Voices Carry
I'm truly at a loss of what to say today. (Last week. It lingers, doesn't it.) So (I guess) let me just repeat a point I've made repeatedly: one of the saddest rationales for using "AI" is for "brainstorming" – a
Breaking Rocks in the Hot Sun
I was feeling much better, thank you very much, until this country took another grotesque lurch towards fascism midweek. I think it had helped, if I'm perfectly honest, that Kin and I had finally completed our re-watching of all six seasons of The Sopranos. As I've
The Watch List
In a children's literature class at Texas A&M University this summer, a student interrupted the professor as she began to recap some of the previously covered material, "remarks on gender and sexuality we bring from the last class." "I just have a question,
The Booster Shot
A couple of weeks ago, Ed Zitron published one of his epic rants -- the kind that, as he warned newsletter readers, is probably better read on the web than via email: it’s 16,000 words long; so long that he added a Table of Contents to aid navigation.
How Bad Could It Be?
Brood Parasites
Humans have always invested great meaning in birds. No surprise, what with the feathers, the flight. Each week, when I look at all the stories that've been told about education and technology and try to figure out some coherence to the chaos, I think about what bird might
Thought-Terminating Clichés
Last week, Max Read asked "Is the 'AI' 'bubble' 'bursting'?" – those scare-quotes strategically deployed to encourage readers to question what we mean when we talk about "AI" or "bubbles," when we predict the technology's devaluation or
The Storm and the Aftermath
I Know What You Did Last Summer
If you were to tell the story of the end of public education in the US, you wouldn't begin with the Trump Administration's bluster about closing the Department of Education. You wouldn't begin with Trump Administration policies at all – as awful and destructive as
Back to School Talk (Obligatory)
[Depending on your geographic location] It's almost/already back-to-school season, which always means a flurry of aspirational, inspirational stories (and their opposite) about ed-tech gadgetry, along with a fair amount of sponsored content and affiliate marketing. ("You're Probably Wearing Your Backpack Wrong" in The
Toast
Education as Prediction Market
In their bestseller AI Snake Oil, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor open their chapter on "How Predictive AI Goes Wrong" with a story from Mount St. Mary's University: how, in 2015, the school had conducted a survey of freshmen to identify ones who were struggling – an