Elsa Devienne

Hope you and door have a good relationship 😂

“When participants used ChatGPT to draft essays, brain scans revealed a 47% drop in neural connectivity across regions associated with memory, language, & critical reasoning.

Their brains worked less, but they felt just as engaged—a kind of metacognitive mirage.”🧪

Face à l’IA générative, l’objection de conscience Manifeste pour l’enseignement supérieur et l’éducation nationale [Vous pouvez signer ce manifeste (version pdf ici) dans ce formulaire. Un document de mise en perspective critique des discours de défe...

Un texte important venant de l'Atecopol (atelier d'écologie politique) sur l'IA générative: "Face à l’IA générative, l’objection de conscience"
atecopol.hypotheses.org/13082

This (with slices of birthday cake wrapped in a napkin and sent home with child after the party) goes on my list of "things I'll never get used to in this country".

The inevitable happened. A package sent by a dear friend in the US ended up in the bin (no slip) and is now heading to a landfill. Why on earth does the UK consider bins a "safe place" for packages is beyond me.

If you have ever liked one of my posts, please help a boy out and listen to my podcast? Or share it with a friend? Or just play episode each muted so I get the streams? It’s Books Up Close on all platforms. I’ll send you a cake/gift/hug if you do.

🔊 Dear Colleagues & Comrades! We are pleased to announce a network dedicated to addressing the omission of Palestine and the ongoing genocide within UK-based American Studies. We are hosting a symposium in Central London on the 9th May 2026. Abstracts are due on 6th February 2026. Please circulate!

Northumbria Pay and Pension Petition: Stop the Steal! If Northumbria does this, other universities will too.  These cuts will harm thousands of people, their students, families, and their local communities now and into the future.

If this goes through at Northumbria, other post-92s are next.
Sign the petition! www.megaphone.org.uk/petitions/no...

Ellie's fundraiser for Step Forward (Tower Hamlets) Help Ellie Mackin Roberts raise money to support Step Forward (Tower Hamlets)

So I am running the London Lea Valley 50km in March and trying to raise some money for Step Forward - a youth centre in Tower Hamlets, Kiddo attends their LGBTQIA+ group and it's been such a brilliant and supportive space for them, which feels so important when trans youth are under constant attack.

Engineering works apparently 😐

yup, exactly how I feel right now. Seriously considering buying a car at this point.

@tpexpress.bsky.social What is happening in January 2026 with the Liverpool-Newcastle line? The journey normally takes 2h19 but I see it takes 3h10 then and there are very few direct trains. Can you please communicate about this and explain if this is temporary?

"The humanities really are a resource — a confidence for living in our times.” Dean Sara Guyer on the modern utility of humanities degrees This interview originally appeared on the Division of Arts

"While other universities report that the humanities are shrinking, at Berkeley, the opposite is true. The music major is the fastest-growing major on campus. We are finding bigger classrooms because film is exploding. English is back to the numbers we saw 15 years ago. We are hiring" bit.ly/4ohKuOe

Signez la pétition NON à la Nuit du Bien Commun à Bordeaux

Pétition à signer pour empêcher la diffusion d'idées d'extrême droite en France sous la vitrine soi-disant apolitique de "Nuit du Bien Commun".
Derrière le projet un milliardaire vivant en Belgique qui veut voir le RN gagner du terrain (voir explications sur la page)
www.change.org/p/non-%C3%A0...

Maybe when this happens in the global north we'll have an actual carbon emission binding treaty? 🤔

I Set A Trap To Catch My Students Cheating With AI. The Results Were Shocking. "Students are not just undermining their ability to learn, but to someday lead."

To “my students and to anyone who might listen, I say: Don’t surrender to AI your ability to read, write and think when others once risked their lives and died for the freedom to do so.”

www.huffpost.com/entry/histor...

La #Cop30 devient le meme.

If you use GMail, AI (Gemini) was turned on yesterday by default and now scans all of your content for machine learning. To turn off, go to Settings>General and scroll down. Uncheck the box for "Smart features."

There's other "Smart" add-ons as well, but that's the one that reads your content.

let's keep each other updated 😅

oh goodness, the chorus pro website 😱. It sends chills... Shall we set up a support group?

Question for people who've received payments from French unis:
A French university owes me money. How do I get paid as someone who pays taxes in the UK? I used to be able to get paid as a French tax-payer (micro-entrepreneur status) but obv not an option now. Anyone with experience with this?

Assigned this @envirohistory.bsky.social article for a class on "Critical Histories of the Present." Very good seminar discussion ensued.

Recommending colleagues consider this for syllabi across a range of subjects!

So nice to hear John!! The topic does seem to engage people easily. I've received a not insignificant number of emails from everyday folks about it.

Still feels unreal, but on Tuesday I passed my PhD viva with no corrections 🎉

Can’t thank my supervisors Ben Hickman and Will Norman enough for all their support. Also very grateful to my examiners @drmattwhittle.bsky.social and @davidhering.bsky.social for an enjoyable and thought provoking viva:)

Someone posted recently about a new book or a book about to be published by a historian on Trump. Anyone knows what it could be? it looked really good and every year one of my dissertation students wants to write on Trump, sooo....

Leading medical publication the British Medical Journal recognises SUVs as a danger to public health in a new editorial co-authored by T&E’s James Nix: bit.ly/4hVDlBC

Large SUVs are a danger to pedestrians, cyclists & other drivers.

It's time to take action to reduce their presence in urban areas.

You know a country by its values. By what a country values. And it turns out thatwhat a country values can change overtime. Sometimes, though, there's a sort of cognitive delay between the country you think you are in, and the country you've actually become. For example, you can keep selling yourself, to foreigners, as the country of William Shakespeare and Jane Austen, and luring busloads of tourists to Stratford-upon-Avon and Bath, and put a statue of George Orwell in front of the BBC, and imagine yourself a cultured and literate nation, which the rest of the world admires for its devotion to the written word - but if you then chronically underfund your cultural institutions, and treat your cultural workers with contempt, many people will suspect you of being full of it. And as the decades pass - and fewer and fewer Shakespeares and Austens and Orwells emerge from your little island - even more people will begin to suspect that in truth you do not value culture at all, and are in fact running a giant heritage museum in which the only cultural workers you respect are the dead ones.

With alt text.

How things are going

A very old school scale

When your mum is proper old school but there's a cake to bake

Help NiCHE Write the Next Chapter of Environmental History: 2025 Campaign The Network in Canadian History and Environment is a not-for-profit public history organization dedicated to the dissemination of environmental history research in Canada and building a network of res...

Appreciate the work we do to get environmental history and humanities into public spaces? Help us continue to do this work by supporting our November fundraising campaign!

fundrazr.com/niche2025?re...

#envhist #envhum #cdnhist #histgeog