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.

2 minute read

Weeknotes are a habit I’m cultivating where I share what I’m working on or thinking about, primarily in my professional life without worrying too much about the ideas being fully formed.

I’ve been sick the last week with a good old-fashioned cold and before that I’ve been dealing with having 1.5 jobs and trying to finish my very late annual review (which actually covers 2 years of work because once you have tenure here you only have to do one every two years, which sounds great but makes it a nightmare to pull together). I smartly also decided that it would be fun to post a version of it on the web, and THEN I decided it would also be a good idea to revive my long-neglected plan to move my website to Jekyll (which is why you are here instead of a wordpress blog). So that was my weekend.

This week, hopefully headed to Ottawa for a few days visiting friends with a new baby. Before that: trying to get things under control enough to feel good turning off the work brain for that trip.

Thinking About / Working On

  • Plaintext and genAI: For years I’ve kept all my working notes in markdown, primarily in Obsidian using a handful of other apps and tools that I’m obsessed with and not ready to talk about yet. This means I have years of instruction and project plans, meeting notes, reflections, grant proposals, feedback, highlights from articles and books, etc. all ready to be fed into AI as context fodder for prompts. I actually think I’ve had a qualitatively different experience using AI because of the affordances provided by being able to quickly work with large amounts of meaningful text that I created and know. Given how rapidly things are changing, having control over your content and how it can be used is more relevant than ever. This is making me want to move more of the content I produce into formats I can quickly search, access, and manipulate.
  • “Don’t cheat yourself out of the work” is something the online video yoga instructor told me last night, and its such a good way of explaining to students and staff why we want them to put in the work of self-directed active learning, even when its inconvenient, or they won’t get the project done on time, or even when it means they need to abandon it for a while. We fail our mission when we do the work for them.

Reading / Consuming / Sharing

  • Finished Tehanu, the 4th in the Earthsea series by Ursula K. Le Guin, and the best in my mind.
  • [Tressie McPhD Some quick thoughts after class on AI solutions for the university’s political problems. Instagram](https://www.instagram.com/tressiemcphd/reel/DBKllBxIAJh/?ref=2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com)
  • AI and the privatisation of everything - by Helen Beetham
    • “The immediate effect of apps like these is that teachers become consumers of recycled expertise, rather than members of a community of shared practice. The medium-term effect is that teaching know-how is invested in the platform, so education funding is diverted into platform subscriptions.
  • Superhistory, Not Superintelligence - by Venkatesh Rao
    • “The humbling thing about the rise of machine learning is not that it shows us how stupid we are in “intelligence” terms, but how empty our lives are, in terms of their information content.”

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