iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

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Roopika Risam @roopikarisam.bsky.social · 12/09/2026

This is an example of why being granular about “AI” is important. The cited study from 2021 uses machine learning. Problems of training data/bias are real, as is automation bias, but this isn’t “ChatGPT, does my patient have schizophrenia?” Knowing the difference and potential implications matters.

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Mai El-Sadany @maitelsadany.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

The United States was the only United Nations member state in the world that voted against a United Nations General Assembly resolution promoting map projections that more accurately reflect the true relative size of continents and countries.

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Jake Grumbach @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

One of those things you were pretty sure was true but now you have causal quantiative evidence in the American Economic Review: business schools trained CEOs to pay workers less in pursuit of maximizing shareholder value www.aeaweb.org/conference/2...

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Philippe Bocquier @phbocquier.bsky.social · 16/08/2026

I am telling you, academics: just reclaim your journals, don't wait commercial publishers to kick you out, they are just here for 30%+ profit, feeding on public money. (Re-)start your own Diamond Open Access journal.

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Samuel Moore @samuelmoore.org · 17/08/2026

Helpful reminder from Elsevier that they have the "legal power" to do what they want with your journals. You have the collective power to take your editorial work elsewhere.

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Brunhilde2525 @brunhilde2525.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

Colleges etc hire standard lawyers who yes, don’t want their clients to become test cases. When what they really need are movement lawyers, who understand that it’s about the mission.

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Ed Fuller @edfuller.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

when services are centralized, they get worse & increase the amt of time faculty/staff have to deal w/ issues. Saves $ for univ that can be easily documented in budget, but reduces morale and productivity which univ leaders supposedly care about. Someone should do a study on this (cough, cough)

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Brendan Cantwell @cantb.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

If you ask me, and in this case someone did, small c conservative lawyerly risk management, the kind of dominates General Council offices, is leading us right into authoritarian control. See the lawyer’s advice versus mine.

"I don't want my clients to become a test case" for the Trump administration's agenda to crack down on higher ed, Crosby Ferise said. If a president or college board asks whether they should answer McMahon's questions, "I will say, 'It's not a bad

"I don't think colleges should ignore the questions.
But I do think that they should be forthright about them,
," he said. "They should say, 'We believe ... that this is an attempt to coerce us, to say that science funding, and other federal resources are contingent upon signing onto the ideological agenda of the administration and breaking the traditions of American higher education, not reinforcing them. And for those reasons, we are taking an informed risk to push back on this and say that this is unacceptable."

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Dr. Damien P. Williams, dread portent down from a mountain cave @wolven.blacksky.app · 08/08/2026

Anyone running middle or high school classes where you give kids cheap blank phones & teach them to deconstruct them? I feel like getting people at an early age w/ things like "what do API calls do?" & "what are your phones/apps doing when you're not touching them?" would be good on multiple levels…

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Solomon @solomonrmissouri.com · 22/07/2026

Have one better idea

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 15/07/2026

No one wants to hear it but tracking everyone in your life is pretty much the gateway drug to the Armageddon you’re so afraid of.

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Eliza Bettinger @scalywager.bsky.social · 08/07/2026

GREAT time to read/re-read Prairie Fires, a fascinating biography of the real Laura, written by Caroline Fraser. Laura’s daughter Rose ran in genuinely fascist circles, and she is the one who encouraged her mother to write the books, and helped edit them and get them published.

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sara m. b. simon @sarambsimon.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

funny and in hindsight unsurprising that many are assuming my original skeet was about digital slop, poorly maintained websites, bad search tools, etc. when in fact i'm more worried about the dozens and dozens of local news outlets that simply no longer exist

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Ryan Estrada @ryanestrada.com · 24/06/2026

A cartoonist named Daniel "Des" Rolando Sanchez Estrada was tried as a terrorist and sentenced to 30 years in prison for having anti-Trump comics in his car. Prosecutors connected him to a 2025 anti-ICE protest he didn't even attend because he was in the same book club as others who were.

A photo of Daniel "Des" Rolando Sanchez Estrada, who looks like a cuddly and rad dude, smiling while holding a sketchbook full of drawings of baby hippos.

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Paolo Crosetto @paolocrosetto.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

An inevitable development for for-profit Open Access publishers is Fordism: automation & massification. If you earn money piece-rate for each paper you want to increase the flow of papers while minimizing cost. e.g. very low and *uniform* turnaround times at Frontiers and MDPI

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Jamila Michener @povertyscholar.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

You already know about Mamdani, but do you know about the incredible work of the Union of Pinnacle Tenants? And why aren’t we telling that story? Who benefits when we onscure the power of ordinary people organized for change? www.pinnacletenants.org/about-us

pinnacletenants.org

About Us - Union of Pinnacle Tenants

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Michael Okun @michael-okun.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

I’ve officially resigned as Associate Editor for Frontiers in Systems Neuroscience. It used to be a reputable journal, but became a case study in how forced automation destroys academic integrity. 👇

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Luke Herrine @lookheron.bsky.social · 04/06/2026

Who knows if this will get through this round, but it's notable that we're starting to see proposals like this floated. As @amandajean.bsky.social points out, part of the logic here is subsidizing education is bad because it keeps people from having babies: www.heritage.org/education/re...

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Chad Loder @chadloder.dev · 01/06/2026

Public records turned up by The Ellis Collective, a student-led research group, have revealed that the UC system shared data collected by automated license plate readers at multiple campuses with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and other federal agencies, in apparent violation of state law.

dailycal.org

Records show UC sharing data with US Customs and Border Protection

Public records turned up by The Ellis Collective, a student-led research group, have revealed that the UC system shared data collected by automated license plate readers at multiple campuses with

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Dan Vergano @danvergano.bsky.social · 28/05/2026

White House proposes new rules giving political appointees final approval of research grants These proposed Office of Management and Budget regulations would render the federal research grant review process opaque www.scientificamerican.com/article/whit...

scientificamerican.com

White House proposes new rules giving political appointees final say on research grants

These proposed Office of Management and Budget regulations would render the federal research grant review process opaque

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Alex Wild @alexwild.bsky.social · 30/05/2026

tl,dr; Scientists no longer allowed to use federal funding to publish, attend meetings, or talk to the public. They cannot collaborate internationally. Grants can be cancelled for any reason, at any time, political appointees have a final say over what gets funded, and who gets funded.

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Tyler King @tyleraking.com · 29/05/2026

This is seriously fucked. Like for starters they’re using commercial web analytics that are in no way in line with federal privacy disclosure requirements…

Every webpage you load is making phone calls.
Not to people, but to servers around the internet, dozens per second, all invisible to you.
When I opened TrumpRx, I right-clicked the page, opened the browser's built-in inspector, and started reading the list. Mixed in with the routine traffic was a name I recognized:
PostHog. PostHog is a Silicon Valley analytics company whose entire business model is recording what visitors do on a website and reporting it back to whoever owns the site.
Mouse movements, clicks, scrolls, keystrokes. I had not typed anything. I had not clicked anything. I had just opened the page, and it was already on the phone with PostHog telling them about me.

The recordings are not anonymized. IP addresses are not stripped. And the way it is configured, the data looks to your browser like it is going back to TrumpRx, but it is actually being forwarded behind the scenes to PostHog.
That is a technique used to slip past ad blockers by disguising where the data is really going, and it is not something I expected to find on a federal health website. So I went and looked at the other sites the studio had built. Real Food, the federal food policy site. Trump Accounts, the children's savings program. The studio's own homepage, ndstudio. gov. All of them had the same vendor, the same setup, IP addresses not stripped, the same forwarding trick. And on

not stripped, the same forwarding trick. And on ndstudio. gov alone, running alongside PostHog, was something someone had built entirely by hand. Five hundred and forty lines of custom JavaScript with a name embedded directly in the code: AutoMonitor. What it appears to do is rewire the part of the browser that handles how a page talks to the outside world, so that every conversation the page has with any server gets copied and forwarded to a private backend with no public presence. The studio has the structural ability to keep a copy of every recording as it passes through their infrastructure. I cannot prove they are keeping one. The pipe is built that way on purpose, and that is the part that matters.

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Lady Froldmagen (she/her) @zinelib.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

Faculty: libraries and librarians need your advocacy BEFORE our collections are shuttered and our workers are fired. Whether you think your library is in trouble, and it almost definitely is, write to your provost and tell them how essential the library and library staff are to your work. Right now.

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Eliza Bettinger @scalywager.bsky.social · 27/05/2026

@jasonkoebler.bsky.social Just listened to the pod about the Bandera TX official crashing out over Flock cameras. To add to your list of public officials crashing out, don't know if you've seen the Troy NY mayor declaring a state of emergency to KEEP the cameras: www.timesunion.com/news/article...

timesunion.com

Troy City Council mounts legal battle over Flock Safety emergency declaration

In a seven-page lawsuit, petitioners claim that Mantello had abused her power by declaring an emergency over Flock Safety not being paid.

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Micah Lee @micahflee.com · 21/05/2026

Cyd for Bluesky is here! I’ve been working on this for months, and also using it on my own account for months. Here are my settings

- Delete posts older than 30 days unless they have at least 20 likes or 20 reposts
- Delete reposts older than 30 days
- Delete likes older than 30 days
- Delete chat messages older than 21 days

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Mike Boylan-Kolchin @mbkplus.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

A great read about the absurd situation at Cornell and the more general alienation of those who run universities from those who work and study there

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Eliza Bettinger @scalywager.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Thank you, @brianphillips.lol this is so well done, and every bit of the analysis is right on the 💰 (Except the “freedom … responsibility” bit, which around here it is intoned daily and attributed to Hans Bethe, whom admin love to invoke)

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Dominique Baker @bakerdphd.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

Well that's a thorough summary. One of the best articulations of university governance for a public audience that I've seen in a while.

Screenshot of article which reads: This is how you end up with an elite university where the president can drive his car into a group of students and be lauded by the board. The president and the trustees are on the same team. The students are on the other team. The trustees know Kotlikoff will reliably enforce their agenda, including cracking down on protests that might be bad for cashflow. It almost doesn’t matter what he does; if there’s any conceivable defense, they’ll keep him in place. (If not, they’ll replace him with someone else who can talk about loving free speech while moving to crush it in practice.) Kotlikoff, after all, has already proved his worth: It was on his watch that Cornell agreed to pay $60 million to the U.S. government to get Trump to unfreeze its research grants.

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Tracy O’Connell Novick @tracynovick.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

“the real crisis facing American higher education is that colleges and universities are increasingly run by people who are hostile to students and professors, and who are frequently hostile to the idea of the university itself.”

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Soren Lorenson is secretly plotting your demise @soren-lorenson.bsky.social · 22/05/2026

I had to sit through an ed tech product pitch today so for all my #academicsky followers and comrades, here's what Turnitin is currently selling (stick around for what's on their product roadmap) so you can prepare yourselves to strenuously reject it. 🧵

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Eliza Bettinger @scalywager.bsky.social · 21/05/2026

Every breathless report on deep springs churned out by a prestige publication in the 30 years since I attended the place sounds exactly the same and they’re all trash.

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Eliza Bettinger @scalywager.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

This is all I dream of. This and similar sleek, university-developed infrastructure to host our research journals, our historical newspaper collections, etc, etc.

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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

3.) "Colleges would be crazy to do it" is the copiest of cope. The instant a large research university realizes they can create a simple, sleek LMS with better security and hundreds of their peer institutions will subsidize it in exchange for licenses, Canvas and Blackboard are dead.

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Freedom of the Press Foundation @freedom.press · 16/05/2026

🛎️ FPF, @wbaidlaw.bsky.social and @spj-posts.bsky.social are hosting an off-the-record webinar for reporters about how to safely, legally disclose wrongdoing when their employers trade independence to curry favor with the gov. It’s sad this is needed, but it is. 🗓️ Tuesday, May 19, 8:30 pm ET RSVP:

us06web.zoom.us

Video Conferencing, Web Conferencing, Webinars, Screen Sharing

Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom...

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Ian Linkletter @linkletter.org · 12/05/2026

BREAKING: INSTRUCTURE PAID THE RANSOM www.instructure.com/incident_upd...

instructure.com

Security Incident Update & FAQs

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Kevin Gannon (now a Moo Deng fan account) @thetattooedprof.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

We need to have a long conversation in higher ed (and ed in general tbh) about our dependence on proprietary software platforms, especially learning management systems

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Jon Becker @jonbecker.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

The rough (and perhaps ironic?) part of this is that these conversations did happen, rather loudly, decades ago, through what was then known as the "open education" movement. Those of us in those spaces started a whole "domain of ones own" movement. We were mostly laughed at by administration.

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Matt Gold @mkgold.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

Many of us have agued against the corporate LMS for decades (e.g. "Against Learning Management Systems" [2009] blog.mkgold.net/2009/03/30/a... ) And we've built alternatives, such as the CUNY Academic Commons (commons.gc.cuny.edu) and Commons In A Box (commonsinabox.org). Check them out!

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Sonja Drimmer @sonjadrimmer.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

I have yeeted the LMS my uni has paid for and which you were probably thinking helps you teach Forgive me it was surveillant so mid and so broke

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Matt Seybold @mattseybold.bsky.social · 07/05/2026

What I wish for everybody to remember when Canvas comes back online: The reason OUR data can be held for ransom is because Instructure, their owners (KKR private equity & Dragoneer venture capital), & our own employers (see ASU Atomic) monetize it. It's Canvas that hacked education & stole our IP.

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Carrie Griffin @carriegrif.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

'Technology firms see the university as a gigantic data farm; they are not invested in our students or the learning process, only in harvesting the attention of an entire generation of users, who will be addicted to their product for the rest of their adult lives.' #GenAI #resistAI #spéirgorm

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Eliza Bettinger @scalywager.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

KKR, a private equity firm, bought Instructure for $4.8Billion in 2024 — why so much money? The value of all that student and instructor data is off the charts. I don’t have data to back this up, but personally, after I see PE acquire a platform, I expect a hack within 2-3 years. See also, LastPass

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Liz Neeley @lizneeley.bsky.social · 06/05/2026

“With access to real names, email addresses and even teacher-student messages, the next wave of phishing will not be generic. It will reference real courses and real conversations, which makes it far more likely to succeed.”

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