Protected: the lesser citizen experience
4.0 –> 4.1
original web hosting plan with bluehost is expiring and becoming too expensive. thus, have migrated to hostinger which is cheaper for the pocket (: hence, site title +.1 to version.
the Age of ……
it was the Industrial Age, followed by the Information Age, or Digital Age; or Knowledge Age (Bereiter, 2002). and 2.5 decade into the 21st century, the next Age perhaps has arrived — the Age of Pretending.
just saw Richard Stallman gave this lecture at Georgia Tech some two weeks ago, and he coined the term “PI”, no, not private investigator, but Pretend Intelligence:
“…nowadays, people often use the term artificial intelligence for things that aren’t intelligent at all because they don’t understand anything and they don’t know anything… promoted the most for large language models, generators as I call them, because they don’t know anything. They generate text and they don’t
understand really what that text means…Every time you call them AI, you are endorsing the claim that they are intelligent and they’re not. So let’s let’s refuse to do that. So I’ve come up with the term Pretend Intelligence. We could call it PI. ” (12:25-12:49)
calling it PI is great, cos very catchy, and cos some singaporeans prided themselves that they like abbreviations a lot (and often these many assumed initialisation is the same as acronym).
was discussing with my new younger friend vera 清雅 (清秀、雅丽, a beautiful name), who happened to share with me an article on the phenomenon of influencers. and influencers essentially banked on “percevied expertise, trustworthiness, and attractiveness” (Duckwitz & Strasser, 2025, p.2). the keyword here is — percevied. and what’s an (best) act that can influence pple? yes no prize for guessing it, wayang (where one defines wayang as involving some act of pretending, intelligence or otherwise).
it’ll be interesting to observe where all these are going some years down the road, how AI or PI is going to advance humanity, in the domain of human intelligence, pretending, or wayang.
a day in the life of the researcher, story teller, and learning designer
today feels like a ‘high’ point for the past 3.5 years. and saying goes, what go up must come down? but whatever. impermanence is real so just record this moment ala in titus’s advert: “不在乎天长地久，只在乎曾经拥有”
today is the first day of our newly launched 3-day workshop. was fully subscribed and we saw 24 participants today. the course is unique as it is the first course in the academy’s offering that’s designed based on the social constructivist philosophy of learning, and a case study was developed to anchor the course and enable the knowledge creation (social) discourse. the main facilitator is my 院长 (aka MD aka 大大老板), who’s a highly experienced comms practitioner and leader with over 30 years of 实战经验 in govt/public comms. with her, my buddy viv, is the co-facilitator.
by design, the learning activities in the classroom today were filled with conversations after conversations — facilitator-peer & peer-peer; and there was but a small segment of transmissionist component at the beginning. towards the end of the day, my buddy prompted participants for a quick feedback on the case study (can’t wait till day 3). one participant felt that the MND experience appeared to be ‘idealistic’ to him. to me, the feel of ideal or otherwise, is often very much contextualised within individuals’ current or past experiences. the case study had not depicted the pains explicitly (e.g., time crunch, limited budget, human resources, paperwork … u name it, we’ve all experienced it) as i have chosen to focus on the ideas that fostered the close collaboration between policy and comms & engagement colleagues, and how they had worked (or toiled?) together towards a common goal. in short, the lived experiences but revealed the possibility of things working out in reality; not a tale of imagination in the case of a case scenario. for the other three participants who shared, am very glad to hear that the MND experience had facilitated their taking away of (personal) learning. which meant, my 初衷 had worked.
and after class ended, my 院长 texted:
“Thanks for your excellent case study that made this workshop possible.”
receiving this msg meant a lot to me, as it’s the first case study (among the nine I’ve written so far) that received affirmation from both facilitator and participants/readers. moreover, it’s an affirmation of the first attempt at a dialogic learning design for a new workshop. strictly speaking, the seasoned educator among us will know that the skilful facilitator is the critical factor in either make or break. therefore, i must thank 院长/MD’s 👏👏👏 facilitation in enabling the tool to perform its design.
if the workshop were to go for a second run (cos who knows what will happen; impermanence of life is but truth), i look forward to the creation of a second case study to enable future knowledge creation discourse.
shall see … …
