Meet Them Where They Are And Modulate Them Slightly
What Jacob Collier can teach us about education in the age of AI
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This last week I’ve been sucked down a YouTube rabbit hole. The source of the gravitational pull? Jacob Collier.
Perhaps Jacob Collier is a familiar name to you. Or maybe you're like me, somehow unaware of him until only a few short weeks ago. For those of you who might not be familiar with him, here's a quick taste. First, a video from thirteen years ago of Jacob multi-tracking himself singing an arrangement of Stevie Wonder's "Isn't She Lovely". Consider yourself forewarned about the YouTube rabbit hole.
For another more recent take, here's Jacob singing his song "Little Blue" live with a group of fans in London.
Jacob defies definition. Artists are known for being hard to describe, but Jacob feels like an especially singular example. From the bed-head hairstyle to the colorful clothing and crocs on stage around the world, he's unlike any musician I've watched before. And this without saying anything about his music, which might be the most unique part of the Jacob experience.
Jacob is truly sui generis. And yet, despite his unique talent, a version of the engine that powers Jacob is inside each one of us. Perhaps it's not present to the same degree, but Jacob's curiosity and creativity should inspire all of us. In educational spaces, Jacob's example should challenge and refresh the way we see our students, our colleagues, and ourselves. If we truly believe it, this understanding of the potential for exploration and creativity has to influence the way we think about teaching and learning.
Last week
wrote a piece asking “What’s happening to students?” There’s a lot to unpack there, but I can tell you at least two things I’m convinced are part of the solution: tapping into students’ curiosity and cultivating relationships with and among them.As I’ve chewed on it over the past few days, I think Jacob Collier can provide a blueprint of how to move in this direction. What I want to do in the rest of today's post is to riff on three ways that Jacob is challenging me. First, for students, he's reminded me of the fundamental importance of cultivating curiosity to foster authentic and engaged learning. Second, for educators, he’s reminding us of the power of a learning community that leverages not just the relationship of a student to an instructor, but of students to each other. Lastly, as we think about generative AI in education, Jacob's approach to leveraging technology in his creative stack gives us some hints for how we might think about how AI should (and should not) shape our practice.
Lesson 1: Curiosity is king
In a recent interview with Simon Sinek, Jacob talks about how he started playing music from a very early age, inspired by his mom, a violinist and conductor. He shares that when he was a toddler he remembers sitting on his mom's lap as she played the violin and feeling the music flow through him. This metaphor of a container or a vessel carries through much of how Jacob thinks about his work.
But it's also clear that this inspirational curiosity has a ying to its yang. You might describe this general vibe as channeling energy, but the tools to shape and form the output are just as important.
In his quest to steward these ideas well, Jacob has channeled his curiosity to develop skills. He tries to walk the line between order and chaos, comfort and discomfort, knowledge and unknown. In addition to his singing and composing abilities, he plays the piano, guitar, double bass, bass guitar, mandolin, ukulele, and melodica, among others. He's a true musical polymath.
Of course, none of this happens overnight. It is the result of countless hours of play, punctuated by experiment after experiment. It's obvious that Jacob has natural talent in spades. And yet, the gifts that we see today are the result of both nature and nurture. There are few of us who have the raw talent and virtuosity that Jacob has. But we can all learn from his example of harnessing and continuing to iteratively build from a foundation of curiosity.
Lesson 2: Tap into relational richness
A few years ago I stumbled on a mathematical theorem that's become a favorite of mine called Metcalfe's law. Metcalfe's law states that the number of unique possible connections (i.e., edges) in an n-node network is proportional to the square of n, the number of nodes.
Rewritten in English, this means that the relational richness of a network, expressed by the number of unique connections between the items in the network, scales much faster than the number of nodes itself. In the context of a classroom, this metric suggests that a classroom of 30 students has nearly ten times the relational richness of a classroom of 10 students. This, too, is something Jacob Collier intuitively understands.
Perhaps the most obvious example of this from Jacob's obsession and off-the-charts talent with creating harmonies. Of the many musical accolades on his resume, one of Jacob's most celebrated skills is understanding and manipulating the interplay between different tones, often in creative, unexpected, and wholly new ways. In his creative harmonization, Jacob explores many untapped connections in a musical network where individual notes are the nodes and the connections are the edges between them.
Another example of how Jacob gets this is in his audience choir. Again, if you're not familiar, here's the idea. He splits the audience into thirds, seeds each group with a note, and then conducts them up and down to make music. Essentially, he uses the audience as an instrument.
He talks about how he stumbled on this at the end of a show in San Francisco in 2019. The video above can give you a taste. Truly unbelievable. Ever since he discovered it, he's been iterating with it at each show, trying new things and pushing the limits of what he can do with it. It's brilliant. He even has used audience choir recordings in his music as backing vocals and created a free Native Instruments audience choir plugin so you too can integrate the magic of what he's done.
I'm increasingly thinking about this in my practice as an educator. We so often think about the classroom as a one-to-many pipeline. The instructor delivers the content and students receive it. But borrowing from the node-and-edge graph metaphor from earlier, this means that there is essentially only one maximally connected node—the teacher—who is connected to each student. What if instead, we found ways to intentionally build and reinforce all the other peer-to-peer connections? Whether it’s curated study groups, randomized in-class activities, or group assignments, there are lots of ways we can do this.
The magic of the audience choir is not just that the audience is interacting with Jacob. It's that they are interacting with each other in an embodied way. They're using their voices together to create music. And not just in a simple call-and-response pattern, but in harmony, weaving in and out of conflict and resolution, departure and return.
How might we think about our classrooms the way Jacob thinks of his audience?
Lesson 3: Use technology as an instrument
The last lesson that I want to take away from Jacob is about technology. Jacob's entire musical stack is built on technology. Whether it's the multi-tracked videos, the library of sounds, or the way that he thinks about mixing and mastering his music in Logic Pro, Jacob fully leverages the tools at his disposal. If you’re really looking to nerd out, check out some of the several-hour-long “logic session breakdown” videos he’s recorded.
But despite all of this, Jacob leverages technology not for its own sake but in support of his values and a larger vision. He uses technology to enable things that wouldn't otherwise be possible, not simply to replace something with a more efficient version.
This reminds me of Albert Borgmann's concept of focal practices. Borgmann, in Technology and the Character of Contemporary Life uses the example of a hearth vs. an electric heater. While the hearth creates warmth, a center for a home, and a place for a family to gather around, a stove commodifies one aspect of the hearth: heat. The heater makes the heat more convenient, portable, and efficient but makes significant sacrifices in doing so.
This feels all too fitting as we think about many of the ways that generative AI is being harnessed in education right now. Even if those applications are marketed as tools to extend our capability and capacity, the reality is often much more disheartening. To borrow from Borgmann's analogy, the AI chatbot tutor commodifies and amplifies the function of an instructor as a source of information. In doing so, the relational layer is lost. There is no working through a question side by side, working together on a whiteboard, or stumbling through a problem together. Even if the chatbot delivers on the promise of a correct and well-structured response (and it is and if), so many of the surrounding elements of the focal practice of something like office hours are lost.
In his use of technology, Jacob shows that technology need not destroy focal practices but can instead enhance them. His use of tools like Logic, microphones, and an array of musical instruments are all used in service of a larger goal: communicating a certain emotion and message and bringing people together.
This is my hope for generative AI in education. That we are thoughtful about how (and if) we use it in our classrooms. That we are thoughtful about the way that AI is commoditizing aspects of valuable, if inefficient focal practices that matter.
To meet them where they are and modulate them slightly
In his interview with Simon Sinek, Jacob has this great line about what he hopes to do with his audiences. He says that he plays in front of an audience with the goal of "meeting them where they are and modulating them slightly." The idea is that we must first meet each other where we are and, then, and only then, move forward together.
This is a beautiful way to think not just about making music, but about teaching as well. Our goal as students and educators must begin by meeting each other where we are. In the physical space we co-inhabit, the content we are coming together to study, the emotional spaces we find ourselves in, and within the context of the others around us that we are in relationship with.
So, this week, wherever you find yourself, why don't you lean into your curiosity, tap into the relational richness around you, and think about technology not what it enables for its own sake, but how it might be used to live more deeply and fully into your own values.
In other words, meet the others around you where they are and modulate them slightly.
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And if you’ve got a thought, please leave a comment below.
Here’s one more Jacob video for your listening pleasure.
Reading Recommendations
writing over at his Substack writes passionately in defense of the continuing value of content knowledge, even in a world where we are drowning in information.You can't acquire knowledge and skill second hand, nor can you do it in a vacuum. Of all the AI-for-student-writing advice I read, the most maddening may be "Have the AI write a rough draft and then have the students rewrite." How the hell does someone who has not written know how to edit a piece of writing? And how do you edit a piece when you have no idea what the author meant to say (or, in fact, the author is incapable of intent)? How do they develop the skill of figuring out what they think about a topic by having the AI spit out some topics for them? The only way this could be worse would be if the topic assigned was something the students had no knowledge of at all.
I linked this post from
above, but putting it again here. I must admit I’m significantly less hopeful than Ted about the potential of the technology companies to rescue us from the mess they’ve created.I loved this piece from
’s archives asking questions about playgrounds vs. playpens. Strongly team playground here, but you probably already knew that.wrote another great piece over at last week. In it, he challenges the idea that we should continue to pursue hyper-personalized learning ala Netflix. The technology is enabling it, but even if we can build it, should we?[I]magine a scenario where more conventional education pathways are augmented by learning “playgrounds” that fostered future-proof skills — the ability to imagine new possibilities, to creatively play and tinker with new ideas, to share these with others and expand the universe of possibilities through this, and to explore many pathways to possible futures rather than just those that convention and a blinkered education dictate are the way forward. And imagine that, in this scenario, student learning in these playgrounds isn’t measured, cataloged, compared, and quantified to the extent that all useful degrees of freedom are effectively shut down.
People do not want their TV shows or their New York Times crossword puzzles or their Wordles customized to their interests. It matters to people that they’re watching and working on the same thing on the same day as millions of other people. Similarly, kids do so much of what they do, including learning in schools, out of a desire to connect with others in the place we call a classroom, to know and be known by their classmates and teacher.
Last, but not least,
writes over at about the downstream consequences ofWe can't detect our way out of this problem. If we're truly concerned about students' learning rather than just detecting AI, we need to confront the uncomfortable reality that our assessment models may no longer serve us in world where AI is increasing unavoidable. What does authentic writing look like when AI is part of a writer’s process? How do we value said process when tools can generate polished products in mere seconds?
The Book Nook
I finally finished up Nick Bilton’s American Kingpin this week. What a story. Hard to believe this guy is no longer in prison for what he did. Bilton does a magnificent job of piecing together the story from a collection of sources.
The Professor Is In
Last week was spring break at Harvey Mudd which meant there was some much-needed rest and relaxation. I took most of the week off and enjoyed bike rides with the family and a two-day mini vacation at Disneyland at the end of the week.
Leisure Line
Food, food, and more food at Disney. Highly recommend the Pixar Pier Frosty Parfait at Adorable Snowman Frosted Treats with lemon soft serve and blue raspberry slushie.
Still Life
A pretty cool shot of Disney’s California Adventure from the top of the floating jellyfish ride.
I really love Jacob Collier. Such an inspiration. Your post reminds me of Gareth Malone and his choir projects. Warning: another Youtube rabbit hole :) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqsOI80VR6Q&list=PL288CD888A4742D5E&index=4