Catherine Cronin

Thank you very much for such an informative session today!

beautiful by Rebecca Solnit: “The fabric of this country is forever being torn apart by hate & exclusion; it is forever being stitched into new patterns, new connections, new relationships… a quilter's art of bringing the fragments together into a whole”

thinking of Frances Bell & #FemEdTechQuilt

Letter from President

What a wonderful President we have. #translivesmatter #transrightsarehumanrights

brilliant news! 👏👏👏

such a long and terrible journey, Ian. I am *so* happy to hear that it is over. thank you, thank you, on behalf of so many of us, for standing up what was right and never backing down. IAN LINKLETTER 👏👏👏

thank you, Ingrid! I have just ordered a beautiful calendar :)

Postscript to Open Access Week 2025 Two years ago this week Higher Education for Good: Teaching and Learning Futures, edited by Laura Czerniewicz and myself, was published openly by Open Book Publishers. To our amazement, the publica…

"This work is not easy, it is risky, and there’s no guarantee that those who do it will see its benefits. But it is essential."

I am grateful for those in #HigherEd who stand alongside me. In the work. And now, when the work is trying to leave me behind.
catherinecronin.net/reflecting/p...

always standing alongside you, Robin. x

thank you for sharing @francesbell.bsky.social & @sheilmcn.bsky.social –– and I hope to be able to see your presentation @gabiwitthaus.bsky.social! the threads of good work, like #femedtech, continue on in new ways and are woven into other good work. thanks for the reminder. love to you all 💛

Transcending the digital and physical at #altc22 – the #femedtechquilt It’s always tricky to try and summarize a conference experience in one post, so this post like so many other of my past conference posts is not going to try to do that. Instead I want to take…

So lovely to see images of the #femedtech quilt peppered through @gabiwitthaus.bsky.social keynote this morning - here's a post about it from a previous conference howsheilaseesit.net/oer/transcen.... #altc25 - @lornamcampbell.bsky.social @francesbell.bsky.social @catherinecronin.bsky.social

Two days to go for submissions (closing 22 October) - please consider submitting a proposal - #Springer #OpenAccess

On-Demand Learning in a Changing World: Philosophical, Technological, and Practical Perspectives on Workforce and Vocational Education

iasle.net/call-for-cha...

I resent having to learn so much about a cabal of ridiculously wealthy mostly, but not exclusively, white tech dudes who believe they should inherit the earth. They really will be the death of us all.

YES, Sherri! and I recently ordered the book. like you, am committed to paying attention to it all as I am quite sure that many will seek to rewrite history at some point. in the meantime, we take receipts and challenge as best we can. thanks for all you do.

We Need To Rewild The Internet  | NOEMA The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.

Can't work because AWS?

It's a good time to read this piece if you haven't! www.noemamag.com/we-need-to-r...

What an honor to be featured in this series! Shout out to @brennacgray.bsky.social for making this a reality. 🙏🏾

so happy about this, Maha! so well deserved for all the thought, care & good work the @equityunbound team has done ❤️

The nomination is absolutely lovely and so, so true:
“In a world of overwhelming content and increasing educational precarity, MYFest offers something different: a space of possibility. It is a deeply human, thoroughly open practice—responsive to community, designed for care, and grounded in equity

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously toa) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

Figure 1. A cartoon set theoretic view on various terms (see Table 1) used when discussing the superset AI (black outline, hatched background): LLMs are in orange; ANNs are in magenta; generative models are in blue; and finally, chatbots are in green. Where these intersect, the colours reflect that, e.g. generative adversarial network (GAN) and Boltzmann machine (BM) models are in the purple subset because they are both generative and ANNs. In the case of proprietary closed source models, e.g. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Apple’s Siri, we cannot verify their implementation and so academics can only make educated guesses (cf. Dingemanse 2025). Undefined terms used above: BERT (Devlin et al. 2019); AlexNet (Krizhevsky et al. 2017); A.L.I.C.E. (Wallace 2009); ELIZA (Weizenbaum 1966); Jabberwacky (Twist 2003); linear discriminant analysis (LDA); quadratic discriminant analysis (QDA).

Table 1. Below some of the typical terminological disarray is untangled. Importantly, none of these terms are orthogonal nor do they exclusively pick out the types of products we may wish to critique or proscribe.

Protecting the Ecosystem of Human Knowledge: Five Principles

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia:
doi.org/10.5281/zeno...

We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical
thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity.
1/n

YouTube video by Institute for Advanced Study RARE/EARTH: The Geopolitics of Critical Minerals and the AI Supply Chain

We explore these dynamics in our workshop report: www.ias.edu/sites/defaul...

And we invite you to watch the public event which preceded the workshop: “RARE/EARTH: The Geopolitics of Critical Minerals and the AI Supply Chain” held at IAS on June 2, 2025 www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxVM...

congratulations Tressie! so grateful for your light right now.

I wrote this thread because I sat at my desk and thought, "Fuck it, we're cooked." But then I remembered something I say in my book that "writing is feeling" and I managed to rekindle just enough spirit to get going on the work and that work will continue to stoke the fire. I want that for students.

Doing DEI when you can’t use the ‘D’, the ‘E’ or the ‘I’ word ‘DEI is dead, long live DEI!’ How to resist attacks on DEI, develop deep resilience and reimagine and reform your practice with kindness

Doing DEI when you can't use the D word, the E word, or the I word:

www.timeshighereducation.com/campus/doing...

This 1 New Instagram Feature Is A Privacy Nightmare. Here's What You Need To Consider Before You Activate It. Sharing this information can be fun, but experts warn it's also a gift to stalkers.

Sharing your location is a personal choice, “but when you do it through a platform owned by Meta, you should understand that information will also be used to target you with ads” & could be demanded by the government, EFF’s @mariotrujillo.bsky.social told @huffpost.com.

Tomorrow: Carole Cadwalladr meets author of 'Empire of AI' Karen Hao Tune in to find out how OpenAI became an empire, and what that means for the rest of us

Tomorrow: Carole Cadwalladr meets author of 'Empire of AI' Karen Hao

12pm BST, Live on Substack

@carolecadwalla.bsky.social @karenhao.bsky.social

More here: citizensreunited.substack.com/p/next-week-...

5 questions for Danielle Citron

Read this interview with a personal hero, Professor @daniellecitron.bsky.social: "we have essentially presumed that data collection is a good...We have long ignored this important inclination that collection itself is endangering our privacy and civil liberties" www.politico.com/newsletters/...

looking forward to listening! :)

Belonging, place and digital practice – institutional insights from visiting fellow’s study at UHI The University of the Highlands and Islands (UHI) is pleased to share the findings of a year-long sabbatical project led by Dr Bonnie Stewart, Visiting Fellow from the University of Windsor, Canada.

this came out this week. :)

my sabbatical research project on belonging. what an absolute privilege to spend a year focused on culture, place, & the intentional, relational use of digital tools...especially in the midst of the current force-fed AI speculation bubble.
www.uhi.ac.uk/en/media/new...

❤️❤️❤️

AI for good, with caveats: How a keynote speaker was censored during an international artificial intelligence summit Q&A with Abeba Birhane on how she was censored during the AI for Good summit and how the industry can do better.

Good interview with @abeba.bsky.social

Challenging AI Hype and Tech Industry Power Authors Emily M. Bender, Alex Hanna, and Karen Hao discuss how AI serves as a powerful marketing tool for tech giants who have a product to sell and profits to rake in.

Enjoyed this conversation very much... @karenhao.bsky.social (author of Empire of AI) and @emilymbender.bsky.social & @alexhanna.bsky.social (co-authors of The AI Con) discuss how to challenge AI hype and tech industry power –– via @datasociety.bsky.social

datasociety.net/events/chall...