iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Anna Smith

Please share & join us! #literacies

Reposted by Anna Smith

Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 8h

It’s not that data brokers and social media companies haven’t been building profiles on people for ages, but it’s worth noting how they are now trying to normalize this by touting it as a benefit rather than the creepy and invasive function that it is.

gizmodo.com

Meta's Muse Is Collecting Information on Everyone in Your Life

Meta’s AI agent creates profiles of people in users’ lives even if they don’t use Muse.

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Anna Smith @anna-phd.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

When are we starting the collective Agatha All Along rewatch?

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Anna Smith @anna-phd.bsky.social · 03/10/2026

I wasn’t ready…but now it’s suddenly October, my decorations for Halloween are up, and then…and then…there was a chill in the air tonight. Now, Oct 16 can’t come soon enough. (I know. I know. You don’t have to tell me.) hallmark.brightspotcdn.com/3a/70/e984e5...

Countdown to Christmas Hallmark schedule available at link in post

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

Please try to reclaim your precious precious attention, at all costs. Do puzzles. Take walks without a phone. Dear god, try to read, almost anything that isn’t a manifesto will really do. You are going to need your brain.

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Anna Smith @anna-phd.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

I was just taking pictures of our abundance

Overflowing bowl of bright red tomatoes on a counter

cherry tomatoes on a vine - lots of vines full of them actually

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Anna Smith @anna-phd.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

Sending love, Ebony. My heart is with you in this moment.

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Mrs. Betty Bowers @mrsbettybowers.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

When you claim renewable energies aren’t workable—but you attach solar panels to all your dystopian Flock surveillance cameras.

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Anna Smith @anna-phd.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

Backlash, as per @merriam-webster.com 1: a sudden violent backward movement or reaction 3: a strong adverse reaction These are not sudden or backward. They are adverse & some strong, but I wouldn't call them reactions, which can imply there isn't thought first. These are considered, shared stances.

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Anna Smith @anna-phd.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

When 7/10 people do not support data centers in their community (as per a @npr.org story), that's not a "backlash." That's a *very* rare shared opinion. When every clip from a town hall, interview with a farmer & message from a lady in Maine includes an informed opinion, those are shared stances.2/2

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Anna Smith @anna-phd.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

First, this is going to be a very blsky post. Apologies. I was listening to @npr.org while mowing the lawn and at least four stories called informed, considered responses to current tech industry growth including increased state-sanctioned surveillance as "backlash." Can we not? 1/2

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Le Ca-ghoul @lecagle.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

I will forever admire Wendell Berry's insistence on living his values through to their natural conclusions and relentlessly ripping through layers of politeness and habit to hold up for judgment those who do not.

Questionnaire
by Wendell Berry

How much poison are you willing
to eat for the success of the free
market and global trade? Please
name your preferred poisons.

For the sake of goodness, how much
evil are you willing to do?
Fill in the following blanks
with the names of your favorite
evils and acts of hatred.

What sacrifices are you prepared
to make for culture and civilization?
Please list the monuments, shrines,
and works of art you would
most willingly destroy

In the name of patriotism and
the flag, how much of our beloved
land are you willing to desecrate?
List in the following spaces
the mountains, rivers, towns, farms
you could most readily do without.

State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security;
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.

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Anna Smith @anna-phd.bsky.social · 01/09/2026

It may be that when we no longer know what to do we have come to our real work, and that when we no longer know which way to go we have come to our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings. - Wendell Berry

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Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 28/08/2026

Oh so you really know jack shit about kids, pedagogy, education… www.scientificamerican.com/article/alph...

When Carl Hendrick took his first ride in a Waymo, the self-driving taxi service, he thought it felt a lot like the future of education.

Hendrick is a senior learning scientist at Alpha School, a buzzy private-school company where he trains artificial intelligence models to teach students—a process, he says, that is not unlike training a self-driving car.

For such a car, “it was just thousands and thousands of miles, training itself on data, and not just on a linear path. The challenge is in all the different eventualities, like the cyclist who’s wobbling in the road, the kid running out,” he says. “I think, in five or 10 years, a similar thing will happen in education where we train AI models on learning and all of kids’ misconceptions and problems.”

For Alpha School, the equivalents to the swerving bikes and unexpected pedestrians are more like misconceptions, learning differences or preteen classroom struggles. And the “cars” the company is testing have 10-year-olds in the backseat.

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Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 26/09/2025

OpenAI's rapid rush into education has been achieved by habituating users through training programs, institutional lock-ins, strategic marketing partnerships, and third party integrations that together are helping it become infrastructural to teaching and learning. It's going to be hard to get out.

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Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

Schools in England start returning from summer break next week, and this term many will become AI testing sites as the Department for Education plans to trial AI tutoring, scale it up sector-wide, and create new standards for classroom AI codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2026/08/27/p...

codeactsineducation.wordpress.com

Prototype testing, scaling, and standardizing AI tutors in schools

As students and teachers return to classrooms for the new academic year, the schools sector in England is set to become a testing ground for experimental AI applications this autumn. Following the …

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Anna Smith @anna-phd.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Oh, the algorithm ONLY gives me the elderly ones. They’re disgusting.

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Anna Smith @anna-phd.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

Same. So dangerous…and the premise to offload a convo with your elders?? I’m pissed every time they come on and they come on constantly.

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Anna Smith @anna-phd.bsky.social · 20/08/2026

Changing offices (becoming coordinator of graduate programs/what was I thinking?!?) and came across this gem. More from it soon. 1971. $1.50. Humanizing English: DO NOT FOLD SPINDLE OR MUTILATE.

Cover of book that says Classroom Practices in Teaching English. 1970-1971 and the price is $1.50. The middle of the book has the cover design in red with what looks like a canton behind it. The title is Humanizing English: DO NOT FOLD SPINDLE OER MUTILATE This last part is in font that looks like computer script from the 1950s.

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DrAnnD @drannd.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

This is the Canvas page I have to delete from my class because it isn't objective and free of political bias as required of all Educator Preparation Programs in Texas. If my students don't learn from me about the policies that directly affect them, where will they learn it?

More on recent laws - optional

While you may just want to teach/coach/conduct/direct, it is always worth remembering that you are doing that in a much larger context that will always impact the way you're able to interact with the students in your care. If you're interested in following up more on the federal education policy context, you can explore the two links below.

Elementary and Secondary Education Act: Title 1 comes from the ESEA, as does so much else. This interactive timeline is full of info.

A Nation at Risk (PDF): This isn't that long. Note where you hear echoes of this language today, particularly in the media.

Texas also holds a unique position in education policy because of Bush's presidency and the textbook industry.

See this op-ed about how Texas influences textbook content nationwide. It is also worth noting that because of SB3 (which we'll discuss later in the semester), Texas is undergoing another social studies revision, so while the article is older, it's an example that history repeats itself.

That all said, technological advances in publishing mean that Texas' influence will decrease as it gets easier to change the literal printed material and as textbooks go online and multiple editions are easier to produce.

Texas has also led the push to remove books from classrooms and libraries, especially those featuring LGBTQ+ and African American stories.

The trend to share lists of books to challenge started in Texas with Rep. Matt Kraus in 2021. In 2022, Texas had banned more books. But HB900, passed in 2023 and requiring booksellers to label the sexual content of books, was found to be unconstitutional.

SB 12, passed in 2025, is a combination of "divisive concepts" laws--"anti-DEI" or "anti-woke" is language the media uses--from across the country and Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law, which purports to make it illegal for teachers to talk at all about gender identity and sexual orientation.

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Anna Smith @anna-phd.bsky.social · 17/08/2026

So…when’s everyone going to start watching Hallmark Holiday movies this year? And what are you going to watch in the meantime?

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Anna Smith @anna-phd.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

We have a virtual speaker series run by doc students called Creatively Critical Tech...We're small beans compared to the audiences you and your work deserves, but we are kind of like a local bookstore version of a virtual series... about.illinoisstate.edu/edunowlab/cr...

about.illinoisstate.edu

Creatively Critical Tech Speaker Series – Education Now Lab

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Anna Smith @anna-phd.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Bonus: I love this set of pull-quotes

pull-quotes from article: These wearingly familiar, recycled reform efforts echo technological solutionism. Critically interrogating platform outputs is inseparable from the relational work teachers do. Teachers asserted their professional judgement through deleberate decisions to adapt, supplement, or replace lesson outputs that conflicted with their commitments to their students' learning. Recentering young writers as the heart of instructional planning involved another powerful and interconnected humanizing move that lesson generators could not provide. Importantly, a transformative activist stance refuses the notion that the future of writing instruction should be outsourced to platform logics.

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Anna Smith @anna-phd.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

The article is Open Access: doi.org/10.58680/la2... We also center Grace Kang & Sonia Kline's critical humanizing writing pedagogy framework from their new volume Writing Reimagined: Bridging Critical Theories & Pedagogical Practices in Elementary Classrooms. www.bloomsbury.com/us/writing-r... 5/5

The cover of Writing Reimagined Bridging critical theoryes and pedagogical practices in elementary classrooms. It looks like it is on a slightly crumpled piece of lined paper with several drawings by children around including a rainbow, and airplane, a child with an envelope

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Anna Smith @anna-phd.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Drawing on Stetsenko's transformative activist stance, we describe this work as acting toward a horizon of "what ought to be." Teachers are not instruction automatons. Teachers must be allowed to remain designers of possibility, advocates for students & authors of more just education futures. 4/5

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Anna Smith @anna-phd.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

The AI lesson generators defaulted to standardization, efficiency & sameness. Teachers repeatedly pushed back by resisting narrow conceptions of writing, recentering young writers, prioritizing relational knowledge & critically interrogating output biases. This humanizing resistance matters. 3/5

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Anna Smith @anna-phd.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

All teachers in this study were forced or heavily encouraged to use AI products to plan. (Talk about "teacher-proofing.") We argue it's not whether they used the products, but how they respond when automated systems collide with their commitments to students and meaningful writing instruction. 2/5

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Anna Smith @anna-phd.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

Nothing beats holding a new pub in your hands! 🔗 ↓ In this piece, we look at teachers' responses to the increased outsourcing of instructional decision to external companies. Yesterday, it was scripted programs & packaged curricula. Today it's AI. Different technology. Familiar reform logic. 1/5

cover of the journal Language Arts with a picture of alien robots and words WE ARE DEFINITELY HUMAN. The theme of this issue is Looking ahead to an imagined but not yet realized future.

open copy of the journal Language Arts with our article

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Anna Smith @anna-phd.bsky.social · 14/08/2026

It's almost like we might need some food quality and health standards and policies based on evidence from scientific studies...but I could be wrong.

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Dominique Baker @bakerdphd.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

I loooooove talking people up. I'm here to learn about what you do, read some of your papers, and talk about the bricks you've helped lay in this house of knowledge we're all trying to build together.

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Anna Smith @anna-phd.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

I love prepping courses and updating syllabi. Williams' quote centers our Day 1 discussion of citational practice, how all our work is informed & influenced by others' work, & what it means to name yourself as a text's author. This has all taken on new meaning since I taught the course 2 years ago.

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Anna Smith @anna-phd.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

"Citation is not simply consuming another’s knowledge; it constitutes a call and response. In this way, citation isn’t passive; it can be a very active and intentional process of intellectual genealogy and community formation." Bianca C. Williams anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com

BLACK FEMINIST CITATIONAL PRAXIS AND DISCIPLINARY BELONGING

What does a Black feminist citational practice look and feel like? This contribution to the #CiteBlackWomen colloquy focuses on two arguments: First, that Black feminist citational praxis is one of t....

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Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 07/08/2026

The evidence about AI in education remains terrible as a basis for policy or practice. As schools in some places come back from summer next week (oh Scotland it's too early), here's a wee roundup on just how truly woefully AIED research has stood up and why educators shouldn't call on it 1/

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Shannon Mattern @shannonmattern.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Might anyone know of a small, non-intimidating zine-y guidebook that helps folks navigate the logistics (+ ethics) of *collaborative* publication — demystifying the design + production process; explaining formatting + rights clearances; addressing mutual accountability + collaborative review, etc.?

halfletterpress.com

Why Self-Publish Under Fascism?

This publication was prompted by an invitation from Mariame Kaba to join her in a discussion titled: Why Make Zines in 2025: Information Control Under Fascism

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Jess Calarco @jessicacalarco.com · 02/08/2026

I wonder if students today would be less likely to lean on AI for writing assignments if schools had made sure they could touch-type (at least 60wpm) before having them submit all their assignments online. 1/🧵

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Anyway, your problem isn‘t finding the time to take notes. The problem is that taking notes is thinking and thinking has to be done by someone. women have been doing a lot of metacognition that looks like a task when it’s really thinking.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

Then they have all the transcripts (and the ai token bill) but no sensemaking. so they make another app — a layer that will make sense of all the useless transcripts. But of course sensemaking isnt just pattern spotting. It’s interpretation. AI cannot do either because AI cannot be curious

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

So a masculinist understanding of notetaking would think a transcription app is the same as taking notes. That’s why they think an AI transcript is a time-saver. They think the notes are the thinking because when a human takes the notes, it is.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 01/08/2026

I like this notetaking example. it is a good case of how gender works. Notetaking has never been about producing a transcript. It is a bureaucratic skill in the 20th c. organixarion because it is SENSEMAKING. Those women socialized to take notes? They have been doing men’s metacognition for them

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Anthony Moser @anthonymoser.com · 23/07/2026