Franklin Sayre

I’m the Makerspace Librarian at Thompson Rivers University and also Co-Chair the Librarians’ Department. These days I am particularly interested in creating active learning spaces that foster belonging and encouraging sustainability and critical thinking about technology and information.

6 minute read

Weeknotes are where I share what I’m working on / thinking about this week and a few things to share without worrying too much about the ideas being fully formed.

writing most of this via voice to text and posting from my phone so expect extra errors.

Thinking About / Working On

Multimodality in the Makerspace Workshop

This Wednesday, I co-teach a workshop on “Multimodality in Curriculum and Research in the Makerspace” with Alexis Brown, a wonderful colleague from our Centre for Excellence in Learning and Teaching. Multimodality is really Alexis’ area of expertise, I’m just there to fill in Makerspace stuff and because Alexis was kind enough to do this help me get more facility using the space in the way it’s intended. I think our space has succeeded in being a place for students to learn and experiment, but we’ve had less success getting faculty to explore how to use the space for teaching, especially for more complicated topics. We’ve had some, but less than I want, and I especially want more integrations that use our pedagogies in a really deep may. Alexis offered to put on this workshop to help faculty explore multimodality as one entry point into the space.

This workshop actually came out of my plan for “show up and make” sessions where twice a week I host coffee, snacks, and time for students, staff, and faculty to come together and co-work on projects. This has been successful in a way I didn’t expect, which is that it’s attracting new students who have never used the space and who see the promotions and think that they need the permission the event creates to come use the space. I’m seeing this over and over, and I think it both suggests a need for a different promotion and communication plan, and also that many students, especially non-traditional students and those who don’t see themselves in spaces like Makerspaces, will always need entry points that give them permission to come for the first time. It’s been less successful with faculty because I don’t think many of them know about it and I haven’t done a great job explaining to those that do why they should come.

So I’m going to make some changes to “Show up and Make” and last week I brought the idea to our weekly operations team that maybe student ambassadors and our makerspace staff could be more involved. Not only was our staff willing, but one asked if maybe moving it to late afternoon between 3:30 and 5:00 would be a good idea because we typically close at 4:00, and students really want to be able to stay later, and it would make it special and therefore more appealing while also meeting that demand. Such a great idea, so moving forward with that.

Pomodoro Fuckboy Workflow

I think the second project that I want to finish up this week is the current iteration of the never-ending Pomodoro Fuckboy workflow project.

One day I will need to explain in more detail what a Pomodoro Fuckboy is, but I feel like it is also pretty self-explanatory.

This iteration has involved building increasingly elaborate iOS shortcut routines that tie together my calendar, obsidian notes, todoist, AI, and various other things.

The main part of this is building a daily briefing shortcut that helps me plan for the day and meet my priorities. I’ve been playing with various versions of this for a couple of weeks, and I think I’ve landed on wanting a simplified version that in the morning:

  • Gets my calendar entries for that day
  • Asks me what the goal is for each event
  • Asks me if I want to add any todos for each event
  • Helps me reflect on what I want to get done that day (and borrowing from Oliver Burkeman asks me “What it would be mean to be done for the day”)
  • Helps me reflect generally
  • Helps me meet longer-term goals and priorities via prompts and reminders, since its easy to lose sight of these in the day to day

And then in the afternoon updates that briefing and helps me close out the day with:

  • Adding new calendar entries that got added that day
  • Asks me for any reflections on each event
  • Asks me for any todos coming out of each event
  • Helps me for reflect on the day

I’m currently running one of these at 7.30 in the morning and a second one at 4.30 in the end of the day.

Something I think is interesting is that in various versions of this I’ve tried using AI to do things like pull notes about upcoming events from my obsidian files to create more detailed briefing documents for a meeting, and that hasn’t been very helpful. What it is actually good at is creating very personal reflection questions and reminders based on my previous entries or my calendar + some prompts or context about my goals. It’s great for looking at what I specifically have that day and comparing it to what I have said is generally important to me and then giving me a couple questions that I can use to help me think through my day and goals. It’s also good at turning these into an alert I get in the middle of the day.

I guess what I’m saying is that I continue to be surprised how bad AI is at things I think computers are typically good at, and how good it is at things I think of as human skills. Or maybe: how good it is as a tool for prompting me to be a better human / expert. The real value I’m finding with AI is that it can rapidly prompt me to think about things in a lot of different ways, but it’s still me doing the work, in the middle of the loop.

Reading / Consuming / Sharing

A real banger with a lot of grist, which I am thinking about a lot as we enter this period of budget reductions caused by a decade of feeding off international students: 13 Thoughts on “The Customs of Obedience in Academe”

Campuses present themselves as idyllic sites of free inquiry, but they’re workplaces just like any other institution under capitalism and so competing class interests dictate much of what happens, or much of what is possible.

A very cool use of machine learning: Dream machines - by Kate Armstrong

The end result is that you can use these ML systems to locate and then stitch together a reel where a figure transforms from one context to another at a point within the frame that remains smooth and consistent, going from a runner, to a firefighter, to two firefighters, to two politicians. This is hard to describe so see what it looks like at 19:44 on the video.

On YouTube culture and the need to at least consider if we should be learning from and even embracing the models of information sharing and community building that the right has so successfully embraced: Does Bluesky have the juice? - by Max Read - Read Max

To some extent, this should be cause for optimism. For reasons that I suspect are obvious to anyone reading this Substack I really hate “debate culture,” and don’t personally find theatrical fact-recitation to be an effective mode of persuasion. Nor, for that matter, am I particularly impressed with “curiosity” that lacks any intellectual resources to shape and direct the “open inquiry” it drives. But the popularity of these formats suggests that there’s a large audience of people with appetite for education, looking for new and more sophisticated ways to explain the world around them.² It’s possible, even likely, that many of those people are reactionaries by inclination and intuition, and merely seeking justification for views they already hold. But it seems like a failure of imagination for anyone who believes in democracy to write off a population of would-be autodidacts rather than attempting to marshal resources to help them, even if it means meeting them where they are.

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