Ryan

They Went to the Woods Because They Wished to Live Deliberately

www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/r...
Quick article about how people build replicas of Thoreau's cabin and what "Walden" means to them. Could be a good way to introduce Thoreau and transcendentalism. I could imagine this in a unit asking, "what does it mean to live deliberately?"
#edusky

"Hamnet" was an incredible movie and that ending was poignant. Jessie Buckley delivered an incredible performance as did Paul Mezcal, but that ending with Agnes reaching out is going to stick with me. Such a beautiful movie about love, loss, grief, and expression.

As A.I. Companies Borrow Billions, Debt Investors Grow Wary

@edzitron.com has been saying it as long as anyone has listened, but looks like the mainstream is finally coming wise to the inevitable AI crash... The whole thing is a house of cards
www.nytimes.com/2025/12/26/b...
#AIBubble

Is teaching future teachers the way out of literacy crisis?

I'm new to Oregon, but this certainly seems like a pressing issue. Based on the reporting, the universities here do seem to be teaching future teachers according to best practices. Of course, there are outliers. Going to keep following.

reader.theoregonian.com/is-teaching-...

144 Picture Prompts to Inspire Student Writing (Published 2023)

www.nytimes.com/2023/06/05/l...

Just learned about these photo prompts from @nytimes.com, and I'm so delighted to have these in my back pocket for ELA journal prompts. #EduSky

What Happens After A.I. Destroys College Writing? The demise of the English paper will end a long intellectual tradition, but it’s also an opportunity to reëxamine the purpose of higher education.

Can we please remember this?

"Large language models like ChatGPT don’t 'think' in the human sense—when you ask ChatGPT a question, it draws from the data sets it has been trained on and builds an answer based on predictable word patterns."

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

#AI #Sceptic

A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness. That’s a Problem The discomfort of loneliness shapes us in ways we don’t recognize—and we may not like what we become without it.

"Evolution primed us to see minds everywhere; nature never prepared us for machines this adept at pretending to have them. Already, the mimicry is good enough for some—the lonely, the imaginative. Soon, it may be good enough for almost everyone."

#AI #Sceptic

www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...

Not a threat?

Using AI for "brainstorming creative projects" and "summarizing long texts" is even more of a threat to student learning than using it to generate text.

And yes, it is cheating -- Cheating students out of actually learning to read and come up with their own ideas.

🤢🤮🤢

#edusky

Teachers will invest in things they see value in. A lot of time. Tamara Ferguson

Maybe it is less about tools saving teachers time and more about taking less time to learn relevant practices and tools.

Ask any teacher what they want from PD. Most start with: Will it help students?

Yes, they want to save time, but helping students comes 1st.
#EdTech #Teaching #EduSky

Finally! The Search for More Money!

Single-panel Mallard Fillmore comic strip. A university administrator is speaking at graduation. They say, "And now that you're officially alumni, it's time to start thinking about giving something back... ... We accept all major credit cards. To set up a one-time or recurring donation, just scan the QR code printed on all four corners of your diploma."

Seems accurate

"resting in our pockets or hanging around our necks."

#AI

"This, in turn, would warp the direction of global economies, requiring the construction of ever-larger data centers. The economic and environmental overhaul would be done in the name of outsourcing our human thoughts and memories to an omnipresent machine...

"This means that, if we all started using our personal A.I. machines dozens of times a day, as we do our iPhones, the environmental toll of our personal technology would skyrocket—imagine something like turning every car on the road into a diesel truck...

"Some research estimates that generating a typical e-mail using A.I. consumes a bottle’s worth of water to siphon heat away from the data centers’ servers to separate cooling towers...

More needs to be said about the environmental effects of AI. Select use of AI I'm all for, but people don't need personal generative AI devices, and such devices will be harmful beyond imagination. Here's a good quote from Kyle Chayka describing the energy demands:

Can we add learning styles, aka VAK, to this list?

Doing this with AI and doing that with AI to improve blah blah blah can be accomplished by working with another human, too... And, get this, you get to develop a relationship with someone whom you can trust and depend on. Quit using AI for human tasks #EduSky

"But both are sensitive"
#scifi #reading #quote

Continued...
"The soundest fact may fail or potential in the style of its telling: like the singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, different, round, and real than pearls are."

Every time I pick up an Ursula K Le Guin book I'm blown away by the force of her writing. The opening lines of 'The Left Hand of Darkness:'
"I'll make my report as if I told a story, for I was taught as a child on my homeworld that Truth is a matter of the imagination.

A small ant mound with homes in it that look like a smiley face.

Little happy ant hill!

Passed my dissertation proposal defense this week, and I'm feeling pretty good about that. Is this how Sisyphus feels when he gets to the top of the mountain?
#phd #phdsky #academicsky

This shouldn't have to be news to people, but unfortunately it needs to be spelled out plain as day like this .. 😔

This was a fantastic article from Dr. D. Graham Burnett. Of everything I've read in argument for the benefits of AI, this was the most moving and articulated.

Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence? Maybe not as we’ve known them. But, in the ruins of the old curriculum, something vital is stirring.

"But no amount of peer-reviewed scholarship, no data set, can resolve the central questions that confront every human being: How to live? What to do? How to face death?"
From Will the Humanities Survive Artificial Intelligence?
www.newyorker.com/culture/the-...

I hope everyone realizes that scrubbing historical references from web sites is no different than burning books

So did DOGE cut the person that was supposed to onboard everyone onto how to send a secure transmission? Signal and then Gmail??!

Medical Benchmarks and the Myth of the Universal Patient From growth charts to anemia thresholds, clinical standards assume a single human prototype. Why are we still using one-size-fits-all health metrics?

Medical Benchmarks and the Myth of the Universal Patient
www.newyorker.com/magazine/202...
I really enjoyed this and thought it was a very well put argument against universal standards.

What's the point of writing an article then if you're just going to reduce it to cutting the "clutter?" Just like online articles written for SEO, academic articles will be written for AI after enough time. Products like yours are going to remove nuance from academic writing—making it all binary.