This website embodies a project in which I wish: to document, describe, and hopefully transmit critical communicative, learning, teaching, and thinking skills that I have picked up over the years, and to foster discussions thereof and so also learn from feedback and dialogue. The name and URL reflect how I think we can and should reclaim and use computational ways of thinking responsibly and creatively.
I am a mid-career academic named Olivia Guest. I work in cognitive science. Perhaps the most important aspect of this project is that I want to explicitly share all this from an angle of certain explicit positionalities, my fields, my upbringing, my life experiences, my age, and so on.I will also use side notes like this for some clarifications or content that’s not always needed to be read or somehow tangential.
My basic thinking here is that a space separate to all my other spaces for sharing these ideas can help nurture them; and importantly, away from the busy mindscape that social media can interfere with, and a way for my mind to be calmer with fewer distractions, but nonetheless allowing for sharing. Perhaps a tricky balance, but I will try and juggle it. Because I can totally log off and work on some writing — and I can totally log on and post a lot, especially when my chronic illness confines me to bed and I get very bored. But to do both? Much harder.
I hope to archive them here (and on Zenodo) to stop these ideas from being lost in the ether, or tangled in ways with others’ perspectives on social media which often facilitates the opposite of what I want to cultivate here explicitly. Ideally, people can find the time to read my ideas — and work on their ideas — in slightly longer form as compared to the microblogging platforms academics normally frequent on the internet these days.
I completely eschew — and stand totally against — the contemporary so-called artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, like LLMs, which serve to displace human labour and deskill us, our students, future members of society. And on this: you can read my other website which has a critical artificial intelligence literacy (CAIL) page and some posts that cover related topics and summarize my longer articles or my thoughts regarding AI. But due to how much AI takes over the discourse, sucks the air our of the room, and rightfully riles people up this is a space to talk about human learning: human critical communicative, learning, teaching, and thinking skills.
This is therefore a no AI zone in at least two ways: no talking about it (as much as possible) as a central topic — and absolutely no using it.
The Dasher D100 image is from here by Ahkâm.
All the content on this website unless otherwise stated is released under CC BY 4.0. The website’s code is released under GPLv3.
If you are unsure how to credit something you found on this website, please feel free to drop Olivia a message.