Two grumps (and, to be clear, I’m grumpy at my employer, not the student reporter):

1. the framing here is, as usual, “how to use” whether than “should we use”

2. “misinformation” is centered as the (implicitly sole) problem with generative AI, not digital labor or any of the deeper issues

Mixed feelings about this. I think there are good reasons to be skeptical of ed tech at this level, but I also think that there is some unwarranted handwringing going on here. I have trouble untangling the two.

Les Cowboys fringants is a Québécois folk rock band that has gotten a lot of my attention over the past five years (though I’ve enjoyed their music for even longer than that. I have a bunch of their albums, but over the past few months, I’ve taken to listening to some of their concerts that have been recorded. I do this while I’m working, so I’m usually listening to the sound rather than watch the visuals, but I do enjoy taking the occasional peek at what’s happening on stage, too.

Last Thursday, I listened to a recent episode of The Vergecast during my morning bike commute. The episode featured Paul Ford talking about his recent experience with Claude Code, and I was genuinely surprised to find some of his comments resonating with me. It helped that Ford wasn’t uncritical about AI (though certainly not as critical as I would have been), but some of it was just that I recognized some of the thrill that he was describing of using tools and resources to learn how to solve a problem. In fact, I found that thrill so contagious that a passing comment he made got me to spend some time once I got to the office converting my Twitter archive into a CSV that I could finally import it into the Day One journaling app that I use.

Once again, my spring break has consisted of: trying to catch up on work, telling myself that it’s spring break and therefore okay to not catch up on as much work as I expected, and feeling guilty about not catching up on as much as I expected

Oh, it’s not just in RSS!! Page is still up!

Love it when this kind of thing shows up in my RSS reader so I can use it as an example in my content management systems class.

Just checked up on the results of a web scrape that worked so, so much better than expected only to find that I hadn’t updated the base URL correctly, so all the results were wrong.

The headline isn’t what I would have chosen, but there’s a lot worth reflecting on in here.

There are so many layers of unearned, inaccurate, and problematic chatbot anthropomorphism here that I honestly don’t know where to start.

Grading anxiety (“am I not teaching this right? is my rubric unclear?”) has been a persistent part of my academic career for so long that I’ve had to deliberately embrace that Simpsons Skinner meme and tell myself that sometimes “no, it’s the [students] who are wrong.”

TFW a special issue deadline gets extended by a month after you dropped everything for a week to meet the original deadline. Alas.

So many horrifying details crammed into a single article. Grateful to be a 404 Media subscriber and angry at ed tech AI grift.

In a Zoom meeting with the dean, with my X-Wing and Enterprise-D posters clearly visible in the background. Living my most professional life.

I began my sudden but immediately sustained interest in Jacques Ellul about a year ago now, and I’ve found his work to be terribly influential on my personal thinking and my professional work. I’m currently working on a manuscript that makes the argument that Ellulian thought is useful for drawing our attention in certain ways when considering artificial intelligence in education. I see theory as serving an analytical and rhetorical purpose for the way that it makes suggestions that a certain phenomenon works in certain ways and invites us to consider whether or how that is true.

Can’t even start a lazy Saturday archive binge of a decades-old webcomic without coming back to Jacques Ellul, concerns about quantification and metrics, etc.

Look, I genuinely appreciate my university employer sending this out in their daily email, but it would be cool if they also acknowledged how much data they and their various platform partners are collecting on faculty and students. Because it’s a lot.

A faculty candidate visit for tomorrow just got moved 100% virtual, and while this sucks for all of us in so many ways, it also means I don’t have to clean out my car for fear of being embarrassed by the mess when giving the candidate a ride.

Kiddo was asking me questions about the manuscript I was writing, that got us talking about science fairs, and then she basically reasoned her way into the idea of a meta-analysis.

Wish I’d had this to cite in some recent publications. What a great(?) example of saying the quiet part out loud:

One internal November 2020 presentation slide said acclimating children to Google’s ecosystem in school would hopefully lead them to use its products as adults: “You get that loyalty early, and potentially for life.” Another undated slide deck suggested imagining a world where “Parents ask their children ‘Why aren’t you watching more YouTube?’” and “School Administrators shift budgets from Textbooks to YouTube subscriptions.”

I guess I should be reading this for the jokes, but I hadn’t realized Academia.edu had done this, and I’m so angry at the inspiration for the jokes that I haven’t made it any further.

Months ago, I submitted a paper to a CFP outside my area—and immediately wrote my co-author a list of what I thought probably still needed fixing. Reviews came back today with both reviewers recommending “ready for publication.” Academic writing is unpredictable, but I’ll take it in this case.

I have largely abstained from the “AI misses the point of writing” discourse, but Cory knocks it out of the park here.

Prepping one of my Spring courses, and I’m apparently so tired that I’ve just decided to appeal directly to my students’ sense of decency when it comes to respecting course policies on generative AI.

This morning, while getting ready for the day, I spent some time catching up on podcasts, including Nilay Patel’s interview of Stack Overflow CEO Prashanth Chandrasekhar on a recent episode of Decoder (a podcast I’ve spent a lot more time listening to since it went ad free for subscribers). I ditched the Stack Exchange network a year and a half ago over digital labor concerns—I was literally being prevented from deleting my own content from the site, which is bonkers—and I’m honestly not sure why I bookmarked the interview for listening a few days ago. I think it was more than a hate listen, though: For all of my own feelings about generative AI, I make an effort to be open minded, and I was interested in the headline for the interview: “Stack Overflow users don’t trust AI. They’re using it anyway.”