Woke up this morning from a dream about curriculum redesign. How’s your end of semester going?

If these numbers are right, the first (“small”) installment alone could potentially be higher than the total of all my paychecks between being hired at UK and my eventual retirement—and this is just a severance pay package.

Today, on the last day of class, a student shared some of their ongoing efforts to mess with local Flock cameras and develop makeup patterns to defeat facial recognition. It was like realizing I’d had a Cory Doctorow character in class all semester, and it brought me joy and hope.

My university just parted ways with our football coach for undesirable results despite the investment of millions of dollars, so I wonder if they’ll be willing to do the same for all the AI initiatives they’ve recently announced.

This just makes me want to dig my heels in further.

Hope this isn’t a canary for Lexington’s coal mine.

Le sigh.

Very happy for Linkletter, but it’s shameful that Proctorio got away with as much nonsense as it did.

Another suspected use of generative AI, another decision that I still won’t subject my students to surveillance and policing, another step towards complete grading nihilism.

Appreciate the work the Kernel is doing here.

I am so very tired. So very, very tired.

I know I’m currently inclined to see everything through an Ellulian lens, but I think one lesson of the first episode of Pluribus is that not all science needs to be done, and especially not just because it can be done.

Really enjoyed listening to this on my way in to campus today.

Adding some nihilism to my Tuesday morning, just for fun.

I have been meaning to read this book for months and was happy to have an uninterrupted couple of hours on a flight so that I could finally get to it.

It covers familiar ground but without feeling repetitive. I expect to cite it frequently in the future—in fact, I ought to work it into some slides I’m presenting tomorrow!

Honestly trying to figure out whether the reason I see Ellul everywhere is because I’m excited about a new scholar I’ve discovered or because his ideas are so well suited for the current moment. “We can be a leader or we can be left behind” captures the opt-in determinism of Ellul’s technique so dang well.

Of course, how the heck am I going to keep expressing concern about AI (through an Ellulian lens or otherwise) if the university has already decided that we’re all getting on board?

Universities are too platform dependent, and even those platforms are too dependent on the next layer of the stack. What a mess.

It’s not that I think pumpkin spice tea pairs well with Friday night sushi takeout, it’s that I can’t remember the last week I lost this much sleep over work anxiety, so I need dinner tea to get through the rest of the day.

Thinking this morning about all of the small, human-oriented things I’ve done this semester to try to be good at my job, and how insulting it will be to have them eventually reduced to a number that can be reported to demonstrate “productivity.”

Good reporting from the Kernel on a really disappointing set of changes at the university.

Remembering the time that an article in the Daily Caller took a colleague’s research out of context to make it look bad, but because it tripped a Google Alert, it still got included in some “our research in the media!” newsletter.

Wild to teach data visualization so shortly after reading Jacques Ellul rail against it in his “Humiliation of the Word.” As is often the case, Ellul’s complaints feel overstated, but as I talk through specific things with students, I find myself channeling his concerns.

“AI is as good as any rubric” (an actual statement I overheard at a campus-wide meeting), if true, is more of an indictment of current assessment practice than praise of AI quality.

Well, this is terrifying.

Strong Ellul vibes in this passage:

The tech could represent the end of visual fact — the idea that video could serve as an objective record of reality — as we know it. Society as a whole will have to treat videos with as much skepticism as people already do words.

Unclear, though, whether Ellul would be cool with increased skepticism of the image or angry at the technology causing it.