iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Tess Bernhard @tessbern.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I have been interviewing families about their hopes for children’s tech use (or non-use) in school and can confirm that this second camp hardly exists

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Conor P. Williams @conorpwilliams.bsky.social · 25/09/2026

I was talking to someone today who framed K–12 AI discourse as between 1) hard bans and 2) families worried that schools aren't preparing kids to use AI. I told them I didn't really know many families in camp #2. www.nbcnews.com/politics/pol...

nbcnews.com

Poll: Most Americans think AI is doing more harm than good in schools

Last year, a slim majority thought schools that integrated AI would be better for students. Now a majority say schools that ban AI are better, according to the NBC News Decision Desk Poll.

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Tess Bernhard @tessbern.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

Thrilled to finally share this work & have my recent pub highlighted! I had the pleasure of analyzing teens' very amusing conversations in order to write this. I hope my article adds some nuance to hot conversations about why children are struggling to learn and engage deeply on school-issued tech.

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Tess Bernhard @tessbern.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

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Tess Bernhard @tessbern.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

Just trying to write my little contribution to a collaborative piece I am working on with friends and there are five (5!) separate places in our Google doc interface where I have been encouraged to use Gemini in the past minute. They just keep squeezing Gemini into new crevices. Make it stop.

Gemini search bar asking the user to enter the prompt “add a paragraph about…”

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Katie Tiedrich @katietiedrich.bsky.social · 09/09/2026

I’m not the first person to make this observation but the prevalence of nauseating ai-generated business logos means stuff like this hits CRAZY for me now

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Jenn Borgioli Binis @jennbinis.bsky.social · 05/08/2026

Teaching "about" is not the same as teaching "how to" - adults absolutely get the difference when it comes to sex ed but so many conflate the two approaches when it come to AI.

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Anna Kornbluh @annakornbluh.bsky.social · 15/05/2026

the thing about tenure line professors forming Pennsylvania’s largest public sector union in 50 years is unions are for everybody!! profs are public servants! and we're doing all the big publics! we're doing Urbana we're doing Michigan we're doing California! www.statecollege.com/articles/psu...

statecollege.com

Penn State Faculty Vote in Favor of Unionizing

Penn State faculty have voted to unionize in what was Pennsylvania's largest public sector organizing election in nearly 50 years. Organizers said on

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Phil Nichols @philnichols.bsky.social · 08/05/2026

Maybe allowing third-party platforms to become load bearing infrastructure for K-16 education was a bad idea? (See @ezekieldixonroman.bsky.social and I on “platform governance“ in education: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.3102/...)

journals.sagepub.com

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

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tamara nopper @tamaranopper.bsky.social · 19/04/2026

Sending rejection letters when she was an editor, Toni Morrison emphasized, according to Melina Moe, readers needing “both drama and organization, the space and information to make discoveries themselves yet a clear enough path so as not to feel lost.” This is also a good approach to teaching.

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Andrew Lawrence @ndrew.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

“you need to learn how to use ai” what the fuck are you talking about, how hard is it to type a prompt

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Jose Vilson, PhD @thejosevilson.com · 17/04/2026

I wish more people who researched teachers actually treated them as intellectual equals as opposed to separate objects for basic analysis. It says a lot about how we treat teachers, but also what we think of our work with children more generally.

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Ketan Joshi @ketanjoshi.co · 25/03/2026

This open letter to students at Georgetown university is extremely good medium.com/center-on-pr...

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Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 05/03/2026

Under no circumstances should we allow OpenAI to become the self-authorized educational research evidenve source that it is trying to be. Vendors must not be research authorities. openai.com/index/unders...

openai.com

New tools for understanding AI and learning outcomes

OpenAI introduces the Learning Outcomes Measurement Suite to assess AI’s impact on student learning across diverse educational environments over time.

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Group Ethics and Critical Theories of AI @ectaiuos.bsky.social · 23/02/2026

📢 New Publication 🎉 We are excited that our latest article has just been published with Wiley @futurehumanities.bsky.social: “When the Future Feels Foreclosed: AI Resignation and the Power to Act” 👉 onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...

When the Future Feels Foreclosed: AI Resignation and the Power to Act
Jan-Philipp Siebold, Annemarie Witschas, Rainer Mühlhoff
First published: 18 February 2026

ABSTRACT

This article develops the concept of ‘AI resignation’ to capture how young people encounter AI not only as a helpful or flawed tool, but as an overpowering and seemingly inevitable force that can foreclose their sense of political and personal power to act in relation to the future. Building on qualitative work with high school students in Germany (ages 15–18), we conceptualize AI resignation as a future-oriented sensibility that emerges at the intersection of pervasive data-driven infrastructures and hegemonic narratives of AI inevitability. Drawing on Foucault's late work on subjectivation and subjectivity, as well as extensions in media and affect theory, we identify four contradictory pulls that structure adolescents' everyday engagements with AI—between enthusiasm and dependency, effortless access and eroded learning, self-governance and repeated failure, aspiration and foreclosed futures—and show how these double binds gradually hollow out experiences of self-efficacy. We further argue that AI resignation fulfils a strategic affective function within digital capitalism: by naturalizing dependence on predictive AI infrastructures and normalizing diminished expectations of the power to act, it stabilizes the very sociotechnical structures that produce it. The article concludes by outlining implications for re-politicizing AI and education, emphasizing power-critical curricula and collective spaces of reflection that enable young people to meaningfully participate in shaping sociotechnical futures.

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ali alkhatib @ali-alkhatib.com · 14/01/2026

autonomous vehicles are an abject lesson about the impossibly complex challenge of trying to effectively navigate a dynamic natural world automatically. the entirety of the field's scholarly & engineering work might be most valuable as case studies in why uncritical automation is a fraught endeavor.

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 29/12/2025

for the love of god, AI systems aren't "just tools that are neither good nor evil in and of themselves". AI systems *are* tools of capitalism. they exist as tools of capitalism. there is no AI system "in and of itself" outside of capitalism

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Shane Anderson 🏳️‍🌈 @shaneanderson.bsky.social · 19/12/2025

"This promise of an AI future, is really just a collective anxiety that wealthy people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us in the future." - @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit. Incredible words. Listen to all of it!

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Ben Williamson @benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 29/11/2025

The "evidence-based" policy model is being abandoned in favour getting AI into schools for "testing in the wild" and that's giving big tech and edtech freedom to pump private tech into public education even harder than before. The "evidence" will only come later, once they're embedded.

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Heather Bryant @hbcompass.bsky.social · 23/11/2025

I don't understand how anyone can watch how blatantly Grok is manipulated to answer the way ownership desires it to and then act like the other LLM chatbots couldn't possibly be similarly but less obviously compromised to produce responses in whatever way corporate interests and priorities dictate.

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 23/11/2025

Yes! This also comes up in my recent contribution to CHE: www.chronicle.com/article/how-...

Screenshot from linked article:

Learning is done best in community. The most important function of educational institutions is providing spaces for building that community. Every time we suggest a student would be well served by “asking a chatbot,” we are cutting off an opportunity for that student to engage with their classmates, instructors, or librarians. Those interactions, however small, are what constitute communities of learners.

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Robert McNees @mcnees.bsky.social · 22/11/2025

Journalist challenge: Use “Machine Learning” when you mean machine learning and “LLM” when you mean LLM. Ditch “AI” as a catch-all term, it’s not useful for readers and it helps companies trying to confuse the public by obscuring the roles played by different technologies. 🧪

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Katie Croonenberghs Art @kamakru.bsky.social · 27/10/2025

Turn off Gemini in Google! It's been turned on by default. Go to your Drive, click the gear icon, click settings, go to "manage apps" and uncheck that nasty "use by default" box. www.zdnet.com/article/how-...

zdnet.com

How to turn off Gemini in your Gmail, Docs, Photos, and more - it's easy to opt out

It's a little hidden, but there is a way to remove Gemini from your favorite Google services.

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Mark Hibbins, Great Lakes Swashbuckler @rejectresubmit.bsky.social · 20/10/2025

"Help you read faster" is so dishonest lol, like yeah if you consider "not doing the reading" as "reading faster"

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Charles Logan @charleswlogan.bsky.social · 08/10/2025

"Too many people are busily promoting a version of "‘AI’ literacy” that is simply training students how to use and consume 'AI' 'properly' – whatever that means – and refusing to admit that there may be no ethical usage of a fundamentally unethical, abusive technology," writes Audrey Watters.

2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com

Without Our Consent

When I wrote last week’s round-up of “AI”-related news, I didn’t include any of OpenAI’s product releases, mostly because it’s 2025 and I’m exhausted by this game that tech companies and tech journali...

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Tess Bernhard @tessbern.bsky.social · 03/10/2025

In a time when workers in higher ed need to be as organized and coordinated as ever to fight threats and build the institutions we deserve, I'm proud to announce I'll be working alongside this great crew on the newly formed RAPUP-UAW bargaining committee 🫡 pennpostdocunion.org/bargaining-c...

pennpostdocunion.org

Bargaining Committee | Penn Postdoc Union

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Dan Greene @dmgreene.bsky.social · 01/10/2025

The @aaup.org beat Marco Rubio in court, with a Reagan-appointed judge ruling that ideological deportations obviously violate the first amendment. These cases cost money. And we need millions of people moving together to make them stick. If you're faculty in the US, join AAUP and join the fight.

aaup.org

Join

Joining the AAUP says that you’re concerned about academic freedom, and about the way that basic freedom protects your teaching and research. Join today.

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Cooper Lund @cooperlund.online · 15/09/2025

I have a theory - much like how if you live in New York City for long enough you become culturally Jewish in a way, if you hang out online for too long you end up culturally Philadelphian

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Alex Hanna @alexhanna.bsky.social · 08/09/2025

This description of Alpha School really would make Foucault melt. www.bloomberg.com/news/feature...

Alpha’s privacy policy accounts for this sort of tracking and more, claiming far more access to student information than is typical for companies selling AI to schools, including MagicSchool. Alpha can, for example, use webcams to record students, including to observe their eye contact (partly to detect engagement and environmental distractions). And it can monitor keyboard and mouse activity (to see if students are idle) and take screenshots and video of what students are seeing on-screen (in part to catch cheating). In the future, the policy notes, the school could collect data from sleep trackers or headbands worn during meditation.

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Dr Abeba Birhane @abeba.blacksky.app · 07/09/2025

In this short piece, I lean on embodied cog sci to argue that we should refuse & resist llms in education (pp. 53-58) unesdoc.unesco.org/in/documentV... "the classroom is an environment where love, trust, empathy, care & humility are fostered & mutually cultivated through dialogical interactions"

But what iseducation? Embodied and enactive cognitive sciences remind us that knowledge is not something discrete that an individual possesses and passes down but an inherently dynamic and evolving endeavour that develops in the process of embodied, curious and engaged interaction through dialogue. The pinnacle of cognition, particularly ‘human knowing’, is inextricably interwoven with interactions we engage in

with each other and the physical, cultural and social world we inhabit, ‘so much so that individuals are not thinkable outside of their interactions and embeddedness in their (social) world’ (De Jaegher, 2019). Dialogic models of knowledge and education emphasize that interactions between a student and teacher and/or peer provide ‘scaffolding’ for how that child understands the world. The always in flux, active and continually transforming nature of human cognition necessitates that education be fundamentally an ongoing activity. Far from the reductionist view whereby ‘formal knowledge’ can be packaged and acquired from an LLM, the classroom is an environment where love, trust, empathy, care and humility are fostered and mutually cultivated through dialogical interactions

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 06/09/2025

2. the strange but often repeated cultish mantra that we need to "embrace the future" — this is so bizarre given, e.g. how destructive industry forces have proven to be in science, from petroleum to tobacco to pharmaceutical companies. (Section 3.2 here doi.org/10.5281/zeno...) 4/n

3.2 We do not have to ‘embrace the future’ & we can turn back the tide
It must be the sheer magnitude of [artificial neural networks’] incompetence that makes
them so popular.
Jerry A. Fodor (2000, p. 47)
Related to the rejection of expertise is the rejection of imagining a better future and the rejection
of self-determination free from industry forces (Hajer and Oomen 2025; Stengers 2018; van Rossum
2025). Not only AI enthusiasts, but even some scholars whose expertise concentrates on identifying
and critically interrogating ideologies and sociotechnical relationships — such as historians and gender scholars — unfortunately fall prey to the teleological belief that AI is an unstoppable force. They
embrace it because alternative responses seem too difficult, incompatible with industry developments,
or non-existent. Instead of falling for this, we should “refuse [AI] adoption in schools and colleges,
and reject the narrative of its inevitability.” (Reynoldson et al. 2025, n.p., also Benjamin 2016; Campolo and Crawford 2020; CDH Team and Ruddick 2025; Garcia et al. 2022; Kelly et al. 2025; Lysen
and Wyatt 2024; Sano-Franchini et al. 2024; Stengers 2018). Such rejection is possible and has historical precedent, to name just a few successful examples: Amsterdammers kicked out cars, rejecting
that cycling through the Dutch capital should be deadly. Organised workers died for the eight-hour
workday, the weekend and other workers’ rights, and governments banned chlorofluorocarbons from
fridges to mitigate ozone depletion in the atmosphere. And we know that even the tide itself famously
turns back. People can undo things; and we will (cf. Albanese 2025; Boztas 2025; Kohnstamm Instituut 2025; van Laarhoven and van Vugt 2025). Besides, there will be no future to embrace if we deskill
our students and selves, and allow the technology industry’s immense contributions to climate crisis

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 06/09/2025

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or
even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in
the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or
apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we
are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not
considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This
is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse
and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece,
we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology
industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to
relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI
(black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are
in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are
both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and
Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf.
Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al.
2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms
are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

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Emily M. Bender @emilymbender.bsky.social · 03/09/2025

Something I didn't get to say yesterday: We heard over and over during the event about "human-centered" approaches to "AI". But if refusal is not on the table (at every level: individual students and teachers right up through UNESCO) then we have in fact centered the technology, not the people.

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Charles Logan @charleswlogan.bsky.social · 01/09/2025

Since tomorrow is Labor Day and school is in session, I'd like to argue (again) that teaching about GenAI should include discussion of the extractive, exploitative labor conditions that make the technology possible. 🧵

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John Warner @biblioracle.bsky.social · 28/08/2025

This is an inevitable byproduct of automation. The AI boosters have been selling us that deskilling in some areas will result in upskilling in others, but we have no evidence of this. We don't even have a particularly good theory. We have salesmanship B.S.

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Joshua Erlich @joshuaerlich.bsky.social · 27/08/2025

we live in a world defined by replacing human labor (employees) with machines which then need human babysitting (independent contractors on slave wages)*

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Karim Wafa-Al Hussaini @karimwafa.bsky.social · 23/08/2025

What frightens me isn’t just that people have stopped reading. It’s that they’ve replaced reading with mimicry. A quote here, a post there, stitched together to sound like wisdom. And sadly, in this world where books gather dust and posts go viral, it’s very easy to confuse loudness for wisdom.

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Tressie McMillan Cottom @tressiemcphd.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

Firing and demoralizing feminized jobs as enemies of the state while brazenly bribing men with violent jobs that almost instantly puts them into the middle of middle class is very basic gendered warfare. Fulfilling the manosphere’s promise.

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Charles Logan @charleswlogan.bsky.social · 15/08/2025

"What's propping up 'AI' is not 'the people.' It's the police. And it's the petroleum industry. As such, when I hear educators insist that 'AI' is the future that we need to be preparing students for, I wonder why they're so willing to build a world of prisons and climate collapse."

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Kim Kelly @kimkelly.bsky.social · 14/08/2025

Kind of feel like it should be bigger national news that the poorest major city in the country is being forced to accept devastating service cuts to our public transit system because PA Republicans actively hate Philly and want to cause us pain

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Tess Bernhard @tessbern.bsky.social · 11/08/2025

A very 2025 quandry: I received a rejection from a journal & the editor's summary of the reviews contains various inaccuracies, misnaming theoretical constructs and misattributing feedback to the wrong reviewers. My worry is that I got decisioned by AI. Is it petty write a note to rebut the summary?

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David M. Perry @lollardfish.bsky.social · 05/08/2025

The answer to “how to use AI responsibly” is “don’t.”

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Meredith Whittaker @meredithmeredith.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

Stand by this: www.politico.com/newsletters/...

What’s a technology that you think is overhyped?

I’m going to give a sideways answer to this, which is that the venture capital business model needs to be understood as requiring hype. You can go back to the Netscape IPO, and that was the proof point that made venture capital the financial lifeblood of the tech industry.

Venture capital looks at valuations and growth, not necessarily at profit or revenue. So you don’t actually have to invest in technology that works, or that even makes a profit, you simply have to have a narrative that is compelling enough to float those valuations. So you see this repetitive and exhausting hype cycle as a feature in this industry. A couple of years ago, you would have been asking me about the metaverse, then last year, you would have asked me about Web3 and crypto, and for each of these inflection points there’s an Andreessen Horowitz manifesto.

It’s not simply that one piece of technology is overhyped, it’s that hype is a necessary ingredient of the current business ecosystem of the tech industry. We should examine how often the financial incentive for hype is rewarded without any real social returns, without any meaningful progress in technology, without these tools and services and worlds ever actually manifesting. That’s key to understanding the growing chasm between the narrative of techno-optimists and the reality of our tech-encumbered world.

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Alex Hanna @alexhanna.bsky.social · 23/07/2025

🔥 from @hellobrittparis.bsky.social Lindsey Weinberg, and Emma May around the weaponization of AI in higher ed. academeblog.org/2025/07/22/f...

Join the Fight
The issue is not whether you personally use Microsoft CoPilot to help with slogging through emails, and it’s not about punishing students. Rather, it is about the value of your work, being paid appropriately for it, the importance of learning and intellectual curiosity, being able to have control over your working conditions, and caring about the future of participation in a democratic society.

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SeasonalPun @pixelfish.bsky.social · 17/07/2025

You know what emergent tech of the last decade actually works well, and was adopted by millions? 3D printing. It’s great! So many applications. But also nobody is sneering at you for not having or utilizing 3D printing. Nobody is trying to sneak a 3D printer into your garage without your consent

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RAPUP-UAW @rapup-uaw.bsky.social · 18/07/2025

🚨WE WON OUR UNION 🚨

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Atrios @eschatonblog.com · 10/07/2025

Every "tech" guy is just a VC guy in a subculture that gets called "tech" for no particular reason. Most real "tech" - like, i dunno, cutting edge materials research - doesn't get called that while "a new pizza delivery app" does

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