A variety of steep and very sinister job reports has just come out. It appears that the government was deluding itself for several months and when they got things in order, the job situation actually looks really bad. It's somewhat obvious what's happening: AI is taking jobs. Nobody's doing anything about it. It'll only get worse. It's a major crisis for society.
It's ok when the jobless population rises a little; the economy adjusts. When it rises a lot, people complain hard and crime goes up. But when it rises too much it can cause a real crisis. If people can't get jobs what are they supposed to do? There is no safety net anymore; it can only be trouble.
It's a much higher class of people that are getting kicked out in the street this time around. Usually it's a trickle down and the poorer wretches get tossed into the street while the better dressed ones manage by just moving down a level to more doable, poorly-paying jobs. This could happen to some degree to the vast number of middle-managers, bean-counters, analysts, stock nerds, etc., whose jobs require thinking but not creative genius. AI's got their jobs, if not today, tomorrow. Society has to find something for them to do. Nobody is at the helm; nothing is being done.
A universal income is an obvious solution, but would be politically almost impossible, like guaranteed health care. Anything that sounds like socialism, people don't want anything to do with it. Yet the result therefore is that it's rugged individualism for the 80% who have no jobs and no hope of getting them, and government handouts for the ultra-wealthy who mostly want to just put their party in there and keep the tax cuts coming. very quickly we'll have a tinderbox here. It's not sustainable.
Our system doesn't ask, "what changes will this cause and how are we prepared for them?" It asks, "how can I integrate this into my business before the other guy, and make a lot of money?" That's because the system is US. Nobody's at the helm. Nobody has figured out what all these unemployed people are going to do.
I have a plan, actually. I don't want to sound overly dark and cynical and pessimistic even though that's the true me, I think it's big trouble. But here's my plan. Anyone who can ride a bicycle, who is young, has working knees, is in any kind of shape at all, can carry around a portable generator. You stop on a street corner, or even in the woods somewhere, and set it up, and start pedaling and creating power. It would not be too hard to make this machine but more important, to make it portable, durable, and legal. You're unemployed? Go create power so that people can charge their phone, stay warm, or watch the telly when the power's off. If the data centers are going to eat up all the power, what can we do? Make it more democratic, so that even the kids can make money. It doesn't matter if the power you generate from a single workout is only say a buck or two or change. That will be enough for legions of starving people and will be a living for lots of poor people who live from one meal to another. And when the power goes off, there you are.
Sunday, March 8, 2026
Tuesday, December 9, 2025
https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/tech-news/la-parents-kids-school-issued-ipad-chromebook-los-angeles-rcna245624
Kingkade, Tyler. (2025, Dec. 5). Parents say school-issued iPads are causing chaos with their kids. NBC News.
What happens when you give an entire district of students iPads? In this article, LA and its students are the guinea pigs. It turns out the district had no idea what would happen, and now they are scrambling to repair the damage.
To me one of the interesting sidelights is how easy it is for students to skirt the various controls they have to prevent them from spending too much time or doing the wrong things. They use proxy servers, set up dummy accounts, etc., and this makes it hard for the district to track what actually happens.
It seems that the majority of students will survive, if not get some advantages from having pretty much constant access to the web and the digital world. But remember, that book hasn't been written. What happens when you give an entire generation iPhones? We'll find out. This is among the first generations to try.
Kingkade, Tyler. (2025, Dec. 5). Parents say school-issued iPads are causing chaos with their kids. NBC News.
What happens when you give an entire district of students iPads? In this article, LA and its students are the guinea pigs. It turns out the district had no idea what would happen, and now they are scrambling to repair the damage.
To me one of the interesting sidelights is how easy it is for students to skirt the various controls they have to prevent them from spending too much time or doing the wrong things. They use proxy servers, set up dummy accounts, etc., and this makes it hard for the district to track what actually happens.
It seems that the majority of students will survive, if not get some advantages from having pretty much constant access to the web and the digital world. But remember, that book hasn't been written. What happens when you give an entire generation iPhones? We'll find out. This is among the first generations to try.
Tuesday, June 10, 2025
AI
A lot is being made of AI. Writers are terrified. All kinds of people will be out of work as soon as we figure out how to harness it correctly. It will be a lot like the calculator.
This blog is basically about how we rush into these things like you would a marriage when you haven't really thought through all the consequences. Some of the consequences are less desirable than others but doesn't matter, too late, we did it, we lost.
Back in the day, people used to memorize whole books, like the Iliad, but they lost that skill when the printing press was invented. We just didn't need the skill anymore. In my generation people forgot how to add, subtract, mulltiply and divide large numbers, because everyone had a calculator and it wasn't necessary. Nobody would argue with me that it was not a useful skill to have, to do these things, yet most people I knew didn't bother learning. The same with GPS. Why bother knowing which way is north, if your phone knows and you can ask it?
I have this one idea about using AI effectively. I could write 45 bioographies, one of each president, in the amount of time it takes to write out the request. If somebody reads this before I actually do it I'm screwed but oh well. Those who use AI well will be at a huge advantage.
One thing I can tell by keeping my eye on the book marketing situation is that there are thousands more books now, probably a thousand new ones per day. A HUGE number of books is just being piled into a crowded market. If I could write 45 books in ten minutes, why not? Or at least set them up, collect the facts, organize. AI can do all that. I just need to be good at setting it up.
I'm all for the married life, for better or for worse. At least I'm reflecting on the morality of it.
This blog is basically about how we rush into these things like you would a marriage when you haven't really thought through all the consequences. Some of the consequences are less desirable than others but doesn't matter, too late, we did it, we lost.
Back in the day, people used to memorize whole books, like the Iliad, but they lost that skill when the printing press was invented. We just didn't need the skill anymore. In my generation people forgot how to add, subtract, mulltiply and divide large numbers, because everyone had a calculator and it wasn't necessary. Nobody would argue with me that it was not a useful skill to have, to do these things, yet most people I knew didn't bother learning. The same with GPS. Why bother knowing which way is north, if your phone knows and you can ask it?
I have this one idea about using AI effectively. I could write 45 bioographies, one of each president, in the amount of time it takes to write out the request. If somebody reads this before I actually do it I'm screwed but oh well. Those who use AI well will be at a huge advantage.
One thing I can tell by keeping my eye on the book marketing situation is that there are thousands more books now, probably a thousand new ones per day. A HUGE number of books is just being piled into a crowded market. If I could write 45 books in ten minutes, why not? Or at least set them up, collect the facts, organize. AI can do all that. I just need to be good at setting it up.
I'm all for the married life, for better or for worse. At least I'm reflecting on the morality of it.
Monday, July 29, 2024
Newton-Rex, Ed. (2024, July 27). Robots sacked, screenings shut down: a new movement of luddites is rising up against AI. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jul/27/harm-ai-artificial-intelligence-backlash-human-labour.
This article is good because it lists carefully the best reasons people are opposed to AI, and it lists carefully the different places the new Luddite movement is taking hold. When they put cones on the driverless taxis, that's a pretty clear protest, isn't it?
The one thing I'll say about the new Luddite movement is that it's got wide support. I say this as a writer, a retired professional ESL teacher most of whose friends are very similar - the people I know are almost universally hostile toward AI. And it doesn't get any more generous as people know less about it. We can all sense that it's taking jobs away, and taking the soul out of the world we live in.
What has saved us so far is the law(?) that one must disclose when one is using AI. I'm not sure it's even a law, but it seems to be a standard expectation. The people who do use it, and disclose it, find themselves the target of hostility and open rejection. People don't want it.
One other thing I liked about the article was the recognition that modern Luddites, as well as the original ones, don't want elimination of the new technology so much as they simply want to be included in the discussion of how and when it's used. Is that too much to ask? We know coming into this that the new tech will railroad all the existing systems if left unchecked; we'll be doomed. I'm already feeling like half of what I read is soulless; on the other end it doesn't care who I am. I heartily prefer a writer who is talking to me. Is that so unusual?
I consider myself a new Luddite, if that's how it's defined. I'm just in favor of our at least trying to find out what we will lose in the process. If you really know what you'll lose, and do it anyway, then it's like marriage, in my opinion. For better or worse.
This article is good because it lists carefully the best reasons people are opposed to AI, and it lists carefully the different places the new Luddite movement is taking hold. When they put cones on the driverless taxis, that's a pretty clear protest, isn't it?
The one thing I'll say about the new Luddite movement is that it's got wide support. I say this as a writer, a retired professional ESL teacher most of whose friends are very similar - the people I know are almost universally hostile toward AI. And it doesn't get any more generous as people know less about it. We can all sense that it's taking jobs away, and taking the soul out of the world we live in.
What has saved us so far is the law(?) that one must disclose when one is using AI. I'm not sure it's even a law, but it seems to be a standard expectation. The people who do use it, and disclose it, find themselves the target of hostility and open rejection. People don't want it.
One other thing I liked about the article was the recognition that modern Luddites, as well as the original ones, don't want elimination of the new technology so much as they simply want to be included in the discussion of how and when it's used. Is that too much to ask? We know coming into this that the new tech will railroad all the existing systems if left unchecked; we'll be doomed. I'm already feeling like half of what I read is soulless; on the other end it doesn't care who I am. I heartily prefer a writer who is talking to me. Is that so unusual?
I consider myself a new Luddite, if that's how it's defined. I'm just in favor of our at least trying to find out what we will lose in the process. If you really know what you'll lose, and do it anyway, then it's like marriage, in my opinion. For better or worse.
Friday, February 23, 2024
AI takes over
A few writer friends of mine are upset that AI is taking over literally everything. They point out that whenever a grocery store puts in self-checkout, someone loses their job. Writers then are endangered too, because so many things are just being written by AI these days.
The obvious solution is to have a kind of revolution where everyone, led by the writers, refuse to accept AI in a kind of Luddite way and demand that only real people be allowed to write stories or copy for a survey or tourist brochure. The last one of these was actually the Luddite movement, where workers protested machines taking over their apparel factory and destroyed some of the machines. This isn't going to happen with AI, and in fact, I see AI taking over gradually and insidiously for a while with no one even noticing it except a few out-of-work writers. Why wring your hands over a change that is inevitable? I say inevitable because as long as these programs are out there there will be people who ue them to make their lives easier or more to the point to have a competitive advantage over some other schmucks who are over there in the corner writing their own copy. The programs are free as I write; I could use AI to fill this blog (hey, that's an idea) and generate thousands of key words while it's at it, ensuring that the world comes to my doorstep.
The point of this blog is not so much that we should start a revolution that will prevent innovation from taking over, but rather, that these change come with this kind of inevitable predestiny and the whole culture adopts the changes without really thinking about what possible consequences there might be. We not only don't identify them, we don't even question them, we make no effort to discern what skills we humans are losing in the process, and there is no group in place to even look at the process and do something about what might be lost. It is like going blindly into a marriage.
I read an article that said that grocery stores are walking back on their innovation of self-checkout because it is costing them too much money. People steal, often inadvertantly, and it costs them just as many store employees to watch you do it yourself as it used to take to do it for you. The stores invested thousands in the machines and now will have to start over. Well, I could have told them that having me do it would lead to and individualized disaster whereby I make mistakes left and right and who even knows? It was their mistake and now they have to pay. And this may play out all over and with other machines as well. They aren't always all roses.
Don't look to me for expertise in what happens when soulless communication floods the market until everyone assumes all writing is soulless or done by machines. To some degree there may be a walkback like the grocery stores are experiencing, but in general innovation is inevitable and will not be questioned by anyone except a few remote souls like me and a few very angry unemployed writers like my friends. It'll just happen and that will be it. Certain human skills will be lost like the ability to add large figures or the ability to memorize long stories like the Iliad (one result of the innovation of printing). Things get lost. People move on. They may look back at this little window of time and say, people could have stopped it, but nobody even thought of it.
The obvious solution is to have a kind of revolution where everyone, led by the writers, refuse to accept AI in a kind of Luddite way and demand that only real people be allowed to write stories or copy for a survey or tourist brochure. The last one of these was actually the Luddite movement, where workers protested machines taking over their apparel factory and destroyed some of the machines. This isn't going to happen with AI, and in fact, I see AI taking over gradually and insidiously for a while with no one even noticing it except a few out-of-work writers. Why wring your hands over a change that is inevitable? I say inevitable because as long as these programs are out there there will be people who ue them to make their lives easier or more to the point to have a competitive advantage over some other schmucks who are over there in the corner writing their own copy. The programs are free as I write; I could use AI to fill this blog (hey, that's an idea) and generate thousands of key words while it's at it, ensuring that the world comes to my doorstep.
The point of this blog is not so much that we should start a revolution that will prevent innovation from taking over, but rather, that these change come with this kind of inevitable predestiny and the whole culture adopts the changes without really thinking about what possible consequences there might be. We not only don't identify them, we don't even question them, we make no effort to discern what skills we humans are losing in the process, and there is no group in place to even look at the process and do something about what might be lost. It is like going blindly into a marriage.
I read an article that said that grocery stores are walking back on their innovation of self-checkout because it is costing them too much money. People steal, often inadvertantly, and it costs them just as many store employees to watch you do it yourself as it used to take to do it for you. The stores invested thousands in the machines and now will have to start over. Well, I could have told them that having me do it would lead to and individualized disaster whereby I make mistakes left and right and who even knows? It was their mistake and now they have to pay. And this may play out all over and with other machines as well. They aren't always all roses.
Don't look to me for expertise in what happens when soulless communication floods the market until everyone assumes all writing is soulless or done by machines. To some degree there may be a walkback like the grocery stores are experiencing, but in general innovation is inevitable and will not be questioned by anyone except a few remote souls like me and a few very angry unemployed writers like my friends. It'll just happen and that will be it. Certain human skills will be lost like the ability to add large figures or the ability to memorize long stories like the Iliad (one result of the innovation of printing). Things get lost. People move on. They may look back at this little window of time and say, people could have stopped it, but nobody even thought of it.
Sunday, January 14, 2024
Keep up with ChatGPT
The first four or five paragraphs of this article I found hilarious:
Mahdawi, Arwa. (2024, Jan. 12). What is Going on with ChatGPT? The Gueardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/12/chatgpt-problems-lazy.
Still processing it. I may comment later.
Mahdawi, Arwa. (2024, Jan. 12). What is Going on with ChatGPT? The Gueardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/jan/12/chatgpt-problems-lazy.
Still processing it. I may comment later.
Sunday, October 22, 2023
Luddism
With a new book, Blood in the Machine, a number of reviews have come out exploring the ideas in the book and the concept of Luddism in general. One of the better reviews is here:
Barber, Gregory. (2023, October 23). Everyone is a Luddite now. Wired. Online: https://www.wired.com/story/everyone-is-a-luddite-now/.
The review makes a number of points, probably from the book, that I would like to explore. It starts with the story of people putting cones on self-driving cars in San Francisco, because that paralyzes them. I like that image; it made me smile and it stuck with me after I'd finished reading the review. But it brought up the question: How much of a Luddite are you? Are you willing to stick a wrench in the machine that you believe will change the world for the worst?
This site has always been somewhat of a Luddite site. All I am advocating here is that we recognize what changes like computer-generated grammar correction will do to our writing and language, but recognizing it is one step away from rejecting it, if you can see that what is happening is bad. The same goes for Chat GPT. If we as a culture come to recognize that it's not taking us in a good direction, we would reject it, right? One would hope it would be that simple.
But the article and the book are right about another thing: although Luddism has gone mainstream, as the vast majority of us are wary of Chat GPT and all AI-generated products, nobody is really doing anything about it. These changes are inevitable in the sense that as long as people are able to use them, somebody will use them, and this will happen until soft spots are found where the technology is actually useful and causes an improvement in someone's eyes. The rest of us can be as Luddite as we want; it won't change the projectory of progress, or at the very least, it will only slow it down.
I find this most scary in the area of genetic modification; it's gotten so that AI-generated books (I am a writer) don't really scare me anymore. I read a computer-generated bear story the other day, and that got my rankles up, because I've told bear stories for years, and I have actually seen bears and interacted with them. Knowing that this one was computer generated made me mad enough that I delivered my best one on the spot, but on reflecting, it was knowing that the AI one was computer generated that made me mad, not the language itself. It's easy enough to consider AI-generated language wooden and without feeling or real substance, but if I hadn't been told it was AI, would I still look at it that way? Would I even be in the habit of asking if it was real? Language is just language, and we tend to impute the real person of the writer behind it, even when that real person isn't there. And we do that by habit, habit generated by years of experience.
Luddism has gone mainstream, and there are many kinds of Luddites. And, the time between the origin of Luddism and now has been marked by the opportunity of the industrialists to define Luddism and make the rest of us consider Luddism to be "technophobe" or simply "bad at computers." OK so I'm a little of both and so don't mind being called a Luddite, even now, but I have a number of questions about it, including the following: What exactly would resistance to AI look like? Is it possible to actually break the system (by feeding mass junk or mass twisted material into it?) as opposed to just objecting to it and never buying an Amazon book that specifies AI creation? Is there a range of ways to resist AI or any other tech innovation?
Luddism is founded on the belief that tech innovation is spurred by the owner class which doesn't care about its effect on the common person or even its effect on society as a whole. Therefore it's the obligation of the "people" to throw a monkey wrench in the works as a favor to the rest of us who will inevitably suffer if the innovation isn't stopped. The Luddites saw themselves as helping the world by ruining the machines that had come to replace people and put everyone out of work. Of course this just happened to be at a time when there were enough people put out of work, and a town where those people were a significant percentage, and the unemployment caused was severe enough that they really didn't have many options left but to resist. I have options. I can retire, or find some other line of work, or even just forget about it; it won't affect me strongly at least right away, and I don't have all that much time left anyway. I have a son who is driving Uber who might very well ask, shouldn't we resist this gig economy? At the moment it's one of his best options, and I don't think he's going to put a monkey wrench in the works. And I don't even know how one would go about doing that, with the gig economy or with AI.
Barber, Gregory. (2023, October 23). Everyone is a Luddite now. Wired. Online: https://www.wired.com/story/everyone-is-a-luddite-now/.
The review makes a number of points, probably from the book, that I would like to explore. It starts with the story of people putting cones on self-driving cars in San Francisco, because that paralyzes them. I like that image; it made me smile and it stuck with me after I'd finished reading the review. But it brought up the question: How much of a Luddite are you? Are you willing to stick a wrench in the machine that you believe will change the world for the worst?
This site has always been somewhat of a Luddite site. All I am advocating here is that we recognize what changes like computer-generated grammar correction will do to our writing and language, but recognizing it is one step away from rejecting it, if you can see that what is happening is bad. The same goes for Chat GPT. If we as a culture come to recognize that it's not taking us in a good direction, we would reject it, right? One would hope it would be that simple.
But the article and the book are right about another thing: although Luddism has gone mainstream, as the vast majority of us are wary of Chat GPT and all AI-generated products, nobody is really doing anything about it. These changes are inevitable in the sense that as long as people are able to use them, somebody will use them, and this will happen until soft spots are found where the technology is actually useful and causes an improvement in someone's eyes. The rest of us can be as Luddite as we want; it won't change the projectory of progress, or at the very least, it will only slow it down.
I find this most scary in the area of genetic modification; it's gotten so that AI-generated books (I am a writer) don't really scare me anymore. I read a computer-generated bear story the other day, and that got my rankles up, because I've told bear stories for years, and I have actually seen bears and interacted with them. Knowing that this one was computer generated made me mad enough that I delivered my best one on the spot, but on reflecting, it was knowing that the AI one was computer generated that made me mad, not the language itself. It's easy enough to consider AI-generated language wooden and without feeling or real substance, but if I hadn't been told it was AI, would I still look at it that way? Would I even be in the habit of asking if it was real? Language is just language, and we tend to impute the real person of the writer behind it, even when that real person isn't there. And we do that by habit, habit generated by years of experience.
Luddism has gone mainstream, and there are many kinds of Luddites. And, the time between the origin of Luddism and now has been marked by the opportunity of the industrialists to define Luddism and make the rest of us consider Luddism to be "technophobe" or simply "bad at computers." OK so I'm a little of both and so don't mind being called a Luddite, even now, but I have a number of questions about it, including the following: What exactly would resistance to AI look like? Is it possible to actually break the system (by feeding mass junk or mass twisted material into it?) as opposed to just objecting to it and never buying an Amazon book that specifies AI creation? Is there a range of ways to resist AI or any other tech innovation?
Luddism is founded on the belief that tech innovation is spurred by the owner class which doesn't care about its effect on the common person or even its effect on society as a whole. Therefore it's the obligation of the "people" to throw a monkey wrench in the works as a favor to the rest of us who will inevitably suffer if the innovation isn't stopped. The Luddites saw themselves as helping the world by ruining the machines that had come to replace people and put everyone out of work. Of course this just happened to be at a time when there were enough people put out of work, and a town where those people were a significant percentage, and the unemployment caused was severe enough that they really didn't have many options left but to resist. I have options. I can retire, or find some other line of work, or even just forget about it; it won't affect me strongly at least right away, and I don't have all that much time left anyway. I have a son who is driving Uber who might very well ask, shouldn't we resist this gig economy? At the moment it's one of his best options, and I don't think he's going to put a monkey wrench in the works. And I don't even know how one would go about doing that, with the gig economy or with AI.
Wednesday, January 4, 2023
ChatGPT
Everyone's been talking about the new program that just writes a paper for you. The fact is, writing is going the way of the abacus. Your process for writing will be the process of feeding the machine the right prompts.
As a writer, a lifelong non-plagiarist, content creator, etc., of course I'm a little threatened by this. Because it is easy to publish, and easy to create new things (just by feeding prompts), there will probably be an explosion of self-published ChatGPT stories, etc. Will there not? I could name my next book, "A real human wrote this."
Seriously, nobody knows yet the full range of implications of having a computer that can write out whatever you want, in whatever form, and even learns to do it better every time. It can write essays, papers, stories, whatever you ask. Should I master it? It sounds kind of interesting in a way.
Its weakness apparently is in doing research. Well, I'm glad I'll still be good for something.
I'll put here my range of thoughts on the matter, and my experimentation, if I get that far, and its results. If we are about to lose skills (namely writing skills), let it begin by having fun, having a machine do something for you. Just like we did with the calculators.
As a writer, a lifelong non-plagiarist, content creator, etc., of course I'm a little threatened by this. Because it is easy to publish, and easy to create new things (just by feeding prompts), there will probably be an explosion of self-published ChatGPT stories, etc. Will there not? I could name my next book, "A real human wrote this."
Seriously, nobody knows yet the full range of implications of having a computer that can write out whatever you want, in whatever form, and even learns to do it better every time. It can write essays, papers, stories, whatever you ask. Should I master it? It sounds kind of interesting in a way.
Its weakness apparently is in doing research. Well, I'm glad I'll still be good for something.
I'll put here my range of thoughts on the matter, and my experimentation, if I get that far, and its results. If we are about to lose skills (namely writing skills), let it begin by having fun, having a machine do something for you. Just like we did with the calculators.
Friday, November 11, 2022
Siri cont'd
There are actually several Siris in our lives; my wife has two. One is an Australian guy who doesn't have a clue about the streets around this small Illinois town. I bite my tongue as he leads her to go west a half a block when we're going east. You're listening to this Australian guy instead of me? Whatever. I don't want to be speaking over him, or confusing the issue, so I just shut up. It's only half a block.
But it seems that my method, knowing the streets so you know which way is fastest, is rapidly going out of style. She'll use Siri even when she's been somewhere several times, knows the streets full well, and should be able to go there blindfolded, so to speak. She'd rather have this Australian guy telling her when to turn right, how far ahead, what to look out for, etc.
There are actually a couple of interesting things about the Siri trend, besides the fact that we as a population become a lot dumber about east-west, north-south, better roads for through-travel, etc. One is that theoretically Siri should be able to pick up on a traffic jam, an accident, in our case a train, etc., and warn us. I left Chicago one night and a simple 20-minute commute out to the southwest suburbs became forty minutes, because of some accident which couldn't be avoided I'm sure but which, if Siri were onto it, and I were on Siri, I could have gone around. I think it's just a matter of time before the overhead satellites pick up on these things and the premium Siris will be able to tell us, Sox game, accident, road closure, whatever. There's no reason they can't be up to the minute.
But as for a population that doesn't know from east, I'm not sure I can live with that. If people are really so clueless that they can't get home without technology, that doesn't bode well, because I am still old-fashioned enough to believe that all technology is simply an aide, a helper, and not meant to replace real awareness of where you are and how it relates to the area transportation hub.
When you're driving a 13-foot high truck and come to an 11-foot bridge, you should know that Siri has let you down, and simply failed to take into account the fact that this particular route was not made for 13-foot trucks. Siri cannot entirely be blamed for not having all this stuff programmed into her/him and I think it's only a matter of time before all this stuff will be programmed into him/her. This includes icy conditions, wind, and the kinds of things that should just simply warn you to get off the road. If my wife wants to hear it from an Australian chap that shouldn't bug me so much as he's just as capable of relaying the collective knowledge as anyone, though I suspect the collective knowledge isn't quite there yet. Siri doesn't know the low bridges, the bad road conditions, or the Sox games yet. But he/she will, it's only a matter of time. And that changes the whole traffic equation. It basically means that, say, on that forty-minute trip out of Chicago, only those of us who don't have Siri will still be on that road. All the others will simply go around, one way or the other, and save the rest of us the bottleneck. It'll be a better world. When everyone has Siri, the yellow-jackets will simply be able to clear out the accident, without the rubberneckers or the anger of people who've been backed up for half an hour. That will be a better world as well.
Almost as good as effective public transportation, which I guess is too much to ask for, at least in my lifetime.
But it seems that my method, knowing the streets so you know which way is fastest, is rapidly going out of style. She'll use Siri even when she's been somewhere several times, knows the streets full well, and should be able to go there blindfolded, so to speak. She'd rather have this Australian guy telling her when to turn right, how far ahead, what to look out for, etc.
There are actually a couple of interesting things about the Siri trend, besides the fact that we as a population become a lot dumber about east-west, north-south, better roads for through-travel, etc. One is that theoretically Siri should be able to pick up on a traffic jam, an accident, in our case a train, etc., and warn us. I left Chicago one night and a simple 20-minute commute out to the southwest suburbs became forty minutes, because of some accident which couldn't be avoided I'm sure but which, if Siri were onto it, and I were on Siri, I could have gone around. I think it's just a matter of time before the overhead satellites pick up on these things and the premium Siris will be able to tell us, Sox game, accident, road closure, whatever. There's no reason they can't be up to the minute.
But as for a population that doesn't know from east, I'm not sure I can live with that. If people are really so clueless that they can't get home without technology, that doesn't bode well, because I am still old-fashioned enough to believe that all technology is simply an aide, a helper, and not meant to replace real awareness of where you are and how it relates to the area transportation hub.
When you're driving a 13-foot high truck and come to an 11-foot bridge, you should know that Siri has let you down, and simply failed to take into account the fact that this particular route was not made for 13-foot trucks. Siri cannot entirely be blamed for not having all this stuff programmed into her/him and I think it's only a matter of time before all this stuff will be programmed into him/her. This includes icy conditions, wind, and the kinds of things that should just simply warn you to get off the road. If my wife wants to hear it from an Australian chap that shouldn't bug me so much as he's just as capable of relaying the collective knowledge as anyone, though I suspect the collective knowledge isn't quite there yet. Siri doesn't know the low bridges, the bad road conditions, or the Sox games yet. But he/she will, it's only a matter of time. And that changes the whole traffic equation. It basically means that, say, on that forty-minute trip out of Chicago, only those of us who don't have Siri will still be on that road. All the others will simply go around, one way or the other, and save the rest of us the bottleneck. It'll be a better world. When everyone has Siri, the yellow-jackets will simply be able to clear out the accident, without the rubberneckers or the anger of people who've been backed up for half an hour. That will be a better world as well.
Almost as good as effective public transportation, which I guess is too much to ask for, at least in my lifetime.
Sunday, July 3, 2022
Siri
What happens when a whole culture of people decide to stop worrying about where things are, and instead rely on Siri to just get them from one place to another? I'm serious, your responsibility ends with typing in your destination, you no longer have to worry about whether you've gone north, south or what to get there. Just let Siri take care of it.
Siri is often wrong, though it rarely matters that much. Siri will send you a mile or two out of the way, and that's if you're lucky, if miscommunication has not cost you more. Sometimes Siri knows what he/she is doing yet there are communication issues betwen you. Sometimes it's just plain wrong.
My wife never had a clear concept of north, east, south and west anyway, so she was more than happy to cede over all route control to a computer. Even now she doesn't know which way the various states are - where's Iowa? How about indiana? They all run together for her. Siri is a godsend to her if only because Siri made it so that wasn't a problem. You could get to your destination even if you had no clue about where it actually was.
In the end though it's a scary world if you really really have no clue about where you are. I'm not even sure Siri can get you out of that jam.
Siri is often wrong, though it rarely matters that much. Siri will send you a mile or two out of the way, and that's if you're lucky, if miscommunication has not cost you more. Sometimes Siri knows what he/she is doing yet there are communication issues betwen you. Sometimes it's just plain wrong.
My wife never had a clear concept of north, east, south and west anyway, so she was more than happy to cede over all route control to a computer. Even now she doesn't know which way the various states are - where's Iowa? How about indiana? They all run together for her. Siri is a godsend to her if only because Siri made it so that wasn't a problem. You could get to your destination even if you had no clue about where it actually was.
In the end though it's a scary world if you really really have no clue about where you are. I'm not even sure Siri can get you out of that jam.
Sunday, December 6, 2020
General update
OK here's the main news. I retired altogether from ESL/EFL about three years ago. I moved to the mountains of New Mexico, where for a couple of years, I became a substitute teacher in Alamogordo, a small town not too far away. Then I retired from that too. My children are still in school but we've moved back into the mountains (just before the coronavirus) and we are just trying to survive without going into town too much. Because my wife and I are in our sixties we consider ourselves vulnerable and want our children to enjoy their teen years but with as little risk as possible. Fortunately they've come to see this tiny town (Cloudcroft NM) as the height of urban variety. But our luck may not hold out forever.
This brings up the question of what to do with this site, which I have always used to make my presentations and demonstrate both the goods and bads of technological interference in the writing process. We the people are now doing all our writing with technology by our side, with the red and green lines doing subtle correction at our side, and autocorrect just jumping in and changing our writing at will. I'll be the first to say, sometimes it's good and sometimes bad. I don't know if I'm done speaking on the subject.
I do get invited to TESOLs to make the same presentation, and I am honored to see those invitations. It's like there's a recognition out there that people need to learn how to deal with what I've called "the elephant in the room." Let's face it, people are not going to stop using spell-check/grammar-check, and if you disable it you are setting up a false writing condition, because they'll have it almost everywhere they choose to write. It's like teaching writing by having them carve their initials into a tree. You can go Luddite on them but it's not necessarily teaching them all the skills they'll need to navigate in the environments they'll write in.
Enough of that...I'll only say, my verbosity has been curtailed by retirement (even coming back to this page feels like work sometimes), and, I feel like there is still work to do, things happening out there. So I'm not quite ready to just say, it's all over. Maybe it's not. Bear with me.
This brings up the question of what to do with this site, which I have always used to make my presentations and demonstrate both the goods and bads of technological interference in the writing process. We the people are now doing all our writing with technology by our side, with the red and green lines doing subtle correction at our side, and autocorrect just jumping in and changing our writing at will. I'll be the first to say, sometimes it's good and sometimes bad. I don't know if I'm done speaking on the subject.
I do get invited to TESOLs to make the same presentation, and I am honored to see those invitations. It's like there's a recognition out there that people need to learn how to deal with what I've called "the elephant in the room." Let's face it, people are not going to stop using spell-check/grammar-check, and if you disable it you are setting up a false writing condition, because they'll have it almost everywhere they choose to write. It's like teaching writing by having them carve their initials into a tree. You can go Luddite on them but it's not necessarily teaching them all the skills they'll need to navigate in the environments they'll write in.
Enough of that...I'll only say, my verbosity has been curtailed by retirement (even coming back to this page feels like work sometimes), and, I feel like there is still work to do, things happening out there. So I'm not quite ready to just say, it's all over. Maybe it's not. Bear with me.
Sunday, April 10, 2016
TESOL Session report
Leverett, T. (2016, Apr.). For better or worse: Grammar technology and the ESL writer. Internet Fair Classics, TESOL International, Baltimore, MD, USA.
Frankly, I had trouble dealing with this PC they gave me, and I was a little nervous. It shouldn't be that hard to find this weblog, and find the Ginger teaser, and find the Grammarly teaser, but I found only one out of three, the second one, and had to wing it from there. I write it up to nerves, and to the fact that when I got there I found I was BYOD (bring your own device) and hadn't remembered being told that; I'd left my device at home. Perhaps it was true that they had told me I was BYOD, and I didn't even know what that meant. But the result was that, as I sat down to the computer, I was shaking a little, and having trouble finding what I wanted.
I typed things into the Ginger window and noticed, even as I was there, that it gave different responses sometimes, even to the same sentences. Grammarly wouldn't even offer me a free window, perhaps because they sensed I was in the TESOL EV. The surprising thing about this session was that a number of people had come specifically to hear me, and/or grab my handout, and so I had much more of a crowd than the people I'm ordinarily able to just draw in. And I had these bright purple handouts, so there was no question about who was hanging around listening to me, or trying to read the handouts. I have to admit, the purple nature of them made them hard to read (I had requested pink, and they were, in fact, a kind of pink)...but, this year, I left this weblog's url off of the handout (an imperfect situation), so I'm linking to it from a number of other places, and I hope that this weblog can remain as the center of my research and writing.
One thing that is happening is that Google docs is forcing me off of the leverett@siu.edu site; or rather, SIU is forcing me off of it. Perhaps people have been abusing the siu domain, I don't know, but for whatever reason, I need new sites for my google docs. That will be this month's project, a general reorganization. All my writing in this area is somewhat haphazard, I admit, and needs to be roped in and organized.
There is a general growing consensus in the world of writing that technology plays an increasing role in the production of student writing and the development of their learning. I found nobody who would dispute that it's increasingly important; that it influences both their writing and their learning; that it's difficult to find out what technology they've been using and how, exactly, they relate and respond to it; and that we owe it to our students to figure out where it has set them back so that we can respond accordingly. I found some people who pressed me until I admitted that in fact, there was no question that it was good in many ways, and that it taught them real stuff and saved us a lot of trouble. When they pressed me more, to find out if it was more trouble than it was worth, for example, I wouldn't commit. Who knows how many errors it has already corrected, so that we get the impression our students are fluent? Who knows what it has taught them successfully, so that they get it right every time, now? As I've pointed out, we are left looking at students who in many cases have had ongoing relationships with technology for years - so, if they have no confidence now, or are unable to place commas successfully, we might blame technology, sure. But is it so bad? People are still becoming fluent; they're just taking a different path.
I feel like I know more about Grammarly and Ginger now; I also know more about Word grammar-check. We investigate these and comment on them as forces of nature, that bend student writing one way or the other. It's a complicated world, and the grammar engines are putting their mark on the language. Feel free to comment.
Frankly, I had trouble dealing with this PC they gave me, and I was a little nervous. It shouldn't be that hard to find this weblog, and find the Ginger teaser, and find the Grammarly teaser, but I found only one out of three, the second one, and had to wing it from there. I write it up to nerves, and to the fact that when I got there I found I was BYOD (bring your own device) and hadn't remembered being told that; I'd left my device at home. Perhaps it was true that they had told me I was BYOD, and I didn't even know what that meant. But the result was that, as I sat down to the computer, I was shaking a little, and having trouble finding what I wanted.
I typed things into the Ginger window and noticed, even as I was there, that it gave different responses sometimes, even to the same sentences. Grammarly wouldn't even offer me a free window, perhaps because they sensed I was in the TESOL EV. The surprising thing about this session was that a number of people had come specifically to hear me, and/or grab my handout, and so I had much more of a crowd than the people I'm ordinarily able to just draw in. And I had these bright purple handouts, so there was no question about who was hanging around listening to me, or trying to read the handouts. I have to admit, the purple nature of them made them hard to read (I had requested pink, and they were, in fact, a kind of pink)...but, this year, I left this weblog's url off of the handout (an imperfect situation), so I'm linking to it from a number of other places, and I hope that this weblog can remain as the center of my research and writing.
One thing that is happening is that Google docs is forcing me off of the leverett@siu.edu site; or rather, SIU is forcing me off of it. Perhaps people have been abusing the siu domain, I don't know, but for whatever reason, I need new sites for my google docs. That will be this month's project, a general reorganization. All my writing in this area is somewhat haphazard, I admit, and needs to be roped in and organized.
There is a general growing consensus in the world of writing that technology plays an increasing role in the production of student writing and the development of their learning. I found nobody who would dispute that it's increasingly important; that it influences both their writing and their learning; that it's difficult to find out what technology they've been using and how, exactly, they relate and respond to it; and that we owe it to our students to figure out where it has set them back so that we can respond accordingly. I found some people who pressed me until I admitted that in fact, there was no question that it was good in many ways, and that it taught them real stuff and saved us a lot of trouble. When they pressed me more, to find out if it was more trouble than it was worth, for example, I wouldn't commit. Who knows how many errors it has already corrected, so that we get the impression our students are fluent? Who knows what it has taught them successfully, so that they get it right every time, now? As I've pointed out, we are left looking at students who in many cases have had ongoing relationships with technology for years - so, if they have no confidence now, or are unable to place commas successfully, we might blame technology, sure. But is it so bad? People are still becoming fluent; they're just taking a different path.
I feel like I know more about Grammarly and Ginger now; I also know more about Word grammar-check. We investigate these and comment on them as forces of nature, that bend student writing one way or the other. It's a complicated world, and the grammar engines are putting their mark on the language. Feel free to comment.
Wednesday, March 30, 2016
practice paragraph, including common errors
Everyday I wake up and read a news. Usually I read it on my phone. Anther hand, some times I use my computer. Recently I read about Donald Trump. Some times a newspaper discuses him. He is defiantly in the news alot. He has all ready won many election.
In my case, I don't like him. Reading about him, the stories let me mad. This morning I retrived four articles from one web site. That website had many opions. Another hand, some web side have only one opinions. Recently Facebook provides a variety of opinion. I like read every thing. Although I don't have time.
In my case, I don't like him. Reading about him, the stories let me mad. This morning I retrived four articles from one web site. That website had many opions. Another hand, some web side have only one opinions. Recently Facebook provides a variety of opinion. I like read every thing. Although I don't have time.
Grammarly reviews
You would think that I, who fashions myself as a critical reviewer of grammar software, would just shell out the $30/mo. that a company like Grammarly charges for its service, but I don't. I hate when companies simply get in the habit of taking money out of your account, even if I have let them; and besides, I don't really need it, though I'm sure you can tell from reading even this far that I could use a few pointers.
Instead, I read carefully all online reviews. I use their free service on the assumption that they'll put their best foot forward and show you how much they can do, right away (I'm not sure if this is necessarily true). And finally, I'm honest with my students, so that I know which ones use Grammarly all the time, and I critically review the papers they write (Grammarly didn't catch this?).
On the online review front, one of the biggest ones came out in 2011, by the Grammarist weblog. In fact I was unable to find an actual date of publication on the review (this is a bad sign, but quite common) but inferred from the comments that it was published around then. The Grammarist weblog was quite stinging, but because it was careful and accurate, and covered a wide variety of errors, I read it carefully. Most of the comments addressed Grammarly's bad business ethics: not announcing its terms before it collects your information, installing a free plugin that's worthless until you actually pay your money, taking payments without warning, etc. Personally, I doubt Grammarly has done much about these, and I also suspect that these people had nowhere else to complain, so they took the trouble to register with Grammarist, just in order to complain about bad business practices. But they were legion; there are lots of complaints about them.
Grammarist noticed that a wide range of contextual spelling errors (such as its/it's, there/their/they're, your/you're, all ready/already) went uncorrected. All passives were noticed and discouraged, even if they were necessary or advisable. Dangling modifiers, redundancies, etc. went unnoticed. They gave credit when Grammarly did well, but they disliked it and requested that they stop being able to advertise themselves on the Grammarist weblog. (As a sidebar, I'll point out the Grammarly is a very aggressive online advertiser - you type anything including the word "grammar" into Google, and Grammarly's paid ad will be there waiting for you. So it's no surprise that it tried to get a reputable grammar website to allow it to advertise itself, for a price, of course).
Careful reading of the comments pointed out a few other things, though. One was that, within a year or two, Grammarly had read the review, and worked on many of the problems it had pointed out. This is one thing a huge budget can do for Grammarly. It has people scanning the reviews (hello!) and responding to the errors people point out. If it is at all possible to fix them, using the technology and programming skills that Grammarly has at hand, they'll do it. At least, with their budget, they are capable of doing it, because they had millions in startup funds, and were able to jump-start a business that at least tried to manage such things.
But to get back to the review's main point, Grammarly advertises itself as the most accurate in the market; as correcting your errors and offering helpful reasons why they're wrong; as picking out the contextual misspellings; and checking for plagiarism as well. And they felt that Grammarly had not done this properly, and was therefore guilty of fraudulent advertising.
The comments by and large agreed that it was fraudulent, but more in its business practices than its grammar practices. It's a given in this field that the consumers don't know grammar, and are thus at a disadvantage when it comes to evaluating a grammar-checking service. And this applies double to international (ESL) students, who are not only unfamiliar with grammatical nuance, but also unfamiliar with shill online installation scams, or proper ways of getting revenge against such companies. The vast majority of complaints were by American writers, but some of them were quite serious consumers, submitting entire manuscripts, and as some pointed out, a service doesn't have to be right 100% of the time to be useful in at least getting you to check things that they consider could be reworded.
To our students, services like Grammarly have left the impression that passive voice is simply wrong (even when their advisors demand it); that when in doubt present tense is always best (in recent days, X become common, says one student who uses Grammarly); and that all other things the teacher points out must be simple harping, since it went under Grammarly's radar successfully. To be fair, I have no idea what they really think (why should they tell me everything?), but, I can tell you that there is still a fair amount of bad writing out there.
As for the plagiarism checking service, I'll say this: it's popular with students. They are scared to death of plagiarism, and they don't really know how to avoid it, and if something will offer them, with any accuracy at all, to point it out, they are more than grateful. Both Grammarist and the commenters pointed out that the Grammarly service was flawed, but if somebody can get a computer to take 3-6 words at a time, from every line, run each chunk through the computer database repeatedly, and simply report to the writer the times it comes up with a hit, that's more than I'm doing for them, and, presumably, it's catching at least the most egregious cases. This is an entirely separate issue from pointing out that disparate is different from desperate or affect is generally a verb, while effect is generally a noun (with a whole host of exceptions). And I believe that some think the entire service is worth its $30/month, in spite of any negative reviews.
One thing I yearn for is what many commenters have pointed out: what you want to do is line it up with other grammar software, and see which one wins. Ginger comes to mind; people like Ginger as the underdog in this matchup (not having millions in startup money) - which of these errors is Ginger catching that Grammarly is not? Are they on to each other's tricks, in terms of being able to program in some "catches" that the other has figured out? I know they are both watching Word grammar-check (the Ubiquitous, the King of all Grammar-checks) trying to do for their customers at least what Word can do. What I don't know is when they figured out how hard definately/defiantly was for people, and how to guess people's intentions by how close they got to it when they first typed it in. Our students, remember, are far more likely to get the vowels wrong, and have their first spelling be way off base, not even close to definitely. When these programs can get close to figuring out our students' intentions, I, like Grammarist, will be closer to actually recommending them.
Instead, I read carefully all online reviews. I use their free service on the assumption that they'll put their best foot forward and show you how much they can do, right away (I'm not sure if this is necessarily true). And finally, I'm honest with my students, so that I know which ones use Grammarly all the time, and I critically review the papers they write (Grammarly didn't catch this?).
On the online review front, one of the biggest ones came out in 2011, by the Grammarist weblog. In fact I was unable to find an actual date of publication on the review (this is a bad sign, but quite common) but inferred from the comments that it was published around then. The Grammarist weblog was quite stinging, but because it was careful and accurate, and covered a wide variety of errors, I read it carefully. Most of the comments addressed Grammarly's bad business ethics: not announcing its terms before it collects your information, installing a free plugin that's worthless until you actually pay your money, taking payments without warning, etc. Personally, I doubt Grammarly has done much about these, and I also suspect that these people had nowhere else to complain, so they took the trouble to register with Grammarist, just in order to complain about bad business practices. But they were legion; there are lots of complaints about them.
Grammarist noticed that a wide range of contextual spelling errors (such as its/it's, there/their/they're, your/you're, all ready/already) went uncorrected. All passives were noticed and discouraged, even if they were necessary or advisable. Dangling modifiers, redundancies, etc. went unnoticed. They gave credit when Grammarly did well, but they disliked it and requested that they stop being able to advertise themselves on the Grammarist weblog. (As a sidebar, I'll point out the Grammarly is a very aggressive online advertiser - you type anything including the word "grammar" into Google, and Grammarly's paid ad will be there waiting for you. So it's no surprise that it tried to get a reputable grammar website to allow it to advertise itself, for a price, of course).
Careful reading of the comments pointed out a few other things, though. One was that, within a year or two, Grammarly had read the review, and worked on many of the problems it had pointed out. This is one thing a huge budget can do for Grammarly. It has people scanning the reviews (hello!) and responding to the errors people point out. If it is at all possible to fix them, using the technology and programming skills that Grammarly has at hand, they'll do it. At least, with their budget, they are capable of doing it, because they had millions in startup funds, and were able to jump-start a business that at least tried to manage such things.
But to get back to the review's main point, Grammarly advertises itself as the most accurate in the market; as correcting your errors and offering helpful reasons why they're wrong; as picking out the contextual misspellings; and checking for plagiarism as well. And they felt that Grammarly had not done this properly, and was therefore guilty of fraudulent advertising.
The comments by and large agreed that it was fraudulent, but more in its business practices than its grammar practices. It's a given in this field that the consumers don't know grammar, and are thus at a disadvantage when it comes to evaluating a grammar-checking service. And this applies double to international (ESL) students, who are not only unfamiliar with grammatical nuance, but also unfamiliar with shill online installation scams, or proper ways of getting revenge against such companies. The vast majority of complaints were by American writers, but some of them were quite serious consumers, submitting entire manuscripts, and as some pointed out, a service doesn't have to be right 100% of the time to be useful in at least getting you to check things that they consider could be reworded.
To our students, services like Grammarly have left the impression that passive voice is simply wrong (even when their advisors demand it); that when in doubt present tense is always best (in recent days, X become common, says one student who uses Grammarly); and that all other things the teacher points out must be simple harping, since it went under Grammarly's radar successfully. To be fair, I have no idea what they really think (why should they tell me everything?), but, I can tell you that there is still a fair amount of bad writing out there.
As for the plagiarism checking service, I'll say this: it's popular with students. They are scared to death of plagiarism, and they don't really know how to avoid it, and if something will offer them, with any accuracy at all, to point it out, they are more than grateful. Both Grammarist and the commenters pointed out that the Grammarly service was flawed, but if somebody can get a computer to take 3-6 words at a time, from every line, run each chunk through the computer database repeatedly, and simply report to the writer the times it comes up with a hit, that's more than I'm doing for them, and, presumably, it's catching at least the most egregious cases. This is an entirely separate issue from pointing out that disparate is different from desperate or affect is generally a verb, while effect is generally a noun (with a whole host of exceptions). And I believe that some think the entire service is worth its $30/month, in spite of any negative reviews.
One thing I yearn for is what many commenters have pointed out: what you want to do is line it up with other grammar software, and see which one wins. Ginger comes to mind; people like Ginger as the underdog in this matchup (not having millions in startup money) - which of these errors is Ginger catching that Grammarly is not? Are they on to each other's tricks, in terms of being able to program in some "catches" that the other has figured out? I know they are both watching Word grammar-check (the Ubiquitous, the King of all Grammar-checks) trying to do for their customers at least what Word can do. What I don't know is when they figured out how hard definately/defiantly was for people, and how to guess people's intentions by how close they got to it when they first typed it in. Our students, remember, are far more likely to get the vowels wrong, and have their first spelling be way off base, not even close to definitely. When these programs can get close to figuring out our students' intentions, I, like Grammarist, will be closer to actually recommending them.
Sunday, March 20, 2016
Data at hand
This year I had a breakthrough in that I took a novel approach to my own class, and got unusual feedback. I had maintained for years that students used a variety of technologies in the process of writing; that they often misunderstood or misused feedback from those technologies; that they very rarely wanted to share what they'd learned with us, because of feelings that we, teachers, wouldn't approve the use of them; and, we were in a jam, to some degree, trying to figure out where their writing had "gone bad" with a lack of information about the processes that had misled them to such a degree.
So, this term, in the process of trying to get them to explore and use a concordance, I required them to write an essay about the technologies they use and their frustrations or successes with any particular one. The concordance was a chapter of its own, since it detected that fifteen of us were accessing it at once, and shut down demanding money; thus leaving me to say to the students, in effect, write about anything; if you have trouble accessing the concordance, you can write about that trouble, or write about any other technological aid that you use. One student actually wrote about, and recommended, Grammarly.
This was interesting to me because Grammarly is the biggest, and most prominent, of grammar-checker services that influence student writing (outside of Word itself, which is the god of technological grammatical intervention in student writing). Grammarly, by securing startup funding, got a wide enough user base to actually explore what works and what doesn't, and got a head start on other grammar checkers by simple virtue of being able to employ more full-time programmers. But its intervention, as is the case with most grammar-checkers, is not perfect.
From my own point of view, this development is ideal, because now I know for sure that certain grammatical patterns are a product of Grammarly's intervention; or, at least, that Grammarly was unable to correct or revise some of them. I would not criticize or admonish this student; I leave to them the choice of using what tools, when, and teach them, ultimately, to manage each, with the awareness that none of them are perfect. This is especially true of the Word software, which is speaking to the writer in green or in red, constantly, whether one asks for it or not, unless the writer is conscious, assertive and deliberate enough to gut the program and disable the service. One can never underestimate the subconscious effect of a red line that, in essence, tells you that you've spelled your own name wrong, but will also remind you of anything that doesn't match up well with its concept of what constitutes a "word." I start out with my students by telling them that you have to make friends with such a voice, and know when it's giving unhelpful advice, and know, if possible, why. They are tools, and like your hammer, they are not useful in every situation.
To unravel why student writing appears the way it does, one has to have a clear picture of the technological influences on it, and the reasons students choose what they do, in the process of negotiation with technological advice. I think it is possible to gather technological clues, so that, for example, I can say to a student: I suspect you use Grammarly; or, I suspect you responded to Spell-check in the process of coming up with this spelling. These clues will help us open the door. The goal is a clear and accurate picture of the influences that change their writing. Those influences are not always bad, but when they are bad, they are bad in such a way that often makes their writing harder to read, and ultimately does them a disservice. The proper management of these systems will help them make better writing, thus stalling until they make better writing naturally; that is the ultimate goal. One cannot simply ostrich oneself to the technological influences of the modern world, though I suppose, in principle, one could prohibit them, and then pretend that what is written, was actually created by the student himself/herself.
So, this term, in the process of trying to get them to explore and use a concordance, I required them to write an essay about the technologies they use and their frustrations or successes with any particular one. The concordance was a chapter of its own, since it detected that fifteen of us were accessing it at once, and shut down demanding money; thus leaving me to say to the students, in effect, write about anything; if you have trouble accessing the concordance, you can write about that trouble, or write about any other technological aid that you use. One student actually wrote about, and recommended, Grammarly.
This was interesting to me because Grammarly is the biggest, and most prominent, of grammar-checker services that influence student writing (outside of Word itself, which is the god of technological grammatical intervention in student writing). Grammarly, by securing startup funding, got a wide enough user base to actually explore what works and what doesn't, and got a head start on other grammar checkers by simple virtue of being able to employ more full-time programmers. But its intervention, as is the case with most grammar-checkers, is not perfect.
From my own point of view, this development is ideal, because now I know for sure that certain grammatical patterns are a product of Grammarly's intervention; or, at least, that Grammarly was unable to correct or revise some of them. I would not criticize or admonish this student; I leave to them the choice of using what tools, when, and teach them, ultimately, to manage each, with the awareness that none of them are perfect. This is especially true of the Word software, which is speaking to the writer in green or in red, constantly, whether one asks for it or not, unless the writer is conscious, assertive and deliberate enough to gut the program and disable the service. One can never underestimate the subconscious effect of a red line that, in essence, tells you that you've spelled your own name wrong, but will also remind you of anything that doesn't match up well with its concept of what constitutes a "word." I start out with my students by telling them that you have to make friends with such a voice, and know when it's giving unhelpful advice, and know, if possible, why. They are tools, and like your hammer, they are not useful in every situation.
To unravel why student writing appears the way it does, one has to have a clear picture of the technological influences on it, and the reasons students choose what they do, in the process of negotiation with technological advice. I think it is possible to gather technological clues, so that, for example, I can say to a student: I suspect you use Grammarly; or, I suspect you responded to Spell-check in the process of coming up with this spelling. These clues will help us open the door. The goal is a clear and accurate picture of the influences that change their writing. Those influences are not always bad, but when they are bad, they are bad in such a way that often makes their writing harder to read, and ultimately does them a disservice. The proper management of these systems will help them make better writing, thus stalling until they make better writing naturally; that is the ultimate goal. One cannot simply ostrich oneself to the technological influences of the modern world, though I suppose, in principle, one could prohibit them, and then pretend that what is written, was actually created by the student himself/herself.
Wednesday, March 9, 2016
defiantly true, continued
Two things have happened since my last post.
First, defiantly true is one of my favorite cupertinos, because very little can be defiantly true, unless it can be defiant, and at the same time, true. One poor woman in the writing lab had written it three times, and they were all in sentences such as That was defiantly a hard time for me, sentences in which it would be impossible for a time to be defiant, although it could of course be a hard time.
But this is what I figured out. Somebody claimed that you could adjust the Word grammar-check software to catch more contextual errors, cupertinos, times in which you needed there and wrote their for example. I didn't believe them, but I went looking for it, deep in the bowels of a Microsoft Word grammar-check at the computer station where I was working. What I found was a list of "change-to" words - such that any time you wrote cutsomer, it would change it to customer. They were clearly sensitive to words like that because they were trying to please the business world; if they had their finger on the pulse of the ESL world, they would have changed costumer to customer but in fact costumer is a word and that's why Word allows ESL students to get away with it.
Well in any event they added definately to this list and had it changed to definitely, and that's what accounts for the lower percentage of defiantly cupertinos that we are seeing these days. To American students, the biggest hazard was putting a single a in the word at the wrong time; but, the common error was fixed at some point, within Word. What remains are the other versions of the word, which cannot be interpreted as easily on the part of the computer, and thus remain in cupertino-land.
My poor American student either had an old version of Word, or, was typing something less typical. In any case, like most, she settled for defiantly, because it looked OK.
First, defiantly true is one of my favorite cupertinos, because very little can be defiantly true, unless it can be defiant, and at the same time, true. One poor woman in the writing lab had written it three times, and they were all in sentences such as That was defiantly a hard time for me, sentences in which it would be impossible for a time to be defiant, although it could of course be a hard time.
But this is what I figured out. Somebody claimed that you could adjust the Word grammar-check software to catch more contextual errors, cupertinos, times in which you needed there and wrote their for example. I didn't believe them, but I went looking for it, deep in the bowels of a Microsoft Word grammar-check at the computer station where I was working. What I found was a list of "change-to" words - such that any time you wrote cutsomer, it would change it to customer. They were clearly sensitive to words like that because they were trying to please the business world; if they had their finger on the pulse of the ESL world, they would have changed costumer to customer but in fact costumer is a word and that's why Word allows ESL students to get away with it.
Well in any event they added definately to this list and had it changed to definitely, and that's what accounts for the lower percentage of defiantly cupertinos that we are seeing these days. To American students, the biggest hazard was putting a single a in the word at the wrong time; but, the common error was fixed at some point, within Word. What remains are the other versions of the word, which cannot be interpreted as easily on the part of the computer, and thus remain in cupertino-land.
My poor American student either had an old version of Word, or, was typing something less typical. In any case, like most, she settled for defiantly, because it looked OK.
Whitesmoke malware
Someone told me to put "whitesmoke malware" into google and see what popped up. I haven't done it yet, but I will. Whitesmoke is a grammar program that has been around for a while. But the two biggest claims against it are fairly harsh. The first is that they give you a lifetime subscription, then come after you later for more money. Can this be true? Don't people have contracts?
But the second is, you can't uninstall it. It leaves pieces of itself in your hard-drive, making it very difficult to remove, and you feel like you have this foreign intruder in your computer, always, and it's kind of like having malaria, only maybe the PC version. This is insidious, and I'm glad I'm not in the business. It was apparently not the best grammar software anyway.
But the second is, you can't uninstall it. It leaves pieces of itself in your hard-drive, making it very difficult to remove, and you feel like you have this foreign intruder in your computer, always, and it's kind of like having malaria, only maybe the PC version. This is insidious, and I'm glad I'm not in the business. It was apparently not the best grammar software anyway.
Concordance assignment
The results are in on my concordance assignment, and I would like to share them. I started with 14 high-level graduate writers and I introduced the concordance (Brigham Young's Corpus) in the computer lab; as part of that introduction, we were frozen out of BYU's concordance because too many computers were pinging their search from a single room. In a bad mood about being essentially locked out of a useful service, I encouraged them to write whatever they wanted about whether the concordance could be useful to them as a writer. If you have three reasons why you hate it, I told them, fine, just be clear, and write an organized essay from your own point of view, from your heart.
Many of them, knowing that I liked the concordance and wanted it to be useful to them, dutifully wrote about ways it was useful, and even mirrored back to me the ways I'd said that it could be useful. They told me how they used it to distinguish insist/persist, in the contrary/on the contrary, etc. One maintained that it was good for discovering how idioms were used (i. e. raining cats and dogs). They said it was good for finding prepositions (interested in vs. interested by), finding synonyms, etc. By far the majority of points they made were positive; it was useful, it could be used for various problems that the writer had, etc. Whether they were saying this to please me or not, that's what they said.
However, some were more adventurous, and pointed out either other tools they used, or pointed out why they would prefer not to mess with BYU's corpus. One was a usability expert and pointed out that it wasn't very usable. Several admitted to being confused by its layout and admitted to being unable to figure out how to get what they wanted. Many were put off by the way it shut us down in class, or the way it kept hocking them for donations.
One interesting paragraph was written by a woman who had a simple job; she'd been told by a graduate assistant to look up "rose up" as in "I rose up my hand." Presumably she would find that rose was intransitive; thus you would raise your hand, whereas the sun rose, or other things rose, though perhaps they didn't rise up. In any case she claimed she got lots of sentences, but nothing helpful. It occurred to me that she wasn't really looking at it grammatically; in other words, she never really said, wait, it's never followed by a verb. She saw sentences, formless, meaningless, cut off from everything; it didn't speak to her.
She was one of the people who pointed out other tools that could be used. There were many - ranging from Google, to Grammarly, to a Chinese vocabulary site - and they talked freely about them.
The ironic thing is that the concordance was not developed as an ESL tool. It's simply a tool, used by lots of people for lots of things, and it delivers the facts, in other words, the occurrences of any given word or structure. That's what I like about it; it's distinctly non-commercial, not directed at ESL; it's just a machine that has the facts. I'm kind of new to the concordance-based learning game, but it's very interesting, and it seems to me that if you like the facts, and are used to the facts, and drive your life toward scientific accuracy, you'd want this with your words as well as, say, your health. You would find the facts useful, and you'd figure out how to use them to your advantage. I'll see how many of my students can actually do this.
Many of them, knowing that I liked the concordance and wanted it to be useful to them, dutifully wrote about ways it was useful, and even mirrored back to me the ways I'd said that it could be useful. They told me how they used it to distinguish insist/persist, in the contrary/on the contrary, etc. One maintained that it was good for discovering how idioms were used (i. e. raining cats and dogs). They said it was good for finding prepositions (interested in vs. interested by), finding synonyms, etc. By far the majority of points they made were positive; it was useful, it could be used for various problems that the writer had, etc. Whether they were saying this to please me or not, that's what they said.
However, some were more adventurous, and pointed out either other tools they used, or pointed out why they would prefer not to mess with BYU's corpus. One was a usability expert and pointed out that it wasn't very usable. Several admitted to being confused by its layout and admitted to being unable to figure out how to get what they wanted. Many were put off by the way it shut us down in class, or the way it kept hocking them for donations.
One interesting paragraph was written by a woman who had a simple job; she'd been told by a graduate assistant to look up "rose up" as in "I rose up my hand." Presumably she would find that rose was intransitive; thus you would raise your hand, whereas the sun rose, or other things rose, though perhaps they didn't rise up. In any case she claimed she got lots of sentences, but nothing helpful. It occurred to me that she wasn't really looking at it grammatically; in other words, she never really said, wait, it's never followed by a verb. She saw sentences, formless, meaningless, cut off from everything; it didn't speak to her.
She was one of the people who pointed out other tools that could be used. There were many - ranging from Google, to Grammarly, to a Chinese vocabulary site - and they talked freely about them.
The ironic thing is that the concordance was not developed as an ESL tool. It's simply a tool, used by lots of people for lots of things, and it delivers the facts, in other words, the occurrences of any given word or structure. That's what I like about it; it's distinctly non-commercial, not directed at ESL; it's just a machine that has the facts. I'm kind of new to the concordance-based learning game, but it's very interesting, and it seems to me that if you like the facts, and are used to the facts, and drive your life toward scientific accuracy, you'd want this with your words as well as, say, your health. You would find the facts useful, and you'd figure out how to use them to your advantage. I'll see how many of my students can actually do this.
Monday, February 15, 2016
Grammarly, Ginger, Word Grammar-check, and wife
Evans, Dean (n.d.). Proofreading test: my wife vs. Grammarly vs. Ginger vs. After The Deadline vs. Microsoft Word 2010. GoodContentCo. Available 2-16 from: http://goodcontentcompany.com/proofreading-test-roundup.
There are things I like about this and things I don't. One is his simple approach: line them up, apply a certain block of text to each, and see what happens. This is what I do, knowing full well that ESL students' problems are to some degree different from the average native speaker writer, and that the free boxes that each offer as teasers often provide the best grammatical advice available on the market, only for 600-word texts, i.e. it's limited to a little bit at a time.
So he applies his text, with three spelling errors, three grammatical errors, and two factual errors. I don't see how you can expect a computer to pick up a factual error; for example, was it called Apple Co. or Apple Corps? Who would know or even look it up? But both Grammarly and Ginger failed to pick up an its/it's error, and I think this is crucial - now I know from the comments that this article was written before 2013, but I also know that even today the its/it's problem is considered one of the biggest out there. You have to get that one, and it's not that hard.
Well, it's hard enough that I myself couldn't program it into a computer, but I could program something in that told the writer: if you are using it's, are you sure you mean it is or it has?
One reason I mention this is that my wife is an academic, a sociology professor, with very high standards for her (fairly high-level, graduate, mostly native-speaker) writers. And she has, in a fit of frustration, just made an assignment that essentially told her writers, no more of this its/it's crap. No more cupertinos. This is formal academic English. Quit with the lousy writing.
Now these are students who are basically on the market for these programs. The internationals get a kind of break in this picture but, basically, they have some of the same problems, often a few more, but at the same time (compared to the native speakers) they have been learning for many years, and if you give them an opportunity to learn they will. The problem is that these programs don't teach. In some cases they un-teach. Usually they just imperiously pronounce. But if they can't even pick up its/it's, we're in big trouble.
The other common ones are there/their/they're and too/to/two which I figured native speakers never got wrong, boy was I wrong about that. The increased frequency of these kinds of errors is alarming, in my book. What, does Autocorrect just remove that extra "o" (making too into to) every time, just for fun?
Back to this guy's methodical comparison. I'm especially impressed by the comments, and may print them out just to see what people have said. They've had at least three years to pipe up; his article has finally reached the point of prominence where if you mention similar grammar programs in one breath, Google will at least pick up on it and put it up there. But three or four years is a long time; a lot has happened since then.
There are things I like about this and things I don't. One is his simple approach: line them up, apply a certain block of text to each, and see what happens. This is what I do, knowing full well that ESL students' problems are to some degree different from the average native speaker writer, and that the free boxes that each offer as teasers often provide the best grammatical advice available on the market, only for 600-word texts, i.e. it's limited to a little bit at a time.
So he applies his text, with three spelling errors, three grammatical errors, and two factual errors. I don't see how you can expect a computer to pick up a factual error; for example, was it called Apple Co. or Apple Corps? Who would know or even look it up? But both Grammarly and Ginger failed to pick up an its/it's error, and I think this is crucial - now I know from the comments that this article was written before 2013, but I also know that even today the its/it's problem is considered one of the biggest out there. You have to get that one, and it's not that hard.
Well, it's hard enough that I myself couldn't program it into a computer, but I could program something in that told the writer: if you are using it's, are you sure you mean it is or it has?
One reason I mention this is that my wife is an academic, a sociology professor, with very high standards for her (fairly high-level, graduate, mostly native-speaker) writers. And she has, in a fit of frustration, just made an assignment that essentially told her writers, no more of this its/it's crap. No more cupertinos. This is formal academic English. Quit with the lousy writing.
Now these are students who are basically on the market for these programs. The internationals get a kind of break in this picture but, basically, they have some of the same problems, often a few more, but at the same time (compared to the native speakers) they have been learning for many years, and if you give them an opportunity to learn they will. The problem is that these programs don't teach. In some cases they un-teach. Usually they just imperiously pronounce. But if they can't even pick up its/it's, we're in big trouble.
The other common ones are there/their/they're and too/to/two which I figured native speakers never got wrong, boy was I wrong about that. The increased frequency of these kinds of errors is alarming, in my book. What, does Autocorrect just remove that extra "o" (making too into to) every time, just for fun?
Back to this guy's methodical comparison. I'm especially impressed by the comments, and may print them out just to see what people have said. They've had at least three years to pipe up; his article has finally reached the point of prominence where if you mention similar grammar programs in one breath, Google will at least pick up on it and put it up there. But three or four years is a long time; a lot has happened since then.
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