Category: shrugcon

In preparing for this conference, I did a fair amount of searching for a post about someone thinking their way through the technical requirements for an online conference. I didn’t find much – but that probably has as much to do with how bad ‘search’ is. In the spirit of someone learning from my mistakes, I thought I might jot down the decisions I made to try and pull #ShrugCon together. The first part of this is being written right before the conference, and I’ll add #PostNotes after.

I should note that while I’m using the Universities time and technology (primarily the Microsoft suite) I’m supporting the whole conference as one person with a budget of $0 (with the exception of some of my Office of Open Learning peeps reviewing the submissions). It started out this way because i didn’t want to jump into people’s schedules on a project that I wasn’t sure was going to succeed and it turned into a bit of an experiment about running an online conference as a team of 1.

I have a previous post describing #ShrugCon

Conference Website

The conference is being hosted on a single page of our uncertainty community WordPress hosted with Reclaim hosting. I considered creating separate pages for more detailed information, but then realized I was creating more things to keep track of and the new Twenty Twenty-Four theme has some pretty easy out of the box theming that allowed me to tile things down the page. So. Conference website is just one long page.

Annotated Bibliography

I’m a big fan of this and would encourage everyone to do one for their online conference/community. I already had one setup on Uncertainty/Community so I didn’t make it ‘for’ this, but it works great. It’s basically just using posts on WordPress with an ‘annotated bibliography’ tag and then creating a link to that tag’s page. I believe that the more we as people interested in knowledge gather together ideas in this way the more we’re contributing to coherence on the web. I’ll post something on this later, but suffice it to say that I believe ‘open annotated bibliography = good’. Every time someone in the conference sends along an interesting link, I add it. After the conference, part of our debrief will be adding cool stuff from the sessions to the bibliography.

Poster presentations

I added this late in the process, but I kind of like it. It’s setup the same way as the AB. It allows people we couldn’t fit into the times to create pieces so they can participate in the conference in ways that can let them share their ideas but also give them a “CHECK” that they can put on their CV.

Newsletter

I’m using the free version of Mailchimp. Straight up, nothing fancy. This is for people to sign up for to get updates and, hopefully, stay on as part of the community after the conference. The upside of this is that its easy to send and keep the emails for later. The downside is that it goes into the ‘newsletter’ stream in people’s inbox reducing the number of people who are going to open it. Open rate is… 60%?

Conference proposals

I set up three different forms using google forms.

1. The first allowed people to express an interest in presenting/attending.
2. The second was for contributing to the annotated bibliography
3. The third was to volunteer to participate in the after-party where we’re going to try to pull together some themes/outcomes from the conference

This was probably too much. I ended up having to pull people out of the forms to add them to the newsletter so I wasn’t emailing a bunch of different people different things. One form that went directly into Mailchimp probably would have been smarter.

Registration

So… I’m using Microsoft webinar for that. I’ve never used it for anything before and its… not bad. It’s part of Microsoft Teams, and you can set it up as a registration system.

I think it looks ok. It’ll handle authors and author Bios and stuff. Allows people to register for it and sends them a meeting reminder. I’ve heard a couple of people suggest they had a few problems, but mostly people seem to like it. It’s easy enough to update and allows for speakers and organizers to have different access which means (I think) that my speakers don’t get an update every time I change the details on an event.

I setup the presentations in blocks of two, the 10am presentation and the 11am presentation are in the same ‘webinar’. I’m still not sure if that was a good idea, I’ll let you know after the conference. I’m going to do a conference survey and will include a question about how people liked this.

Direct communication with speakers

I thought about setting up a Teams meeting with all 20 speakers in it, but I decided to just go with email. It’s been fine. I kind of didn’t want people to be too planned… and email is just clumsy enough to discourage collaboration. 🙂

Who’s the audience for this post dave?

This is the question i’m left with after writing it. In some sense, this post is for future dave, so that he remembers what past dave did. If there’s someone else out there who does something similar, I’d love it if you left a comment and told us how it went.

A conference about uncertainty which might also be about the left-overs after problem-solving.

I have spent the week watching my youngest do two types of ‘problem solving.’ I got her one of those ‘daily calendars’ at Christmas – one of the ones that has a puzzle to solve everyday. She’s getting better at them, and while I was waiting to get asked to help with one… she really didn’t need it. She’s got the trick to doing them. The second kind of problem solving she was doing was quadratic equations. She does pretty well with it, but sometimes gets caught up in one method (her teacher has very specific methods) and then takes a few minutes to see that the textbook has just switched the problem around. She’s mostly got the trick of it.

ChatGPTo, it turns out, mostly has the trick of both of them. The algorithm is amazing at the puzzles and… mostly reliable for the word problems. (it got some of the variables mixed up… I asked it why, it said it just got ‘confused’)

Problem solving, it seems, is something we can get the trick of. It’s also something that new GenAI systems are doing extremely well. As I explained to a Social Psych grad student last week, employers are not going to need as many ‘problem solvers’ going forward. If a problem can actually be solved, an algorithm is probably going to be able to do it.

Turns out, if we follow work done at RAND and by the folks below, our method of problem solving was learned FROM early digital tools.

A little history of the kind of ‘problem solving’ I’m talking about?

In their 1958 article, Newell, Shaw and Simon suggest that we need a theory of problem solving so that we can “explain how human problem solving takes place.” They’re looking to describe a method that they’ve learned from digital computers (in this case RAND JOHNNIAC) because the digital thing can “be induced to execute the same sequences of information processes that humans execute when they are solving problems” (p.153).

The problem solving literature that comes out of this thread still has a long history. Simon and Newell’s thoughts about ‘well-structured problems’ (1970) and their obsession with using chess as an exemplar for ‘problem solving’ (Ensmenger, 2011) keep showing up in the literature. How can we solve the problem faster? How can we solve the problem more reliably? How can we beat the chess player/machine? How can we think more like a chess player?

In their ‘impacts on education’ section of that same 1970 article, S&N claim that they know very well that there are two kinds of learning – rote learning and meaningful learning. They suggest that we have known for a long time that there’s a real difference, but we’ve never been able to talk about ‘meaningful learning’ before. They propose, as you might expect, problem solving as meaningful learning.

What does it mean to ‘solve’ a problem?

In his 1973 article, Simon describes a ‘well-structured problem’ as one where the question, the process to solve the problem and the solution are known or knowable. Solving the problem, then, is to

1. take the question that has been given to you
2. Use the process for problem solving you’ve been taught
3. Check if you’ve got the right answer against the answer that the person who has ‘structured’ that problem has for you. (back of the textbook, in my daughter’s case)

This is the standard trope of problem solving in the education system. It’s also the thing that many people like to study in educational research. “Did the kid get the right answer?” It can only be the ‘right answer’ if someone else has cleaned up all the messy stuff. Someone built a problem to solve, someone made a puzzle, someone developed the formula…

Isn’t that the hard work already done?

Newell and Simon address this issue. When asked whether the solving of a problem is implicit in the designing of a problem, their response is simple and direct. “Observation of subjects’ behavior over a sequence of chess problems, cryptarithmetic puzzles, or theorem-finding problems shows the argument to be empirically false.” (1970)

You can have solvable problems and puzzles and theorem finding, I’ll take the ‘left overs’

In 2001 Simon (yup, same guy – he won a Nobel Prize along the way) said that Ill-structured problems are what’s ‘left over’ from well-structured problem. They are the things that don’t fit into the nice categories of question/process/solution. This conference is about the leftovers. It’s about the things in life/learning that aren’t tidy. The ones that no one can confirm are right (there are many ways to confirm that an answer is wrong).

A well-structured problem almost never happens to me in real life. At work, as a parent, as a partner, as a citizen I am almost never in a position where I’m given a clear question that isn’t messy in some way, a process that I can follow, and a way for someone to say ‘yeah, you did that exactly right’. And when I am, I can mostly just use a GenAI tool to get there.

The things that are meaningful, to me, are about real life. They aren’t about chess, they aren’t about puzzles, they are about how each of us faces the uncertainty around us. With all these GenAI discussions swirling around I’m even more interested in how we learn when things are uncertain.

This conference is about how we teach and learn in that uncertainty.

References

Ensmenger, N. (2011). Is chess the drosophila of artificial intelligence? A social history of an algorithm: Social Studies of Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306312711424596

Newell, A., Shaw, J. C., & Simon, H. A. (1958). Elements of a theory of human problem solving. Psychological Review, 65(3), 151–166. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0048495

Simon, H. (2001). Problem Solving. In The MIT Encyclopedia of the Cognitive Sciences (MITECS) | MIT CogNet. The MIT press. http://cognet.mit.edu/erefs/mit-encyclopedia-of-cognitive-sciences-mitecs

Simon, H. A. (1973). The Structure of Ill Structured Problems. Artificial Intelligence, 21.

Simon, H. A., & Newell, A. (1970). Human problem solving: The state of the theory in 1970. American Psychologist, 26(2), 145. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0030806

We care about learning… but what does that mean today? I have this suspicion that it’s about preparing people to deal with uncertainty… I’d like to know if you agree with me AND if you do, what we might do about it.

Dates

• July 16-17 Online for the stories/discussions 
• July 18-19 Hybrid after-party for creating usable artefacts from the discussion

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