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colleen wood

@colleenwood.rocks
825 followers 422 following 306 posts

I teach political science at a big community college in Minnesota. I study digital politics and authoritarianism in Central Asia. Opinions expressed here are mine; views do not reflect the state of Minnesota or U.S. government.

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Reposted by colleen wood
Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave @wolven.blacksky.app · 01/10/2026
When it comes to research, there is no single tool or site that is as robustly useable as Google scholar is, and google scholar a) ain't as robustly useable as it could be and b) has started integrating LLM-based "AI" "summaries" into their search results, and i just HATE it.
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 30/09/2026
Okay jaw on the floor for this, but MAN she didn't go for the long-a dirtbayg
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Pam Herd @pamherd.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
America.gov launched today--a DOGE initiative to use AI to deliver public services. Child lying facedown on a frozen lake as the image accompanying the question: "How can I invest in my child's future" is just incredible. Way to go AI
Image of a child lying facedown on a froze lake.  above is the portal where you ask AI questions about government services.  the question matching this image is:  "How can I invest in my child's future?"
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 23/09/2026
Thank you so much for sharing all these details + slides + researcher handles about how the conference went!
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Anthony Iannaccio @mrtonynacho.bsky.social · 02/01/2025
Mister Rogers never misses
You know, your own imagination is far more wonderful 

Mister Rogers’ NeighborhoodThan any computer could ever be. You know why?

Mister Rogers’ NeighborhoodYou’re a living human being. And a computer is just a machine.

Mister Rogers’ NeighborhoodHuman beings are far more wonderful than machines.

Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 09/09/2026
Faculty at my college are making a ton of noise to try to get a testing center with computers w/out internet access so students could type their answers, but there's little movement (they'd have to pay people to staff the testing center, which is a no go apparently).
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 09/09/2026
The "retro" framing seems so strange to me? I was taking blue books exams in undergrad between 2010-2014, I took blue book exams for some of my grad classes between 2018-2019. I'm not that old, this tool is not some ancient lost art of assessment?? Who is winning out from this framing?
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 09/09/2026
Is there data that people ever abandoned blue books as an assessment method? (Sales plummeting during 2020 doesn't speak to a bigger trend... there was literally no way to do in-person assessment for most of 2020 in higher ed.)
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Reposted by colleen wood
NY Times Pitchbot @nytpitchbot.bsky.social · 07/09/2026
Liberals say that our democracy is in a death spiral. They're wrong—our republic is in a death spiral.
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ProPublica @propublica.org · 06/09/2026
Read the full story:
projects.propublica.org
“I Have Lost Everything”: The Toll of Cities’ Homeless Sweeps
Cities often take belongings — including important documents and irreplaceable mementos — when they conduct sweeps of homeless encampments. ProPublica gave notecards to people across the country so…
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Asheesh Kapur Siddique @asheeshks.org · 02/09/2026
Tech companies don’t understand scholarship. ‘Quickness’ and ‘efficiency‘ are not always the right values. Sometimes you don’t want to “answer your research queries faster” and when you do, existing search technology is more than adequate to help you do scholar.googleblog.com/2026/08/quic...
Answering a research question often requires reading through several papers and figuring out how each of them might be useful. You need to track down what each paper says about your question, what methods the authors used to arrive at the relevant results, and what caveats to keep in mind to understand the boundaries.

Today, we are introducing Scholar Quick Read, to help you answer your research queries faster. Search results in Scholar Labs and Scholar search that discuss your question in depth now include a “Quick read” link.
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 01/09/2026
Y'all I got a 5th place ribbon at the Minnesota State Fair for my savory scones!! Finally got to wander through the Creative Activities building today to see all the the amazing things Minnesotans have made this year
Lady in a light blue sleeveless shirt poses next to a display case filled with scones and intricately decorated cakesA hand holding a golden (slightly singed) triangular scone in front of blurred background of blue and yellow flags, fluffy clouds, and crosswalk
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Anjali Dayal @anjalikdayal.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
be the state fair goat you wish to see in the world!
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Chris Steller @chrissteller.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Minnesota State Fair Attendance Reaches New Falcon Heights
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Doug Mack @douglasmack.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
rebel loon made out of pull tabs and meat raffle tickets, a staple of minnesota dive bars. this is such beautiful, perfect energy on every level. (worth noting that those meat raffle cards are from small towns in rural minnesota)
Rebel loon made out of blue meat raffle tickets and black and white pull tabs
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Yan Matusevich @ymatusik.bsky.social · 29/08/2026
Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan used to be the two most remittance dependent countries in the world back in 2017 and 2018, but have gone on completely different trajectories since. In 2025, remittances make up almost 60% of Tajikistan's GDP whereas that number has dropped to just 17% in Kyrgyzstan.
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Matthew Vinge @mvinge.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
Lunar Eclipse on the first day of the 2026 Minnesota State Fair First time in 167 year history that a lunar eclipse visible during open hours It wasn't until after doors closed that I had idea to take these pics. A friendly security guard escorted me back in!
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Dr. Casey Fiesler @cfiesler.bsky.social · 28/08/2026
I tried something in my class today that I was really excited about and I think went well! Basically a set of activities (with a bunch of polling) that turned students into an LLM in order to explain how they work. For example:
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Stacey Burns @wentrogue.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
Jennifer Nelson’s entry to this year’s Minnesota State Fair crop art
A localized version of Guernica with a loon at the center and a person holding an ICE OUT sign 

“My piece was inspired by Picasso's Guernica, a work that was his response to the Nazi's bombing of the Basque town. I thought there was a fitting parallel between these incidents about the high price paid by ordinary people when aggressive regimes try out new tactics of war, as well as a fitting juxtaposition of the darkness of living such an experience and the light we shone through it in our own resistance and care for one another. The patterns near Renee Good and Alex Pretti’s mouths are actually their last words in Morse code: ‘I’m not mad at you,’ and ‘Are you okay?’” 

Jennifer Nelson
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W.E.D.em Boyz @leftistwonk.bsky.social · 27/08/2026
ICE has fallen out of the headlines but July marked the largest number of migrant detentions ever on record. Five migrants have died in ICE custody in the last two months. It's also currently impossible to legally migrate to this country, as 100% of visa applications have been paused.
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 27/08/2026
My porch tomato plants are just getting started for the season! Very much still tomato season.
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Michael Corey @mikejcorey.bsky.social · 26/08/2026
If only these same outlets had not been absolutely salivating to run with these stories while people were cautioning this the whole damn time.
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 24/08/2026
me picking up the copy of the power broker i abandoned this summer bc of the bqe video
still from Mean Girls where side character wearing a pink sweater + her hair half up says I saw Cady Heron wearing Army pants and flip flops so I bought Army pants and flip flops
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 24/08/2026
Y'all are the best!! Sending high-energy vibes your way for a great conference!
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 24/08/2026
First day of the semester, but the vibes are weird because my first class starts at 6pm🥴 I would rather not be at work from 8:30 until 9pm but I'm so antsy to get things started
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 24/08/2026
Same!! I put a T/F question about the exams in my asynch classes being 50 multiple choice questions... It's the question with the lowest accuracy rate on my syllabus quiz, but I've never done MCQ exams online? I thought I might have mistakenly put in the wrong correct answer, but no
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 23/08/2026
🔥🎯🔥🎯🔥🎯
“[T]hese guidelines afford students the freedom to think for themselves, to listen to one another without the cacophony of other (disembodied and non-human) voices in the room, to make mistakes, and to change their minds as they engage with thinkers of the past, with us, and with their fellow students in good faith, face-to-face,” the SSCD memo reads.
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 23/08/2026
I'm at a community college and my colleagues in polisci, history, and humanities are almost uniformly taking a "no AI, no student tech in classrooms, minimal faculty tech" approach! (The bigger challenge comes from like 50% of our school's courses being asynchronous)
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Keegan Lannon @keeganlannon.bsky.social · 21/08/2026
Rhetorically speaking, it benefits GenAI companies for this obfuscating generic terminology. The gun lobby does the same thing with words like "assault rifle" and "automatic weapon"--terms that have general purpose use but no domain-specific reference.
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Marcus Luther @marcusluther.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
...at some point we need to answer the question of what reading is going to feel like when 50% or more of the text we encounter isn't written by humans. (Seriously: students are wondering!)
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Nick Kodama 🌳👻 @nickkodama.bsky.social · 20/08/2026
distracted bf meme looking at stopping the bomb ignoring bombing to win
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 16/08/2026
Begging for an analytical piece about Hong and Crowley and Evers and Tiffany from Cramer
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 16/08/2026
I remember hearing Kathy Cramer give a book talk at Columbia and feeling so inspired. 1) a tenured professor presenting ethnographic work and interview data to a room of causal inference folks and 2) a tenured professor with the accent I got rid of when I was made fun of my first semester of college
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 16/08/2026
Book cover for Kathy Cramer's The Politics of Resentment. Pastel yellow background. Two images nested in an outline of Wisconsin; top half is a red farm and cornfield, bottom half is a blue pinstripe suit with a red VOTE button
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 15/08/2026
are you 9 feet tall?
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 15/08/2026
Ironically it's probably Nebraska (arguably midwestern if you include the plains states) for me
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 15/08/2026
Slightly different: what are the boundaries of the Midwest? I remember getting into a screaming match with a guy from Chicago in my undergrad's student-run grocery store because he was adamant that Minnesota was not in the Midwest (???? if not us, who??)
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 15/08/2026
it's cheugy to say cheugy isn't it
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 12/08/2026
I really don't understand how the administration can square "DOGE to save money on all that deep state fraud" with "giving authoritarian governments millions of dollars to imprison people indefinitely." A gutting read; incredible, nimble reporting.
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Marco Langbroek @marcolangbroek.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
Very happy with this result. Combination of #eclipse images (time lapse) with 35 mm lens, one image per 5 minutes, from #Leiden, the Netherlands. Old Leiden Observatory bottom right.
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👻👹 boo-rit 👹👻 @britculpsapp.bsky.social · 12/08/2026
welp, just lost my life savings on kalshi
Fin Twitter
@fintwitter.bsky.social
U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar secures
Democratic nomination for Wisconsin
governor
8:25 PM • Aug 11, 2026
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 12/08/2026
I guess I've only seen them from ... 100 feet away? But cool, more state pride!
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 12/08/2026
Dang are loons really that heavy? Going to share with my students to keep the whole "talking about politics in 2026" energy light
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 11/08/2026
A 700-page history of modern terrorism's shift from leftist revolutionary attacks to religious extremism was just one of my spring break beach reads, vacation is better with a heavy dark book on your lap
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 11/08/2026
Three strikes is too many, I know, but I'm also trying to guard my sanity from student complaints to my boss + from teenagers writing really mean things about me on the internet for being strict about them not lying to me
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 11/08/2026
Asynch is another ball game. This semester 3 of my 6 classes are asynch, 2 are intro surveys. The intro surveys heavily weight two 15-minute oral exams + have a "three strikes you're out" plagiarism/fabrication policy: 1st = 0 on assignment, 2nd = letter grade reduction, 3rd = fail.
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 11/08/2026
This is more or less what I'm doing for my in-person classes + 6 short at-home (300-600 words) which require footnotes with correctly-formatted references to stuff I assign and *only* stuff I assign. Time stamp or a direct quote from the source in the footnote if they paraphrase.
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 11/08/2026
Bleak stuff: administration isn't from/doesn't live near our college; college was in a neighborhood with multiple daily ICE detentions during Metro Surge; stifled faculty from sharing resources with students "to avoid taking a side"
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 11/08/2026
Awkward/absurd stuff: VP of academic affairs is a woman of color who used a fake Thomas Jefferson quote about racial diversity in a back-to-school speech. The next year a prof got fired for going off the rails + making racial jokes about said VP in his back-to-school speech on assessment data
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colleen wood @colleenwood.rocks · 11/08/2026
2023 was my first year working at the community college in my hometown - it felt like all the drama was goofy silly shenanigans and I joked to colleagues daily that I was saving it up for a novel. Last year though was bleak, all I wanted was for there to be *whimsical* drama again
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