Just a professor standing in front of BlueSky demoralized because exams my students used to get a mean of 83% on prior to 2020 are now failed in large numbers. It seems that their ability to APPLY concepts to new contexts/domains has all but disappeared.
I love these students & I am worried.
This is the first oil crisis in which clean alternatives to oil and gas — solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and batteries — are both inexpensive and widely available.
clean technology flying off the shelves already...
nytimes.com/2026/04/01/o...
'Yesterday, TED, Khan Academy, and ETS announced they will "reimagine higher education for the AI age." Corporate partners include Google, Microsoft, Accenture ... Not a single university is present. Think about this.'
www.linkedin.com/posts/jeppes... #HigherEd #Learning #Education
I am once again asking
this company is scraping and reposting anonymous support group Zoom meetings. Please be careful if you're using Zoom webinars for anything remotely sensitive www.404media.co/webinartv-se...
Another example of how care work is systemically undervalued in our society
You can't drive a car with a faculty handbrake, where are the brakes for tech? 9/10 apps transmit data to 3rd parties before a user interacts with them—just opening an app enough to send identifiers, location metadata+ to analytics platforms & advertising networks
www.unsw.edu.au/newsroom/new...
For every $100 invested in data centres, $80 leaves Australia almost immediately www.smh.com.au/technology/f...
New study finds that correcting false health claims directly is as effective or more effective than trying to discredit the source, even if they lack expertise.
iaap-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1...
"AI literacy" in schools means knowing how to prompt ChatGPT.
Not who owns the output. Not what it costs the planet. Not whose labor trained it.
Consumers. Not citizens.
#raisewages
A black & white photo of maya angelou she’s wearing a head scarf & holding a copy of her book I know why the caged bird sings
You may not control all the events that happen to you, but you can decide not to be reduced by them.
Happy Birthday to Dr Maya Angelou (born April 4, 1928)
The systematic targeting of sociology reveals deeper anxieties about critical thinking in higher ed. When students learn to examine power structures and social inequalities, it challenges narratives that rely on unquestioned acceptance. #AcademicSky #sociology
tampabay.com/viewpoints/202...
Y’all need sociology. Example # 456,149
Another paper showing that family poverty is more important than psychosocial adversities
Parental socioeconomic resources and adverse childhood experiences as predictors of not in education, employment, or training: a Finnish register-based longitudinal study: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
slop is something that takes more human effort to consume than it took to produce. When my coworker sends me raw Gemini output he’s not expressing his freedom to create, he’s disrespecting the value of my time
Jean Baudrillard's work on terrorism and symbolic exchange is useful for understanding why Trump and his allies are losing, and Iran are winning.
What does a new gender inequality index reveal about engaging men to undertake unpaid care and domestic work? Elizabeth Hill, Rae Cooper and Suneha Seetahul give us the analysis from the Australian Centre for Gender Equality and Inclusion at Work
@sarameger.bsky.social @drmeljohnston.bsky.social
Excellent #4Corners episode highlighting the public funding crisis in Higher Ed. & the corporatisation of universities into which slimy consultants have well & truly dug their claws, giving bad & manipulative advice.
Bravo, Steve Cannane!
#auspol #HigherEducation #universities #FundEducation
The Enshittification “framing assumes a prior state of genuine service, a golden age of the open internet, that was for many people never particularly golden. The early internet was structured around the assumptions of its architects: predominantly white, male, Western, educated, & abled.”
🙏🏼🔥🙏🏼🔥🙏🏼
This is not the US. It's Australia. In
2026.
#NickHanna
Perfect. No notes. Oslo Davis cartoon, March 28, 2026 www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/opinion/cart... via @thesaturdaypaper.com.au
A fully automated news site with no journalists shows how easily AI can mimic real reporting – at almost no cost.
That raises serious questions about trust, accountability and the future of journalism, Antoinette Lattoufe and Soaliha Iqbal write.
#AI #Media #Disinformation #auspol
Whaaaaaat?! Florida bans sociology from core curriculum at state universities www.miamiherald.com/news/politic...
after much deliberation and giving AI the benefit of the doubt, Wikipedia editors have had enough of AI slop. New policy bans LLM generated content, periodt www.404media.co/wikipedia-ba...
Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.
Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).
Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.
Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles
Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...
We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n
"Meta and YouTube were negligent in the design of their platforms, knew their design was dangerous, failed to warn of those risks and caused substantial harm to the plaintiff, the jury found. The decision could set a precedent for hundreds of similar cases and lead to major changes..."
