Thinking Out Loud in Public

I am particularly interested in what is apparently known as “source bounded AI” such as Google’s NotebookLM. This allows you to “train” and individualized use based only on the documents that YOU have uploaded. I’m particularly interested in how that might be used in education and self-education. One of the real issues once you have gotten out of school is not being able to have a real discussion about things you read. While AI is not nearly as dynamic as a class discussion, it can also allow you to clarify confusion, develop and test arguments, explore arguments against the ideas in the document, and so forth. In a traditional college classroom, I’m curious about how I might use a source bounded AI as student preparation for in-class discussion (using the AI to do the things I mentioned), and then to have students provide the transcript of their AI discussion to me as homework. I could then collect class transcripts and upload them to my own AI and ask for a summary of common questions, common points of agreement and disagreement, what sort of arguments I might see, and so forth – so I could, as a classroom teacher, go into discussion with a deeper understanding of what my students are thinking. Encouraging students to prepare for class using an AI might, I suspect, make shy students more likely to speak in class, and help insecure students overcome their fear of asking a “stupid question” or expressing what they might think is an “unpopular opinion.”

If you’re at all interested, I have two videos I’ll link to below. The first is by Tiago Forte, the author of Building a Second Brain, and it is more of a tour of how to use NotebookLM. The second video is an interview with Raiza Martin and Steve Johnson, two of the people most involved in the development of NotebookLM at Google. It is a bit more focused on the added feature that will turn a text or your notes into a podcast-like audio discussion, which might also help students stay engaged and review on their commute.

Tiago Forte.

Raiza Martin and Steve Johnson.

[Note: I’m not very interested in the question of whether or not we can trust Google to do what they say. This is about exploring the uses of a tool.]

Really? We’re going to judge learning effectiveness based on (checks notes) an EEG assessing “cognitive load”? Please. Just stop with this.

arxiv.org/abs/2506….

Tom at @apoorplayer wrote a powerfully honest essay called “The Age of Futility” that inspired me to do what we used to do in the old days of blogging: write a post on our own blog, and then link to the original, creating an actual conversation. Here’s my contribution: “The Age of Sensibility.”

“The theatre, by the beginning of the current century, had become yet another American industry composed of a series of interlocking professions, each dependent upon the others, with its business operations centralized structurally and geographically. It had, in the course of the nineteenth century, become less democratic in both its administration and appeal and had assumed the role of manufacturer of a product prepared and packaged for nationwide distribution. The long run had become its principal goal; the star system and the star vehicle had become the means to that end; the combination company had become recognized as the standard producing unit of the commercial theatre; and the practices of theatre management and play production, once the domain of the actor-manager, had become discrete and separate endeavors.”

Cambridge History of the American Theatre

More commodified, more centralized, more profit driven, more star-oriented, less democratic. Sounds right.

“The Annecy [Animation Festival] crowd cheered the announcement [of the upcoming Pixar film Gatto and went wild as Docter unveiled animation tests of a distinct, unique hand-painted look, something Pixar has never shown before. The film appears to be rich in colors from Venetian settings, and blends 2D hand paint textures with cutting-edge CG animation."

I assume the anti-AI crowd will boycott this as well as all other Pixar CGI-created films.

Yesterday, I got a mailer from the New Criterion saying they were “defenders of the beautiful and the good” and that they focused on the arts and culture. I know from writing my dissertation that the New Criterion leans right, but I figured no big deal because the focus was on art and literature. So I subscribed. The first article was Heather Mac Donald parroting Trump’s dumb ideas with admiration while she accepted the Burke Award, and praising Roger Kimball for predicting (and celebrating) Trump’s election. The next article was about Hitler’s attack on “degenerate art,” which failed to note that Trump’s NEA policies echo those attacks. I canceled my subscription. Which bums me out because decent arts criticism is as hard to find as decent art itself. For the editor of a journal devoted to art and cultural criticism to celebrate a president who has never, to my knowledge, even mentioned a novel, a play, a piece of music, a dance, a painting or even a film undermines the New Criterion’s claim to defend the beautiful and the good (notice the deleting of “the true” from what is usually a 3-part phrase seems significant. Let me be clear: I have subscribed to many right-leaning journals in the past, and most recently the Dispatch and, to my initial horror, I am enjoying the thinking of Jonah Goldberg. But neither Goldberg nor those right-leaning journals have the intellectual cravenness to support Trump. So my search for a decent arts journal continues.

Officials in the Trump administration had some well-timed trades right before Trump announced tariffs. It was totally obvious at the time, and it was good to have it confirmed. Propublica is playing it very safe in this article, but has made the evidence public nonetheless. Well done!

www.propublica.org/article/u…

I have a new author page that includes a blog: scottwalters.net.

OK, this is cool. Falcons nest on the roof of the UMass W. E. B DuBois Library where I get my academic books (I get my more popular books at the local Cheshire Library). They have a live cam on this page so you can watch:

www.library.umass.edu/falcons/

Just finished “The Heartbeat Library” by Laura Imai Messina. A beautiful, deeply-felt book that was truly extraordinary.