Mindfulness is awareness that arises through paying attention,

on purpose,

in the present moment,

non-judgmentally.

 

—Jon Kabat-Zinn

Claudia L’Amoreaux

Mindful Digital Life

AI

World Building

© by Claudia L’Amoreaux

Photo by Frog Song Photography. Location: my favorite Northern California beach

The future isn’t something that rushes over us like water. It’s something that we all play an active roll in shaping and defining.

~Liam Young, world builder

I have always appreciated this moment in the turning of the seasons when we celebrate the longest night and the lengthening of days again. Thoughts of a “new year” turn my usual relationship to time inside out for a very brief spell. Some years, I’ve managed to create personal retreats that allowed me to reflect deeply on what I lived in the past year, and to contemplate what I wanted to bring forward in the coming months. But these days, I practice reflection and visioning on the fly. I think that’s a good practice to be working on…

This is my last post for 2019. I’m taking some time to refresh, renew, and reinvent. Family, friends, and beaches will be involved. See you in 2020. Enjoy!

I’ll leave you with some fuel for your Co-Creative Conversations about technology and well-being…media for co-viewing:

Worldbuilding with Liam Young – it’s about the video. Liam talks about using science fiction to prototype new cultural responses to technologies.

Next gen wildlife conservation: Wildlife Insights—Biodiversity and AI. Make sure to watch the 5 minute video. Seriously.

Space geeks in the house? Check out this digital labor of love—If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel.

A wonderful list of kids’ books about where and how we live

#GetMoreMeta

© by Claudia L’Amoreaux

It’s so easy to take the Internet for granted (until our power gets shut down or we lose our phone). Have you noticed? This week I’ve rounded up a few links to help you and your families or students #GetMoreMeta with your relationship to the Wild World Web.

Here are a few resources to fuel your investigations, and enliven your weekly technology conversations this season.

1. In the Age of AI, a PBS documentary. This video is four minutes short of 2 hours long. It’s divided into 5 sections. If you have tweens and teens, consider co-viewing a few sections a week and talk about it.

2. Youth and Artificial Intelligence: Where We Stand (free PDF download). This report by a team at the Berkman Klein Center at Harvard is an excellent companion to the PBS documentary. The authors give you some great question sets to consider. I wrote about the report here back in June, 2019.

3. The Common Sense Census: Media Use by Tweens and Teens. This new Common Sense Media report presents results of a nationally representative survey of more than 1,600 U.S. 8- to 18-year-olds, about their use of and relationship with media.

4. YouTube Algorithms: How to Avoid the Rabbit Hole. I love Myles Bess and KQED’s Above the Noise. This 6-minute video walks you through YouTube’s recommendation algorithms. And after you’ve watched the video, you’ll find the list of sources that informed the piece to take you and your family deeper into an investigation of the role of algorithms in media consumption.

I believe investigation is an essential practice for bringing forward a mindful digital life. Investigation takes time. Alas. But it’s time well spent. 

Hands-on family explorations of AI—in local nature

© by Claudia L’Amoreaux

Screen shot of Seek app showing photo and identification of Coast Redwood

I live on a steep hillside with several enormous and non-native Eucalyptus trees. They dominate the scene, so much so that I didn’t really notice the presence of a native & threatened species—Sequoia sempervirens—camouflaged just on the other side of my neighbors’ 6-foot wooden fence. But within 3 minutes of opening and using the Seek V2 app by iNaturalist, I had identified the Coast Redwood tree that I walk by everyday. And I had learned that this species which includes the tallest living trees on earth, can live 1200–1800 years. Respect.

Seek was created by the iNaturalist team at the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco. I had tried V1 but found it frustrating to use and abandoned it quickly. There it sat on my iPhone, along with my other abandoned apps, gathering pixel dust. Apparently I was not alone in this frustration. So they fixed it. And I have to say, they really got it right this time.

The iNaturalist team writes in an announcement about V2:

“In Seek v1, which launched in March 2018…you needed to take a photo before you had a sense of whether or not it was even identifiable by Seek. This caused frustration when people repeatedly experienced the lack of a computer vision match. Now, since you can see predictions overlayed on the camera you get immediate feedback about what you see and the specificity with which Seek can identify it.

The species included in Seek are based entirely on photos and identifications made by the global iNaturalist community, so the Seek camera will work best in places where there is already an active community of iNaturalist users, and for species that are easily identified from photos. Seek also uses data submitted to iNaturalist to show suggestions for ‘species nearby,’ but unlike iNaturalist, findings made with Seek will not be shared publicly, making it safe for children to use.

Seek is geared to encourage outdoor exploration of wild biodiversity (rather than pets, zoo animals, or garden plants). We hope kids, families, educators, and anyone into games will start exploring their natural surroundings with Seek, and we want this to inspire the next generation of biodiversity stewards by encouraging exploration and unlocking the names of species as a way to learn more about them. We want to make it easier for curious people who may not consider themselves naturalists to learn more about nature.”

Read this review by Eric Simmons, digital editor at Bay Nature, my favorite local magazine, about his experience taking Seek V2 out for a spin. You’ll learn more about how the computer vision works in this augmented reality app, and how the artificial intelligence trains to identify your images.

Make your family explorations of AI hands-on and grounded in learning about your local nature (for some guidance on family conversations about AI, revisit the second part of this post I wrote a month ago ). Try Seek. And do let me know how it goes. I would love to hear from you. Contact me here.

Let’s talk with young people about AI

© by Claudia L’Amoreaux

We call you ocean.

We call you sea, gulf, strait, bight,
bay, lagoon, river, falls, creek,
stream, lake, pond, spring.

We call you rain.

We call you pool, puddle, snowflake,
glacier, dew, mist, cove, channel, inlet,
cascade, brook, tributary, bayou, tarn,

H2O.

Those are the opening lines to “Prayer to Protect Water,” a piece I wrote several years ago (click the link on H2O to read the rest). And that’s the Pacific Ocean underneath the fog layer visible on the horizon in the photo above. I took the shot at the crest of Highway 46 before heading down the hills to Highway 1 South to Morro Bay…for a long weekend immersing in Blue Mind. I mentioned in the last post that I was reading the book Blue Mind by marine biologist Wallace J. Nichols. I did read some of the book that dives into the neuroscience of our relationship with water, but mostly, I set my digital media aside, and enjoyed living outside for entire days at a time—canoeing out to the sandspit in the bay with my daughter, her husband, and my granddaughter, wading in the warm, shallow water, communing up close and personal with the Black-crowned Night-Heron and Downy Woodpecker, appreciating the crescent moon in the dark night sky, delighting in how a particular type of Eucalyptus pod fits on tiny fingers like a funny little fairy cap.

Restorative nature time. Precious family time. An essential reset for how I interact with the vast flows of digital information surging into my daily life. Strengthening my ability to focus on topics I really want to investigate.

Black-crowned Night Heron (Nycticorax nycticorax). Photo by Calibas.

Two questions I’m asking myself are: What does a 12-year-old who has just been given a smart phone need to know? Who is working on answering this question in a creative way?

In my last post I mentioned I was reading the Spotlight by a team at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society titled Youth and Artificial Intelligence: Where We Stand. I finished it this week. What I appreciated about their work is that instead of answering questions, they focused on the questions we need to be asking about AI and youth in the areas of education, health and well-being, the future of work, privacy and safety, and creativity and entertainment. The questions they ask are really important. I encourage you to take the time to read their work. When you prioritize studying a bit on this area of technology that is advancing very rapidly and is already affecting our children’s and teenagers’ lives profoundly, you’re modeling engaging with the technology more responsibly, and you’re educating yourself for deeper conversations with our families about our relationship with technology.

For some kid-friendly content for conversations on artificial intelligence, start with this article in The Journal: Transforming Education through Technology to see how some teachers across the country are engaging students with AI. And with Deepfakes very much in the news this month, tweens and teens will be interested in the new video Deepfakes: Can You Spot a Phony Video on KQED’s Above the Noise, hosted by Myles Bess. Great series! [Note: Preview the video first to make sure you’re comfortable with sharing the content with your tweens—the video includes some sexual content. You should just be prepared. Above the Noise is for teens.]