IP 2 - Artificial Intellegence

(*All text in brackets is “flavor text” and is not included in word counts...including this header*)

Who were these people, and how did/does each contribute to the development of artificial intelligence? How did/does each think “intelligence” could be identified?

Alan Turing

The “Father” of modern computing. Turing was the innovative genius responsible for many foundational concepts in Computer Science including some of the earliest electromechanical devices.

His work on applying these concepts while working as a codebreaker during world war 2 helped the allies win the war in the Atlantic.

Much of his work was not public due to wartime restrictions and because of his tragic death in 1954.

John McCarthy

(Can we applaud the level of nerd it takes to get kicked out of Caltech for refusing to attend PE classes?)

If Turing was AI’s father, McCarthy was the parent who named it, along with three other names on this list (Simon, and Minsky)  in the Datrtmuth workshop in 1956.

In addition to writing on the field of AI and its philosophy, McCarthy also solved a large number of technical problems including being the first to implement time-sharing, which is the backbone on which most computer infrastructure runs in the modern day (we know them as servers). (Wikipdia, 

Herb Simon

Herb Simon is one of the early theorists of AI. He focused on decision making and leaned towards the social sciences. His push, the one that earned him a Nobel prize, was around the need to collect data before a decision can be made. With this he developed a theory for simulating the problem solving process This is a core tenant of how machine learning algorithms process information today. (UBS, n.d.)

Marvin Minsky

If Herb Simon represents learning by crunching massive piles of data, Minsky represents the Neural Network which relies heavily on multiple layers of machine decision making processes modeled on the human brain. Ironically, some of his work with Seymore Papert is understood to have changed the course of AI research erroneously away from neural networks due to pessimistic views on future problems in the discipline. (Minsky, n.d.)

(While you want to hear about Minsky’s contributions to AI, I also want to note him being credited with making famous the useless box)

Timnit Gebru

A modern example of AI progress to contrast with the white guys above. Timnit is credited with bringing discriminatory AI into the public consciousness.

As we will discuss below, machine learning is only as good as its dataset and Timnit was someone looking at how biased datasets could create biased AI. (as an aside, 99% Invisible did a great segment on this in their You’ve Got Enron Mail episode) (Hao, 2020)

How do “machine (programming) languages” differ from human (natural) ones?.

XKCD.com - Misinterpretation - by Randall Munroe (2018) (xkcd comics have scroll-over text. This one’s is: "But there are seven billion people in the world! I can't possibly stop to consider how ALL of them might interpret something!" "Ah, yes, there's no middle ground between 'taking personal responsibility for the thoughts and feelings of every single person on Earth' and 'covering your eyes and ears and yelling logically correct statements into the void.' That's a very insightful point and not at all inane.")

The communication flow between natural and computer language can be summed up by the fact that all computer language is meant to eventually be translated in machine code of zeros and ones. Each term is translated to a specific meaning when interpreted by the compiler. Most compilers will also refuse to compile language that it does not recognize. Natural language is far less logical. It includes multiple layers of meaning to interpret ranging from simple syntax, to variations in tone(when verbal communication is considered). It also complicates communication that natural language changes over time and has to be interpreted by the receiver no matter how error-strewn it is (though, as a teacher I do like to throw error messages at my students who communicate poorly much like a compiler does).

How does “machine (artificial) intelligence” differ from the human version?

“Intelligence has been defined in many ways: the capacity for abstraction, logic, understanding, self-awareness, learning, emotional knowledge, reasoning, planning, creativity, critical thinking, and problem-solving. More generally, it can be described as the ability to perceive or infer information, and to retain it as knowledge to be applied towards adaptive behaviors within an environment or context.” (Wikipedia)

Machine intelligence is currently good at abstraction, logic, understanding, emotional knowledge, and problem solving.

The major difference between machine and human intelligence right now is the human intelligence’s ability to draw novel connections between disparate pieces of knowledge. This is what makes humans much better at self-awareness and creativity, though recent events with Google’s LaMDA AI may beg to differ. (Collins, 2021)

How does “machine learning” differ from human learning?

XKCD.com - Machine Learning - by Randall Munroe (2017)

(Is it bad to keep using xkcd comics? You told us to me multimodal….)

Again, a bit big for 100 words. ETEC 512 is a whole course on the latter concept. 

In short: machine learning is when you feed a lot of data into an algorithm so that it can recognize patterns. That algorithm can then be used to check a novel piece of data against the existing data to recognize patterns in the new data.

Human learning starts with sensory perception before that perception is committed to different synaptic branches of memory. Those branches are squishy and are not always reliable. When actions cause feedback, those things are re-wired into the synapses creating systems of learning that can explain parts of the more complex pieces of human thoughts and memories.

A machine learning system is only as good as its data. A Human learning system is only as good as its complex brain architecture.

And for your LAST challenge, a version of the Turing Test: how do YOUR answers to these questions differ from what a machine could generate?

Example AI Generated Essay from MyAssignmentHelp.com

The first question is: “Is the AI trying to answer these questions with the best possible answers, or the best answers to seem human?” (are we getting too meta with the Turing test?)

The above text is from MyAssignmentHelp.com when asked the differences between machine and human learning. Is it a mess, sure; is it assembling things within an imperfect set of rules like a seventh grader learning to assemble an essay? Also yes. This would be an example of an AI trying to be human. After all, this site exists so that students can convince their teacher that it is their work (the site emphasizes their premium, paid :Hire an Expert feature for that human touch).

There are layers to this question here. My original thought process is if the AI is tailor-made to respond in natural language with the parameters being “convince a human that I’m human while answering these questions”, I have reason to believe that it would answer in a similar way to me. What the AI produced was not nearly as convincing as I thought it would be and set my faith in machine learning back a bit.

Ironically, the AI answers the question about its own limitations: “Machine learning needs lots of sample data or data in general to learn and be able to find valuable information respectively results in patterns.”

And I love the Jerry Kaplan quote it found noting where human learning is far superior “...[when] there's no data, just some initial conditions, a bunch of constrains, and one shot to get it right” (Kaplan, 2016) 

(footnote: - the AI pulled the name with the quote but not the full citation which could only be found via Google search on a textbook that someone at SUNY Oswego forgot to make private, I could only find it in German via the UBC library. A machine learning Ai is only as good as it’s dataset after all.)

XKCD.com - Turing Test - Randall Munroe (2007)

References

Collins, E. , Ghahramani, Z., (2021) LaMDA: our breakthrough conversation technology, Google - the Keyword [blog] retrieved from https://blog.google/technology/ai/lamda/

Hao, K., (2020) We read the paper that forced Timnit Gebru out of Google. Here’s what it says, MIT Technology Review .https://www.technologyreview.com/2020/12/04/1013294/google-ai-ethics-research-paper-forced-out-timnit-gebru

Intelligence, (2022 May 21). In Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence

Kaplan, J., (2016) Artificial intelligence [textbook], Oxford University Press

Minsky, M., (n. d.)  Brief Academic Biography of Marvin Minsky, Retrieved from https://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/minskybiog.html

Munroe, R., (2007) Turing Test  , xkcd, retrieved from https://xkcd.com/329/

Munroe, R., (2017) Machine Learning  , xkcd, retrieved from https://xkcd.com/1838/

Munroe, R., (2018) Misinterpretation  , xkcd, retrieved from https://xkcd.com/1984/

UBS (n. d.) Herbert A. Simon, Nobel Perspectives, Retrieved from https://www.ubs.com/microsites/nobel-perspectives/en/laureates/herbert-simon.html 

IP 1 - Usability

 A Conception of Usability and Educational Usability

The concept of Usability is a complex one that is heavily influenced by the realm of product design and engineering design which has in-turn affected the realm of technological development and education by their association. A simple conception of usability as studied here is: 

The conscious process of including and testing a designer’s control over the experience of use of an object or process.

This concept of usability is actually easy to bridge into the educational realm using the educational equivalent, Task Design.(Galileo Educational Network, 2015) One paragraph that is particularly pertinent to this connection is: “people will leave the website [if]: 

(a) if is difficult to use; 

(b) if the users get lost on a website; 

(c) the information is hard to read; 

(d) it does not answer users’ key questions; 

(e) and lastly, if the homepage fails to define the purpose and the goals of the website.” (Issa, Isaias, 2015)

Likewise, students will disengage with lessons and learning activities if the activities are difficult to use, cause them to get lost conceptually, are difficult to understand due to language or other reading barriers, does not provide adequate feedback, and does not speak to the student’s need to know the information or skill. One common activity in both teaching schools and professional development time is having teachers sit in a variety of places in their classroom. It is a small exercise that speaks to the basics of communicating a concept such as sight lines and classroom acoustics (the real-world analog to information being hard to read on a website)

One difficulty in the on-the-ground experience of K-12 teachers is the fact that we can’t stop everything and do a usability test before releasing a product(lesson) to the customers. The process by which we navigate usability is actually more akin to the Design Thinking model than the formal process Woolgar lays out.

Figure 1: Design Thinking (IDEO, n.d.)

The examples of usability in the readings would occur during the prototyping phase of this process (“Test to Learn” in Figure 1), whereas in a classroom it may be happening during the Sharing of the Story (the Test phase in the d.School model of Design Thinking).

Does testing on the fly affect the parameters of usability testing? Probably not. It likely just creates lightning fast cycles through Norman’s Interaction Model (Figure 2) with less of a formal usability testing phase. A personal example of this is in a day-to-day teaching feedback cycle: The lesson and/or assignment are delivered, an assessment is given, the assessment is graded providing quantitative feedback to go with any qualitative feedback gained during the course of this lesson. In most cases the feedback gained in that cycle will then inform the next lesson as the class calibrates the teacher (to play on the phrase from Woolgar) into the next day’s feedback loop.

Figure 2: Norman’s Interaction Model (from Issa, 2015)

Usability Examples

Two examples of configuring the user in the Woolgar reading include the perception of the user by the Technical Support team and the attempts by the usability test to calibrate (we might say train) the user to operate the machine.

One example revolves around an engineering visiting a school and noting:

“And pinned above [the computers] were very very simple instructions for what to do. And they weren't, they looked like they'd been used, you know? It was almost as if they'd been unpinned, taken down and pinned up again and again so that someone had had them right by the machine.” (Woolgar, 1990, pg. 72)

The usability testing should identify that schools have specific Learnability and Robustness needs and that a “cheat sheet” is a really common way to bridge that gap with students.

The observers also provide a level of calibration that, while likely unintentional, detracts from truly testing the product effectively and instead just smooths the fears of the user, thus calibrating them.

“Observers frequently intervened to explain the origin of a problem in terms of a machine fault, where this prevented (or made difficult) the completion of the task by the subject:

4. (SPIAIS 29:05)

A: It's a hardware error (3.0) probably a loose connection(3.5) you always have these problems on pre-production. But why did it have to happen in the middle of a trial!” (Woologar, 1990, pg. 85)

These are examples of the usability testing process can calibrate the user, but technology can do this by itself. Nowhere is this more starkly evident than seeing the contrast in how I learned to understand technology as a 6-9 year old and how my daughters are doing the same thing now. I grew up with an MS-DOS OS and a Treasure Mountain game on a 3.5” floppy disc. If I wanted to play it I needed to navigate the series of text based commands needed to open the exe file and then begin playing; my children start their game playing workflow with a negotiation with their father for either technology time or to approve their game download. My children’s technology experience is calibrated for them by the devices they use as much as mine was to MS-DOS. Neither me nor  my daughters at 9 years old could operate each others’ technologies if we swapped. I would not understand the concept of a GUI any more than she would be with having a paper manual next to her computer; we were both calibrated for our technological surroundings.

Quotation Discussion

"…the usability evaluation stage is an effective method by which a software development team can establish the positive and negative aspects of its prototype releases, and make the required changes before the system is delivered to the target users"  (Issa & Isaias, 2015, p. 29).

“…the design and production of a new entity…amounts to a process of configuring its user, where 'configuring' includes defining the identity of putative users, and setting constraints upon their likely future actions” (Woolgar, 1990).

To be honest, I find a lot of the examples here to be a great exercises in configuring the user in a world where every computer required a user guide. The discussion of the machine as a text is apt here because how someone in 1990 would address a text is not the same as I am doing now from a process or context view 30 years later. Since looking at the Woolgar reading, I have searched the history of the Stratus 286 as well as drifting between a variety of web based sources in this exploration. Many of these were written by a democratic diaspora of digital natives who now maintain the knowledge infrastructure the world runs on.

Figure 3: XKCD - Dependency (Munroe, 2020)

It leads to a really strange question in usability which is not “how do I configure the user once my text leaves the walls of this company?” In this both sides of that usability argument are present as the product must be usable AND the user must be configured,

In 2022 it lies somewhere in the middle and is best summed up as: 

“how is the internet going to interpret this text(machine?) once they get ahold of it? Will the media that they (the crowdsourced internet) create configure the user in the way that I, the product designer, want for usability?”

References

d.School(n.d.) Getting Started with Design Thinking, Retrieved from https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources/getting-started-with-design-thinking 

Galileo Educational Network (2015) Focus on Inquiry - Chapter 2: Designing Great Tasks, University of Calgary, Retrieved from https://inquiry.galileo.org/ch2/designing-great-tasks/ 

IDEO (n.d.) Design Thinking, Retrieved from https://www.ideou.com/pages/design-thinking 

Munroe, R., (2020) Dependability [comic], xkcd, Retrieved from https://xkcd.com/2347/ 

Norman, D., (1986) Seven-stage model of (individual) interaction. Department of Computer and Systems Sciences, Lulea University. Bai Guohua, Sweden

Issa, T., & Isaias, P. (2015) Usability and human computer interaction (HCI).  In Sustainable Design (pp. 19-35). Springer.Woolgar, S. (1990). Configuring the user: The case of usability trials, The Sociological Review, 38(1, Suppl.), S58-S99.

Usability Week Activities

What is “usability” and why does it matter to educational technology studies?

Documentation tool

1. Learnability

Describe in your own words:

Based heavily on Norman's concepts of feedback and discoverability, a well designed learnable system can be interacted with to discover it's use.

Provide a concrete/practical example:

Touchscreens with feedback systems are the ubiquitous example nowadays.

2. Flexibility

Describe in your own words:

Are there multiple ways of achieving your goal?

Provide a concrete/practical example:

My favorite example in my day to day life is in AutoCAD how you can use buttons on the ribbon or the command line to enter your commands.

3. Robustness

Describe in your own words:

Is there a help menu, button, or feedback mechanism when you cannot discover how to move forward?

Provide a concrete/practical example:

Clippy. The annoying paperclip was an example of early design for robustness.

4. Efficiency

Describe in your own words:

Is the ceiling on how well you can use this tool/software sufficiently high to provide an incentive to become good with it.

Provide a concrete/practical example:

Early word processors like notepad provided very little in the way of efficiency-incentive as they were meant to be very basic tools.

5. Memorability

Describe in your own words:

How intuitive is the process of operating the software. Alternatively, how easy is it to commit to memory (frustration is memorable, so oddly some poorly designed systems could score high in being memorable)

Provide a concrete/practical example:

I don't have any personal examples of this at this point.

6. Errors

Describe in your own words:

What is the cost of making mistakes with this process?

Provide a concrete/practical example:

"Mr.Way, did you know that if you use a While(1) loop in this simulator it crashes the whole platform?"- Me, trying to break a new robotics simulator with my students (who clearly paid attention in Computer Science Class)

7. Satisfaction

Describe in your own words:

Do you hold this process or technology in your hands and does it spark joy?

Provide a concrete/practical example:

(this is more a satirical take on if the machines derived satisfaction from the encounter)

“Listen,” said Ford, who was still engrossed in the sales brochure, “they make a big thing of the ship's cybernetics. A new generation of Sirius Cybernetics Corporation robots and computers, with the new GPP feature.”

“GPP feature?” said Arthur. “What's that?”

“Oh, it says Genuine People Personalities.”

“Oh,” said Arthur, “sounds ghastly.”

A voice behind them said, “It is.” The voice was low and hopeless and accompanied by a slight clanking sound. They span round and saw an abject steel man standing hunched in the doorway.“

What?” they said.

“Ghastly,” continued Marvin, “it all is. Absolutely ghastly. Just don't even talk about it. Look at this door,” he said, stepping through it. The irony circuits cut into his voice modulator as he mimicked the style of the sales brochure.

“All the doors in this spaceship have a cheerful and sunny disposition. It is their pleasure to open for you, and their satisfaction to close again with the knowledge of a job well done.” As the door closed behind them it became apparent that it did indeed have a satisfied sigh-like quality to it. “Hummmmmmmyummmmmmm ah!” it said.

- Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Thinking Critically about Usability

Do the principles (and criteria) of “usability” that you’ve been working through and finding examples of (from Issa & Isaias, 2015, 2.4.3) fit into HCI’s ‘present,' as set out in the above diagram? Or do these principles (and criteria) of “usability” fit better in its ‘past’?

Contextual shifts matter in design and I think that is what makes this question really hard to answer. The In The Past aspects of usability are still important when designing experience and are intrinsically a part of the present ones, just in a more complex way.

Note that I say "designing experience" as this is the natural bridge between technology UI's and educational UX applications for this. The concepts used here to define website design are just as applicable to task design in education as they are to designing a theme park (Iwerks, 2019) or experience of designing a new car (Galdwell, 2020).

Of particular note is a quote from Don Norman, the father of Human Centred Design:

“The problem with the designs of most engineers is that they are too logical. We have to accept human behavior the way it is, not the way we would wish it to be.” (Norman, 1988)

References

Gladwell, M., (2020) Go and See, Pushkin Industries. Retrieved from https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/go-and-see

Iwerks, L., (2019) The Imagineering Story, Disney, Retrieved from https://www.disneyplus.com/en-gb/series/the-imagineering-story/6ryoXv1e1rWW

Issa, T., & Isaias, P. (2015). Usability and human computer interaction (HCI)Links to an external site.. In Sustainable Design (pp. 19-35). Springer.
Norman, D. (1988) Design of Everyday Things, (originally published as The Psychology of Everyday Things), Basic Books, ISBN 978-0-465-06710-7

Opening Activity - Truth and Reconciliation

This task is to identify indigenous themes and specific knowledge in a piece of educational text.

Looking at this I initially went to a document that came up as a guiding source multiple times early in my career as a teacher. At that time I was riding the beginning of a career temporary contract carousel and bouncing from school to school each year and this document was a guiding piece of work in the Professional Development process in multiple buildings.

The document is What Did You Do In School Today? - Exploring the Concept of Student Engagement and Its Implications for Teaching and Learning In Canada (Dunleavy & Milton, 2009) and it was an initiative by the Canadian Education Association to provide a framework for engaging students in school in a 21st century context. It is closely tied to Calgary and Alberta as the Galileo Educational Network has close ties to this city.

The overarching question I wanted to reflect upon was: “How is Indigeneity reflected in this document that we were using as foundational to student success ten years ago?”

The document is a manageable 20 pages long and so I set about a preliminary search for any terms related to indigenous students or ways of knowing including: first nation, indigenous, aboriginal, and FNMI (which was a very popular term at the time).

Zero instances of any of these terms appear in the document, but to not give up hope I went through it in more detail to see if there is implicit focus on indigenous students and/or practices in the document (which would further strengthen the assertion of erasure of these issues in educational literature).

The new question then is: “does this framework provide a place to recognize indigenous student needs within the framework (even though it isn’t specifically mentioned)?

The data suggests that this was an issue in 2009 when this was published as in 2006 Indigenous Canadians were much more likely to not finish high school than non-indigenous Canadians. , this trend continues into the 2016 census, though the percentage of indigenous students without a certificate, diploma, or degree is shrinking much faster than in the overall Canadian population. (Arriagada, 2021)

Table 1 from Arriagada, 2021

The work defines engagement at school in terms of how it works with social and academic engagement. I want to focus on Social Engagement first as this is where we will likely find connections to 

“Social engagement is commonly defined as a combination of students’ sense of belonging at school, their acceptance of the goals of schooling, feelings of being connected to and accepted by peers, and experiences of relationships with adults who ‘show an interest in them as individuals’ (National Research Council, 2003, p. 42). Research in this area has led to an awareness that large numbers of students feel disaffected or alienated from the life of school, and this is cause for concern because a student’s sense of emotional attachment to school has ‘a strong effect on whether a student persists or drops out’ (National Research Council, 2003, p. 25). “ (Dunleavy & Milton, 2009)

So, we can identify that a student’s emotional attachment to school at least partially dictates success. How does this square with the generational trauma towards school of residential school survivors? I would be curious to see how this report would be re-written a half decade later as Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission brought these events more into the public eye (or even in the past years’ outrage over the discoveries at those schools).

“For teachers’ work together to be effective, they also need reliable and meaningful sources of research and data, combined with regular opportunities to make sense of what the evidence is telling them in relation to their own experiences and beliefs about their practice. Too often we draw a direct line from evidence to decision-making and miss out on the essential idea of inquiry as a learning process that requires not just analysis in an objective sense, but also personal and group reflection about the subjective impact of new ideas or evidence. Engaging with teachers as influential leaders in developing new ways of thinking about school and classroom practices requires us to approach the practice of improvement as an inherently social, emotional and cognitive process that is most powerful when it is connected to teachers’ day-to-day lives in classrooms with students and as members of professional communities of practice.”(Dunleavy & Milton, 2009)

My takeaway from this is that yes, the work we did a decade ago with this What Did You Do At School Today? report were not completely misguided. It provided, at least in spirit, an imperative to be responsive to the students’ needs and to do research into what their needs are to engage with our educational institutions.

References

Arriagada, Paula. The Achievements, Experiences and Labour Market Outcomes of First Nations, Métis and Inuit Women with Bachelor's Degrees or Higher. Statistics Canada, 2021. Insights on Canadian Society.

Dunleavy, J. & Milton, P. (2009). What did you do in school today? Exploring the concept of student engagement and its implications for teaching and learning in Canada. Canadian Education Association (CEA), 1-22.Retrieved from: http://www.cea-ace.ca/sites/cea-ace.ca/fles/cea-2009-wdydistconcept.pdf

National Research Council – Institute of Medicine (2003). Engaging schools: Fostering high school students’ motivation to learn. Washington DC: The National Academies Press. http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10421

ETEC 510 - Makerspace for Sustainability Group Project

Makerspace for Sustainability Project Site

This was our group project from ETEC 510 on Makerspace concepts with a mind for Sustainability.

Resource - Daily Class Video Updates with OBS

ETEC 523 - A1 Is that a Camera on your Face?

ETEC 523 - Playing With Design

ETEC 523 - 5G Tech Exploration