Words and Values

I have been thinking a lot this week, as I normally do, about the words we use, share, or write, and the values they suggest. What value do words have? Whose words have value over others? What is the implication of recognizing words as values? All these nice important and heavy questions are what I am going to try to frame in this week's blog. I will lead you through my thought process, but also leave you with a suggested activity for folk to do in the fall around this with their students that I think may be of value (lol) to different areas and disciplines.

I am going to be honest and say that where this thread of thought came from is from some LinkedIn requests to connect I received this week. I started thinking about how some folk frame their headline in LinkedIn, because so many started with "award winning..." And it made me think about the values work that having such a headline does. It also made me think about audience; you know in the way that someone like myself who teaches professional communications should think about about and care about. From an audience standpoint having award-winning as the first word to describe you, says you understand that you work in a space, or want to work in a space where awards are of the most importance to you. It doesn't matter what award, that is never mentioned specifically, it is always some vague descriptor "award" that could even have been made up, but it just matters that the word award is there.

It also made me think about how my job title has the words Accessibility and Inclusion in it, and that my About section has the word ethical in the first sentence. And then I further reflected on how I often receive emails or messages from folk asking to meet or for advice about a thing that is happening and often that ask is framed as they are reaching out to me as someone with a "moral compass" or as some of my friends call me "Ethical Ann." Therefore, somewhere the words I have put out there, the way that I have been in the world, privately and publicly (because I am the same in both spaces as ethical humans try to be), has told folk I care about ethics and not just in a words with empty meaning way, but in a my praxis is ethically informed kind of way. 

This in turn made me think about whether folk are thinking about the morals and values they are suggesting in the words they use and if that even matters to them. I saw a post by Stephanie Moore the other day about how folk told her not to focus on ethics, that no one cares about ethics and increasingly how no one will care about ethics. So I started to wonder how the students are thinking about ethics and values, or not thinking about ethics and values. And more importantly to a pedagogical lens in terms of folk who are working on designing or redesigning courses and assessments, what a large language model (LLM) world is telling them about ethics and values. 

Because as I mentioned last week, the kind of data guessing that the models create around word use and choice tend to suggest that nothing has real value except for the product. This is why headlines need to be crafted in a certain way on LinkedIn, because the person is the product. But I am a person who cares deeply about how the person became that specific product. I also believe that eduspace should be deeply interested and invested in the becoming part of this as that is often what happens or should happen in classrooms (thank you to the professor I talked to this week who put this idea of "becoming" in my brain, you know who you are).

I was thinking that it would be a great exercise, activity, reflection piece that could be scaffolded to a larger project, to have students think about what they value and the words they use to express those values. My guess is that no one has really asked them this question and they probably have not taken a moment to reflect on the implications of values, because many things have been focused on product as opposed to process and values and ethics are about having ethical processes to get to an ethical product. Also the socio-political space we are in really avoids conversations around values because you know then we would have to have the hard conversations that no one wants to have.

So here are some prompts that may be of use, and feel free to modify them to your particular context, that you can ask students this term as stand alone reflection questions or part of larger scaffolded assessments. 

• Where have you heard about or encountered a discussion of ethics or values in your day-to-day or social media engagement? Why do you think values was important to that particular context?
• How would you define or describe values or ethics if someone is new to the planet and this is a concept they never have encountered before? What specific examples from your life would you use to explain this concept?
• If people you are close to (friends, guardians, community members) were asked what you value or believe in, what would they say and why?
• If you were to pick 3 words that represent what you value what would those 3 words be? Have they changed over the years and if so why? Can you remember when these words became important to you? How old were you?
• [As an Exam or Test Wrapper] Based on the questions in this test or exam, what do you think this course values or demonstrates as valuable?
• Whose words or perspective do you value over others? Why do you value their perspective more?

I strongly believe that these are appropriate to all disciplines. I know we often have discussions about how STEM fields are places that we don't need to have conversations about morals and ethics and values because you know science doesn't have space for these things, it is not subjective. However, this is exactly how we ended up with LLMs with deep biases in their training data and product.  Questions like the last two on the list would be helpful in exploring those biases that exist in the data and procedures that lead to the product. The words we use have value, and they also express value and this is something that we should try to put into our course designs as we are thinking about the fall.