Thomas J. Tobin

Tom Tobin smiles in front of a sign for Farmingdale State College.

Tom Tobin smiles in a room full of educators.

Tom Tobin smiles in front of a sign advertising his keynote at Farmingdale State College.

It's an honor to speak at the @sunyofficial.bsky.social Farmingdale State College Accessibility Summit today. Thank you for inviting me!

Buffalouie's for wings and weck.

Tom Tobin stands in front of a sign with Jane Goodall on it.

Rest in peace, Dr. Jane Goodall.

Tom Tobin smiles in front of a sign for the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

Tom Tobin stands next to an emergency room bed in a simulation room at the University of Nebraska Medical Center.

Thank you very much, @unmc.bsky.social, for inviting me to keynote your InnovatED Symposium today. I am proud of the work you are doing to lower access barriers for learners.

How in the hell do you know this, Barry? Winner, winner!

Tom Tobin smiles in front of a fiberglass gorilla who is holding two giant hamburgers.

Where am I? Right or wrong answers welcome.

Tom Tobin smiles in Trinidad in front of palm trees and lush forest.

Glad to be in Trinidad today! Thank you to the University of the West Indies for inviting me to give the Premium Open Lecture on UDL.

Advice | Sometimes We Resist AI for Good Reasons Why higher ed needs to listen to the contrarians in setting policies on using tools like ChatGPT in faculty work.

My latest column for the Chronicle of Higher Ed is now live. It's an argument for including AI-critical voices in campus conversations and policymaking workgroups, and I'm proud to get this dissenting piece into the mainstream genAI/higher ed discourse. Please read and share if you're so inclined 🙂

Get your copy, friends, and then check out Chavella Pittman's work at effectivefaculty.org, too!

Tom and his cat Webster sit at a table and read a book together.

Purr-fessor Webster and I are reading about autistic self-determination. Thanks, Sol Smith for a splendid book!

EP cover for Sepultura's 1993 song "Refuse/Resist," showing a protester holding a flaming Molotov cocktail running toward Korean riot police.

Sepultura's "Refuse/Resist" is playing on repeat in my head today.

No reason.

youtu.be/6ODNxy3YOPU

Uh, boo?

when I wrote for @chronicle.com about mental illness & academia all my sources who went on record were young, female faculty (often of color) w/o tenure or job security. the tenured profs I interviewed wanted anonymity.

tenure doesn’t make you brave if you weren’t before. speak now.

Hear, hear. My medical autism Dx came at the age of 53, & I have experienced a clear "before" and "after" in the way my colleagues and institution perceive & treat me. Before: respected, quirky expert. After: "I knew there was something wrong with him." 1 among many reasons to advocate & speak up!

Learning With GenAI: Shortcuts Versus Cutting Yourself Short When should you use generative AI to learn? Some say you should use generative AI all the time; others say never. Your answer should depend on your goals.

🗣️ When is using #GenAI a helpful shortcut, and when is using it really just cutting yourself short?

Find out in this (short!) article in Psychology Today by yours truly.

#PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky #Expertise

When we were in Japan a few months ago, I bought a black festival shirt with a monkey pattern on it. Even though I got an extra large, it's still small for me (more like a US men's medium).

Anybody want one for you, your kid, or your Japanese-festival-going friend?

www.ebay.com/itm/27738057...

Tom Tobin smiles in a Japanese restaurant, holding chopsticks and a plate of takoyaki octopus fritters. There is a plate of okonomiyaki on the table in front of him.

Okonomiyaki + takoyaki = oishii!

Title slide for "Beyond the Guidelines: UDL Strategy-Development Meta-Pathways" showing Goodwin University logo and a photo of Tom Tobin, a white man with gray hair, glasses, and a giant black mustache, smiling in a suit.

FREE #UDL Webinar!

"Beyond the Guidelines: UDL Strategy-Development Meta-Pathways," Sep 17, 2-3p EDT.

Are you a nerd for all things #UDL? This one's for advanced-level practitioners (& those who want to be).

Bring your brain, questions, and colleagues.

www.eventbrite.com/e/beyond-the...

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

Webster the orange cat looks up with a derpy look on his face.

I will gladly accept my photojournalism prize, now.

a close up of a man 's face with a plaid shirt on Alt: Will Ferrell looks puzzled as he stares into a field of glowing numbers around his head.

This answer snapped a synapse for me because it inverts the categories in the question. Well played!

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
WINNER

Thanks--haven't seen this one yet!

I wonder if the folks over at CAST have seen these new studies? They are still claiming that UDL is based on neuroscience. It's an effective framework with large-n studies to show positive effects (I'm a proponent), but neuroscience it ain't.

I did not come on this platform to be attacked like this, David.

Seriously, enjoy some rest and keep writing!

In a mysterious smoke-filled space, actress Meryl Streep turns toward the camera to reveal she is wearing a large false mustache.

Hello, friends & new followers. I'm glad you're here. You can expect that I will

address inequity,
lower barriers,
call bullsh*t,
celebrate marginalized voices,
speak truth to power,
simplify complex topics,
question why we do what we do, &
share cute animal vids/pics/memes.

New by me, as we launch this new academic year.

Found ya! A little late, but welcome to the Blue Place.

I, too, thought that Clay Shirky, of *Here Comes Everyone* fame, should definitely know better. He's written about accessible spaces and tech before. This was an odd one.

Screen shot of a word=processed document titled "Who's Our Next Speaker," with a note from Tom Tobin and a fuzzed-out list of categories and people. The note reads "Thank you for working with me to be part of your event. Many folks ask me “who should we ask next,” and I’ve compiled a list of speakers and facilitator who can help you continue your good work. Please reach out to any of these colleagues and let them know that I mentioned them to you. Thanks!"

Hey, academic friends.

Are you hosting a conference, need workshop facilitators, or have grant funds for professional development?

I made a PDF list of dozens of splendid people who can help you!

P.S. Who's awesome and should be added?

www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/ie713...