Human Creativity and Technology

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IBR Roomba

In a fascinating article, “Art by Algorithm,” Ed Finn, Founding Director of the Center for Imagination and Science at Arizona State University, ponders how machines support as well as challenge human creativity.  To dispel any fears that the author might be urging his readers to surrender to the inevitable dominance of artificial intelligence, I reproduce the closing paragraph below:

The remarkable precipice we stand beside now is one where our tools are, in a transformative way, just as plastic as we are. Our algorithmic systems are watching us, learning from us, just as we learn from them, creating the possibility for a complex dance of intention, anticipation, creativity and emergence based on individual people, algorithms, and the social and technical structures that bracket them all. This is terrifying and breathtaking all at once, and it’s [as] artists that we need most of all to make sense of a future in which our collaborators are strange mirror machines of ourselves. Aesthetics has always been the unforgiving terrain where we assess pragmatic reality according to the impossible standards of the world as we wish it would be. Computation is a parallel project, grounded in the impossible beauty of abstract mathematics and symbolic systems. As they come together, we need to remain the creators, and not the creations, of our beautiful machines.

 

Activities for the First Day of Class

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   Linh Do

Syllabus speed dating as a first-day, ice-breaker exercise? Maryellen Weimer, an emerita professor at Penn State Berks, who is responsible for Teaching Professor Blog, offers this and a number of other activities for the first day of class.  You may find resources from Faculty Focus, the site her blog is associated with, useful as well.

For Ryerson resources on what to do on the first day of class, see this handout from the Learning and Teaching Office.

If you’re teaching CMN 314, I recommend Sandra Rosenberg’s ice-breaker exercises, detailed in the “Teaching Tips” page of this blog.

Productive Class Discussion Using Polls

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                                                                                                            Eltpics

In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, James M Lang weighs the advantages of rich class discussion using online polls against the risk of smartphone distraction. The article links to a variety of valuable resources on online polling and device distraction and includes a brief list of sensible approaches to handling student smartphone use in the classroom.

Role Play for Negative Messages

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Tim Green

 © Sarah Kriger

Coming from a theatre background, I’ve had some good experiences building on performance activities for lesson plans. My favourite is a role-playing exercise that I developed for part of the Negative Messages class for CMN 279, focusing on delivering negative messages in person.

I like that role-play helps students experience and overcome “safe” versions of potential emotional obstacles to delivering effective negative messages. Often, many of them start the exercise feeling confident about the concepts we cover but find that applying those concepts in a face-to-face discussion with another person raises new challenges.

Because this exercise has been helpful in my class, I thought I’d share it with everyone else. The lesson plan has six main parts. I’ve found it leaves plenty of time to go over written negative messages and upcoming assignments at the end of class.

CLICK HERE FOR INSTRUCTIONS

 

Social Media and Censorship

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Bill Kerr

I attended a number of Canadian Communication Association sessions at Congress and thought you might be interested in a summary of the keynote address by Tarleton Gillespie.

Here is the bio provided by the association:

Tarleton Gillespie is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research, an affiliated associate       professor in Cornell’s Department of Communication and Department of Information Science, a faculty associate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, co-founder of the blog Culture Digitally, the author of Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture (MIT, 2007) and a co-editor of Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society (MIT, 2014). His next book (Yale University Press, forthcoming, spring 2018) examines how the governance of content and behavior by social media platforms has broader implications for freedom of expression and the character of public discourse.

His lecture distilled his current research on the quiet content moderation conducted by a complex hierarchy of checkers–paid and “volunteer”–by Twitter, Facebook and Google. Using Facebook’s removal of the famous image from the napalming of Vietnam as an illustrative case, he explained how censorship decisions based on algorithmic triggers and personal bias can determine what is culturally acceptable, often without our knowing it.

Here’s one of his YouTube lectures exploring similar questions in 2010, as well as an interesting article defining “platform.”

Gillespie’s twitter page is a rich source of alerts about ComCult issues. See also his blog, Culture Digitally.

Tool for Ranking Criteria

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If you’ve taught report writing, you may have found it difficult to explain how to weigh the importance of one solution criterion against another.  Filippo A. Salustri, a professor of mechanical engineering at Ryerson, has devised a straightforward pairwise comparison problem-solving method that you could introduce to your students. Thanks to Richard McMaster for drawing my attention to this tool.

You may also want to look at Professor Salustri’s engineering design site.  His uncompromising policy on grade bumping requests, entitled “don’t bother begging for marks,” is eye-opening.