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Ryan

@ryansmits.bsky.social
157 followers 625 following 107 posts

teacher, luddite, hiker publications listed at www.ryansmits.com

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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
reader.theoregonian.com/google-searc... Who would have ever thought anything bad would happen from testing an unknown technology on kids? /s We're at a point where we should just ban Google from schools. They have repeatedly shown they do not care about safety or privacy.
reader.theoregonian.com
Google Search AI poses ‘unacceptable risk’ to kids, report finds
The artificial intelligence features built in to Google Search failed to detect suicide risks, said an eating disorder symptom was normal and provided instructions for creating deepfakes.
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
reader.theoregonian.com/doj-levies-f... These Morrow officials absolutely need to be held accountable for the obfuscation of this Windwave's value. The accounting firm that helped hide that value also needs consequences.
reader.theoregonian.com
DOJ levies fresh allegations in data center ‘scheme’
The state alleges officials lied to watchdogs as associates “rubber-stamped” the deal.
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 26/07/2026
I think we're going to see that Mitch McConnell died on August 3, 2026. Maybe they'll surprise us with August 4th so it's not as obvious.
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
Have students show up with parent notes saying that they are excused from this curriculum to study something that is more relevant to their lives. Or consider, who is going to audit every day of your instruction to make sure you actually teach this?
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
Assign students to read the contentious required works and have a brief slide to cover the requirement of including it in instruction. Tell students straight up that you are required to teach this but make it clear that you have no desire.
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 28/06/2026
Some ideas I write about: Assign the required literary works for summer reading and ask them about them when they return. Tell parents the state is requiring you to teach the Bible as a literary work, which means open to analysis and literary interpretation, and tell them they can opt out.
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
I wrote up some thoughts about the new required list of literary works that Texas just adopted including ways to resist: www.ryansmits.com/2026/06/thou... They don't go into effect for a few more years, but now is the time to start thinking about how to respond. #Texas #censorship #EduSky
ryansmits.com
Thoughts on Texas' 2026 Literary Works Requirement
Thoughts on the   2026 Texas Literary Works List   The State of Texas just adopted a new policy where they are going to require specific t...
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
Of course, like any good philosophy book, there's a critique and a call for what is next. Hopefully he can expand with his techno-abolitionist alternatives to humanist ontological policing. He gives a glimmer of the in- un- non- and counter-humanisms in the last pages as a hint of what is to come.
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
But what Dekeyser does in this book is near maddening. Not only does he lay out the logic of technological critique, he critiques the humanism that produces both the technology and the critique. What he ultimately argues is that we have to abolish the humanist perspectives to stop the onticide.
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
And to what end? A techno-rationalist perspective would argue that this is breaking up the limits of what humans can think and do. Surely the neural network that has learned from the wisdom of all words written is smarter and more prescient than the learned person, right? Right?
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
what pages go with what with what with what with what with what and on an on. So now, when someone types into the chatbot anything, all those cut up pieces of all the world's lasting literature to yesterday's tweet get instrumentalized to produce some word salami of what matches best to its network.
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
Then they have all these chunks of text, completely separate from its original meaning, just sitting there on the neural network. They train the network to use all those chunks of text to reinforce its networks of what words go with what words go with what sentences go with what paragraphs go with
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
it can then use the blue it has cut and separated and now it can call forth that bit of information when it is useful. And this to me is what OpenAI and its ilk did with pretrained transformers. They took all the text that they could find and cut it up into code or tokens as they would call it.
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
It would cut up all the art into its various colors, and then it would make one big pile of blue from millions of paintings that use blue. There is no meaning to that piece of blue from that particular painting, but it is useful to the computer because, "hey, it's blue!" Now that the computer has it
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
The world is being cut, separated, and instrumentalized. The world is cut up into what is usable for a computer, that is, data, zeros and ones. Then it makes sure that it is separated from any and all context that would make it have any meaning. Imagine a computer trying to learn to pick blue out.
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
This...allows digital reason to proceed in three steps: cut, separate, instrumentalize." This little excerpt seems so germane to everything that is going on with generative AI today, and seems to describe the long process of digitalization that has been occurring since the 1950s.
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
...digital reason is divided into two—subject and object, self and world, human and animal, idea and matter, presence and absence, private and public, substance and attribute—by way of various transcendentalisms: separation, extension, opposition, alienation, exteriorization, and individuation...
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
On page 123 Dekeyser wrote, "Digital formalism needs to be understood as a mode of thinking that is digital in logic rather than method. It s fueled by the principle of distinction...such a principle makes it at once possible and desirable 'to differentiate between formally indistinguishable things.
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
Basically how technology in combination with humanist philosophies has been used to "other" people and not count them as being "human." There is a distinction between "existing" as a human and "being" human, which is where the whole ontology thing gets involved. But I keep thinking of a particular..
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
I was glad to have powered through and read "Techno-Negative: A Long History of Refusing the Machine" by Thomas Dekeyser in much shorter of a time than I should have. He brings up a very interesting history of the humanism and ontological policing through technological onticide. Word salad, I know..
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
I enjoyed the #CivicsOfTech book club meeting today, and I encourage anyone and everyone who is interested in learning more about the role of technology in our lives but particularly in education to check out their website or join a book club. I had a few days warning for this one...
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 19/03/2026
Why am I watching Zac Brown talk about spearfishing on #Survivor?
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 14/02/2026
www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/r... Quick article about how people build replicas of Thoreau's cabin and what "Walden" means to them. Could be a good way to introduce Thoreau and transcendentalism. I could imagine this in a unit asking, "what does it mean to live deliberately?" #edusky
nytimes.com
They Went to the Woods Because They Wished to Live Deliberately
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 04/01/2026
"Hamnet" was an incredible movie and that ending was poignant. Jessie Buckley delivered an incredible performance as did Paul Mezcal, but that ending with Agnes reaching out is going to stick with me. Such a beautiful movie about love, loss, grief, and expression.
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 26/12/2025
@edzitron.com has been saying it as long as anyone has listened, but looks like the mainstream is finally coming wise to the inevitable AI crash... The whole thing is a house of cards www.nytimes.com/2025/12/26/b... #AIBubble
nytimes.com
As A.I. Companies Borrow Billions, Debt Investors Grow Wary
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 07/12/2025
I'm new to Oregon, but this certainly seems like a pressing issue. Based on the reporting, the universities here do seem to be teaching future teachers according to best practices. Of course, there are outliers. Going to keep following. reader.theoregonian.com/is-teaching-...
reader.theoregonian.com
Is teaching future teachers the way out of literacy crisis?
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 13/09/2025
www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/l... Just learned about these photo prompts from @nytimes.com, and I'm so delighted to have these in my back pocket for ELA journal prompts. #EduSky
nytimes.com
144 Picture Prompts to Inspire Student Writing (Published 2023)
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 24/07/2025
Can we please remember this? "Large language models like ChatGPT don’t 'think' in the human sense—when you ask ChatGPT a question, it draws from the data sets it has been trained on and builds an answer based on predictable word patterns." www.newyorker.com/magazine/202... #AI #Sceptic
newyorker.com
What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing?
The demise of the English paper will end a long intellectual tradition, but it’s also an opportunity to reëxamine the purpose of higher education.
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 20/07/2025
"Evolution primed us to see minds everywhere; nature never prepared us for machines this adept at pretending to have them. Already, the mimicry is good enough for some—the lonely, the imaginative. Soon, it may be good enough for almost everyone." #AI #Sceptic www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
newyorker.com
A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness. That’s a Problem
The discomfort of loneliness shapes us in ways we don’t recognize—and we may not like what we become without it.
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Reposted by Ryan
Erin J. Wamsley 🧠📈😴 @wamsleylab.bsky.social · 06/07/2025
Not a threat? Using AI for "brainstorming creative projects" and "summarizing long texts" is even more of a threat to student learning than using it to generate text. And yes, it is cheating -- Cheating students out of actually learning to read and come up with their own ideas. 🤢🤮🤢 #edusky
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Reposted by Ryan
SkillTech Learning Solutions @skilltechsolution.com · 13/06/2025
Maybe it is less about tools saving teachers time and more about taking less time to learn relevant practices and tools. Ask any teacher what they want from PD. Most start with: Will it help students? Yes, they want to save time, but helping students comes 1st. #EdTech #Teaching #EduSky
Teachers will invest in things they see value in.  A lot of time.
  Tamara Ferguson
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 13/06/2025
Finally! The Search for More Money!
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 08/06/2025
Seems accurate
Single-panel Mallard Fillmore comic strip. A university administrator is speaking at graduation. They say, "And now that you're officially alumni, it's time to start thinking about giving something back... ... We accept all major credit cards. To set up a one-time or recurring donation, just scan the QR code printed on all four corners of your diploma."
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
"resting in our pockets or hanging around our necks." #AI
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
"This, in turn, would warp the direction of global economies, requiring the construction of ever-larger data centers. The economic and environmental overhaul would be done in the name of outsourcing our human thoughts and memories to an omnipresent machine...
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
"This means that, if we all started using our personal A.I. machines dozens of times a day, as we do our iPhones, the environmental toll of our personal technology would skyrocket—imagine something like turning every car on the road into a diesel truck...
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
"Some research estimates that generating a typical e-mail using A.I. consumes a bottle’s worth of water to siphon heat away from the data centers’ servers to separate cooling towers...
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 03/06/2025
More needs to be said about the environmental effects of AI. Select use of AI I'm all for, but people don't need personal generative AI devices, and such devices will be harmful beyond imagination. Here's a good quote from Kyle Chayka describing the energy demands:
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 31/05/2025
Can we add learning styles, aka VAK, to this list?
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 29/05/2025
Doing this with AI and doing that with AI to improve blah blah blah can be accomplished by working with another human, too... And, get this, you get to develop a relationship with someone whom you can trust and depend on. Quit using AI for human tasks #EduSky
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
"But both are sensitive" #scifi #reading #quote
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
Continued... "The soundest fact may fail or potential in the style of its telling: like the singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, different, round, and real than pearls are."
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 20/05/2025
Every time I pick up an Ursula K Le Guin book I'm blown away by the force of her writing. The opening lines of 'The Left Hand of Darkness:' "I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 12/05/2025
Little happy ant hill!
A small ant mound with homes in it that look like a smiley face.
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 09/05/2025
Passed my dissertation proposal defense this week, and I'm feeling pretty good about that. Is this how Sisyphus feels when he gets to the top of the mountain? #phd #phdsky #academicsky
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 08/05/2025
This shouldn't have to be news to people, but unfortunately it needs to be spelled out plain as day like this .. 😔
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 04/05/2025
This was a fantastic article from Dr. D. Graham Burnett. Of everything I've read in argument for the benefits of AI, this was the most moving and articulated.
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 04/05/2025
"But no amount of peer-reviewed scholarship, no data set, can resolve the central questions that confront every human being: How to live? What to do? How to face death?" From Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence? www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...
newyorker.com
Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?
Maybe not as we’ve known them. But, in the ruins of the old curriculum, something vital is stirring.
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Reposted by Ryan
John Vibes @johnvibes.bsky.social · 12/04/2025
I hope everyone realizes that scrubbing historical references from web sites is no different than burning books
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Ryan @ryansmits.bsky.social · 02/04/2025
So did DOGE cut the person that was supposed to onboard everyone onto how to send a secure transmission? Signal and then Gmail??!
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