Katherine's EDC blog » Google

Playing with algorithms 2: Not much help here

Katherine — Tue, 10 Mar 2015 03:36:14 +0000

I have spent the last 8 years fighting the alogorithms and that makes it hard for me to find a place where my longitudinal choices lead to good recommendations.

I only read Facebook via Most Recent stories (though that isn’t possible on mobile, and even then various things are promoted for me that aren’t a pure timestream); I usually use Twitter and never the Discovery timeline because I like the crowdsourced flow. I spent years trying to get Amazon’s Recommended for You to actually recommend me books I liked–‘all books by this author’, ‘no books by this author’, ‘I really don’t ever want to read erotica about shapeshifting bears’, ‘I will sometimes read about werewolves though’. I’d think this was easy, but Recommended for You has gone from being sometimes useful to almost useless.

So I had to go back to the drawing board.

Playing with algorithms 1: Proposal

Katherine — Thu, 05 Mar 2015 04:22:33 +0000

I will explore what happens with algorithms when I search as I usually do, on the Google open web (influenced by location etc data, but not me specifically).

I will then carry out the same search logged in on my personal Google account. I rarely use this account, but I do occasionally fail to log out for a few days after I’ve logged in. I would therefore expect a longitudinal series of random snapshots of my search behaviour.

Finally I will carry out the same search using my work account. I am usually logged into this account at work, and most of my search and activity should be stored there. As it is a work account, I expect all my activity to be passively logged by my employer anyway. I also expect to be doing the same searches over and over again to carry out routine professional tasks, and so a preference ‘bubble’ or ‘me loop’ is actually useful.

I have predictive search turned off on my laptop, but on on my mobile. I may get different answers depending on the research.

Digital culture images

Katherine — Tue, 24 Feb 2015 05:56:59 +0000

Digital Romance hair accessories, seen at the Pharmacy.

A friend posted this on Facebook. This is genius. Authorial intention is dead. “death of the author roland barthes”.

Another screenshot from Facebook. Douglas Adam’s rules about technology and the ‘natural’.

A work matrix I created on Paper.

After the Hangout: What about post-human pedagogy?

Katherine — Thu, 05 Feb 2015 06:04:31 +0000

Classrooms are already post-human.

Transcript:

I’ve worked out my discomfort with post-human teaching.

Students are already de-centred in the classroom. (I was reading bell hoooks & thinking about this). They are already understood as “happy robots” (to quote Paul Giroux). They already write & learn for machine marking (in SATS and Turnitin). They post-human classroom is here & it’s not a good classroom: not good for teachers, or learners, or communities. Not good for emploers, or knowledge transfer, or thinking. Not good for critical pedagogies, democracies, industries.

What is central are computerized systems of control:
The PowerPoint
Echo360
Turnitin
The laptop note taking.

I have radical lectures … where I don’t use PowerPoint. That’s what’s radical. That’s ridiculous.

We need to be post-post-human in the classroom. To re-centre the student & the teacher & the things we are learning about.

We may consider centring the earth, animals, systems or objects, but we must stop centring the technologies.