Ted Palenski

How US tech giants supplied Israel with AI models, raising questions about tech's role in warfare U.S. tech giants have quietly empowered Israel to track and kill many more alleged militants more quickly in Gaza and Lebanon through a sharp spike in artificial intelligence and computing services.

I would like to remind people that AI has already been used to kill people

OpenAI and Microsoft supplied Israel with AI models to track and kill people in Gaza which led to increased civilian deaths

apnews.com/article/isra...

if those scripts involve edtech or not, it’s beyond the point

We really need to think better about how tech can supplement the provision of education at local levels. Tech is part of a larger picture of what education is; it cannot replace it. And this goes for both proponents and critics of edtech. We risk missing the educational forest for the edtech trees.

certainly are the result of, and reinforce, those forces. Here I am thinking about the types of pedagogy that individual screens and a focus on 'cognitive' measures make possible. There is a (anti-tech) solutionist bent here: remove the tech, problems solved. This may end up being counterproductive

A narrow focus on some set of 'cognitive' measures was the justification for a lot of this tech. There is a lot here that responds to greater cultural trends, but I would be wary of placing the blame on screens. There are deep structural forces that have led us to where we are today, and schools...

They should never find rest.

Digital literacy, ai literacy: everything but reading

this especially needs doing in education. the distinction is often "the drudgery" and the "human part". i don't think the discourse ever gets to describing teaching as creative or expressive.

How do I join the non-hegemonic scholar club?

But it really is worth considering what "independent scholar" or "academic" or even "professor" (!) might do in shaping how we understand critique in relation to its object. E.g. we never hear debates in medicine framed in this way. 'Health sceptic' ?!

On top of that, wouldn't it be nice if there were efforts across civil society to create viable alternatives to Big Tech? (Thinking specifically about the UK and the US.) Yet there is *so* much investment (money, attention) in AI at the moment. This is the most unhinged element of all.

It would be fantastic if governments could get serious about regulation and, importantly, enforcement. There are so many ways that tech could be better for all of us. The focus on bans is diverting attention from systemic, obviously more challenging, solutions that require political will + stamina

Yes, agree, and the situation is even more unhinged in schools: normalisation of all sorts of tech and AI-everything, biometrics, massive data tracking operation

Legendary founder of NPR programming Bill Siemering is enjoying Zoom visiting with students so much that he's asked me to put a second call out. No honorarium necessary. Any takers?

CU signs $2M OpenAI deal for ChatGPT access Students and faculty will gain access to ChatGPT Edu starting in March under a three-year deal.

My employer, Univ. Colorado will pay OpenAI $2M/year under the banner of “equity”. That’s 54 full scholarships / year. Plus, our IT will be able to read our chatGPT logs, and our chats can be requested under public records law. No thanks. Surveillance is not equity

www.axios.com/local/boulde...

Microsoft Copilot Chat

If your (Canadian) university is buying subscriptions to gen AI like Copilot etc, can you send me a link (or the email you’ve gotten) about this?

Collecting for a reflection…

Example: it.ucalgary.ca/it-security/...

Yes it’s Valentine’s Day. But it’s also the chosen birthday of Frederick Douglass who was born in 1818 on a plantation in Talbot County, Maryland. He escaped from slavery & rose to become the most eloquent and forceful voice for the abolition of slavery & for Black voting rights in the U.S.

This is what happens when people think neurons are just doing a binary transmission of electricity around to "process information."
Meanwhile even lowly bacteria are making and deploying stuff like this:

rage as moralizing

rage as motivation to keep going

Gosh, he really likes what he does. A balm indeed for a wound that's been festering too long.

Perhaps the more important point is that, yes, learning is complex, and we ought (together) to critique the ways that edtech negatively reshapes learning, including the individual/cognitive but also the collective/social. And this says nothing of how tech constrains and shapes teachers and teaching.

Pupil tech and memory: what schools should do next Many schools have become reliant on tech to deliver lessons, but we need a more reflective approach if we are to avoid lost learning, says neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath in an exclusive extract f...

I should have a look at the book (maybe a close reading and write a review). Reading the author in TES, I do see many good strategies that shift focus away from *only* tech to pedagogy. I just worry that leaning into brain stats is (partly) how we got into this mess. www.tes.com/magazine/tea...

I am really just asking for a little bit of educational philosophy. Seems useful when we’re talking about what we’d like to see in education. Maybe certain effect sizes wouldn’t be noticeable but we’d all likely be better off.

Brain stats, PISA and IQ stats. What a world. Makes for some confusing reading. It would be nice if critics (over in the US) could read a bit more widely, and also connect the dots between the push for standardization, the evacuation of professionalism and agency, and (maybe) increasing tech use.

Cartoon. Person says to other person „We invented a robot that answers questions.“, adding, „we just have to feed it 10 baby giraffes a day“. The other person asks „But it answers the questions correctly?“ Person responds „Oh my goodness, no. No no no no no.“ By Aram J. French Appropriated due to missing alt text

No torment great enough either for the man or the system. Really underscores the structural evils of a system that can be upended by one man (plus a cabal of enablers) AND how the 'U.S. market' (highest per capita spend on healthcare) shapes medicine

Excellent, really looking forward to this. We desperately need new narratives (which we didn't really hear at the panel). Critics often talk about 'discursive closure' in research contexts abt tech. Shouldn't we look in the mirror once in a while? Work to hone our critical vocab, our imagination?

This says nothing of the possible financial impacts on people, on communities, of massive data centres; who pays for what when seem questions that ground critique in the material.

especially if we focus on how monied interests may continue to have radically deleterious effects on civic life and democracy itself, in addition to the values and dispositions we ought to cherish and foster in communities.