Kathleen Quaintance

Four Frictions: or, How to Resist AI in Education - Public Books We are calling for resistance to the AI industry’s ongoing capture of higher education.

www.publicbooks.org/four-frictio...

THIS is the way to get students to admit their AI use

Me doing natural dye workshops in 2025, vs. my mom doing a cooking show on the local TV channel in the 90s. 🥹

My grandpa passed away over a year ago and we're still finding gems among his extensive collection of tools + implements (he was an engineer and a farmer.) Why he would keep old castrating bands is beyond me, though...

Something I love about the dialect i grew up with is the verb "fuss." someone "takes to fussing," someone's "fussing about," or "makes a fuss." so much fussing!

how to think about research from someone writing about handweaving in 1922

I'm just on here to follow all the neuroscientists because I'm determined to be the one humanities partner of a scientist who actually attempts, even if unfruitfully, to understand what he does!!

using the brain as the dominant metaphor/model for computation was a mistake. It naturally leads to the foolish assumption that computers can have intelligence like real brains can. We should change the metaphor to the loom. (Which used to be the metaphor for the brain, before computers!!)

it can produce students who don’t know what they want or what they believe. (They do know what they SHOULD want and believe, or what they’re told), but questioning remains limited. We need to re-instill the spirit of the gumshoe in our students …. Dig into the microfiche again kids …. !!

Everyone said that their students seem to hold less agency: they’re unable to ask themselves: “what do I think of this?” If given a book and an LLM, they’ll turn to the LLM to ask what the book means instead of seeing for themselves. good strategies were discussed to meet them where they’re at tho!

I went to a meeting yesterday for educators who want to teach attention in today’s tech-addled world + folks from ALL levels, from kindergarten to grad students, are seeing the same behaviors that seem to me influenced strongly by AI.

i'm glad that you've figured that out, but I'm (a) bad at computers and it's not exactly super easy (b) don't have enough gpu or ram or capacity for that. and I kinda think I'm not alone in that

yeah! and this framing also helps alleviate the kinda hand-wavey "well, learning to phrase prompts is like learning to phrase research questions, so it's good!" I'm level-headed about it but I think the industry has resorted to so much mythical boosting that critics have to retaliate in turn.

I know many others have mentioned this, but I keep reminding my students and colleagues that to speak to to the LLM is to give it your voice--your input becomes its training data.

I feel like this resonates at a mythic scale--it's like the little mermaid. don't give your voice to the witch, girl!

The Grid Philip Glass · Koyaanisqatsi · Song · 1983

i would go to church if the church had The Grid open.spotify.com/track/64VYy2...

the structure of the grid is crazy powerful to me for some reason (the reason: i am a weaver) such that when i saw the phil glass/lucinda childs/sol lewitt ballet irl I was so inspired that I turned up to the house of the person I had a crush on and gave them a kiss and now we are in love 4ever...

Kinda crazy that I have to remind my students even if they’re just using AI as a tool, whatever they say to it is probably being absorbed into its training data. So if you don’t want it to own your ideas, best not to talk to it at all. “Talk to the hand,” as they say ✋

thinkin abt piling up on a friend’s dad’s office chair to watch videos together on the very nascent YouTube, and how my twin brother and I were only allowed computer time if I did the keyboard and he did the mouse. The experience of looking *together* is rich

Like I use my loom to teach and research, not to make money. I use one crock pot for dyeing, and the other for food. Straightforward stuff maybe, but “use” and our choice in it is a tanglier category than it seems

The internet is only useful to me as a tool for making helpful or enlightening discoveries. I do not need to see what I already know nor promote myself. Some ppl do and that’s ok! but having a guiding user principle for a given technology I think is wise

when historians study cybernetics i'm like the astronaut with the gun in that meme but i'm saying "it's all history of anthropology....always has been..."

Aha!! This makes so much sense, thank you. There was a big shift recently from Orbis to this new interface and there was a big pushback and now I finally understand why. Thank you so much 🙏

Then I cannot be said to have too many tote bags because I can simply turn 5 bags into 1. and then I shall have less.

I’m so excited to be done with the fiery deadline hell I’m in so that I can cut up all my unused tote bags - which I hoard to no end - and sew them into larger and better franken-tote bags. It’s the little things

I’m also told that if they don’t confess there’s nothing you can do, which seems like a real way to just resign everyone to full adoption. very huge bummer

Recently I’ve been grading less on “proper” things (it’s helpful that I teach WGSS/art history which has less strict conventions!) and more on what I’m calling “panache and verve.” We practice it in class so they can’t use AI, but it does involve taking creative stances that AI can’t.

I think the thing that bums me out is that the writing center has been taking a pro-AI tack. I think plenty of tutors and teachers who work there aren’t down for it but the institution as a whole is. as is the curriculum for the required English comp class. Feels like an uphill battle :(

I'm also mostly importing these things by just clicking the browser plug-in button on Chrome and not actually properly processing through a citation export on the lib's catalog, even tho that is a function they offer. So it could just be me being lazy tbh

I definitely agree! i find little else more terrifying than the sites and programs that I regularly use deciding to "integrate AI"

I'm importing from my uni's online library catalogue, which could be the problem. When I ask it to generate a bibliography that includes edited volumes, it tends to put all edited volumes under "unknown" and then all the blank spaces below are the repeats of the "unknown" author if that makes sense!