Prof Prachi Srivastava 🌈
@prachisrivas.bsky.social
Education and global development, Adelaide University | UNESCO Network on Education, Epistemic Justice and the Knowledge Commons Previous: UN, University of Oxford, University of Sussex, IRC https://researchers.adelaide.edu.au/profile/prachi.srivastava
No - it's one wholesale entry of private firms after another in education. EdTech firms know that seeming magic bullet solutions will get picked up in the face of severe underinvestment of public education.
Hypervisible @hypervisible.blacksky.app · 8h ago“Teaching educators about AI is a ‘moral imperative’, said Randi Weingarten, the AFT president.” “And without outside funding, it was a choice between taking big tech’s money or doing nothing, she said.”
Reminder that Australia has amongst the highest private school enrolments in the OECD (~30%) and the highest private school tuition. This enrolment figure is similar to L/LMICs. And, there are major funding inequities from the public purse to private schools. theconversation.com/families-say...
Families say they are struggling to pay school fees – why are so many still choosing private schools?
We know more students are going to private schools, even though fees can be steep and families might need outside help to afford them.
theconversation.com
Penny Allman-Payne@pennyallmanpayne.com · 18h agoSomething that’s been lost in the NAPLAN reporting today: the equity gap in our school system is growing. First Nations kids, kids living in poverty, and those in regional, rural and remote communities are falling further behind. Most of them attend an underfunded public school.
The researchers that I know, myself included, who were 'pulling their hair out' because of school closures were balding because of the very issues you raise: systemic inequality. And, because we knew the long-term educational and developmental harms. We also knew what should be done to prevent them.
When schools reopened, those communities were not prioritised for extra resources or for curricular adaptations. They should have been. Research in the US, and in similar systems show that the long-term effects of pandemic school closures still exist and are worse for marginalised children.
On average, both the number of schools and the length for which they were closed were greater in marginalised neighbourhoods serving marginalised children. These neighbourhoods also tended to have higher incidents of infections because of the systemic issues those communities faced.
I can appreciate that the post is drawing attention to systemic racism in education. But, it also perpetuates a myth that is harmful to those very students. Schools were not 'closed for five minutes'. In some jurisdictions, closures amounted to half a school year or more.
I've noticed an increase of blogs, columns, substacks, etc. clearly primarily generated by LLMs and most times without any attribution to AI. It's false representation and intellectual pillage. It's not confined to men. The women who uncritically engage don't see tensions of feminist positionality.
Kate Manne@katemanne.bsky.social · yesterdayGenerative AI is catnip to the men who miss female sycophants katemanne.substack.com/p/a-culture-...
Academic folks - @wikipedia.org scam alert: Someone contacted me on my university email twice with the address: [Name]wikipediaeditor@gmail.com They claimed to be a Wikipedia editor wanting to create a public page for me. I reported it as phishing. #AcademicSky #BlueSky #phishing
Fake Wikipedia Page Editorial Assistance Scam | Information Security Office
security.berkeley.edu
1. Academics aren't 'imagining' deaths. They're estimating them. Using data. This is substantively different. 2. Dismantling USAID triggered a knock-on effect of 11 aid agencies cutting aid = ~25% of ODA. The effect is cumulative. 3. Deaths are the worst but not only effects.
The Economist@economist.com · 16h agoElon Musk claims that his dismantling of the world’s biggest foreign-aid agency cost “zero” human lives. That is plainly wrong. But so are estimates of millions of additional deaths
New Zealand capital delights in rare snowfall as southern city residents ski down world’s steepest street
New Zealand capital delights in rare snowfall as southern city residents ski down world’s steepest street
Snow falls in Wellington for the first time in 15 years while snow blanketed Dunedin and Christchurch on the country’s south island Temperatures have plummeted across New Zealand as an Antarctic cold snap hovers over the country, delighting the capital, Wellington, which experienced snow for the first time in 15 years, while giving a southern city’s residents a chance to ski through the streets. The front moved in on Tuesday, with much of the country waking to freezing conditions, frosts, snowfall, hail and bitingly cold wind. Continue reading...
theguardian.com
Seven people in my network, including 3 in my extended family, perished during the pandemic. Several people, too many to count, were seriously infected. Many were hospitalised. They lived in Canada, the UK, the US, and India. Mortuaries and hospitals overflowing. Global.
Anjali Dayal@anjalikdayal.bsky.social · 6d agoI will never forget waking up at 3am every morning as they turned the floodlights on outside to place more bodies into the mobile morgue outside my window. Everyone’s beloved dead, stacked nightly like so much excess, while the waking city was a claustrophobic nightmare. Never.
I will never forget waking up at 3am every morning as they turned the floodlights on outside to place more bodies into the mobile morgue outside my window. Everyone’s beloved dead, stacked nightly like so much excess, while the waking city was a claustrophobic nightmare. Never.
Bill Grueskin@bgrueskin.bsky.social · 7d agoRunning out of body bags, using forklifts to transfer corpses into makeshift morgues, a mortician conducting 200 funerals in a month when he usually does 30, crematories running at double capacity… And these senators just want to memory-hole it all www.nytimes.com/2020/04/30/n...
The point on school closures was not just 'open' or 'close', it was also what mitigation and resourcing were provided to systems and to the most vulnerable communities to mitigate educational and developmental harms that we knew would occur. These were not done.
With the COVID inquiry in the UK and Dr Fauci in the US, suddenly my feed is ablaze with pandemic discourse and discussions on school closures like it was in 2020 and 2021. And just like 2020 and 2021, my head is spinning. Wow. We really do need a proper discussion on the effects of closures.
Must see pics. Too long to wait until I'm back there again.
The Guardian@theguardian.com · 3d agoInside M&S’s Oxford Street swanky revamp, the blueprint for its £700m growth strategy
Maybe that was the secret. Otherwise committees and admin.
London Review of Books@lrb.co.uk · 3d ago‘In 1905, Einstein had no academic position, but somehow managed during that year to write 21 reviews for an academic journal and to publish four major scientific papers.’ Ray Monk (@raymodraco.bsky.social) on Einstein. www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v4...
Boy would I have loved to be on the academic program development committee for this one.
Luke Steuber@coolhand.bsky.social · 4d agoI’m with the boomers on this one. Burn it all down
"You want to write a sentence as clean as a bone. That is the goal." — James Baldwin, born on this day in 1924 #AmWriting
This is the kind of recognition we spend our whole academic careers striving for. Few will be victorious.
EMILY WILSON@emilyrcwilson.bsky.social · 6d agoNo professional accomplishment has ever made me happier than this. theonion.com/translator-o...
As someone who sat on the Education Policy Institute’s working group on disadvantage gaps during covid, I’m under no illusions about the enormous educational and psychological harms of school closures – especially for working‑class and BME children. Those impacts are real and must not be downplayed.
Yes, to all this. I intimately worked on COVID and education globally for the G20 and in Ontario. We just re-ran a lit review on school closures as a lever to curb infections. Cross-national studies (globally) find they were not effective when other societal mitigation measures were not used.
Prof Christina Pagel@chrischirp.bsky.social · 5d ago🧵On @thenewsagents.co.uk yesterday, school closures and the lab leak theory were offered as two examples of legitimate questions that were hard to ask. Both have in fact been asked constantly since 2020. But here's a thread on why I think they were wrong and dangerous on school closures 1/12
Oh... *that's* why they don't want to tell us. They're looking out for our health and wellbeing. So very benevolent.
WIRED@wired.com · 4d agoNew EU rules stipulate that people must be told when they’re interacting with AI or looking at AI-generated or -edited content, leading to fear of “disclosure fatigue.” www.wired.com/story/europe...
Most of my university students agree to such measures.
Roopika Risam@roopikarisam.bsky.social · 4d agoFrom the mouths of teens: “States should provide AI literacy as soon as students get access to classroom devices; AI use should be banned on all graded tests; and teachers can require an oral defense of any project from a student suspected of using AI inappropriately.” www.npr.org/2026/07/30/n...
No.
Zachary Schrag@zacharyschrag.bsky.social · 4d agoThe first students who were given these teaching machines were like, “Wow, this is cool. This is amazing.” And then after three weeks, they’re like, “Wow, this sucks.” — @audreywatters.bsky.social thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/can-the-clas... via @mitpress.bsky.social
Great roundup! On Windows, you can do almost all of this in one script which also takes away various ads, demos and upsells too. I'm fairly evangelical 😁 github.com/Raphire/Win1...
GitHub - Raphire/Win11Debloat: A simple, lightweight PowerShell script that allows you to remove pre-installed apps, disable telemetry, as well as perform various other changes to declutter and custom...
A simple, lightweight PowerShell script that allows you to remove pre-installed apps, disable telemetry, as well as perform various other changes to declutter and customize your Windows experience....
github.com
