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What’s it all for?

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Talking to a friend last week and he summarised my approach to life as “it doesn’t have any meaning, but that’s ok”. Which is spot on. I do actually envy people who can convince themselves there is ultimately a point – that there’s fate or a god, or something watching over them – to be able to turn off the rational part of their mind like that at will. That’s not supposed to sound snide or anything, it’s a skill, and there’s a demonstrable link between being able to do that and positive mental health.

That sort of thing is easier in crowds the “collusion in delusion” which explains the popularity of church, or sporting events, or cinemas, and of course most of us can do it for specific periods and locations, it’s the theoretical basis for much of playful learning – Huizinga’s magic circle. There’s contentment in those moments and searching for spaces that can help us reach that point can be worth seeking out. A prime example for me was Seonbawi rock in Seoul.

There was something about the peacefulness, the immense solidity of those two rocks, the tolling of a bell at sunset from a nearby temple, everything just felt … OK. Only one person visited during the hour or so I was there, and it’s a touchpoint I can call up. I’ve not found the equivalent in the NE of the UK, except I guess looking out down on the valley my home sits at the end of. Sheep, cows, rabbits, various birds, connects me (well anyone) to those metanarratives Serres discusses in The Natural Contract.

Of course, there’s not actually any pattern – thinking you can see one is a warning of incipient apophenia. Something to be indulged in briefly, but can tip from rabbit-hole to tar-pit if you’re not watchful. Don’t believe in yourself, don’t deceive with belief. All that quicksand stuff.

But when you’re enacting practice, teaching, researching, doing your job, is it necessary to think that ultimately there’s a point to motivate yourself to keep going? I was reading Lyotard last week, The Inhuman (specifically “Can Thought Go on without a Body?”) and in that he discusses the post-solar humanity (I’m studying post-humanism and trans-humanism) and he discusses the ultimate fate of humanity to be either destruction when the sun dies, or to escape this destruction by becoming something non-human. Lyotard’s point of this is to show the fundamental error in unlimited technological progress – either it’s not possible because the sun will undergo a helium flash in 4.5 billion years, or it’s undesirable because the only logical end point is for us to not be human any more.

To which I’d answer “generation starships”. Or “pantropy”. Or any of the known SF solutions. I don’t read that Lyotard’s question as a hypothetical – I mean what are we going to do? I’m reminded of a line from a Woody Allen routine where a woman turns him down with the line “not even it would help the space programme”. Is all our endeavour actually reducable to this one goal? It could work for me – understanding virtual embodiment, how humanity is reflected in our avatars, how an extended body works via telepresence, all that could help us survive the ultimate fate of the solar system. How would what you do help anything long term? Except …

we’re just postponing the inevitable. The heat death of the Universe. There is no long term solution.

Maybe just getting a few extra billion years on humanity’s clock is point enough? But it could possibly all seems a bit abstract for day-to-day life. I was chatting with another friend over the weekend and her answer was to have as much fun as possible without causing harm to anyone.

Not sure how that justifies me doing what I do. I suppose a lot of it is fun, and when it’s not fun I justify it in terms of it earning me enough of a living to spend money on things that are fun. I’m sure there’s an integral equation for that so that you could work out how to maximise fun over time. But that, as a philosophy has actually been captured succinctly by The Wyld Stallyns.

Be Excellent to Each Other

Party On Dudes

Is that actually ultimately the point?

Letting the GenAI out of the bottle

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I’ve had a couple of interesting conversations at work recently about the use of AI in education – prompted largely by sharing this poem

https://poets.org/poem/student-who-used-ai-write-paper

which asks the question “I know your days are precious on this earth. But what are you trying to be free of? The living? The miraculous task of it?”

It’s a good question and I think is a good one to raise with students, because it reframes the whole relationship between teacher, student, assessment and study. We’re not (or we shouldn’t be) trying to persuade students not to use AI because we don’t want them cheating, or because there’s a standard we want them to attain under some artificial constraints, just to make assessment more challenging (which we shouldn’t) but because there are skills we think they should acquire because they are skills that will develop them, their interaction with the world, and to feel the pleasure of enacting their abilities well.

AI has its place – in the words of someone I was talking to at a conference recently, it’s good for doing the boring stuff we already know how to do. There’s also the possibility you could get by through getting AI to do the work, but to progress past a certain level, you need to have the skills that (if you’ve used AI) you’ve bypassed the acquisition of, for example, you could get AI to write an essay that synthesises different writers, but to create something novel, you need to make associations that aren’t really obvious. To do that you have to have the ability to summarise papers, follows citations, pull out key thoughts and abstract them.

Also, to stick with it, you’ve got to find where the fun is in it. In the degree I’m doing at the moment, I’m enjoying doing the assignments, because I’m finding my own take. For example, my essay on Leibniz I developed by relating each of the aspects of his philosophy to different cake metaphors. Because I like cake but I can’t eat it, basically.

Though, having fun with something is really possible only when you’re not overly concerned with the mark that you’re going to get and that as I said in a meeting last week “is only possible when you’ve reached an age where … err … you’re confident enough that you don’t feel the need to prove yourself further” to which my colleague responded “you mean run out of fucks to give” which is exactly what I was going to say before I self-censored myself. 😀

The issue is that students are just scared, scared by the amount of assessment they have to do, scared by the amount of competition (some people still do normative grading – which is inexcusable) and scared of screwing up. Sitting back and smelling the roses is – or the pleasure in just learning – is rarely possible.

What we can do is make their engagement with AI authentic at least. People who insist on written testing simply so that they can be sure it’s the student’s own work need to think again. If AI can do the thing we’re testing them on and will do that better then – and I’m going to put this in capitals so that this stands out – because it’s key

WHY THE HELL ARE WE STILL TEACHING THEM TO DO IT?

If this is a skill AI can acquit perfectly, then it’s not something that’s worthy of a human doing. So, maybe this will rule out a huge chunk of a maths syllabus, for example, or coding. Well fair enough. Rethink your syllabus from the ground up. Maybe it’ll make it easier, well deal with it, you’re now teaching an easy subject and all the people who can’t do the tricky things will take yours as the easy option. But putting in artificial barriers, simply to make the assessment harder (like in person testing), is missing the point of what education is for (the subject of my next post). Find a way of assessing which actually challenges the student on something that has some value, like groupwork, or have an assessment that checks in on them frequently so you can observe their process.

Avoiding coming up with authentic assessments, which test the non-AI skills is simply failing the students, yourselves, and the education system. In fact, that’s where the cheating is, not in the students using the AI.

Curriculum of kindness

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I’m part of a critical pedagogies group at work. It’s often a reading group – someone picks a book, we pick a chapter from it and then talk about the one we’ve read. It’s an excellent way to prompt reading and discussion, but it’s mainly a chance to just chat with colleagues once a month. So many of the meetings we have are around the basic transactional stuff of getting academic development and teaching done, it’s good to have something that’s more about why we’re doing it. We’re always advised to get to know the people around us because it’s helps getting work done, but the vagaries of “just attend lunch” or “just come in to the office” don’t really support that. It has to be more structured than that, but not too structured because then there’s no chance to actually chat about the things that interest us. A reading group hits the sweet spot on that spectrum.

The last book selected was Enacting a curriculum of kindness and I chose the chapter Kindness in curriculum and course design. The two authors work at Southern Cross University’s Centre
for Teaching and Learning. They describe themselves as “lecturers” – the quotes are theirs. The point being that they don’t give lectures. They also don’t have tests. The rationale for the former is that they don’t work as effectively as other forms of learning – as indicated by this study:

Schmidt HG, Cohen-Schotanus J, Van der Molen, HT, et al. (2010) Learning more by being taught less: A “time-for-self-study” theory explaining curricular effects on graduation rate and study duration. Higher Educ. 2010;60(3):287–300

There are rationales for lectures, which is why they still have a place, but they’re not about students’ learning – they’re more about allowing students to get to know their module leader and maybe identify them as a role model. And because lecturers like demonstrating their knowledge (why not allow teachers to do stuff just because it makes them happy? – there’s little enough around that does that).

The rationale for the dropping testing though is that not only is it pointless (it’s testing skills – memorising a bunch of stuff and working under time pressure that rarely have any value) it’s also unkind. It seems a dreadful way to treat other people to put them under that kind of pressure.

Actually, on the lectures thing. It is also unkind to take fees from students and then fob them off with as poor an educational experience as lectures. Sure a few are nice to have, but for them to predominate isn’t giving value for money.

So – Southern cross has already achieved what seems like a far-off dream … no lecturing and no testing.

What was revelatory for me about the book chapter was that the authors recount the opposition to their learning design work from colleagues, who positioned that as unkind. Which sent them into a sort of spiral of self-doubt and questioning – am I being unkind by asking colleagues to do stuff which they’re uncomfortable with?

The example they start with was backlash against online submissions of assessments. Been there. When I was at Coventry, we introduced online marking and to smooth things over I was tasked with 1) looking at devices where people could mark using a stylus like they used to and 2) looking at bulk printers so that academics could print stuff out. As an initial postdoc role, measuring print speeds of various machines was not (I felt) making best use of my PhD.

But it came from a good place – being kind to the academics. But then – looking back, none of that resistance was justified – because we now just mark online and get on with it. And it’s fine.

Throughout the chapter, Mieke and Lachlan lay out how the curriculum reforms institutions are enacting – are all also kinder. Active pedagogies, authentic assessment, constructive alignment would be the obvious ones to me, but they also mention moderated assessment and feedback which makes sense, as it’s through this that students perceive fairness of treatment. It’s not a question we ask regularly enough when we encounter poor and recalcitrant pedagogies – “how is this kind?” As if kindness is somehow not a factor. When ultimately it should be the most important factor. If we’re not hardline about kindness, how are the students going to demand that of each other and themselves? If we’re not sending out a generation of kind people to be in the world, we’ve failed at our most important task.

What Mieke and Lachlan keep coming back to in their chapter in amongst this, is how reform is unkind to their peers. It’s a difficult thread to navigate. Wait. A difficult course to thread. Some metaphor. Balance. How do you balance what needs to be done to be kind against the fact that doing it requires work, stress, re-evaluation?

I’d say demanding change in and of itself is not unkind. It’s the difference between what my colleague who chose the book calls brave spaces as opposed to safe spaces. Spaces should not be comfortable, we should be challenged to change practice, and this in itself should not be stressful. Learn to mark on a screen – it won’t take long to adapt. Where it becomes unsafe and unkind is when the time and the support for the change is not supplied – and that’s a structural thing. The authors’ solution is more support staff to help with the educational technology. Well I’d say more learning designers too. But also time. To redesign. To get your head around the fact that lectures and testing are bad models for learning. To have those parts of the month allocated to sitting around and absorbing the ideas. But then do it.

The self-questioning is also revealing from the perspective of why maybe kindness is more difficult to demand than anything else, because the people who are working from a position of kindness are less prone to making demands. We’re self-doubting and always try to place ourselves in the position of the other person, which acts partly in being self-defeating. Whereas those who are without any self-doubt, get to take the lead because they have no self-doubt, but are therefore usually wrong.

Anyway, read the chapter. I’d strongly recommend it.

Reflecting on reflection

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As part of a project I’ve just started working on I spent two days last week at a castle in Yorkshire.

The project is fascinating – and fun – it’s about integrating playfulness within the curriculum and measuring its impact. You can read more about the project at https://research.northumbria.ac.uk/replay/One of the things that came out of the workshop was being given the task with three other participants of coming up with the structure for one of the final steps, which is where we all reflect on the project. We decided that we’d actually plan the reflection for the whole project all the way through, as one is so dependent on the other. As the learning designers on the project (across six universities) have to do research diaries, it makes sense that these should all be integrated.

As part of this “working group” one of the people in the team shared this: https://eprints.staffs.ac.uk/9080/1/Lesley%20Raven_Thesis_2025.pdf It’s really focused on reflection in design education / studio learning – that general domain – but there’s a lot that’s transferable to other disciplines. The key thing that was fed into our process on the day was the key phrase “Reflection is not admin”. If we have to do repeated reflection throughout the project, it shouldn’t feel like a chore, but actually be playful practice too.

I started skimming through it, but there’s such a lot of good stuff in there, i’m reading the whole thing from beginning to end.

What I particularly liked about the bit of it I’ve read so far (p. 34 – ) is the break down of reflection into these five themes. The design ed focus shows through but most disciplines will have something that aligns to these.

1) Technical rationality – This is really the basic “did it achieve what it set out to do?” – most tasks will actually have some learning to acquire, even if it’s not a technique or skill. Bottom line is – did it work?

2) Artistry – again this is obvious for design ed (and art) not so much for other things. Though this book shows how artistry is a principle that can be applied anywhere. Chapter twelve is especially worth a read.

3) Constructivist assumptions – constructivism is the principle that we develop knowledge by building on what we already know – and so this reflection would address the extent to which these assumptions have been met. Did we build on any knowledge?

4) Tacit knowledge – tacit knowledge is the hidden bits of knowledge we have, but we’re not aware we have. This part of the reflection aims to unpack that aspect. So the question here might be “has any knowledge or understanding emerged through the process of reflection?”

5) Mind and body dualism. This is a bit trickier to apply generally. The thesis isn’t really suggesting we adopt mind body dualism but be aware of it. We often ask ourselves how have our minds developed, but of course design ed is also about physical skills. The two are intertwined so much the idea of dualism is outdated. Embodied learning. Post-humanist post-dualism etc etc. Lots of post. It’s a bit difficult to say what your body has learnt from … say a maths lecture … except lecture seats do not provide adequate lumbar support for 62 year olds. For me this makes sense in terms of Gibbs’s “feelings” stage of reflection. How did it make you feel? When you reflect do you cringe or smile? There’s a quote by Polanyi (1974) which helped me get my head round this – “practical wisdom is more truly embodied in action than expressed in rules of action”. So basically, don’t overlook the embodied aspect. It’s the ontic before the ontologic (to get all Heideggery again).

Also reading the thesis I realise how much scope there is to reflection – it’s not a boring chore if you do it properly – it can be a creative act in itself. Maybe the most creative part of the cycle if done in a fun and playful way, which is what we’re here for.

Obviously I blog, I do podcasting and I have a constant internal self-critical monologue so reflection is something I do a LOT of, but finding alternative mechanisms to reflect that are creative and invite people to want to reflect is, I’ve realised, going to be a fascinating parallel part of the project.

Polanyi, M. 1974. Personal knowledge: Towards a post-critical philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

Privileging the corporeal

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It’s still happening

This train of thought was triggered by this headline:

Couples who meet on dating apps are doomed science says

https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/68440/1/couples-who-meet-on-dating-apps-are-doomed-science-says

Well, OK. That does not surprise me. But then the first line of the copy says: “A new study has found that people who meet their romantic partners online are less happy in love compared to those who meet in person.” Now that is a very different statement than the headline. What about all the people who meet online through other mechanisms than dating apps? What about all those who meet through community groups? Gaming? People you know mutually through social media? Or (my own experience here) social virtual worlds? Those are very different dynamics and aren’t mentioned in the article.

I posted about this on Bluesky (follow me @markchilds.bluesky.social) a month ago, and not only is it still annoying me (hence the blog) but also the news item is still appearing on my browser home page

https://www.newscientist.com/article/2492159-couples-who-meet-online-may-have-lower-relationship-satisfaction/ for example.

And this one is an earlier study that says the same thing, the news item is in 2023 https://www.psychologytoday.com/gb/blog/dating-in-the-digital-age/202310/unpacking-the-online-dating-effect. (Links to the Sharabi and Dorrence-Hall paper)

which also got picked up by the media, for example: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/nov/18/relationships-online-mates

Now you expect this from reactionary rags like The Guardian, but New Scientist?

The original article doesn’t link to the research (shameful!) but does mention the lead researcher (Marta Kowal) so I tracked down the paper, assuming that the conflation occurred through sloppy reporting. But no – it’s in the original paper!

The literature review is even-handed – they reference studies that find no difference, or even stronger relationships if begun online (due to enhanced disclosure online). However, they then note that since those studies online dating behaviour has changed – there’s more of a swipe right / left culture – which leads to a more transactional mindset and gaming the algorithms. Also if you’ve scanned through a thousand opportunities and picked one, it’s going to make you wonder more about the 999 you didn’t pick and if perhaps one of those would have been a better choice so increasing the chances of dissatisfaction with the person you did pick. Fair enough.

They also acknowledge in their limitations “our binary categorization of meeting context—online versus offline—did not account for nuanced digital contexts.” Well true. But this caveat does not appear in their conclusions or their paper title. A simple addition of the phrase online dating apps would have made the distinction clearer.

And this conflation occurs all the way through the paper. They’re obviously talking specifically about the mechanics of dating apps, but throughout they describe this as meeting online. For example the Discussion section starts: “The present study aimed to better understand the increasingly common phenomenon of meeting romantic partners online.” No it doesn’t – it better understands the phenomenon of meeting romantic partners through online dating apps. Meeting offline involves the various serendipitous, low stakes, casual connections that can occur through the traditional venues like family, friends, work, school and the Oldenberg third places list (1997). They don’t just get you through the day – though these last group have declined. It’s the (I’m assuming) low stakes, random connections, where you’re not meeting with a potential partner in mind, but just doing stuff, then suddenly after a while thinking “hang on, this person I like a LOT” and taking it from there that makes those relationships so great in the long term (no evidence about in general, but that’s how it worked for me). Doing research like this either means comparing like with like – so all the serendipitous, third space type places online with the equivalent offline ones – or being very cautious about how the claims are framed. Particularly when the key distinction is something other than what you’re claiming. This isn’t offline v online, it’s serendipity v algorithms.

And the other reason why if I was a reviewer of this paper I would have rejected it. There’s no qualitative data. They surveyed a huge number of people, BUT DIDN’T TALK TO ANYONE. Essentially they have no real clue about what the data mean because they haven’t checked their thoughts with any of the people they surveyed. Even my undergraduate students do a better job than this – they understand the complementary roles of data in a mixed methods approach (in an interpretivist study) and why both are necessary for a fuller picture.

But this leads to a wider question – the glee with which the “journalists” pounced on the findings and spread them abroad. There is still (despite lockdowns) a widespread mistrust of online interactions – that for many people there is an in inherent inauthenticity to them. What Carl Mitcham (1994, p.298) calls “ancient scepticism”. It’s a distrust of technology. I see it at work where people say they prefer to teach in person because they can judge the engagement of their students better.

I’m here to tell you. No. You. Can’t. There is no evidence (unless I’ve been very bad at tracking it down) that perceptions of engagement actually correspond to actual engagement. All those nods and eye contacts DO NOT MEAN anyone is paying attention. In fact, students report all that performance around paying attention distracts them from actually paying attention. Admittedly anecdotal, but no-one has anything else to go on.

Sure I agree the apps are pretty dodgy, I would hate them, but the relationships you can build up through online communities, through gaming, through social virtual worlds, are real relationships and it’s disengenuous to criticise one through the guise of reporting on something completely unrelated, just because it happens in the same place.

References

Marta Kowal, Piotr Sorokowski, Adam Bode, Michal Misiak, W.P. Malecki, Agnieszka Sorokowska, S. Craig Roberts, Meeting partners online is related to lower relationship satisfaction and love: Data from 50 countries, Telematics and Informatics, Volume 101, 2025, 102309, ISSN 0736-5853,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tele.2025.102309.

Liesel L. Sharabi, Elizabeth Dorrance-Hall, (2024) The online dating effect: Where a couple meets predicts the quality of their marriage, Computers in Human Behavior, Volume 150, 2024, 107973, ISSN 0747-5632,
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2023.107973.

Mitcham, C. (1994) Thinking Through Technology: the Path Between Engineering & Philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Oldenberg, R. (1997) The Great Good Place: Cafes, coffee shops, community centers, beauty parlors, general stores, bars, hangouts and how they get you through the day. Marlowe and Company, USA: New York