Again and again I find the most interesting things that turn up in my various web pokings is not what is served up on a platter as an answer like search or now spewed into prosaic all knowing “intelligence” by generative machines.
It’s what I find accidentally, often when i am looking for one thing completely unrelated. There has to be a clever word in a non English language for this phenomena. If you ask the machines, they suggest Serendipity, which is not quite what I am after. Maybe closer is apophenia “the tendency to perceive meaningful connections between unrelated things.” But its some combo of both.
But phooey on definitions. This is it in action.
It starts with reading a new “post” (in quotes) by Lance Eaton “…screw around with it. See what it does. And we have to do that, fearlessly” an interview he did with Corrie Bergeron (I dug around to see any current blog, profile links, alas I just get a LinkedIn profile, through which I do find a most cleaver association description with SCA).
It’s funny because I know I have crossed comment, blog, social media, video session moments with Corrie. I can’t recollect a conversation or meeting in person- which I say knowing full well he might reply and say “We met at NMC in ….”.
In his interest, Lance is asking about Generative AI and Corrie refers back to PLATO- I can remember some of my first computer experiences at University of Delaware where I had a part time job as a PLATO tutor:
Back at PLATO in the ’90s, we did something called Math Problem Solving, which kind of simulated AI in DOS, with a coach based on a state engine. It looked at the state of the simulation and provided coaching to the student as they went through it, based on the state of the various objects in the system. It worked pretty well.
https://aiedusimplified.substack.com/p/screw-around-with-it-see-what-it
Okay, that is a possible jump off memory path, but the real journey begins down page, with their recalling of the early excitement era when there was a magical platform that rhymes with Bitter, when Corrie says:
So there’s this presenter named David Warlick, this science teacher from Georgia I think, and he says something profound. He says, “We are the first generation in history who knows that we have to prepare the next generation for a future that we know we can’t imagine.”
https://aiedusimplified.substack.com/p/screw-around-with-it-see-what-it