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.

Un peu par hasard, j’ai fini récemment ma lecture de deux livres différents par Jacques Ellul : Théologie et technique ainsi que Humiliation of the Word (la traduction anglaise de La parole humiliée, car je vais devoir en écrire en anglais, et j’avoue en plus que mon français n’est pas toujours à la hauteur d’Ellul « en V.O. »). Ça fait plusieurs jours que j’ai envie d’écrire quelque chose sur la relation image-parole qu’il établit dans les pages de La parole humilié, et je compte toujours écrire ce post-là, mais en terminant Théologie et technique, j’ai été frappé par un passage qui ressemble beaucoup ce dont j’avais envie d’écrire dans l’autre livre.

This never occurred to me, but distupting interlibrary loan is a mortal sin.

I have gotten a remarkable amount of work done on my phone while waiting for my delayed eye doctor’s appointment, but it is now time to read Rogue Squadron on Libby and not feel guilty about it.

5,000 cameras?! What the heck?

Surprised that more isn’t made of the fact that Anthropic was surveilling users’ conversations for its research. Are professors and students thinking about the company’s ability to read everything they type?

Saw an AI “summarize this discussion” button in Canvas today and it was a real downer. It seems to be only instructor-facing, which is better(?) but still makes me angry.

Last week, I read a post from Andrew Heiss on Bluesky that inspired me to take a look at whether/where I was cited on any Wikipedia articles. I knew my research had been referenced on one particular page, but I’d never done a thorough search for this and decided to give it a whirl.

While I can’t claim anything as cool as the page on Hosni Mubarak (where Andrew’s research is cited), my research is referenced on three different Wikipedia articles, which feels pretty cool, actually. It seems like my newer Mormon Studies work is what is getting traction on Wikipedia, as opposed to my historical (and continuing) focus on educational technology research. This doesn’t totally surprise me; I’ve observed for a couple of years (or longer) that while my edtech research gets a whole lot more scholarly attention, my Mormon Studies work tends to get more media and popular interest. I attribute this to doing niche work on subjects where a smaller number of people show a greater amount of interest in what I’m studying.