activities that Tom Woodward (I think) and the team created. I did however, haul out the ChatGPT. And showed participants, how I could get a story generated about me, using a prompt or two.

[INSERT Video about prompting]

Time began to run out, and I had not really finished part 3 and part 4. (See below). So I rounded the my workshop off with Postman & Weingartner’s Teaching as a subversive activity and a small video

https://youtu.be/q0WIgQSJ67o

There was lots that I did not say in the workshop. I would have loved to cover the following two points

3 | FIND OUT – The Do’s and Don’ts When Using ChatGPT & Similar LLMs

4 | TRACE BACKWARDS  – What’s your digital story. Are you the autonomous narrator of your Ai story? Or is your “tech-positive” story narrated for you? Are you crafting stories from your story telling toolkit, or is the platform shaping your story? (thanks McLuhan)

I still would also like to award a Digital Badge to those can show and perform their two stories at a post workshop meeting (date to be decided).

References

Beetham, H. (2023). AI literacy and Schrödinger’s ethics: Reviewing the Russell Group’s Principles for the Use of AI in Education. Substack. https://helenbeetham.substack.com/p/ai-literacy-and-schrodingers-ethics

Biesta, G. (2015). How Does a Competent Teacher Become a Good Teacher?: On Judgement, Wisdom and Virtuosity in Teaching and Teacher Education. In R. Heilbronn & L. Foreman‐Peck (Eds.), Philosophical Perspectives on Teacher Education (1st ed., pp. 1–22). Wiley. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118977859.ch1

Brint, S. (2016). Thinking about Schools and Universities as Social Institutions: An Intellectual Self-Portrait. In A. R. Sadovnik & R. W. Coughlan (Eds.), Leaders in the Sociology of Education (pp. 37–55). SensePublishers. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-6300-717-7_4

Korhonen, V. (2010) Chapter 10 – Dialogic literacy: A sociocultural literacy learning approach, Editor(s): Annemaree Lloyd, Sanna Talja, Practising Information Literacy,
Chandos Publishing, Pages 211-226, ISBN 9781876938796,
https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-1-876938-79-6.50010-8.

Lu, C. (2024). Rethinking artificial intelligence from the perspective of interdisciplinary knowledge production. AI & SOCIETY, s00146-023-01839–2. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-023-01839-2

Matthews, A. (2023). The Mode 3 Network University and Design: A New Materialist Perspective. In N. B. Dohn, J. Jaldemark, L.-M. Öberg, M. Håkansson Lindqvist, T. Ryberg, & M. De Laat (Eds.), Sustainable Networked Learning (pp. 189–209). Springer Nature Switzerland. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-42718-3_11

Nørgård, R. T., Mor, Y., & Bengtsen, S. S. E. (2019). Networked Learning in, for, and with the World. In A. Littlejohn, J. Jaldemark, E. Vrieling-Teunter, & F. Nijland (Eds.), Networked Professional Learning (pp. 71–88). Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18030-0_5

Omizo, R., & Hart-Davidson, B. (2024). Is Genre Enough? A Theory of Genre Signaling as Generative AI Rhetoric. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 54(3), 272–285. https://doi.org/10.1080/02773945.2024.2343615

Pierosara, S. Narrative autonomy and artificial storytelling. AI & Soc 39, 1785–1794 (2024). https://link-springer-com.wikipedialibrary.idm.oclc.org/article/10.1007/s00146-022-01595-9

Postman, N. & Weingartner, C. (1969) Teaching as a subversive activity. Penguin. Available https://kairosschool.co.za/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/Teaching-as-a-Subversive-Activity.pdf

Rata, E. (2021). The Curriculum Design Coherence Model in the Knowledge‐Rich School Project. Review of Education, 9(2), 448–495. https://doi.org/10.1002/rev3.3254

Whittaker, Meredith, The Steep Cost of Capture (2021). Meredith Whittaker. 2021. The steep cost of capture. interactions 28, 6 (November – December 2021), 50–55. https://doi.org/10.1145/3488666, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4135581

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More Details

Title: Serious Games and AI Symposium
Date: 17 September 2024 online

P. S. Please note that I am an Ai Sceptic. But I am also drawn, like a curious moth, to most emergent technologies. I use Ai, I think that it holds some promise for language development in the majority world. I also acknowledge the ethical debt that accumulates with my experimentation. I too am a part of the apparatus.

Last Updated: 20 September 2024

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