@mberehil.bsky.social
Arguing schools need to teach "AI literacy" is entirely corporate marketing or geopolitical "new space race" rubbish now. It eradicates the history of media/digital literacies as *critical* programs to support informed consumers and creators. It just means accustomization to prompting for BS jobs.
What does vendor commitment to 'responsible AI' and 'safety' mean in a world where the biggest AI companies sell their technology and support services to war criminals and repressive regimes like the USA and Israel? www.dropsitenews.com/p/microsoft-...
The Israeli Military Is One of Microsoft's Top AI Customers, Leaked Documents Reveal
Microsoft is a major provider of cloud services and artificial intelligence for the Israeli military, according to internal documents.
dropsitenews.com
Clearview’s facial recognition business model is based on “weaponizing our own images against us without a license, without consent & without permission” Mother Jones. www.motherjones.com/politics/202...
Revealed: The shocking far-right agenda behind the surveillance tech used by ICE and the FBI
Thousands of newly obtained documents show that Clearview AI’s founders always intended to target immigrants and the political left. Now their digital dragnet is in the hands of the Trump administrati...
motherjones.com
Excellent rebuttal of the "AI will save teachers time" claim that education policy and edtech developers keep circulating, written by a teacher who is "very tired" of hearing it
Marcus Luther@marcusluther.bsky.social · 2y ago...and that's assuming that "efficiency" is always a good thing. Which it's not. Especially for teaching and learning. thebrokencopier.substack.com/p/the-senten...
“Though the AI was trained on the work done by the LIS [legal investigations support] team, it has not yet been able to replicate it. And now 10 engineers charged with developing the AI have been sacked and the fate of the project has been thrown into doubt…”
Google Wants AI To Process Police Data Requests. It’s Not Going Well.
After Google laid off part of the team responsible for ensuring government requests for users’ private information are legal, it turned to AI to pick up the slack. Employees tell Forbes it hasn’t.
forbes.com
Wrote a piece about the return of "brain training", a very old phrenological and pseudoneuroscientific business now being re-booted as a pedagogy of "mental fitness" with wearable neurotechnologies and "brain models" trained on users' neurodata codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2025/03/20/t...
Training and valuing the brain through neurotechnology
Image from Leiden University Libraries on Unsplash A neurotechnology company has just released a new headset device that claims to improve “cognitive fitness” by scanning and training users’ …
codeactsineducation.wordpress.com
Silicon Valley is coming for faculty governance. The vultures are circling the corpse of the neoliberal American university. www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
As #AIagents multiply, IT becomes the new #HR department "Getting to an agentic AI-powered enterprise has its challenges, however -- especially when it comes to data, trustworthiness, and talent." ~ @joemckendrick.bsky.social www.zdnet.com/articl... #GenerativeAI
As AI agents multiply, IT becomes the new HR department
Fast becoming the emerging power behind enterprise microservices, AI agents will need to be acquired, onboarded, and guided - just like their human counterparts. Here's how that works.
zdnet.com
Columbia University pushed out professor @katherinefranke.bsky.social because of her pro-Palestine advocacy. She joins @premthakker.bsky.social to discuss the systematic free speech crackdown at Columbia and across the US. Watch the full conversation: zeteo.com/p/columbia-t...
Full article: Mapping rentiership and assetisation in the digitalisation of education www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Mapping rentiership and assetisation in the digitalisation of education
Published in Learning, Media and Technology (Ahead of Print, 2025)
tandfonline.com
"We’re going all in on AI this semester! Instead of traditional lecture slides, you’ll be working with three AI tutors,” said the university. “Complete bull****,” one student enrolled on the course said. “The university should not have ever allowed this to happen.”
Lisa Stampnitzky 🤷🏻♀️@lisastampnitzky.bsky.social · 2y agoThe kids are alright “AI is constantly incorrect, environmentally damaging and such a stupid way of learning. I started studying so I could be taught by professionals, not a robot telling me slop gathered from hundreds of places on the internet,” www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/universit...
New paper from our @leverhulme.bsky.social funded project on biology, data science and education just out Led by Dimitra Kotouza, it explores how student "attention" has been conceived by neuroscience as an object of intervention and a source of value via neurotechnologies doi.org/10.1080/1750...
"If universities don’t start asking harder questions about AI’s real value, they’ll keep spending money they don’t have on tools their students don’t need—while real educational challenges go unresolved."
Marc Watkins@marcwatkins.bsky.social · 2y agoWhat’s really going on with campus-wide AI adoption is a mix of virtue signaling and panic purchasing. Universities aren’t paying for AI—they’re paying for the illusion of control. open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...
"Right now, our unregulated environment means that AI is being sold as an appropriate tool for automating teachers ... and a host of other connective jobs. When we are inventing a new hammer, we need to remind ourselves that not everything is a nail." hbr.org/2025/02/im-a...
“I’m Afraid We Are Automating This Work Without Really Understanding It”
AI is often touted as a way to handle busy work to free people up for tasks that matter. But in the race to add automation to pretty much every job, it’s rare that people question what, exactly, peopl...
hbr.org
„This evidence is intended to create novel types of consensus between industry, academia, government and schools, redefining the boundaries of public education and the private edtech sector in an increasingly digital age.“ Straight on my priority reading list!
Ben Williamson@benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 2y agoMost edtech sold to schools is not supported by evidence. Now, a new edtech evidence industry promises to address this gap to support schools. For our new article, we studied how "edtech brokers" make evidence and how they are becoming "edtech knowledge governors" doi.org/10.1080/1476...
Who is setting the vision for the future of education, and how? Short thread about the futuring methods of the venture capital edtech investment industry "fuelling the future of education" ⬇️
Ben Williamson@benpatrickwill.bsky.social · 2y agoDigital futures of education are often defined by the edtech investment industry in terms of market value forecasts made with predictive technologies Our new paper on edtech venture capital just out for a forthcoming special issue on assets and rents in education www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
One of the reasons the university sector has come so spectacularly off the rails is the fact it's so unfriendly to family life, people with caring responsibilities and parents. The attitude is often: 'Not working 24/7? You're not fully committed!' www.science.org/content/arti...
Universities are trying to make data useful for purposes such as efficiency, while EdTech companies try to generate commercial value from data. @jkom.bsky.social and I will look at the problems of making data useful and valuable at the London BETT show in January!
Janja Komljenovic@jkom.bsky.social · 2y agoCheck it out: uk.bettshow.com/2025-agenda/...
New from 404 Media: Bluesky may have said it won't use user data to train generative AI, but someone else just published a dataset of million Bluesky posts for "machine learning research". Already very popular dataset, your data may be scraped www.404media.co/someone-made...
Someone Made a Dataset of One Million Bluesky Posts for 'Machine Learning Research'
A Hugging Face employee made a huge dataset of Bluesky posts, and it’s already very popular.
404media.co
‘Protect the climate for whom?’ #Cop29 More than 80,000 explosives have been dropped on the area, 75% agricultural land damaged and already exhausted water systems contaminated. “Israel controls more than 90% of our energy" www.theguardian.com/environment/...
‘Protect the climate for whom?’: Palestinians highlight Gaza at Cop29
Advocates and officials argue that consequences of Israeli siege are inextricably linked to tackling the climate crisis
theguardian.com
AI in schools is a huge market opportunity for the tech industry, but it's also a massive public problem and requires much better oversight. Our report on this for the National Education Policy Center tried to ring the alarm bell on AI in schools earlier this year nepc.colorado.edu/publication/ai
Brian Merchant@bcmerchant.bsky.social · 2y agoHonestly, this should be ringing alarm bells everywhere — if OpenAI is successful in this effort, it would mark the biggest intrusion into general education of Silicon Valley yet, giving it power to shape lesson plans and course generation, and locking schools into enterprise contracts.
Let's go, call your senators and demand they support Sanders' Joint Resolution of Disapproval. It would block $20 billion in weapons transfer to the genocidal IDF. #Gaza #FreePalestine
“We've never seen in the history of the United States a stronger surveillance capacity paired with weaker rule-of-law protections…”
High-risk groups are preparing for increased surveillance during Trump 2.0
The president-elect has promised retribution against his enemies — and that will likely include digital monitoring.
axios.com
"The Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) says approximately 55,000 workers in its urban, rural and suburban mail carrier bargaining units are off the job, saying little progress has been made during bargaining." Solidarity with all postal workers. www.cbc.ca/news/busines...
Canada Post workers go on strike, negotiations still underway | CBC News
The Canadian Union of Postal Workers (CUPW) says approximately 55,000 workers in its urban and rural bargaining units are on strike. Both the union and Canada Post say progress in negotiations has been slow, leaving businesses and consumers to fret as busy shopping and holiday periods loom.
cbc.ca
