Dr. Heather Leslie

Dr. Heather Leslie

@heatherleslie.bsky.social

Learning Designer. Purveyor of pedagogy. Educator. Lifelong learner/forever student. #ungrading Humanity not AI

586 Followers 349 Following 143 Posts Joined Oct 2023
4 days ago

I’d extend this argument to say that a lot (maybe most) courses are writing courses because writing is a big part of how we communicate what we know about our subject

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5 days ago
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Study Finds That Execs Are Outsourcing Their Thinking to AI The same class of business executives who heaped AI onto us by the shovelfull aren't immune to its effects.

Outsourcing their what now?

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4 days ago
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If You’re Going To Defend AI And Whine About Its Critics, You Should Probably Be Honest About Its Actual Harms I think this recent post by AI industry CEO Matt Shumer is worth a read. In it, he basically explains how quickly LLMs (large language models) are evolving to supplant many developers and prog…

had some thoughts on AI boosters' weird myopia

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6 days ago
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Visions of Life / Agents of Death: On Love Thy Neighbor and Love Thy Nature Donald Trump's world is a dead and lonely world, a world in which everything is for sale and nothing really means anything and no one else matters. Earlier this year, he pressed Nobel Peace Prize winn...

The best I've read in quite some time. I STRONGLY hope / recommend that you find/make time to read it in its entirety.

From @rebeccasolnit.bsky.social.

www.meditationsinanemergency.com/visions-of-l...

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6 days ago

there's so much bad in the world but there's also people who lift up and carry an elderly bat around every day so he can pretend he's flying again, and that's the part of the world I think is worth fighting for

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1 week ago
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What Worries Me About Teachers’ Use of AI A high school teacher reflects on how adult choices around AI use—particularly their approaches to transparency and focus on efficiency—can affect classroom culture.

As always, here's @marcusluther.bsky.social with a truly excellent piece on @edutopia.org! In education, we talk about the time about teachers modeling learning and behavioral habits for kids. Marcus applies that same idea here to our AI use.

www.edutopia.org/article/teac...

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1 week ago
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AI and Ethics AI and Ethics seeks to promote informed debate and discussion of the ethical, regulatory, and policy implications that arise from the development of AI. It ...

CFP, AI Resistance, Refusal, Reclamation & Reimagining: Ethical Imperatives and Emerging Practices! Note "This collection is focused ...on the strategies & actions of individuals, communities, organisations & collectives to actively resist, refuse, reimagine & reclaim 'artificial intelligence."

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1 week ago

Good thread on the psychological violence and emptiness of wrangling synthetic text.

Still, note that "hallucination" is a misnomer; the epistemic nihilism is always. Meaning is strictly in the eye of the beholder and correctness or falsehood can only ever be incidental, linguistic serendipity.

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1 week ago
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A new education model for peace Launching the Thich Nhat Hanh School of Interbeing

We need a new model for peace education for this world. Here is one school that is giving me hope for the future medium.com/@heatherlesl...

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1 week ago

Hi friends - I'm working on article about efforts to measure, track, and adjust WORKLOAD in higher ed, both for staff and faculty.

I'm interested in talking to people who have experiences w/:
-Workload management gone wrong
-Exemplars of workload measurement
-True tales of workload being adjusted

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1 week ago

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality.”

James Baldwin

posted today by @sjcerv.bsky.social

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1 week ago
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Are AI-generated summaries suitable for studying and research? Despite didactic, ethical, and environmental concerns, the use of GenAI is on the rise in academia. For most applications, the jury is still out on whether and how they will benefit education and rese...

This is one of the most reasoned & persuasive arguments for not allowing LLMs anywhere near reading & writing intensive classrooms. We can 100% choose not to outsource our reading & writing labor to a bot, and model for our students why they should do the same. #EduSky

www.tue.nl/en/our-unive...

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2 weeks ago

okay real quick 🧵: why AI is definitely going to explode and die, because of the last two times this happened: the dot-com bubble, and enron.

people say these events are complicated, but they're actually pretty simple

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2 weeks ago
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The People vs. AI Across red states and blue, a grassroots movement is pushing back on the unchecked growth of the artificial intelligence industry.

Don’t believe them when they say it’s inevitable.

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2 weeks ago

I continue to be fascinated by the phenomenon whereby an expert engages with any of the LLMs on their field of expertise and is instantly horrified by the wrong answers, and then goes on to use it for things they are not experts in as though it won’t be just as bad for those.

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2 weeks ago

Many in industry are now realigning their role into essentially data entry for an LLM, following this same pattern.

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2 weeks ago

Love Prof Sepinwall’s approach to cultivating student engagement, belonging, and success in the classroom 🙌

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2 weeks ago

I don't think the "Einstein" or other AI replacing the important steps of learning, esp in higher ed, would be posing quite the challenge it is right now if students hadn't been sent the message their entire lives that the point of college is to get good grades and a high paying job, not to learn.

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2 weeks ago

These thieves keep stealing blueprints from my theft empire!

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2 weeks ago
Last month, University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Jennifer Mnookin approved a proposal to establish a College of Computing and Artificial Intelligence funded by private corporations and philanthropy.
Mnookin said the move was a response to the inevitable creep of artificial intelligence into all disciplines of academia. Rather than reject AI, she envisioned a university that capitalized on this change by making artificial intelligence a "hub" connecting the humanities to computer science. On the first day of my economics elective this spring, my professor said we would be expected to use NotebookLM to pass his class. He had lengthened the coding assignments so that they would be doable only with the help of AI. The reading assignments were longer, too: ten 40-page papers per week, which he asked us to feed into AI for a summary rather than read ourselves. When it came to lectures, he told us to simply upload the slides to AI and ask it to teach us whatever he failed to explain properly in class.

BLEAK. Bleak. I’d been paying attention to Columbia selling out its governance to the Trump admin, not so much its stance on AI.
www.columbiaspectator.com/opinion/2026...

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2 weeks ago

Genuine question about this:

What does it actually look like to “augment thinking” using AI in a way that actually enhances a student’s intellectual growth?

In my personal experimentation, AI short-circuits the kind of thinking that allows for building knowledge and reflection on worldview … 🤷🏾‍♂️

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2 weeks ago

Alysa Liu telling 60 Minutes “I love struggling, it makes me feel alive” is a legit revolutionary statement from a Bay Area native in a time when copious amounts of time and resources are being put toward convincing us to opt out of experiencing struggle, friction and self-actualization

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2 weeks ago

And for *me*, given what I know now and how *I* feel, it would be “critical washing” to use LLMs with my students for reading and writing.

bsky.app/profile/iris...

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2 weeks ago
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"the loss of critical thinking and learning skills is less of a personal failure and more of a policy one, calling the generation of Americans educated with gadgets victims of a failed pedagogical experiment."

shorturl.at/Xukya

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2 weeks ago

Important thread about dehumanization by and for the benefit of tech companies w/lots of good resources

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3 weeks ago

This is why the phrase comes up in so many of the things I've written about AI.

AI does three main things:

1) dismantle the institutions necessary for democratic society to thrive

2) transfer wealth upwards

3) create the permission structure for (1) and (2)

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3 weeks ago

"Part of the reason I made a hard leftwing turn was because I was burned by my own techno-optimism. I am part of a generation that believed it could change the world, and then was taught a harsh lesson about money and power."

The Left Doesn't Hate Technology, We Hate Being Exploited

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3 weeks ago

I’m interested to know what happens in cases like this where the university provides an institutional license to a chatbot (ChatGPT, Gemini, etc.). If universities are providing access to the chatbot and it causes harm, who is liable?

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3 weeks ago

An Effective Altruist writing about AI should be taken as seriously as a Scientologist writing about L Ron Hubbard webworm.co/newgods

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3 weeks ago
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Revisiting Good Old-Fashioned Artificial Intelligence (GOFAI) In Defense of Bounded, Non-Machine Learning AI

The spirit gripped me today and moved me to write this essay on "good old fashioned artificial intelligence," which I position as opposite to the ethically compromised Machine Learning-based AI of today. I don't think people will like what I have to say.

blog.wellssanto.com/revisiting-g...

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