Serendipity35

After two decades teaching "children," I moved to "higher" education where the line between children and adults is fuzzy. For the last decade, I have been involved in adult education and lifelong learning. The "adult” adjective is significant. 

Adults face a lot more barriers during the learning process. There is the transition back to education, the cost of it, the time needed to devote to it, and all the normal distractions of full or part-time jobs, kids and—hopefully—a social life.

My lifelong learning students are often age 55+ but my theory is that lifelong learning begins as soon as you leave formal learning. You can be a lifelong learner at 19, 39, or 79 or any age, but in any case, you are definitely an "adult learner."

Pedagogy is the methods and practice of teaching children. Andragogy: the methods and practice of teaching adults. But as I said, that line
when a student no longer a child, but an adult is not hard and clear. We often view high school graduation as the entry into adulthood, but anyone who has taught college students and also taught younger students will tell you that there are often more similarities than differences.

Andragogy, a concept dating to the 1960s and Malcolm Knowles, is important because it recognizes that adult learners are different and that these differences are extremely important. Here are some things that andragogy and adult learning theory stress.

ADULTS:   
    Are more independent than children when it comes to learning.
    Are capable of critical thinking (unlike some children) but are still interested in the “correct answer."
    Learn more slowly but just as effectively because they have more life experience and deeply ingrained stereotypes and ideas.
    Must be given respect as adults and for their life experience or lack of experience.
    Need classrooms that embrace active learning, including hands-on activities.
    Learn material that is relevant for their needs.
    Are driven less by grades (performance goal orientation) and more by understanding (mastery goal orientation).

My lifelong learning students are often age 55+ but as I said earlier, my theory is that lifelong learning begins as soon as you leave formal learning. Of course, some lifelong learning still occurs in a classroom, a school or a course that you pay for or can do for free.

In my formal education courses, I studied basic human growth and development theories. You can study Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, Malcolm Knowles' work, and Piaget’s stages of cognitive development. 

There are some basics I mention to people who are going to be teaching in any formal or informal setting.

Children need more guidance. Children are just not physiologically capable of performing certain skills or critical thinking. They benefit from active learning and student-centered learning situations. But so do many adults. Adults can handle learning something theoretical and then seeing its application. Children prefer the application and then the theory behind it.

Back in the end of the 20th century, I became very interested in learning styles. The theory is that learners of all ages (maybe more so as adults where they have options) think they have a learning style. An overly simplified breakdown is that you might be a visual, kinesthetic, or auditory learner. More recently, some research now suggests learning styles are a myth. Maybe, but I still like the theory. 

Adults learn differently from children, but "pedagogy” is still often used for learning of all age levels. I think that is a mistake.

As part of my job starting in 2000 at NJIT, I organized and conducted training for professors and some of that included "pedagogy." It was all new to them. I usually had to define the word and I certainly had to define andragogy. They found it interesting and admitted that they had never had any education courses. they "tried to what their good professors had done and not do what the bad ones had done." Professors who voluntarily attended training tended to want to learn new things. Some professors never attended and might say that it all sounded like the training required to teach K-12.

The term FOBO appeared in something I was reading recently. It is the fear of becoming obsolete (FOBO) and it is very much a workplace fear and generally connected to aging workers and anyone who fears that they will be replaced by technology.

Of course, AI is a large part of this fear. It's not a new fear. Workers have always considered that they would be considered obsolete as they aged, especially if they did not have the skills that younger employees brought to the workplace. It has been at least two decades of hearing predictions that robots would replace workers. In fact, that was the case, though not to the levels that were sometimes predicted. Artificial intelligence is less obvious as it makes inroads into our work and outside life.

Employers and workers need to be better at recognizing the ways AI is already here and being used. Approximately four in ten Americans use Face ID to log into at least one app on their phone each day. That is about 136 million people. How many think about that as AI?

If you have an electric vehicle, A.I.-powered systems work to manage the energy output. In your gas-powered car, you very likely use an AI-powered GPS for navigation.  

One survey I saw found that just 44 percent of the global workforce believe they interact today with AI in their personal lives. But when asked if they used GPS maps and navigation, 66 percent said yes. What about predictive product/entertainment suggestions, such as in Netflix and Spotify?  50 percent said yes.  Do you use text editors or autocorrect? A yes from 47 percent. 46 percent use virtual home assistants, such as Alexa and Google Assistant. Even chatbots like ChatGPT and CoPilot - which are less hidden and more proactive for a user - had a 31 percent yes response.

Most of these are viewed as positive uses of AI, but not all uses are viewed as positive or at least are viewed as somewhat negative. One example of that category is the AI not so positive is its use in filling up newsfeeds. Each social media network - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram et al  - has its own A.I.-powered algorithm. It is constantly customizing billions of users’ feeds. You click a like button, or just pause on a post for more than a few seconds,and that information changes your feed accordingly. Plus, the algorithm is made to push certain things to users that were not suggested by your activity but by sponsors or owners. This aspect has been widely criticized since Elon Musk took over Twitter-X, but all the platforms do it to some degree.

Some common applications are both positive and negative. Take the use of artificial intelligence in airports all over the world. It is being used to screen passengers passing through security checkpoints. At least 25 airports across the U.S., including Reagan National in Washington D.C. and Los Angeles International Airport, have started using A.I.-driven facial recognition as part of a pilot project. Eventually, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) plans to expand the ID verification technology to more than 400 airports. This can speed up your passage through security which is something everyone would love to see, but what else is being done with that data, and will the algorithm flag people for the wrong reasons?

Do you want to push back on FOBO, particularly in the workplace? Some suggestions:
Continuous Learning: Stay curious and keep updating your skills. Whether it’s taking a course, attending workshops, or learning new technologies, continuous education is key.
Networking: Engage with your professional community. Networking can provide insights into industry trends and offer support and advice.
Adaptability: Embrace change and be open to new ideas. Flexibility can help you stay relevant.
Mindset Shift: Focus on your unique strengths and contributions. Everyone has something valuable to offer, and feeling obsolete often stems from undervaluing your skills.
Digital Detox: Sometimes, limiting your exposure to social media and other sources of comparison can reduce feelings of inadequacy.
Seek Feedback: Regularly seek feedback from peers, mentors, and colleagues to understand your areas of improvement and strengths.

I saw that today is the anniversary of the start of Facebook back in its undergraduate days of 2004. An old post on the now-defunct Writer's Almanac did a nice job of summarizing that early history, so I am using most of it here.

The social networking site Facebook was launched from a Harvard University dorm room on February 4, 2004 by  sophomore Mark Zuckerberg in his dorm room (Suite H33 in Kirkland House). He was aided by three other 19-year-olds.

Zuckerberg was a smart, middle-class kid from Dobbs Ferry, New York who started writing computer software when he was 12. In high school, he created a program called Synapse Media Player and was offered millions of dollars for the product and job offers by both Microsoft and AO. But he passed on them in order to attend Harvard instead.

The program he created at Harvard was called Facemash. It displayed two student photos side by side and asked people to rank who was hotter. It would later be duplicated in various forms as a "hot or not" game. In the site’s first four hours online, the photos were viewed 22,000 times. The site was shut down by Harvard a few days later. It so popular that it overwhelmed their server, but also because there were privacy violations since Zuckerberg had acquired the photos for Facemash by hacking into Harvard’s photo directory.

A couple of months later, Zuckerberg began writing code for a site that would allow students to view each other’s photos and some basic personal information. This site, TheFacebook, was launched on this day in 2004 at www.thefacebook.com.

More than a thousand students signed up within 24 hours, and after a month, half of Harvard’s undergraduates had signed up. Zuck was in trouble again, this time with three seniors who claimed that they had hired Zuckerberg to create a similar site, but that Mark had stolen their idea. Several years later, they reached a multimillion-dollar settlement.

Google Search has integrated a feature that links directly to the Wayback Machine, allowing users to access archived versions of webpages through search results.

The Wayback Machine is an online archive created by the Internet Archive, a non-profit organization. It allows users to access and view historical snapshots of web pages, dating back to the late 1990s. Essentially, it's like a digital time machine that lets you see how websites looked in the past. This can be useful for research, preserving digital history, or just satisfying curiosity.

By clicking the three dots next to a search result and selecting "More About This Page," users can view how a webpage appeared at different points in time. The collaboration enhances public access to web history, ensuring that digital records remain available for future generations.

Source  https://blog.archive.org/2024/09/11/new-feature-alert-access-archived-webpages-directly-through-google-search/