Jon Coburn
@joncoburn.bsky.social
Mediocre historian. University of Lincoln, UK | US history | activism | protest suicide | information literacy |
MIT report is superb. It acknowledges disruption, concedes different disciplines will handle this differently, foregrounds people and social interaction — but also says something obvious I had just about given up hope institutions could say: aiandeducation.mit.edu/report/
Final call for today’s fantastic panel discussing post-PhD careers beyond the PhD, including politics, research, administration, and the private sector. Join us on Teams at 5:30. Sign up and more info here: www.history.ac.uk/news-events/... @royalhistsoc.org @ihr.bsky.social
Finding a Role: Using History PhD Skills Beyond HE
History Lab+ Training
history.ac.uk
History Lab Plus@historylabplus.bsky.social · 2w agoFinding a Role: Using History PhD Skills Beyond HE Online Workshop August 24, 17:30-19:00 Imogen Albiston, George Higgins, Andy Holroyde and Joe Ryan-Hume will discuss careers outside the academy for ECRs… Registration open: www.history.ac.uk/news-events/...
This is what selling your soul looks like.
Jordan@jordanpfot.bsky.social · last wk.Please watch this to the end.
I can't believe the amount of recent history revisionism in the UK. Response to Polish immigration was so severe that it successfully led to Brexit. BREXIT. And tanked British economy. This happened last decade, you can just Google it.
The loss of search structure is devastating for knowledge retrieval. I teach basic lit searching and it's always felt like a really core transferable skill for students to know boolean operators and "exact phrase searching" and now google, microsoft etc have just killed it to force us to use slopAI.
Elliot @nameoftheyear.bsky.social · last wk.Oh I fuckin hate it out here. Yesterday I had to search Gmail for the quotation-enclosed string “code of conduct” and Gmail showed me every email that contains the word “of”
Sorry chatbot lovers but the waning of Boolean operators in most search functions on websites has made my life actively worse. You can't find anything, you can only have things suggested to you.
None of these things are possible now that we have to worry about AI cheating. Back to blue books and hand-graded multiple choice. Oral exams.
What’s worse is that Ai is eliminating the usefulness of previously useful tech. Use of internet in classroom? It used to make exams more efficient. You can use canvas for quizzes and tests. No more deciphering handwriting, no more scan tron machines. Students can use e-textbooks saved in the cloud.
Finally, we are not a bunch of luddites. Even humanities folks love things like zotero and scrivener. Anyone with classes over 100 students praises the good lord for spreadsheets (pls forgive). We’ve all gotten comfy with zoom and canvas and online publishing.
It feels like industry is waiting for universities to come up with ideas about how they can use Ai and all I can think is: it is not my job to make your business more profitable.
Students are often portrayed as antagonists/perpetrators in AI cheating stories, and surely some of them are—I won't entirely dismiss their capacity to make choices. But students are also the main victims. The real villains are not living in dorms or going into debt to learn nothing.
Tressie McMillan Cottom@tressiemcphd.bsky.social · last wk.Almost every single student who has found me this week wants to talk about AI. A couple reflections. One student has taken three AI courses in philosophy, health sciences and comm. They’re basically the same class. As it turns out, it doesn’t take a lot of classes to “learn” ai.
Well, ok. For information anyway. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
The Generative AI Learning Penalty: Evidence from Chinese Secondary Education
Using 30 months of panel data on 26,811 Chinese students in grades 7-12, we study how generative AI affects homework productivity and learning. The data combine
papers.ssrn.com
There is another way to produce writing that sounds like you, I'm pretty sure.
Beginning my research seminar, as always, with Lynn Hunt's essay How Writing Leads to Thinking (and Not the Other Way Around). Should be mandatory reading in light of the impact of AI. www.historians.org/perspectives...
“Why do our readers believe what we tell them?“
Roland Smith@rolandmcs.bsky.social · 2w agoIs it something to do with the Telegraph (that published this)?
Thankfully Turnitin's planned change in terms to use all student content for AI development has been forced back. But the big Q remaining is: How did getting a degree from universities worldwide become conditional on students agreeing to the end user licence agreement of an *edtech company*?
Dr Vanessa@hpsvanessa.bsky.social · 2w agoMy #DigitalFriday finds are 1. An alarming change in policy by Turnitin, who are apparently shifting to keeping all input as data for training their ML, no opt-out available (could be hugely problematic f.ex for PhD students putting in unpublished chapters...) bsky.app/profile/link...
Why is academia the only industry in which people who know nothing about it yet hate it get to represent it and opine about it in the media? The fossil fuel industry and weapons producers get friendlier coverage in the MSM than universities. It’s wild!
Sonia Sodha@sonia-sodha.bsky.social · 3w agoI’ve written for the Times today on what Jason Arday’s rise and fall from grace tells us about the chunks of modern academia that have become places that prize midwitted groupthink, and people parroting idiotic ideologies to remain in with their mates. www.thetimes.com/article/b3e4...
There’s technically already an “Annekylosaur“ so would it be a Hathawaysaurus, a Hathasaur? A (p)Hathadactyl?
Fifteen years ago, in the classroom, wikipedia was annoying because it was hard to describe to kids who relied on it why it wasn't a good source to cite in a paper. Now, it's the final remaining example of citational responsibility any of them have ever seen.
Rodger Sherman@rodger.bsky.social · 2w agoLowkey excellent thing about Wikipedia: accurately describing the extremism and lies of right-wingers because its sole concern is provable truth, while the media tiptoes around accurately describing whats happening to avoid appearing “biased” against the extremists and liars
You know who wasn't hounded to suicide for dodgy academic research? ANDREW FUCKING WAKEFIELD.
Bela Lugosi's Dad 🏳️⚧️ 🇵🇸@belalugosisdad.bsky.social · 2w agoFucking Christ alive. This is fucking horrific. Like the dude was obviously a fabulist and probably a plagiarist but SO ARE ALL FUCKING ACADEMICS. He was also still a vulnerable, autistic Black man and the entire campaign against him was motivated by racism. All these things can be true.
This is good and will prevent simple copy and paste jobs But this will also just let leaders ignore about the big problem - those using LLMs “for learning”, and making AI summaries of texts rather than doing the more time-consuming BUT necessary AND beneficial work of reading the actual things
Jacob Öberg@profjacob.bsky.social · 2w ago🚨🚨Good news: #AI detectors, human and otherwise, are about to get their biggest boost ever with new EU "watermarking" requirements that came into effect this month. Big tech is also falling in line. 🧵 www.politico.eu/article/arti...
Normally I just appreciatively read @jamellebouie.net 's columns-sharable video content just isn't my bag. But this is a very, very, very trenchant piece of commentary that captures a lot of how I increasingly understand the disjunction between the commentary environment and on-the-ground politics.
The pundits have completely lost the plot
YouTube video by Takes™ by Jamelle Bouie
youtube.com
![[Scene is a kitchen - a middle aged woman called JANET is boiling peas at the stove. A younger more colourfully dressed woman named LIZ approached her.]
JANET:
Ugh...
LIZ:
What's up?
JANET:
I am so bored of cooking peas!
LIZ:
Have you tried...
AI peas?
JANET:
AI peas?
LIZ:
They're peas with AI!
[Liz holds up to us a packet of peas labelled: Pea-i AI - Peas with AI].
LIZ:
Al-powered peas harness the potential of your peas
JANET:
What
LIZ [Now a voiceover as we cut to a whizzy technology diagram of peas all connected by meaningless dotted lines]
Why not take your peas to the next level with Al Peas' new Al tools to power your peas?
[Show a techno diagram of a pea with a label reading 'AI' pointing to a random zone in it]
LIZ:
Each pea has Al in a way we haven't quite worked out yet but it's fine
[Show Janet and Liz now in a Matrix-style world of peas]
LIZ:
With Al peas you can supercharge productivity and make AI work for your peas!
JANET:
What
LIZ:
Shut up
LIZ:
Our game-changing Pea-Al gives you the freedom to unlock the potential of the power of the future of your peas workflow
From opening the bag of peas
to boiling the peas
to eating the peas
To spending millions on adding Al to the peas and then having to work out what that even means.
JANET:
Is it really necessary to-
LIZ [Grabbing Janet by the collar]:
THE PEAS HAVE GOT AI, JANET
[Cut to an advert ending screen, with the bag of peas and the slogan:
AI PEAS: Just 'Peas' for god's sake buy the AI peas.
[Ends]](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:4m3we4apbjayclzcnhwe3pfp/bafkreiayqa37f7kik7l7s7fbtfp2sir5ckb662ry2lylinyjrfa2rkvvka)
