Two emails from my own website

Transcript

It’s great sometimes to teach as well as doing the thing, whatever the thing is.

Hi, this is John-Paul Flintoff and you’re listening to Voice Notes to the World.

I think of myself mostly as a writer, an author, and an artist, and a performer. But teaching is a big part of what I do and teaching helps me to reflect on my own work. And when other people have asked me to do teaching, I’ve jumped in if they provide a classroom and some people who want to learn.

But I’ve often held back from doing any teaching myself because I don’t really like the ways in which it’s been possible. I don’t want to keep feeding nice people into spaces that are provided by great big data-harvesting megacorporations. I mean, you know, teaching in a Facebook group or on a LinkedIn group, it just doesn’t quite feel right. So I kind of, year after year, don’t do it. But I love doing the teaching.

So that’s why I’m really excited, because just after midday today, I got two emails from my own website. One of them told me that someone had answered some questions in a survey that I have on the website. And the other one went to the person who had actually answered the questions, with their answers written underneath.

Now, as it happens, it was a test. And both of those emails came to me. But they were both real. They really worked. It worked. Submitting answers to questions on my website sent me, the owner of the website, a notification, and it sent the answers to the person who had written them.

And that’s a big breakthrough, even on Friday. I mean, I made a huge breakthrough on Friday because I just worked out how to do surveys on my website at all. But at that point, the answers came only to me. And whoever bothered to type something had given it all away. They had nothing left. They didn’t see what they typed. But now they’re going to get a copy of it as well as me. And this is a huge breakthrough and a big opportunity for me and for anyone, I guess, who has a website like this.

Partly, I think it’s to do with making comments more civil. I get this idea from a man called Dave Winer. He’s one of the original architects of blogging. And he said somewhere – there’s going to be a link on the transcript on my episode webpage – he said somewhere that replies should be visible only to the person replied to, who can then make them public. And I just thought that sounded like a very civilised way of proceeding. So if someone replies to me in a form, it won’t show up unless they have said I can share it. And I hope I might be able to share some answers later. But I always want people to be able to reply privately first.

And what this means for my teaching and my courses is it was huge, because like the Micro-Memoir course, which starts on Monday, I can ask people questions as they’re doing the course and they can answer. And they can type into a box to work out where they are for themselves, and then they send it to me and they know that I’m holding them accountable. They know that I’ve seen what they’ve said, which is a huge part of the value of the course. This isn’t some automation, it’s really me and I really read things. But also they will get a copy of what they’ve typed, and that’s massively important too, of course, because it will go into their memoir, probably.

And as I said earlier, for a long time I assumed that doing anything like this would need me to have a Facebook group or a LinkedIn group, and I have run those and I’ve joined other people’s, but Facebook is distracting just in itself. If you just open the app, everything is clamouring for you, and it also feels like being on Facebook. It doesn’t feel like it has anything to do with the personality of the person who runs the group. There’s nothing quirky or idiosyncratic or homemade or wonky.

And I hope that someone who comes here on my website to answer a set of questions will find it calmer, and also they can be assured that there’s no spycraft. There’s no surveillance code keeping an eye on them and telling me things about anyone. People can come to my website and I will only know what they tell me if they fill in a form.

So I hope that that’s a plus, a good thing, I like it. And I need to say that it was not possible for me to do it on my own. It took about an hour for me to think it all through, and then I used Claude to write the code, which it did in front of my eyes. I opened the browser and let Claude go into the kind of back office coding function of my website. It updated a plugin called com_connect – a bit of credit to the people who built it, it’s been looked after by Stef Dawson and other people at Textpattern for a long time, so I’m very grateful to them.

So I couldn’t have done the thing that Claude did in a few moments. I would have spent days on it, and because I couldn’t afford to spend days on it, I wouldn’t have done it. So this whole thing is possible because of AI. Thank you very much, AI. I don’t love AI, but it’s there, and I don’t want it to be me. I don’t want it to write like me or to try to be a human among other humans. That’s for me. It can do boring logistics like this.

Oh, what a relief, I think you can hear.

So there’ll be – the Micro-Memoir course will use this, and there’ll be other courses coming soon. Until recently I thought that was only possible for a company with its own IT department, but in fact, this is making it possible for me to increase my capacity as a human among other humans, helping them to do what they care about, and that feels very, very good.

jp at this domain name.