Chalkface to touchscreen: Convivial learning with Socrates
The past is strange, and we are all someone’s past.
Mostly states and institutions are technology solutionists at heart. All our incentives lead that way. If only we could get just the right amount of leverage, tweak inputs in just the right way … they muse …then people would play nicer, learn harder, eat healthier, stop liking Coldplay. Ai is the the current Hail Mary.
Technology surrounds you. Newer is not necessarily clearly better. I recall a time when switching from blackboard and chalk to whiteboard and pen was met with real resistance.
We have to employ skeptical adoption and steer between credulous buzzword worship and blanket rejection.
Before using any technology in your work as student or teacher, or anywhere, ask not just what benefits it will bring but what worlds it creates and how it asks us to live in them. Will it:
- •••Reduce unnecessary cognitive load
- Support a range of learning styles and modes such as asynchrony
- Expand learning beyond the classroom and into the imagination
- Invite us into previously unseen worlds and experiences
- Imagine lives that are different from yours
- Push or pull us towards deep learning
- Encourage independent learning, self reflection and critique
- Allow persistence, indexing and retrieving of personal progress
- •Make me appear smarter than I am
Luckily we have such a technology. It is called the book. Might we look at it anew?
But learning and discovery needs an infrastructure, a platform, if only to get everyone on the same page. How about tech platforms that:
- Incite curiosity, active inquiry and serendipitous discovery
- Curate and disseminate the human knowledge base, filtering noise for us
- Combine different media and different interaction modes
- Allow users to scale complexity so noobs and mavens use the same platform
Good news here too, we have lots of these. They are libraries. An archive is another.
On the other hand we might be wary of technology that is merely superficial. Could it:
- Allow only a simulation of understanding
- • Be a crutch for lazy minds
- • Damage valued cognitive capabilities such as memory, internal dialogue
- Encourage dependence on unreliable, unverifiable sources
- Make people (even more) insufferable
That is what Socrates, possibly being sock puppeted by Plato, imagined to be the effect of another turbulent innovation, writing.
“this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.” Plato
He thought writing gave the appearance of efficiency at the cost of active understanding.
- •••We have never been able to separate the technology good from bad.
So also the pocket calculator and the search engine. We can guess Socrates’ thoughts on the Antikythera Mechanism.Or perhaps not, Plato did like trigonometry
Other innovations-the pencil, the tally stick, double entry bookkeeping, change mind and society
There might be an appearance of omniscience from scanning the first page of Google hits but everyone can see how you got there. Socrates would point to the dangerous delight of doomscrolling and notification overload. Do not get him started on Powerpoint.
Moveable-type books were revolutionary. They shook the authority of the Church. Knowledge was suddenly portable, copyable. Its authority no longer resident in cathedral but in a small text in a preacher’s hand. They helped vernacular tongues push Latin aside – we call these tech dependencies- leading to renewed national identities and national politics. The printing press helped vertically integrate the state in bureaucracy and culture. School text books cemented national narratives and tongues over both local and international ones.
- • Educational technology is tied to power and change.
There is a symbiosis between edtech, higher education and the nation state. Data mining and monopolistic practices should be in our sights. Ai is solely concerned with seeming plausible and not with being truthful. You might say, ‘what makes a book especially truthful?’ Nothing, but at least it sits still while we interrogate it. Ais are epic smooth talkers, champions of the patter.
Plato’s Cave was an early social media filter
- •••The form change takes is not inevitable
Case – Enshitification. Once there was the internet and it was good. Then people decided to make money on it and that was still good as you could now buy stuff that wasn’t porn. Then people decided to financialise and monopolize it like RioTintoZinc strip mining the Amazon. And that was very bad.
- •••Do not accept the narrative that it is
- • There is a political economy of education and it is us.
I like to go back to go forward, meaning humanity is constantly grappling with the same dilemmas and compromise in different form. Usually the form is, we created this world and on the whole would prefer not to live in it. Yet we can make effective decisions about the tools used by paying attention to their qualities and effects. A horror of Socrates is lock-in or path dependance. You cannot un-invent writing. That’s probably a good trade given that is why we know of him at all. Other dependent qualities can be worrying like corporate lock in or software and hardware reliance on geopolitical rivals. Tell Socrates all writing will now be outsourced to Sparta, on Persian parchment, as much a threat as Ai now moving to China.
Social media platforms can be more present where students are, growing networks and access but make learning part of the attention economy. There, student attention is sliced, diced and commodified. An echo chamber eliminates internal and external dialogue.
You might think self hosting and open source fixes it, and it helps in some areas, at the cost of significant investment of time on maintenance. I took a few years shifting my stack and it is fun and maddening, an ever evolving challenge. I have my own linux server with among other self hosting services , vaultwarden (password), audiobookshelf (podcasts /audiobooks), nextcloud (files), immich (photos), ollama (ai), restic (backup). I like challenges and then sometimes I like Spotify curated playlists. The process itself is educational. Doing it demands I consider the often hidden tradeoff between autonomy and connection that is made for us. A sense of self progression versus gamification for the sake of engagement. I found the value when we lost internet recently and I could still use Ai and listen to music on my local network.
- Maintenance is part of learning
Nothing ‘just works’. It takes labour, tending and supervision. Look behind the curtain. Tech is part material culture, part agriculture. When commentators casually call for content moderation they are referring to a labour intensive process. Compare with how EdTech is often sold as a one-click solution. No blame there. Universities demand these services and companies provide them. Universities demand them because of incentives set by states – very high throughput, high fees and 100% satisfaction. Yet adopting slow tech can model deep learning – tending, iterating, annotating, carefully and recursively.
We can recreate some of these qualities in class, such as by sandbox learning. Socrates worried that writing destroyed memory. We worry social media destroys the attention needed for reading. Do they? Maybe reading need not be passive and we can encourage practices like annotation to make it active. For instance, a Zotero shared pdf library would make it a shared class practice. Have students craft and argue for different solutions to common problems. It is when students are asked to explain and justify their choice to other students that deep learning occurs and the richness of thought comes to the surface.
Compare the trajectory of Ai to the book. They both rapidly generated meta-cognitive effects. Prompt engineering is analogous to meta-reading skills.
Illich calls for tools for conviviality. He was damning of tools of separation, of caste-making . Medical professionalisation and specialisation separated family members from care. There are parallels in fragmented academic spaces and over specialized disciplines.
Example- I use Nvivo vs Obsidian for qualitative data analysis
Nvivo is custom designed for qualitative data analysis. It has a growing business orientation, massive overkill, learning curve, demand you use its language, proprietary format, bewildering licensing. Heavy. Slower than the speed of thought. It does some things well such as search /autocoding .
Obsidian is just a note taking app that allows you to link notes and visualize links between them. It is extensible, and uses the open markdown format. Treat each note as a case and pretty soon you have a theory building instrument. A tool you shape in the using, that grows with you .
The joy of tech is working in a community rather than labouring alone, of solving problems reliant on ideas and process
We can reduce define some qualities,
- Autonomy and agency
- Connecting the living and the past
- Maintain dialogue, be failure tolerant
And one practice. Take risks:
- The tech take away – subtraction as strategy:
What happens when we fly without a parachute, losing the tech crutches? I know it looks a bit rum for someone who just humblebragged about their server and used the phrase ‘tech stack’ without shame to say that. Stay with me. Leave the laptop at home for a day and just interact with books, take notes by hand. See how your attention changes. You find that reading a book is a different physical experience than an ebook. Writing and typing inscribe differently. Funny side-quest – since becoming disabled I cannot do either and now have to hold more of my mental map in my head. Socrates would appreciate it. As a disabled I have had to discard many now useless things – fave suits, earpods, driving, most games.
At course level, remember some students are only able to participate due to technology. Blanket bans need consultation. We can try setting up a simulation. I teach about organised crime and cybercrime. I ask students to design a cryptocurrency exchange. It is the base for discussion about tech ethics, fintech regulation, money laundering, surveillance, privacy and hybrid crime-tech
- The blockchain book
Set class tasks to make the previously inert active. The book is radical tech, reimagine it. Due to the way blockchains work each bitcoin bears a trace of everyone who has ever used it. What if books did that? Tell me about the people who read this book before you. Tell me how it will be read in 5, 40, 100 years’ time. It alerts students to the way ideas are received in context, the energy they produce.
Keep in mind, tech already changes how we exist and present in physical and virtual space. Humanity has always been at war with, and too in love with, its tools. Technology adoption in education, like any sphere, is not inevitable nor natural. We can learn as much by taking away as by adding. Cool evaluation and reflection will get us through. The book remains our most revolutionary technology. We only need to open one.
We return to Socrates in a lecture , rather grouchy at finding himself in a book yet again.
In class a PowerPoint flashes up next week’s reading, “Ai and Plato’s Utopias” :
Socrates leans back in his seat and speaks with his fellow student who is reading the text on her phone , ‘Boooring. Where is the effort in this stream of letters ? Cold information without insight. Ai is the endpoint of writing, the imitation of understanding. Words without animating life. It requires no effort. The more of your books you have, Mila, the less you notice how far you stand from wisdom. What is the dry written word alongside living conversation?’
Mila leans in, ‘Socrates! slow your roll. Cannot we grow with books? After all I am having a dialogue with you. Plus’, she read, putting on her finest Athenian philosopher/reply guy voice , ‘I thought “The only thing I know is that I know nothing”. Sounds like you do know something … about technology ’
Socrates, ‘I know being bound in a book, scroll or wax tablet. Blame Plato, the scribbler. The answer lies in the question. They call it a Socratic Paradox. The written word binds your mind. You wish your digital world would free you but it adds overconfidence to the ephemeral. It is seductive. Ai is more dangerous. It speaks words without thoughts.’
Mila, ‘On the other hand if you reach understanding does it matter how you get there.
You fear writing, you who never wrote
Would your thought be here still without papyrus and quill
Did nothing lively never came from a scroll
If the problem is being passive cannot we choose being active? Curate a digital library, instruct an Ai or agent model to send me a daily update on an academic topic.’
Socrates, ‘More and faster, but is it deeper?
Mila, ‘If you know why it is doing it. I use a calendar, but I know what time is. I use a calculator but I know numbers. If I use Ai to filter smartly it lets me get to the truth. There is an art called prompt engineering. It ’
She demonstrates
Socrates, ‘A sprite to question me?
Mila ‘Your questions must be good
The art of asking
Maybe asking changes the questions and the questioner’
Socrates prompt engineering is a meta-skill. You need it to work your tools . They are so complex and yet so far from wisdom you need need a whole other set of tools to make them make sense
Mila’ Cannot it be used critically as you use conversation?
Socrates, ’How do you know you know it is the truth? . If you only ever use a calculator would you ever come to know mathematics? Are you trapped in Plato’s cave? Would you know it was truth? Your prompts might be those agreeable shadows on the wall.’
Mila, ’Then to attain wisdom, we abandon tools? Cabin in the woods? ’
Socrates, ’Not abandon, but know them, ask questions of them, as I do of you. Put thought before them, not use them before thought. A farmer uses a scythe to harvest what he has cultivated. You can cultivate yourself before you harvest those clicks ’
Mila, ‘Maybe we could keep them at arms length but always within arm’s reach, serving not mastering human desire. Nothing is good or bad but everything has effects.’
Socrates, ’Now, you sound like you would fit right in at the Symposium’
Scene
Let’s design a place to learn
Illich, Ivan. Tools for Conviviality. New York: Harper & Row New York, 1973.
Plato. Phaedrus. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Internet Archive, 2005.
Comments by Angus Bancroft