We built a nest in the links
LLMs are the first splashes of a flood tide that will forever drown the connected internet of words. While we still can walk the halls of Atlantis, we should consider what was worthwhile
Sorry, I didn’t mean to get “time as a helix of semi-precious stones” but I got legit misty-eyed at the notion of a link blog.
so, in full performance of my truth, here’s a blog post that I want to talk about.
It’s from 2011. This is what we had in the #mttbos or however we compressed the portmanteau.
It’s a math smackdown on Professor Wu on a wonderful tiny post from Christopher Danielson of (in my house) Which One Doesn’t Belong fame.
But I’m posting it to talk about literacies, about the way conversation practices and texts shape our communities.
I know 3rd+ quartile about:
math, math education, education theory, Cal math professors, UCSC math professors, mathematical conservatism, evangelical conservatism, constructivism, Seymour Papert, Milton Friedman, Chicago school education policies, California k-12 mathematics initiatives from 1980 onward, history of California educational practices and budgets from the launch of the community college system
and I bring all of those lenses to these conversations. So when I show “texts” (in the IB L&L sense) to my colleagues, I think they hear me asking how best to scaffold ALL OF THAT CONTEXT so that students can follow the same train of thought and association.
Looking back at this small conversation, between basically 2+ people over about two weeks, I’m reminded of that focus. It took time to write, sure, but we were here because that was a very “write at your computer” time for teachers. Legit… I may consider the idea that improvement in printers or shift to digital resources just opened up a surplus for math teachers, and we spent that talking to each other.
So this “public” conversation was really really two people in an intense moment by the shelf of math books.
So, aside from the obvious reasons that I, Andrew, found that personally validating (Narrator: No one ever asked about Andrew’s shelf of math books), that conversation was happening everywhere. Maybe this is what people mean when they say water cooler conversation, but I am a teacher and we have lots of coffee pots and water spitters. I have a long experimental history of how well “structured discussion of math pedagogy stretched out over 3 weeks, delivered in 6 paragraph chunks” works as a social gambit.
This was the long social tail. This was the internet shape I first saw from the 2400baud Maximus BBS, through a.g.sf2 and rastb5m, through .plan files and friend of a friend Livejournal. It was the shape that caught Anni, in the gentle social slide of American Girl Doll Photography Instagram. It was the shape I was arguing for my Doctorow vision with the SFPD officer who’s job was to honeypot predators on AOL chatrooms….
I think a LOT about the myriad tech choices, and blatant capital ratfuckery that has caught and collapsed that space, the connected internet of words, and left us with the truism about the Internet now being 5 websites each offering algorithmically generated content consisting mainly of screenshots from the other four.
But today I’m thinking about the way we could be on the connected internet of words.
All of my LLM work is playing in the first splashes of the flood tide that will forever drown the connected internet of words. While we still can walk the halls of Atlantis, we should consider what was worthwhile? What virtues should we cast into legend?
Here’s a start. Have a thought, explore it in your head, bring the complex and confounding to each other and share your best. There is pure social value in refining how you communicate in text, which can performing in a wide variety of social codes.
And, crucially, that if you can find enough people to have the conversation, you will always have enough space for it.
So, please read through the actual great math content. It’s my second favorite slanderous bit of Wu-content!
But think, Dear Reader, about when the last time you had a slow conversation with that level of focus and interaction?
Tie And Jeans 