What Happened After a Teacher Ditched Screens Why one early adopter of computers in classrooms has decided to toss them

What a surprise, screens in the classroom are bad:
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

As I say all the time in my basic communication theory class: information is not understanding, the more complicated problem is always making meaning never transmitting information.

Opinion | Is It 1914 in America?

War as a failure of literacy; the inability to understand the meaning of events instead of just information. There's a lot hear to justify attention to humanities education (and the lack of just that in this moment): www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/o...

The annoying gruntwork you’re off-loading to AI is how you learn basic information and skills that help power the logical leaps that lead to creation and innovation. This is why CEOs are all f**king idiots.

It's kind of alarming, this just reads like a restatement of what I've already published, within my own field, yet no acknowledgement?

Reclaiming Civility: Towards Discursive Opening in Dialogue and Deliberation In the midst of polarization often linked to incivility and a 'call out' culture, this paper re-imagines the role of civility. Moving away from reductionist definitions that claim civility is either o...

What does an academic do when people publish something that basically says exactly what you have said over two books and never even cite you? delibdemjournal.org/article/id/9...

AI update: replication crisis — Jessica Kant Regardless of who actually prints a story, it is the merger of social media and machine learning which increasingly drives narratives in the immediate wake of a major event. The next time a catastroph...

Reposting this because, hilariously, someone running an AI news aggregator just plagiarized the hell out of it and got shared 3x as much as the original post. So you know, here's the actual piece. Where I talk about LLMs making copies of copies of copies of copies and how that drives disinformation.

This is awesome

I tell my students that one of the main reasons not to over-rely on AI for research/writing is because--at some point in the future--you're going to have a face-to-face conversation with someone who matters, and if you don't actually know some things, that interaction will not go well for you.

Opinion | A.I. Companies Are Eating Higher Education

yes, absolutely:
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/12/o...

I think this semester has reminded me more and more of 2017/18 when I was really impressed with students. The pandemic and AI have muddled teaching and learning in so many bad ways. Ask the students to return to forms of education described here and they'll go with you.

This is really good, especially the idea to stop somewhere and let them catch up:
www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

What Should Americans Do Now? We need a mass movement for basic decency.

I wrote several books and spent the better part of my career writing about why this matters for democracy and how to do it. I'm skeptical such a movement will happen. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/0...

Radically Civil: Saving Democracy One Conversation at a Time If you feel like the world has gone to hell in a handbasket, you’re not alone. If you often feel there’s nothing you can do about it, you’re also not alone. Along with this increasing anger, fear, and...

We already wrote a book on this, much better and more detailed than what's in this essay. www.routledge.com/Radically-Ci...

Opinion | What Science Tells Us About Arguing With Your Father-in-Law

Oh look, a Harvard person discovered the field of communication. www.nytimes.com/2026/01/25/o...

So many years of using war rhetoric against the US has turned into war against the US. It's a natural progression, which is why we asked people to notice the war rhetoric when it started. You don't use war rhetoric to prepare a nation for war unless you plan to do it 🥹

AI companies will fail. We can salvage something from the wreckage | Cory Doctorow AI is asbestos in the walls of our tech society, stuffed there by monopolists run amok. A serious fight against it must strike at its roots

This is excellent:

www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...

Wow. Hey @uwaterloo.ca people in needles hall ought to read this. We need a campus wide ban on AI in classes.

this is great news

And saying Canada needs "robust nationalism" to fight American fascism? Does this guy know anything at all about Canada?

And stop yelling at people about travel and where they choose to go to university. Here's another example of a philosopher that discovers the wheel and is surprised to learn lots of people have known about the wheel for centuries.

And, yes, we know the US is dangerous and shitty a lot of the time, we didn't just discover that last year with Trump. Instead of scolding and lecturing Canadians try listening to them, they know how to build the thing you say you want. You might actually learn something here,

Dude, shut up and stop arrogantly lecturing people in "your new" country that have been negotiating their relationship with their dangerous and unpredictable neighbour for hundreds of years. Yes, canadians have family and friends and houses and businesses in the US

I left Trump’s America to teach in Canada. I didn’t expect this from Canadians During my short time here, I've encountered a shocking level of naïveté about what's happening south of the border.

This is just funny:
www.thestar.com/opinion/cont...

The most searched topics of 2025 revealed by Google Google has released its annual search trends, revealing the people, issues, and moments that sent millions racing to their keyboards.

I had some stuff to say for this story:
www.chch.com/chch-news/th...

The other thing about normalizing gAI use in higher ed is that we are teaching our students that they cannot trust their own creativity, their own thoughts and brains, their own skills without having it reshaped/shellacked/transmogrified by LLMs. We’re setting them up for failure and dependence.

Good Intentions Gone Bad How Canada’s “reconciliation” with its Indigenous people went wrong

www.theatlantic.com/internationa...

Why doesn’t this get more attention in the Canadian media?

The decision to recognize the indigenous claim to Canadian land is a misstep, @davidfrum writes. “Just when Canada most urgently needs to jump-start the country’s economic growth, the country’s courts are inventing new obstacles to development”:

Slop has got to be the word of the year.