This BBC piece about the origins of the de-cluttered household caught my eye: https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20230103-the-historical-origins-of-the-de-cluttered-home It's a swift and effective overview of architectural minimalism and the cyclical waxing and waning of fashion for de-cluttered interiors. The pendulum has swung towards maximalism and eclecticism for a bit now and perhaps there are hints that is starting to swing back. I suspect the article presents too linear a summary, as there seem always holdouts that can linger on until suddenly becoming “in” again as the pendulum swings back. But this piece got me thinking about how much minimalism is cyclical in other areas outside its home base of architecture and design.

For teaching and learning, one could perhaps think of Holt (unschooling) or Dewey in terms of minimalist practice. Or, going way back, Socratic method, which Plato is at pains to show off as distinctive, often seems minimalist today. An interesting feature of minimalism in education is the way that it feels more of a shifting target impacted by the passage of time than does architectural minimalism. Less stuff is less. Clean walls or lines are empty. But minimalism in pedagogy isn't absence or emptiness or simply less stuff. It might mean making the most out of as little as possible, but that's something a bit different than the kind of minimalism that is so tangible in design. Things that seem minimalist now were almost always not so when first (or most famously) practiced. Initially they may have been radical or driven by ideas and ideology outside of pedagogy (similar to the way design minimalism was impacted by philosophy, religion, and the like), but self-conscious minimalism in education seems more often an epiphenomenon of pedagogical criticism. A good way to act contrary to prevailing practice is to go back to some sort of putative foundation or, alternatively, to remove elements that others take for granted.

There's value in that contrarianism, but I'm struck by how much more important the other strand of minimalism might be, namely the way minimalism can overlap with sustainability. Minimalism in education can have greater overlap with sustainability than design minimalism tends to do. As the article I cited above notes, some minimalist design elements have very low embodied energy (e.g. rocks) but many are energy intensive to manufacture and transport (e.g. steel). The two are not always aligned in design.

This idea of embodied energy is a useful concept when applied to pedagogy. How much energy are we expending on tools relative to pedagogical value? What's the embodied energy, in terms of attention, preparation time, or training time, relative to the eventual outcome?

Our pedagogical workspace isn't just the physical or the object. Stuff isn't the only measure. For learning, the “stuff” can be squishier quantities: time, attention, pace. Computing has its own “stuff” to add to the equation: electricity, money, human time (again) for setup and maintenance. All of that combined makes up the embodied energy of pedagogy. As such, there is value in keeping that as low as possible, not as an aesthetic choice, but because in most cases those are exactly the limited resources effective pedagogy requires.

#minimalism #minimalistedtech #sustainableeducation #sustainabletech #education

postscript: This is not a post about ChatGPT, but I would be remiss not to mention that one under-discussed aspect of large language models for use in education is sustainability. These models are expensive to develop both in hardware and in energy costs. The fact that OpenAI is currently showing off ChatGPT “for free” (= they want your data) may be masking the fact that these models are most definitely not free. More on that in a later post.

#minimalism #lessismore #edtech #edtechminimalism #minimalistedtech

This recent piece about the psychological reasons why it might be hard to think of solutions in terms of subtracting something rather than adding features hit home with me. (Of course it did: less is more and all that...) I am particularly fond of their “No-bell”:

Every time we subtract an activity that is not helping us create or share knowledge, we ring the bell and celebrate the No-Bell Prize. Quit a dead-end research project? Ding! Cancel a time-suck meeting? Ding! One way to get more meaningful work done is to add work hours. A better way is to subtract tedious time-fillers.

I could have annoyed my office neighbors with that quite a bit; probably every time I deleted an email from on high. That seems a bit extreme as an action, but I do appreciate the idea of turning subtraction into a reward and celebrating the idea of less.

Immediately I was reminded of the old advice about writing and public speaking. You make your last step removing something and almost always the whole thing is better for it. In the case of lectures and academic talks, this is a great technique both because it means that you will feel more relaxed about bringing the talk in on time but also because in any question or answer session you usually have at least one answer (on the stuff you cut out) in the bag. In fact, because you cut it out and it likely had a natural place in what you were saying, it is very likely that someone will ask you about it, so you've even done the work, simply by removing it from your prepared remarks, of making it likely that someone will ask you about it.

Applied to teaching and technology, I found myself thinking less about avoiding the tedious time sucks (though those do, in fact, suck) and more about feature creep in a lot of edtech. Or, put differently, about how often it is that technology offers “solutions” to problems that can be solved or alleviated by subtracting something rather than adding a new tool or feature to a tool. I get this vibe all the time from “AI” marketing copy around edtech and too often from tools that seem to be suffering from feature creep or mission creep over the years (looking at you Tophat). It is endemic in LMS-es and their integrations, where I often have to ask myself whether what they're selling could be done with a simple document or video rather than a platform or piece of software. It is advice I would give to students when using tools too — not least of all when they want to do PowerPoint presentations and refuse to heed the advice about less text, more message.

More often though, it is habits around use that drive the “more”; there isn't always a feature that is the culprit.

The easiest example of this recently is with Zoom and its overuse this past year. How many meetings, particularly one on one, might be better with a simple phone call, removing the video and just sticking to the voice? Or how often is it helpful to remove one thing that you think you have to do online and put it in a simpler form. I think often about the simplicity of early Khan Academy videos. They could be effective with a piece of paper and a good explanation. You don't always need a digital whiteboard or an online tool when you can use paper, pencil, and conversation.

More specifically though, the process of subtraction seems something that could be a regular part of the toolkit for working with any educational technology. Sort of a line item in the process, where you stop and ask, ok, what could I remove to make this work better? It's the kind of exercise that contains within it the seeds of critical process. It forces a question: is this thing that I'm doing valuable?

More often than not, I find that the payoff for this sort of subtraction exercise isn't just in what is removed. It often helps reveal a better way forward through a clear-headed assessment of what you are doing out of inertia and obligation vs. what is of practical value. So, for example, a process like this had me rethink a lot of the way I gave comments on student writing. I found myself wasting a lot of time writing or recording via audio comments that students would never see. (I know they didn't see them because the edtech tool in this case tracked whether or not students have looked at the comments. Over the years it has been clear that only about 50% of students read comments, even when doing so is required for editing and revising.) So I started by removing that process, removing the tracking, forgetting about that whole way of doing things. Once all that was subtracted, then I could think through leaner ways of giving feedback that would be immediate and actionable and, crucially, unavoidable, for students while not feeling like I was wasting all my time and labor. The direction I went in is less relevant to subtraction, but it was essentially to replace technology with individual meetings, at a massive scale; though that might sound more involved, it was in fact less stuff going on, less hours, and less work for greater benefit and better outcomes. It was also, incredibly old-fashioned and non-technological.

I appreciated this article because it gave some context for why it is so hard to think in terms of subtracting as a path to solving problems. We have to force ourselves to think that way, to think through doing more through doing less. (And, to be fair, it's not a solution in all situations. Sometimes more is more.)

I was intrigued by this recent post by Tim Denning where he connects minimalism and a quiet ego. I don't buy that connection, as it seems like an extrovert's misunderstanding of introversion. (I would recommend reading, as complement, Susan Cain's Quiet), but it did get me thinking about how and if “minimalism” translates to quiet. Further, it made me think about how much that metaphor of loudness translates to technology. Some technology seems to yell, other technologies just whisper urgently in your ear, and some others sit quietly until called upon.

A minimalist edtech is often a quieter edtech, both for teachers and for students. But thinking in these terms also might help articulate better how students respond to and interact with educational technologies. Just as some people are more sensitive to the external world than others, and just as some people turn outward or inward with their energies more than others, so too responses to edtech vary greatly depending on your need for or, conversely, tolerance of technological noise.

I talk to students quite a bit who fall more on that highly sensitive end of the spectrum. They are often overwhelmed by the push notifications coming their way. Even turning those off and minimizing what they can, they still are usually required to use an LMS and other tools (not least of all the university's own overstuffed class and student management portal) that are visually busy and “noisy.” At a certain point, for their own sanity, they feel like shutting it out. It is not simply distracting but also distressing, simply to open up the tools they are required to use for “managing” their learning.

This isn't just a problem for highly sensitive people. Other students, particularly those who tend to need a lot more input and reminders and notices to gain their attention, tune out because they have to do too much work to sift out what might be actionable from what is routine or redundant or irrelevant to them. They tend to get stressed about missing things precisely because, in the wash of push notices and menu items, they do in fact miss things in real time and have to scramble after the fact to fix it.

This is a specific case of our more general technological saturation, where we marinate in a steady stream of email, social media, refreshing web pages, texts, and anything else simmering in our feeds, phones, and inboxes. To that general problem there are domain specific solutions: email clients that slice and dice your incoming mail, AI-ed feeds, quiet mode or digital diets on the low tech side.

Are there edtech solutions that similarly don't yell at you all the time?

Almost every edtech tool I've used over the past 15 years feels like it is yelling at me.

Too many menus or settings or checkboxes that need to be clicked. Default settings which push notification after notification to my email. Interfaces that foreground sending out constant notifications about things. At scale, with hundreds of students, it's just a never-ending mess of noise.

The only tools I've seen that attempt to cut through this noise do so with a simpler interface. I haven't in general seen a lot of tools that are functionally minimalist for education in the way that there exist minimalist tools for writing or coding, note-taking or project management (like the platform I'm using here, write.as, for example). Those tools aim, as a goal, to get out of the way of a task. There's a lot of work that goes into achieving that to be sure, but I don't see that as an aim in edtech. How often do tools get out of the way of grading rather than imposing themselves in your view, adding layers of complexity? How often do tools get out of the way of course design vs. inserting their structure upon whatever it syou are trying to do? Quite the contrary, more often in educational technologies it's an aesthetic of more. More notifications, more analytics, more AI, more noise.

Perhaps this is what turns some teachers off?

After all, having to divide one's focus to dozens if not hundreds of students all the time is distraction and noise enough. What I need is less noise in my technology, not amplifying the classroom noise further.

It is easy to assume that teachers who are slow to adopt new technologies do so because of technological discomfort or not having training or being old-fashioned. But are they also just not interested in the noise?

On the other hand, how many students don't have the option to say that the constant noise of technology distracts and bothers them? How many can't quite articulate it in those terms, even though they know that something doesn't feel quite right, a general sense of unease that they are missing things, that they don't really want to be checking on this machine all the time?

Children of the '90s (and their parents) may well remember the Tamagotchi fad. The Tamagotchi was a “digital pet” that would beep at you and demand attention if you didn't click the right button and “feed it” or otherwise tend it. It is still around, but in modified form.

In dark moments, as I feed the LMS assignments that will post to students' feeds automatically, as I tend the grading notifications as students submit their assignments back to me, I wonder whether I'm stuck with the toy which I would never have had, because it was in fact a Sisyphean torture device, yelling at me for my attention every minute of every day.

#minimalism #quiet #minimalistedtech #introversion

As it is nearly midterm season, a student asked the other day whether we were going to have a midterm. This tends to be a question from a corner of the Zoom that is a bit... er, clueless. It was in my pitch for the course at the beginning of the term: no midterms, no final. I get applause for that. They do the wave. They profess affection and my immortal glory. (The trade-off is they have to do a fair amount of writing and speaking.)

So, maybe a question that makes me wonder whether anything I've said is being heard out there, but good to reaffirm the plan anyway. No midterm.

I went on to say that I didn't have any high stakes assessments because I didn't think they could be done well remotely. Or, rather, there were more effective uses of our time. And, I added, I also didn't think it was ethical to ask students to install spyware on their computer simply to monitor whether they are taking a test without cheating.

Students were grateful and said as much. But it got me thinking about how many of their other classes are simply plowing ahead with these technologies. Too many I think.

This Vice piece from a couple of weeks ago is vivid illustration of the outrage from students: https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7wxvd/students-are-rebelling-against-eye-tracking-exam-surveillance-tools

But this is a case where the expectation of finding a technological solution seems to have eclipsed the more obvious low-tech solutions at our disposal already. While I won't deny that there are plenty of cases where high stakes tests are necessary and these sorts of verification and monitoring tools provide a service (one that is still ethically dubious, but I put that burden on university administrations and not the software companies), I suspect that for the vast majority of use cases simpler adjustments would be effective and require little to no technological overhead.

For example, there is already plenty of evidence and argument against high-stakes testing. For the general audience summary, check out, for example, https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/post/the-complete-list-of-problems-with-high-stakes-standardized-tests/2011/10/31/gIQA7fNyaM_blog.html and https://www.usnews.com/opinion/knowledge-bank/articles/2017-09-15/stop-pretending-that-high-stakes-testing-is-making-schools-better and https://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/uk/17/11/when-testing-takes-over

Rather than jump to an over-engineered solution to a pedagogical constraint, it makes much more sense to start with the goals of the testing. More often than not, there are a lot of ways to get the desired outcome, of which a big test that requires monitoring so that students don't, for example, consult the internet or notes, is only one solution.

Teachers (and universities) are missing an opportunity to innovate in teaching, taking what seems like the direct solution — hey, it's a magic panopticon proctor! — instead of doing the technically less sexy but pedagogically more robust work of assessing learning outcomes and methods in light of the current teaching environment.

Constraint breeds innovation. Rather than forcing spyware on students, start from the assumption that students have access to the internet. Anything you ask them to do is open book, by definition. If you ask for regurgitation of facts, then you will likely get folks reaching for their phones and dialing up Prof. Google. So .... don't ask those kinds of questions. Don't design an exercise like that in this medium. Don't just reproduce without thought what you would do in a physical classroom where you can hover like a hawk and the soft social pressure not to cheat weighs in the air. (It has to be noted though, cheating can be too common in classrooms anyway.)

But stop and step back for a moment consider the constraint. Why do we ask students to answer those sorts of questions in the first place? What's the payoff?

One key of translating to the remote and online mode, for me at least, has been to shift from a focus on end products to a focus on process. End products, like the easily google-able answers to simple questions, or even papers on conventional and canonical topics, tend to invite cheating and shortcuts. Process is harder to fake. Or, put another way, it's just not worth the time for most students to fake process rather than just do the thing. Effective assignments online, in a world where “the answer” is only a swipe away, have to have steps, with clear benchmarks along the way, and a rubric that rewards the process as well as product. This works easily and well with writing, but most anything can be made into a form of response and iteration over time. Think of it maybe as version control. By asking for more of that record, that documentation, you are in effect getting a cheap form of monitoring. But it is the students themselves who are responsible for recording, in cruder chunks than video perhaps, that they've gone through the steps to do the work.

The other key feature of process-based assignments — ones that don't require obsessive spying on my students to be reasonably confident that they aren't cheating — is customization. The process forces them to integrate some aspect of where they are, what they're doing, things that are distinctive to each of them. It isn't something personal, but there are almost always a series of choices they have to make in deciding how to proceed with the assignment. For example, it might be that they have to use some feature of their own environment to as the seed for reflection. Or it is something in the reading that connects to them specifically. Even if they have trouble at first, it is a request for authentication. Include in the assignment something that is authentic (not personal, not revealing) to the student.

Process-based assignments often shift the burden of defining the boundaries of the assignment to the students themselves. What I mean by that is that it can be helpful to involve the students in formulating their own prompts, their own cues to further research, investigation, or questioning, in defining how far is “far enough”. They can go searching for things online, but where they stop and what they do with that information will leave a mark in how they write or speak about it in their response. They may go out searching for information online, but the process is about formulating questions as much or more than it is about retrieving answers.

Finally, shifting the focus to process over product often helps students gain perspective on their work in new ways. Some assignments require documentation (of a sort) of the process, a kind of meta reasoning that students don't necessarily engage in. When asked to think about why they do things the way they do, they gain more control over their work. They may also be prone to question the value of various types of academic work they've been compelled to do over the years. That seems to me like a welcome bit of criticism. Much of the schoolwork they've been asked to do has been in fact as pointless as they thought it was. To focus on process is to allow for criticism of the very things we're doing.

The trend towards massive surveillance of students is a case of one of the most common EdTech blind-spots. Products are geared towards the surface features of teaching rather than the deep experience of being a teacher. Proctoring software (aka spyware) tries to imitate the situation of a classroom where a teacher (theoretically) can see whether people are teaching. That form of slavish replication in technology is lesson 1 of what not to do in instructional design.

It's unethical; but it's also so unnecessary when there are other solutions — non-technical solutions in particular — readily at hand.

It reminds me of that infamous Silicon Valley failure, the $400 Juicer, an over-engineered contraption that attracted millions in venture capital and then failed spectacularly. It failed because it was expensive, yes; but it also failed because it turns out that there was a convenient and inexpensive tool that worked better at getting the juice out of the company's custom-made fruit pouches: the human hand.

#edtech #minimalism #minimalistedtech