Yearnotes: 2019
Last year's thoughts on weeknotes basically still stand:
A lot of last year's yearnotes still stand, too. So what changed in 2019?
I left the Trust&Technology Initiative in good hands, but stayed on at the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Cambridge to help as an interim with industry collaborations and miscellaneous research facilitation things. By December a new research strategy manager had started and I was able to hand over to her. I'm remaining part time at the Lab though, with a revised set of activities for 2020, which I hope to finalise in the coming weeks.
I am still very loosely connected with Doteveryone, which continues to do incredible things beyond what you would think possible for its size and resources. The team remain diverse and astonishing, and looking back at the four - four! - years since Rachel Coldicutt, new there herself, brought me in to help with "the NHS project", my time at Doteveryone stands out. The culture, especially the support and care within the team, is exceptional - even through occasional turbulence, Doteveryone has learned and strengthened.
I joined lowRISC in May, four days a week, and it's been a learning experience on several fronts. There's been fewer opportunities to write and speak about the work than I had hoped. In November we announced OpenTitan.
We didn't get the Impact Union going. Still feels like a good idea, just needs a team with more bandwidth than we could muster.
Many of the topics I reflected on in 2018 are things I am still reflecting on. We need to build more and better alternatives to big tech, and to do so in ways that are sustainable and meaningful for people. I still think going smaller is wise:
The Festival of Maintenance ran again, this time in Liverpool, and went well. New this year: making it to Maintainers III in Washington DC, which was excellent. Thanks to the Software Sustainability Institute, where I am a Fellow this year, for supporting my travel. Timely write ups of Maintainers III suffered with the work period leading up to the announcement of OpenTitan - I still have some session posts to finish, argh. It says a lot that the event had so many posts of notes and thoughts in it.
Wuthering Bytes was back, and excellent as ever. It is not often I get to compere for an event with quite so many Tesla coils in it. I was crew boss - an unexpected promotion! - at Liverpool MakeFest which was also superb, and Denise well deserved her honour at the year end.
I became a co-founding trustee of the CoFarm Foundation, a new social venture creating a community farm in Cambridge. "We bring people together to grow and share delicious food, build stronger communities and healthier ecosystems." Very excited to see this develop, and learn more about food production and biodiversity.
Comparing to 2018, I have done fewer things in 2019 - or at least, fewer things with names which are worth mentioning; I had intended to slim my portfolio down, so that seems to have worked.
Last year I said:
I'm still valuing the slower pace of blogging, even if what I'm creating is more of a commonplace book (thanks Phil Gyford!)
than writing articles. It's still hard going, taking the time to
reflect and synthesise; hence these year notes in day 4 of 2020. I'm not
sure that says anything good about the pace of everything else, but it
does take the pressure off when something happens and everyone else
seems busy with hot takes. I don't think that's me. This is probably why
I am not a top paid invited speaker or influencer :)
The following sections vaguely reflect the topics I'm finding interesting. I can't claim these are deep notes, worthy of a year of thought, though.
Maintenance and sustaining things
We're starting to think about the 2020 Festival of Maintenance and also potentially some way to keep the conversation going between festivals - perhaps some small online events.
The Long Now seems increasingly relevant; it was good to see Stewart Brand at Maintainers III and to properly realise the long term connections for maintenance more generally.
I enjoyed this article about the complexity of the current era. I don't entirely agree with all of it - there's still a lot of legacy power in traditional forms, for instance - but an interesting perspective.
Project management means so many things, as I am reminded lately as this is my main role at lowRISC. Aside from the 'digital' sphere apparently binary question of agile or waterfall, there is a question of scale. Darwin Correspondence struck me (when I briefly worked adjacent to it) as a very long-lived software project at 30 years; still, this has nothing on a cathedral.
Climate change
Some people end the year by offsetting their carbon footprint for the period.
I've had fairly minimal flights this year. It's astonishing how much some people fly, be it for conferences or holidays or speaking gigs or work. I'm happy not to fly much as it's usually not a particularly great experience (airport malls, cramped airless spaces), aside from the carbon impact.
If you are offsetting, it might cost less than you think; the cost for an "average Amercian" to offset a year's emissions is just $130.64 on Cool Effect, for example. ClimateAction.tech have recommendations for offsetting:
John Elkington reflects on sustainability in business, waves of change to date and what might be coming next. Has the latest wave of sustainability action now peaked?
Sustainability is not just about energy and food, but also objects and materials. This year I read Secondhand by Adam Minter, whcih describes local and international systems of reuse (and recycling, but really, reuse is better and there's more of it than we tend to realise).
From carbon towards technology in Logic magazine. Can decarbonisation follow an exponential curve like Moore's Law? What activities would be needed to make this happen?
Alex Deschamps-Sonsino gave a punchy short talk in December on smart homes and dirty homes and energy, which brings together a lot of ideas about technology and people as well as the obvious themes.
Sustainable and equitable organisational structures (and resourcing for these)
In early 2019 I read several books which are somewhat related to this topic. Anand Giridharadas's terrific rant Winners Take All about philanthropy and wealth and power started the year. I enjoyed the book, although it resonated so much with my world view that I felt I should seek out some sort of critique of it (not that I've found one, since). The essential idea, as I would say it, is that powerful people and organisations will pursue the appearance of positive change (around climate, inequality, etc), in such ways as to avoid any serious challenges to their power and wealth. The book also details the support systems of elite consultancies which enable and back this up by applying business methods, the particular frustration with (US) philanthropy, and the ways well-intentioned people can end up following these undisruptive paths to change (because it’s a route to funding and support for good causes).
After an interesting discussion dinner with Nicolas Colin, I read his book Hedge, which explores ideas for how a better social safety net might look for a modern era of networked people, with uncertain income, which considers mobile (and less mobile) populations, and housing costs in urban areas. He calls for entrepreneurial thinking around worker support (perhaps new kinds of union), social insurance and more. Hedge doesn’t offer detailed solutions, but anything that moves popular startup culture thinking on this beyond universal basic income is good.
In February I attended the UK launch of Douglas Rushkoff's new book, Team Human. It's a rallying cry for a more collective and collaborative approach to our world, getting away from inappropriate competitiveness and isolation, focussing on the key things that make us human, and calling for solidarity in the face of technology, political division, and climate change. Rushkoff says that we have lost touch with important human values through neoliberalism and a focus on the individual, and that we are, in these things, going against our true natures. The book is written in many small sections, grouped under bigger themes, which is an unusual style and helped keep a sense of momentum. There is quite a bit on technology - a frustration with the focus on regulating Facebook, when the real issues are in the underlying structures below the technology; the destructiveness of our obsession with growth, for both money and tech.
Thanks to Oli Sylvester-Bradley for the link to Extinction Rebellion-inspired Economic Rebellion. Maybe some non-violent direct action might catalyse action here?
2020 is the 150th anniversary of Co-operatives UK, and the 175th anniversary of the Rochdale Pioneers, who established the co-operative principles generally recognised today. Seems like it will be a big year for co-ops, with new programmes pushing for employee ownership, ongoing support for new co-ops (especially in digital), and the Conservative manifesto promising a Community Ownership Fund with £150 million to encourage local takeovers of civic organisations or community assets that are under threat.
Responsible technology
Four years of working at Doteveryone! We've done so much (check out the 2019 report (PDF)). Figuring out how to build and operate digital technologies responsibly remains a fascinating area.
There's still a gap between the "tech for good" and "tech ethics" or perhaps "tech not actively for bad" communities and ways of thinking. Each looks at problems and ways to resolve them in very different ways; really we need some middle path which can see both positives and negatives, and ways to talk about these without being excessively optimistic or pessimistic.
Not all "tech for good" is without problems or challenges (sometimes quite significant ones, just not in the focus area of the 'good' being considered). And not all 'regular' tech is bad, or equally bad. We just tend to get very enthusiastic one way or the other.
This was, perhaps, the year of Shoshana Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism. The Trust&Technology Initiative hosted her for a super lecture in Feburary (Margrethe Vestager was speaking in the adjacent lecture theatre!) and the catchy title seems to have properly hit mainstream awareness now.
I confess I didn't read Surveillance Capitalism - too long, and I wasn't sure there would be enough new ideas there. I did read Adam Greenfield's Radical Technologies, which illustrates different aspects of technology in our lives today.
Douglas Ruskoff nicely sums up the decade in terms of how we feel about tech in the Guardian:
Smaller scale technology and local communities
What do connected devices and online services look like if we don't have to "go big or go home"? How can we secure risk capital to make useful, sustainable, resilient systems, which work well for a specific local situation or community with particular needs or interests, without needing a million-user market? And how do we build these systems, so they are in fact sufficiently resilient, reliable and useful, in changable times?
I'm currently finishing reading Tipping Point by Michael Clarke, which looks at the British security in the coming years. It's a very clear read even for someone with essentially no background in politics or national security. It's easy to miss the underlying shifts in the wider landscape given today's news cycle.
I'm not convinced local buying is going to be a big thing - there are so many product categories where this isn't possible anyway, and it ignores the complexity of supply chains even for simple products. Reading Finbarr Livesey's From Global to Local was helpful background here.
Complex systems of food, water and biodiversity
The following example came up randomly, but caught my attention, as it's the sort of thing that can change gradually then suddenly.
This month I learned about the millions of beehives which are trucked around the USA to pollinate almond farms (and other large scale agriculture). The scale is quite astonishing - so many hives travelling for a perhaps 3 week stay, then moving on. It must be weird to be the bees finding themselves in wholly new places so often - hardly something that can have happened to them before. You can find all kinds of short videos on YouTube about this - how to pack bees, how hives are inspected for parasites at state borders, etc. The scale of the almond farms - rows of trees as far as the eye could see, captured by hovering drones - shows why you need to bring bees in. It's not, I think, the monoculture (and/or cost) that makes it unviable to have permanent hives on site - it's that you'd need more than half the US bee population just in those almond farms in California. So it's a scale issue - you can't just make more bees. In fact there are problems - bee colonies are dying at a faster rate then normal.
There's a nice bee backgrounder in the Conversation.
The best year end summary I've seen for 2019 was from the Prepared - everything from gig economy platforms sucking up money, to the realities of recycling, and simulations of bread baking.
Some people are looking back a whole decade. That seems a long time - my decade encompassed many projects. I started it in working in what might be called ed tech. Audrey Watters has written up a summary of the 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade - and didn't need to struggle to find that many, either.
Particular highlights in Audrey's list for me:
As usual, new works come into the public domain on the 1st of January. Check out this year's selection on the Public Domain Review.
Here's one - Klee's Carnival in the mountains:
So, this is my inspiration for 2020 (reposting from November):
“Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation” is Scottish writer Alasdair Gray’s rephrasing of a line from beloved Canadian poet Dennis Lee (the original was "a better world").
“The Jackpot” comes from William Gibson's novel The Peripheral, and is a distributed, slow-motion apocalypse of climate change, crop failures and famine, pandemic, political collapse, etc.
One thing my weeknotes show clearly is that each week there are diverse topics catching my eye, and although I can probably sketch out a few recurring themes, they are all happening in parallel — and most of them are not topics I am actually working on, in a paid sense. There’s not been the clear blocks of time to synthesise any one of these strands, or sufficient bits of time to work through them with others, as I generally think better with others.
 |
| Seen at Doteveryone's new office: https://www.instagram.com/p/B5dUD_cpwHv/ |
I left the Trust&Technology Initiative in good hands, but stayed on at the Department of Computer Science and Technology at Cambridge to help as an interim with industry collaborations and miscellaneous research facilitation things. By December a new research strategy manager had started and I was able to hand over to her. I'm remaining part time at the Lab though, with a revised set of activities for 2020, which I hope to finalise in the coming weeks.
I am still very loosely connected with Doteveryone, which continues to do incredible things beyond what you would think possible for its size and resources. The team remain diverse and astonishing, and looking back at the four - four! - years since Rachel Coldicutt, new there herself, brought me in to help with "the NHS project", my time at Doteveryone stands out. The culture, especially the support and care within the team, is exceptional - even through occasional turbulence, Doteveryone has learned and strengthened.
I joined lowRISC in May, four days a week, and it's been a learning experience on several fronts. There's been fewer opportunities to write and speak about the work than I had hoped. In November we announced OpenTitan.
We didn't get the Impact Union going. Still feels like a good idea, just needs a team with more bandwidth than we could muster.
Many of the topics I reflected on in 2018 are things I am still reflecting on. We need to build more and better alternatives to big tech, and to do so in ways that are sustainable and meaningful for people. I still think going smaller is wise:
I think we need to look smaller, at more local, relevant and appropriate technology. In humanitarian aid or development, no one would dream of proposing a tech solution which would work everywhere or scale to the whole planet, or even a set of countries. Local and appropriate technology is essential. So why do we persist with the Valley-style idea that we need to go big, or go home? More and more it feels like smaller services, doing something useful for a modest number of people and well designed for their needs, with connections to other systems if required, is a better way to go.Since our event series ended, I've missed the discussions at our CRASSH research network, ostensibly about open intellectual property and emerging technologies. I've tried to keep up other miscellaneous discussions - definitely more success here earlier in the year!
The Festival of Maintenance ran again, this time in Liverpool, and went well. New this year: making it to Maintainers III in Washington DC, which was excellent. Thanks to the Software Sustainability Institute, where I am a Fellow this year, for supporting my travel. Timely write ups of Maintainers III suffered with the work period leading up to the announcement of OpenTitan - I still have some session posts to finish, argh. It says a lot that the event had so many posts of notes and thoughts in it.
Wuthering Bytes was back, and excellent as ever. It is not often I get to compere for an event with quite so many Tesla coils in it. I was crew boss - an unexpected promotion! - at Liverpool MakeFest which was also superb, and Denise well deserved her honour at the year end.
 |
| https://www.instagram.com/p/BzRHZ9jJb--/ |
Comparing to 2018, I have done fewer things in 2019 - or at least, fewer things with names which are worth mentioning; I had intended to slim my portfolio down, so that seems to have worked.
Last year I said:
Increasingly I think that means looking at climate and sustainability stuff, and I have a sense that there’s more I could do to build on my previous experience around manufacturing and materials, and energy. These seem like they might be more fruitful routes to interesting work and useful new things in the world.
Whilst I might not be sure what exactly I’d like to be working on, I’d like 2019 to mean doing fewer things, and making more tangible progress on them.The things I have done are perhaps neither in these anticipated areas, nor what I'd previously been building expertise in (responsible tech and data). I did have a good number of interesting discussions with people, especially at the start of the year.
 |
https://www.instagram.com/p/BymbujPnAci/ Women's protests in Zürich |
The following sections vaguely reflect the topics I'm finding interesting. I can't claim these are deep notes, worthy of a year of thought, though.
Maintenance and sustaining things
We're starting to think about the 2020 Festival of Maintenance and also potentially some way to keep the conversation going between festivals - perhaps some small online events.
The Long Now seems increasingly relevant; it was good to see Stewart Brand at Maintainers III and to properly realise the long term connections for maintenance more generally.
I enjoyed this article about the complexity of the current era. I don't entirely agree with all of it - there's still a lot of legacy power in traditional forms, for instance - but an interesting perspective.
Project management means so many things, as I am reminded lately as this is my main role at lowRISC. Aside from the 'digital' sphere apparently binary question of agile or waterfall, there is a question of scale. Darwin Correspondence struck me (when I briefly worked adjacent to it) as a very long-lived software project at 30 years; still, this has nothing on a cathedral.
Guy Nordenson...argues that a megaproject succeeds because it resonates “in a powerful, fundamental way.” Contemporary megaprojects are fragile because they are capitalistic, without a solid foundation of social justice or labor relations: “Does anyone ask an iron worker his opinion about the design of something like Hudson Yards? Hudson Yards is executed directly from the dictates of one person who runs the development company that has overseen it, and to whom the city and the state had abdicated all social responsibility.” The Apollo Program, the Brooklyn Bridge, the Chunnel – these were successful, posits Nordenson, “because the idea was compelling.” Nordenson sees the essence of a successful project as bound up with an idea John Ruskin described when he talked about gothic architecture: Every participant – from the bishop to the artisan carving gargoyles – has a shared ownership of the project’s outcome. That is, a project succeeds when there is an alignment between the people who design buildings and the people who build and use them – between Lefebvre's conceived and lived space.
Climate change
Some people end the year by offsetting their carbon footprint for the period.
I've had fairly minimal flights this year. It's astonishing how much some people fly, be it for conferences or holidays or speaking gigs or work. I'm happy not to fly much as it's usually not a particularly great experience (airport malls, cramped airless spaces), aside from the carbon impact.
If you are offsetting, it might cost less than you think; the cost for an "average Amercian" to offset a year's emissions is just $130.64 on Cool Effect, for example. ClimateAction.tech have recommendations for offsetting:
Look for projects validated by Gold Standard (https://www.goldstandard.org/) or Verified Carbon Standard (https://www.vcsprojectdatabase.org/#/home). Cool Effect (https://www.cooleffect.org/) is another option that adds another layer of rigorous validation and only supports projects that are “additional,” meaning they only exist because of funding from offsets (e.g. they are not required by law).
John Elkington reflects on sustainability in business, waves of change to date and what might be coming next. Has the latest wave of sustainability action now peaked?
past experience suggests that the really useful work tends to get done in the downwaves, rather than in the frothy peak periods.I'm reading Andrew McAfee's More from Less, which - like John's article - also looks back at Earth Day and describes a level of awareness and fears which seem hard to imagine so long ago, now.
Sustainability is not just about energy and food, but also objects and materials. This year I read Secondhand by Adam Minter, whcih describes local and international systems of reuse (and recycling, but really, reuse is better and there's more of it than we tend to realise).
From carbon towards technology in Logic magazine. Can decarbonisation follow an exponential curve like Moore's Law? What activities would be needed to make this happen?
If Moore’s Law is to be a useful story through which to approach this future, it will be for all the reasons its green proponents currently ignore. The history of the microprocessor revolution is ultimately about the immensity of effort that goes into maintaining the dream of exponential growth — and its inevitable collapse. Moore’s Law was neither a socially constructed prophecy nor a materially determined outcome. It was a period of coordinated action within specific material parameters that have now passed. It leaves us facing a technological future that will require creativity within new constraints.Cambridge Zero launched in 2019, and I look forward to seeing what it does and achieves. The way the University of Cambridge (and its many and various constituent parts) tackles climate change will be interesting, too - as an 800 year old institution it has demonstrated resilience, but today's large university faces new challenges. It is also notably place-based, in a marshy area little above sea level.
Alex Deschamps-Sonsino gave a punchy short talk in December on smart homes and dirty homes and energy, which brings together a lot of ideas about technology and people as well as the obvious themes.
Sustainable and equitable organisational structures (and resourcing for these)
In early 2019 I read several books which are somewhat related to this topic. Anand Giridharadas's terrific rant Winners Take All about philanthropy and wealth and power started the year. I enjoyed the book, although it resonated so much with my world view that I felt I should seek out some sort of critique of it (not that I've found one, since). The essential idea, as I would say it, is that powerful people and organisations will pursue the appearance of positive change (around climate, inequality, etc), in such ways as to avoid any serious challenges to their power and wealth. The book also details the support systems of elite consultancies which enable and back this up by applying business methods, the particular frustration with (US) philanthropy, and the ways well-intentioned people can end up following these undisruptive paths to change (because it’s a route to funding and support for good causes).
After an interesting discussion dinner with Nicolas Colin, I read his book Hedge, which explores ideas for how a better social safety net might look for a modern era of networked people, with uncertain income, which considers mobile (and less mobile) populations, and housing costs in urban areas. He calls for entrepreneurial thinking around worker support (perhaps new kinds of union), social insurance and more. Hedge doesn’t offer detailed solutions, but anything that moves popular startup culture thinking on this beyond universal basic income is good.
In February I attended the UK launch of Douglas Rushkoff's new book, Team Human. It's a rallying cry for a more collective and collaborative approach to our world, getting away from inappropriate competitiveness and isolation, focussing on the key things that make us human, and calling for solidarity in the face of technology, political division, and climate change. Rushkoff says that we have lost touch with important human values through neoliberalism and a focus on the individual, and that we are, in these things, going against our true natures. The book is written in many small sections, grouped under bigger themes, which is an unusual style and helped keep a sense of momentum. There is quite a bit on technology - a frustration with the focus on regulating Facebook, when the real issues are in the underlying structures below the technology; the destructiveness of our obsession with growth, for both money and tech.
Thanks to Oli Sylvester-Bradley for the link to Extinction Rebellion-inspired Economic Rebellion. Maybe some non-violent direct action might catalyse action here?
2020 is the 150th anniversary of Co-operatives UK, and the 175th anniversary of the Rochdale Pioneers, who established the co-operative principles generally recognised today. Seems like it will be a big year for co-ops, with new programmes pushing for employee ownership, ongoing support for new co-ops (especially in digital), and the Conservative manifesto promising a Community Ownership Fund with £150 million to encourage local takeovers of civic organisations or community assets that are under threat.
Responsible technology
Four years of working at Doteveryone! We've done so much (check out the 2019 report (PDF)). Figuring out how to build and operate digital technologies responsibly remains a fascinating area.
There's still a gap between the "tech for good" and "tech ethics" or perhaps "tech not actively for bad" communities and ways of thinking. Each looks at problems and ways to resolve them in very different ways; really we need some middle path which can see both positives and negatives, and ways to talk about these without being excessively optimistic or pessimistic.
Not all "tech for good" is without problems or challenges (sometimes quite significant ones, just not in the focus area of the 'good' being considered). And not all 'regular' tech is bad, or equally bad. We just tend to get very enthusiastic one way or the other.
 |
https://twitter.com/DrHughHarvey/status/1212646954477539328 |
I confess I didn't read Surveillance Capitalism - too long, and I wasn't sure there would be enough new ideas there. I did read Adam Greenfield's Radical Technologies, which illustrates different aspects of technology in our lives today.
Douglas Ruskoff nicely sums up the decade in terms of how we feel about tech in the Guardian:
We may come to remember this decade as the one when human beings finally realized we are up against something. We’re just not quite sure what it is.
More of us have come to understand that our digital technologies are not always bringing out our best natures. People woke up to the fact that our digital platforms are being coded by people who don’t have our best interests at heart. This is the decade when, finally, the “tech backlash” began.
....
Shoshana Zuboff recently published her comprehensive Surveillance Capitalism to deserved acclaim, but the book is really about some decisions that Google was making twenty years ago to harvest our data and sell it to advertisers. The Center for Humane Technology has called attention to the way that the manipulative techniques of behavioral finance have been embedded in our apps – bringing us all up to speed on the science of captology and addiction, circa 1999.
These are necessary critiques, but they’re too focused on the good old days, when the business plans of a few bad actors and the designs of some manipulative technologies could be identified as the “cause” of our collective woes....
We must stop building digital technologies that optimize us for atomization and impulsiveness, and create ones aimed at promoting sense-making and recall instead. We must seize the more truly digital, distributed opportunity to remember the values that we share, and reacquaint ourselves with the local worlds in which we actually live.
Smaller scale technology and local communities
What do connected devices and online services look like if we don't have to "go big or go home"? How can we secure risk capital to make useful, sustainable, resilient systems, which work well for a specific local situation or community with particular needs or interests, without needing a million-user market? And how do we build these systems, so they are in fact sufficiently resilient, reliable and useful, in changable times?
I'm currently finishing reading Tipping Point by Michael Clarke, which looks at the British security in the coming years. It's a very clear read even for someone with essentially no background in politics or national security. It's easy to miss the underlying shifts in the wider landscape given today's news cycle.
I'm not convinced local buying is going to be a big thing - there are so many product categories where this isn't possible anyway, and it ignores the complexity of supply chains even for simple products. Reading Finbarr Livesey's From Global to Local was helpful background here.
Complex systems of food, water and biodiversity
The following example came up randomly, but caught my attention, as it's the sort of thing that can change gradually then suddenly.
This month I learned about the millions of beehives which are trucked around the USA to pollinate almond farms (and other large scale agriculture). The scale is quite astonishing - so many hives travelling for a perhaps 3 week stay, then moving on. It must be weird to be the bees finding themselves in wholly new places so often - hardly something that can have happened to them before. You can find all kinds of short videos on YouTube about this - how to pack bees, how hives are inspected for parasites at state borders, etc. The scale of the almond farms - rows of trees as far as the eye could see, captured by hovering drones - shows why you need to bring bees in. It's not, I think, the monoculture (and/or cost) that makes it unviable to have permanent hives on site - it's that you'd need more than half the US bee population just in those almond farms in California. So it's a scale issue - you can't just make more bees. In fact there are problems - bee colonies are dying at a faster rate then normal.
There's a nice bee backgrounder in the Conversation.
The best year end summary I've seen for 2019 was from the Prepared - everything from gig economy platforms sucking up money, to the realities of recycling, and simulations of bread baking.
Some people are looking back a whole decade. That seems a long time - my decade encompassed many projects. I started it in working in what might be called ed tech. Audrey Watters has written up a summary of the 100 Worst Ed-Tech Debacles of the Decade - and didn't need to struggle to find that many, either.
Particular highlights in Audrey's list for me:
- Ning. I remember using this, figured it had faded away, but didn't know the full 'sunset' story.
- Badges! OpenBadges was a thing both in education and in open culture communities. I hadn't been paying attention, missing the transfer of badge spec and also badge display system away from Mozilla to commercial hands.
- 3D printing
- the death of libraries
- The death of Aaron Swartz
- Turnitin - plagarism detection, and a classic example of the way investment and ed tech interact (in a list of many of these)
- Google Reader - which was closed in 2013, probably changing behaviours in news consumption and blogging. "So anytime someone tries to tell you Google’s mission is “to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful,” remind them that Google killed Google Reader and that in doing so, it’s helped make the world more susceptible to the mis- and dis-information that now thrives online."
- "Everyone Should Learn to Code" - a great summary in itself
“[The] literature [on online education] was preoccupied with what I call ‘roaming autodidacts’. A roaming autodidact is a self-motivated, able learner that is simultaneously embedded in technocratic futures and disembedded from place, cultural, history, and markets. The roaming autodidact is almost always conceived as western, white, educated and male. As a result of designing for the roaming autodidact, we end up with a platform that understands learners as white and male, measuring learners’ task efficiencies against an unarticulated norm of western male whiteness. It is not an affirmative exclusion of poor students or bilingual learners or black students or older students, but it need not be affirmative to be effective. Looking across this literature, our imagined educational futures are a lot like science fiction movies: there’s a conspicuous absence of brown people and women” — Tressie McMillan Cottom, “Intersectionality and Critical Engagement With The Internet” (2015)Oh, and her take on TED talks:
One can trace far too many bad ideas to the event whose focus purports to be on “ideas worth spreading”: TED. It’s not just that the talks are terrible, trite, and full of historically inaccurate information. .. But people hear those TED Talks and then think they’ve stumbled upon brilliance....
Unfortunately, education-related TED Talks are some of the most popular ones out there. Some of these are laughably silly, such as Nicholas Negroponte’s prediction of a pill you will be able swallow to “know Shakespeare.” And some of the ones with the greatest appeal, such as Sugata Mitra’s “School in the Cloud,” may just re-inscribe the very exploitation and inequality that the TED Talks promise, with their 18-minute-long sleight-of-hand, to disrupt.
TED Talks are designed to be unassailable — ideas to spread but never challenge. As I noted back in 2013, “You don’t get to ask questions of a TED Talk. Even the $10,000 ticket to watch it live only gives you the privilege of a seat in the theater.”
As usual, new works come into the public domain on the 1st of January. Check out this year's selection on the Public Domain Review.
Here's one - Klee's Carnival in the mountains:
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| https://arthive.com/paulklee/works/247682~Carnival_in_the_mountains |
So, this is my inspiration for 2020 (reposting from November):
 |
| https://twitter.com/debcha/status/1193143681181736961 |
“The Jackpot” comes from William Gibson's novel The Peripheral, and is a distributed, slow-motion apocalypse of climate change, crop failures and famine, pandemic, political collapse, etc.