Scholé Supplement #3

✍🏼 Old School School

Sharing knowledge feels good. If you’re excited about something and you’ve built up a store of knowledge about it through your own experience, few pleasures in life can compare to the satisfaction of sharing that knowledge with someone who appreciates it.

This is the joy and the gift of teaching. It’s a sublime and spontaneous pleasure that can be found even in the most ordinary and unlikely situations, like showing someone how to do something simple in a spreadsheet and watching them have a brain explosion.

The grind of teaching professionally in institutions can mean that such moments are rarer, where creating joy is just one of many pressing priorities and almost never the most urgent. Professional teaching can become a path to burnout not unlike that of the person who becomes a vet because they love animals, only to find that the daily reality of the job is mostly not about that, to put it mildly.

I am in quiet awe of the heroic qualities possessed by those who toil at the frontlines of caring professions through daily disappointment, numbness, and heartbreak. Even so, it is possible to support and admire those who care heroically within uncaring systems, while insisting that it is the systems that need changing.

One of the luxuries afforded by starting a new project is that we needn’t import any previous assumptions or thought categories about how things are supposed to work. We are free to start from where we are, with the circumstances in which we find ourselves, and also free to re-interpret those circumstances from first principles to take the courses of action that delight our ethical imaginations.

In other words, when we start afresh, we get to make it up as we go along.

So here’s some first-principles thinking – the joy of teaching happens in the space between two or more people. It doesn’t have to be in a classroom or a course. It happens when those involved have the freedom and safety to invoke a spirit of generosity and an ethic of care. It doesn’t have to be for credit or incentive – the exchange is its own reward.

I’ve come to think of myself as a philoso-preneur – I want to figure out ways to create the organisational and commercial structures that make it possible to bring to life the educational philosophy and values that I champion, in real-world ways that are accessible, inclusive, sustainable and for public benefit.

Perhaps that sounds a bit dry and abstract. So to give it some oomph, I teamed up with philoso-rapper Nathanology to make a song about it – a grokkists’ anthem, if you will.

You can listen to the full song here, but here’s the take-home message:

Redefine School: Not a tool of the state,
But a movement that arises from those who create –
Whose mode of exchange isn’t monetary wealth
But Relationship and Wisdom. An end in itself.

We're working on a video version that will be available in the coming weeks (sneak preview here). Read on for more about my conversation and collaboration with Nathan in this edition's Still Curious Podcast digest.

TikTok teaching and activism with philoso-rapper Nathan Dufour Oglesby aka ‘Nathanology’ | S2E7

In this episode: What’s involved in being an artist, academic and activist on YouTube and TikTok. Musical influences from Bob Dylan to Public Enemy. Why …

Still Curious Podcast

A few months ago, a good friend of mine showed me one of Nathan's YouTube videos – Introduction To Critical Theory for the 21st Century – saying 'you have to see this!' He wasn't wrong.

Eventually I got chatting with Nathan by email and was delighted to find I had discovered a fellow traveller who inhabits a different universe. It's nice when life hands you moments like that.

I know there's some of you reading this who are fans of the the idea of the podcast but aren't actually big podcast listeners – yes, that's a thing, totally get it. If that's you, then I suggest if there's one episode you're prepared to spend your time on, make it this one.

I'm also aware that many of you who follow what I'm doing find the energy and authenticity of my activities inspiring, even if you have no idea where I'm going with it or even, let's be honest, what it is. You have to watch, even if just to see what happens next.

Nathan's stuff is like that for me.

So if you want to spend a while marinating in the company of two articulate, enthusiastic and slightly out-there people talk from the heart about stuff they care about and almost forget the mic is on, you could do worse than spend an hour with Nathan and myself.

In this episode

‣ What's involved in being an artist, academic and activist on YouTube and TikTok.
‣ Musical influences from Bob Dylan to Public Enemy.
‣ Why make songs and videos about the history of words and ideas?
‣ Getting naughty for nature and performing rap on tap.
‣ Teaching as performance.
‣ Meditations on the self and social media.
‣ BONUS: Nathan and Danu collaborate on a song about the history of school.

5 Links for grokking humane technology

by Charlotte Perry-Houts

🔸 What gets me excited about humane technology

As 21st century technology rapidly changes the way we live our lives and interact as a society, we are faced with some critical questions and choices.

How can we ensure that the technology we build is propelling us toward a brighter future, instead of inventing new ways of exploiting people and the environment?

How can we democratize the development of new technologies, instead of imposing them on people?

We are forced to grapple with deeply existential questions, from the meaning of truth right down to what it means to be human, and there is an urgency to understanding the implications of today's choices on our global heritage and our collective futures.

🔸 How I learned about humane technology

I've always been interested in the underlying mechanisms that make a free society possible, especially free and fair access to knowledge and education through media and public institutions.

I have worked in open access publishing, scholarly tech, and education technology for the past six years, and became aware of how many opportunities there are in tech to fight for a more fair society, from protecting privacy to designing a more equitable and less toxic media ecosystem.

I have tried to actively embody those values in my work, to always challenge my team to consider the ethics of the solution we want to build, and to think critically about the impact we are having on society.

In 2021 I completed a course on data ethics through the University of San Francisco, and I learn more every day by following organizations like the Center for Humane Technology and the great journalism of the MIT Technology Review, as well as from all of the fine and brilliant people in my communities.

Foundations of Humane Technology Course

A free online course for product teams building technology that strengthens human capacity.

Home

This free and online course is an accessible and thought-provoking introduction to humane principles in technology and includes concrete, actionable ways of applying these principles at work.

Full-genome screening for newborn babies is now on the cards

A boon for medicine. But it raises questions of privacy

The EconomistThe Economist

There are so many murky possible trade-offs presented by the notion of sequencing every baby's genome at birth, and it's a really interesting lens into how we weigh incredibly serious risks to privacy against potentially revolutionary improvements to our quality of life.

The push to unionize at Amazon is a really important reminder that there is an essential continuity in the labor movement and continued relevance of labor organizing, even as tech giants paint a narrative that there is something fundamentally different about 21st century capitalism.

A new vision of artificial intelligence for the people

ln a remote rural town in New Zealand, an Indigenous couple is challenging what AI could be and who it should serve.

MIT Technology ReviewKaren Hao

New Zealand's Māori community is using AI to preserve te reo (the māori language) while retaining data sovereignty.

Dark sky tourism is on the rise across the U.S.

Where are the best places to stargaze in the U.S.? A growing list of Dark Sky Preserves shows where to avoid light pollution and see the stars.

National GeographicCassandra Brooklyn

I'm including this last link as a reminder that as we all work towards a common future under the same starry sky, we should always take the time to be humbled and awed at the beauty of the universe and the planet where we're lucky enough to live.

If you haven't played Cuphead but you're in any way interested in animation, the indie game dev scene or the highs and lows of bringing an ambitious passion project to life, this 24-min mini-doco will have you captivated. If you have played Cuphead, then I'm betting you will already have clicked the link by now.

Trapital Podcast - Trapital by Dan Runcie

Gain insights from top execs in music, media, and entertainment. Dan Runcie interviews heavy hitters who share lessons to help you level up.

Trapital by Dan Runcie

The Trapital podcast explores the intersection of hip-hop, business, media and tech. Every episode is a mind-bending whirlwind of insight. A representative sample is the episode where former Spotify economist Will Page talks about the future of the music business, touring after covid, the resurgence of vinyl, and web3.

Dense Discovery

A thoughtful weekly newsletter helping you be productive, feel inspired, and think critically. No buzzwords, hype or FOMO.

Dense Discovery is a free weekly newsletter on tech, design, ethics and sustainability run by Kai Brach in Melbourne. I subscribe to dozens of newsletters – this is one of the few I always open and Kai's activities have long been influential for approaching my own work.

Readocracy: a new way of governing the internet and rethinking influence

What it means and where it comes from. Motivated by a divided, overwhelmed, superficial world.

ReadocracyRenee Diresta

Readocracy is a super-interesting and thoughtful project that offers to track and 'give credit' for all the information we absorb and informal learning we do on the internet. On the one hand, a way to democratize organic expertise and recast attention from being a monetizable resource for social media platforms, to a source of legitimacy and social proof. On the other hand, maybe a bit mechanistic and creepy? I don't know, but I'll be watching closely.

Natural language AI DALL-E 2 reimagines Hieronymous Bosch for our times. I can't think of a more fitting way to end this edition of the newsletter.

About Grokkist

We're building a community of learners, educators and practitioners who are curious, creative and committed to finding and designing learning experiences that set the soul of fire. Learn more at the Grokkist website.

Grokkist – a learning community for curious and creative people who love learning but don’t love school

We’re building a community of curious and creative learners, educators and practitioners who are interested in designing life-changing learning experiences that set the soul on fire.