100% this. Every time someone says 'AI is here to stay," we need to ask why. Why? This is not some all-powerful deity we are unable to resist. It's a damned technology product that doesn't work well, and we can choose to refuse to use it.
Science, technology, and neuroscience educator, mostly retired but still kibitzing. Into cartooning, maker spaces, and storytelling. And because life demands it, politics.
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100% this. Every time someone says 'AI is here to stay," we need to ask why. Why? This is not some all-powerful deity we are unable to resist. It's a damned technology product that doesn't work well, and we can choose to refuse to use it.
Yeah. They brought in a new tech director over the summer who had only worked in business. He wasn't a bad guy, but he honestly believed that PCs were less expensive to purchase and maintain, so he made the switch. He simply had no understanding of the systemic disruptions that would entail.
They really were! For quite a while virtually all of the special ed adaptive devices were Apple only. One painful memory is talking to a special ed teacher in the 1990s whose district removed all the Macs and replaced them with PCs. She had $25,000 in adaptive equipment that was rendered useless.
I worked in ed tech for forty years, and there has been a constant cycle of technology people looking at education as a big, juicy market. They assume they understand what teachers and students need, and leap in with their solution. Almost all eventually fail, including Microsoft.
I worked in ed tech wayyy back then, and I worked with virtually every computer company. In the 80s and 90s nobody came close to providing the support, curriculum materials, and training Apple did. It was effective marketing, but it also made their devices far more useful in a classroom. 2/2
That's somewhat of an exaggeration. They never "gave away" computers, but they did offer large discounts to educators for their personal purchases, which certainly helped with teacher acceptance. And they actively sought educator feedback in a way the other companies didn't. 1/2
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I’m not disputing that voter suppression efforts impacted the election; there’s plenty of evidence for that. I’m saying recounts probably wouldn’t have uncovered tally manipulation, since nothing surfaced in the audits.
Yes, but it turns out Biden received no votes in that same precinct four years ago. It’s a small precinct representing a tight-knit Hasidic community that appears to vote as a bloc. There are similar patterns in other precincts.
All of the swing states conduct post-election audits of some kind. Nothing showed up. www.scribd.com/document/787...
This is Leo Macallan. He's a transgender man. I wonder how happy these legislators would be to have him share the restroom with their mother/sister/wife/daughter.
There are four main arguments for AI in education: 1. Efficiency, saving teachers time 2. Equity, making education inclusive 3. Improving outcomes by personalizing learning 4. It's inevitable Is it true? Nope. Micro 🧵
I wish lawmakers would focus on this (and AirBnB/VRBO) with at least as much vigor as as current efforts to change zoning laws to increase supply. Extra supply won't help if malign financial actors just buy up any new inventory.
My lab's been attacked by an anti-wind group and their lawyers. They threatened the science funding of my whole university, to shut me and my undergraduate research assistants up. NYT just covered it. 1/n www.nytimes.com/2025/08/25/c...
Message to the National Guard
And a functional question - if you eliminate te entry jobs, where do the future employees for the more challenging roles come from?
Just listened to an interview on KUOW with Ed Lazowska, of computer science department at the University of Washington. They haven't seen a dramatic change in employment for their graduates, and he attributed what issues they did see to shifting money to AI infrastructure, not using AI to code.
The most remarkable thing about this morning’s raid on John Bolton is that he’s not a Black woman. I suppose he’s their DEI target for harassment this week.
Excellent thread. It’s also important to remember that the “owners” where the head of the household. The 2% number does not include all of the family members who also benefited from enslavement. And many, many people who didn’t own slaves rented them from people who did.
Again: this is not about what this country can or can’t afford. It’s about priorities.
Hello. I wrote a nice long essay about AI and this very strange moment where we're constantly told we're living in the dawn of a strange new future but the only thing that's actually clear is that everyone feels pretty unmoored and uncertain. I hope you'll read it
I'm in Walla Walla today to hear from local health care providers about the consequences of Republican cuts to Medicaid and health care. Democrats need to pound the pavement in rural areas to make plain WHO is responsible for longer wait times and higher costs.
As of today, thanks to Trump, Americans are paying the highest tariff rate since 1933. And the average household is going to lose out on $2,400 thanks to Trump's tariffs. You are paying more for almost everything because of Trump himself.
I am reading a lot about Ed tech and AI this month, to get caught up. And I want to say one thing — this is every previous wave of ed tech extraction at one time, on steroids. Not even the Apple/microsoft school wars comes close.
Just a note this has changed over time, at least in Washington state. When I was certified in the early 1980s the only content area with two quarters of study (rather than one or none) was reading. It was intensive, and it really prepared me for how complex and challenging teaching reading can be.
Microsoft says AI will transform how we use computers, but as of right now Outlook consistently puts error messages *from itself* into my junk mail folder, so I don't know when a message has bounced. If they can't make a 40-year-old technology dependable yet, I'm not holding much hope for AI.
People who keep posting guillotine memes need to remember that many, many more poor and middle-class French citizens were executed than the rich and royalty.
Actually, he saw 1.2 million die, give or take. But in his fevered alternate reality, the vaccines were responsible for many/most of them.
Education grade-level standard are quasi-arbitrary, too, but that sure doesn’t seem to preclude using them to drive policy discussions.
Every person who works in educational technology should read this at least twice a year.
I agree with you. It was a close election, and she was running against headwinds (especially inflation frustration and the Gaza tragedy) that had nothing to do with her race and gender. Of course racism and misogyny in the end made the difference, but each election is different.
As someone involved in educational technology for 40+ years, I strongly endorse this. Students absolutely should not be using generative AI, in school or at home. #edtech
A piece of property he flipped to a Russian oligarch just a few years later for more than double what he paid for it.
Lots to unpack in this study, but to me the critical issue is in the last line of the abstract: "...strikingly, where they increased AI persuasiveness they also systematically decreased factual accuracy." arxiv.org/abs/2507.13919
I worked with many schools and districts in my career, and the most consistent pattern I saw was this: Whatever you want students to experience in their classrooms is what your teachers need to experience in their work. An old Latin phrase translates “You can’t provide what you don’t have.”
I know these are trying times and venting can be helpful, but can we give these over-used comments a rest? “We’re cooked (or f***ed or doomed).” “Make it make sense.” “Got it.” “We live in the stupidest timeline” or “I hate this timeline.”
Just genuinely curious - how do schools in states/districts that have regulations requiring board approval of curriculum deal with using generative AI, which is creating curriculum materials on the fly? #edtech
Don't get me wrong - I think it's far more likely that those were indeed his personal picture, particularly since he hasn't offered up any good alternate explanation. Hacking is plausible, but that's not the same as probable.
In less than five minutes, before we had even finished configuring things, someone outside our office connected and started to Airplay porn. We quickly booted them and turned on password protection. It’s entirely plausible that Walters could be that incompetent with his security settings. 2/2
I am absolutely NOT defending Ryan Walters, who I believe is a disgrace, but - Some years ago we installed our first wall-mounted TV and AppleTV setup in my boss’s office. We left password protection off because we were on the third floor of an isolated building, so we figured it was safe. 1/
I finally unfollowed Axios because they were regularly posting stories clearly intended to inflame the progressive/liberal divide, always with unnamed sources, and never confirmed by any other outlets or journalists. This is just one of many such stories.
Excellent article about how LLMs perform their feats of "magic" by exploiting the same psychological hacks that psychics do when performing cold readings. ::Chefs kiss:: softwarecrisis.dev/letters/llme...
That would be rational, but the problem is that virtually all the tech companies have convinced themselves that AI will be the true Sorcerer's Stone, and that the first company to create Artificial General Intelligence will rule the world. That requires going full tilt with data centers.
He's staying low to let the spotlight shine on his boss. I agree he would be a poor candidate in an open election, but if DJT passes during the term JD will pull out all the stops to lionize DJT: Huge, garish funeral, statues, face on currency, etc. to show his obeisance to the cult leader.
Remember that DJT was able to capture his base in part because the pre-existing network of evangelical/Christian Nationalist leaders actively promoted him to their flocks. They will do the same for Vance. If they can convince the faithful that DJT is godly, they can convince them JD has charisma.
A tale in two headlines. The second headline is just one of the reasons I am not the least bit interested in the first one.
The press (and voters) will give him a honeymoon, and he has little of the scandalous baggage DJT. He won't be a chaos agent like DJT, and his administration will seem calmer and more reasonable by comparison. He'll keep most of the cult, and could easily pick up a sizable chunk of the middle. 2/2
In the long term, yes. But in the short term, if DJT expires while in office, Vance will provide the cult with an extended period of mourning and lavish state funeral that lionizes their hero. He will probably move quickly to add his face to Mt. Rushmore, onto currency, and build a statue in DC. 1/2
Yes, but. He's the groomed Manchurian candidate of Thiel and the fascist authoritarian movement. He'll never have the cultish devotion of DJT, but if DJT leaves/expires during his current term, JD will take over with the kind of tight focus on cementing authoritarianism that DJT is incapable of.
I am cancelling my Paramount+ membership, and will be sending the money instead to support public broadcasting. If one out of eight Paramount+ subscribers were to do the same thing, it would make up for the federal budget cuts - not to mention make an important political message.
Not in our state. Voters passed a constitutional amendment to establish the non-partisan process in the 1980s. In order to change it, you would need a 2/3 majority vote in both houses of the legislature followed by a statewide vote. We’re blue, but nowhere near 2/3 in either the house or senate.
The challenge is that in many blue states (such as mine) we have passed laws to prevent gerrymandering, setting up independent commissions to draw up the maps. Hopefully some of the blue states have more easily adapted processes.
We already have a lot of anecdotal evidence of chatbots contributing to serious delusions among some adults. It's absolutely insane to turn kids loose with such a powerful technology without first understanding its impact, especially during the critical period of adolescent neurodevelopment.
After every election, regardless of outcomes, pundits of every stripe write articles about "What the voters told us." It's almost never based on any data, just the pet issues each particular pundit is already focused on, or the groupthink they fall into as a herd. It's all self-hypnotized blather.
I'm confused about the idea that "identity politics" is unique to the left. *All* politics is "identity politics." Everything 47 and his ilk talks about is which identities are worthy of rights, and which identities aren't. Ignoring marginalized people is just identity politics with an eraser.
I’m not trying to be argumentative, but it’s my belief that we are at the peak of a hype cycle, not revolutionary change. We have always been terrible at predicting the adoption or impact of new technologies. Always. The more certain someone is about the future of AI, the more likely they are wrong.
These are the same people and companies who told us the Metaverse would take over our lives, and who encouraged businesses and organizations to squander tens of billions of dollars preparing for it. The best outcomes in that situation were for those who stayed away from the conversation entirely.
All of these are being built and launched before conducting even the most basic level of research on their effectiveness. I have seen countless examples of technology-based instruction products over the years, and 99% of them launch with great promises and then eventually disappear without a trace.
I began my career in ed tech in 1979. I have seen these same claims over and over and over again. They always fade away under rigorous independent scrutiny. I grant little credibility to the data the sponsoring company provides; show me truly independent research that properly measures results.
These tools are too new to have any evidence of long-term benefit. There is absolutely no need to rush AI into the hands of children before the impacts of their usage are clearly understood. The manufactured sense of urgency is being used to shut down critical consideration and discussion.
There has been no independent assessment of the success of this approach, and given that tuition is roughly $40,000, it’s very likely there are other contributing factors to the students’ high scores. It’s certainly not sufficient evidence to counter the many known negatives around use of AI.
Have you listened to both seasons of Rachel Maddow's "Ultra"? The fascist movement has been a significant subculture within the United States since the 1920s, openly embraced by popular figures and politicians. We have done our level best to ignore or forget it.
re: generative AI I have finally fully and accurately explained my problem with how it’s marketed and used. And now, you can use it, too.
These are not mutually exclusive.
Honestly, I’ve never seen anything like it. Most new technologies have a small group of early adopters before others come on board more slowly; this feels more like a pell-mell stampede without any thought about separating hype from reality or consideration of the unknown negative side effects.
“There are no magic wands” is not a defense of the status quo; it’s a statement that reflects the reality that all (successful) major system changes involve a lot of work over a long period of time. It’s not a message to discourage, it’s a message to encourage buckling down for the long haul to win.
As a retired educator who spent his entire career working with educational technology, few things have disappointed me more than the enthusiastic and unquestioning adoption of AI by my former colleagues.
I found this take interesting - youtube.com/shorts/3WXdT...
I am pleased to see academics pushing back hard against the unquestioning adoption of AI. This quote captures all of my concerns in a nutshell.
Dr. Yong Zhao wrote the book “What Works Can Hurt.” It’s about how quick we are to implement innovations in education without assessing the potential negative side effects. That’s a central aspect of medical practice, and it’s irresponsible we don’t do it with powerful, untested tech with kids.
I have been totally shocked at how cowardly many universities and administrators have been, first in Florida and now at the national level. I never would have imagined it.
Unfortunately, the quality of the constitution isn’t relevant when you have judges who intentionally misinterpret it.
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He did the same thing in 2020, after the killing of Iranian General Soleimani. In retaliation, Iran fired missiles at two American bases in Iraq. Trump steadfastly claimed there were no injuries other than "headaches," but dozens were treated for TBI, and one committed suicide due to their symptoms.
The official account of the DNC was quick to congratulate him. bsky.app/profile/demo...
That's great to see! The next question is which efforts drove the gains. Each grant funded different models, and just the one I was a part of had 18 sub-projects targeting different issues. If that was the average effect size, some initiatives must clearly have had larger impacts. Which ones?
We just released the Pew Research Center's 2024 validated voter report! This comprehensive analysis of the 2024 electorate examines turnout and vote choice by matching members of our survey panel to official state voter records. www.pewresearch.org/politics/202...
MERKLEY: How do you feel about being responsible for hundreds of thousands of kids dying because of your sudden interruption in these key programs? VOUGHT: I reject the assertion MERKLEY: I find your response both ignorant & callous. Few Americans have had a more devastating & disastrous impact
I saw a presentation by Khan in 2012, and he gave an example of their iterative design practice and how they used it to improve the testing in Khan Academy. What they “discovered” was an aspect of good testing design that actual educators have known for a hundred years. I was appalled.
I think you’re missing my point. The Democratic Party is formed by the votes in primary elections. If the people want something different, they can organize, campaign, and elect new leaders. Just like New York City did tonight. The old guard Democrats didn’t determine the outcome; voters did.
Perceived authenticity is key - as is Mamdani’s apparent willingness to collaborate with others, even if they don’t agree on everything.
To make clear where I stand, I’m thrilled to see that it looks like Mamdani is going to win in NYC. I love firebrands like AOC and Rep. Crockett and want to see the Dems filled with such leaders. But both of them understand power is developed through coalitions, not fratricidal confrontation.
First, I don’t have “a candidate.” I’m independent. Having open fascists running against non-fascists makes a pretty clear choice to me. Second, it’s not an “attitude,” it’s a logical choice. There’s no R that stands for *anything* I believe. Any D stands for at least something I can agree with.
I’m not saying Bernie was wrong or that he wasn’t a good candidate. I’m saying the majority of people voting in the Democratic primaries preferred Clinton. The leadership of the Democratic Party is who it is because it’s who people voted for, and I f people people want better options, they can vote.
Bernie ultimately lost because he didn’t get enough votes. Unless you think Democratic voters can’t think for themselves, the opposition of the party leaders isn’t why Clinton won. If Bernie had started his campaign earlier - and been an actual member of the party - it might have been different.
The change is made at the primary and local level. DJT and the Rs win because conservatives vote red no matter who. He won the 2016 election even though he had less than 40% of the primary vote. Once the ticket is set, blue no matter who. Voting otherwise is bringing a spoon to a knife fight.
It's up to us a voters to change the dynamic. Look at the Republicans - ten years ago the entire R leadership rejected DJT and his brand of politics. It's beyond unfortunate that DJT was successful, but it's a good illustration of how powerless party leaders are when voters take control.
More than 50,000 new people have signed up to run for office since Trump's election in November, an unprecedented spike in young Democrats interested in seeking public office for the first time, says the progressive group Run for Something. www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-...
At least a few are. This one, and MTG, too. bsky.app/profile/raws...
We need to remember - and remind others - that using generative AI is a choice. A bad choice 99.99% of the time. The intellectual atrophy and real costs of creating and maintaining these tools vastly outweigh any supposed benefits they bring.
What I find even more disheartening is how many people have used this issue to falsely accuse Harris and the Democratic leadership of abandoning their duty by not fighting the mythical theft of the election.
(sigh) A *lot* of the latest "Trump/Musk stole the 2024 election!" buzz surrounds a lawsuit regarding the results in Rockland County, NY, where people are claiming "Harris received 0 votes which is statistically impossible!" In fact, she received ~44% of the vote in Rockland County, NY. 1/
It's like the "right way" for a minor to drink alcohol or use online gambling.
It's certainly worth the caveats you mention, but so far I haven't seen *any* study with positive effects from using AI. Dr. Yong Zhao's book "What Works Can Hurt" points out that we rarely consider negative side effects of new educational technologies as we rush to adopt them. That needs to change.
Another good article on the cognitive damage (or loss) caused by use of using AI. My only addition to it would be to emphasize that the skill of critical thinking requires holding content knowledge, and reliance on AI damages that as well. #edtech open.substack.com/pub/briankla...
@democrats.org have a new #DailyBlueprint and as always, I learned so much www.youtube.com/watch?v=NAId... 1. Republican Senator Josh Hawley (MO) is really not okay with the budget bill cutting rural healthcare. www.youtube.com/watch?v=aL26... 🧵
Donald Trump and Republicans are trying to steal food from hungry people to give huge tax breaks to billionaires. @tokuda.house.gov shows just how difficult it is for thousands of Hawaiians – and millions more across the country – who rely on $6 a day from SNAP to feed their 'ohana (families).
Today in #Skrmetti, SCOTUS allowed Tennessee's cruel ban on necessary care for young trans people to stand—a devastating blow to the most vulnerable in our community. Today is a loss, but we won't stop fighting for full equality. Read our statement at the link in our bio.
Absolutely. Tesla’s 99% accuracy rate is a recipe for disaster, because it’s cognitively impossible to maintain driving focus if the car is doing it for you 99% of the time. You won’t perceive any problem in time to respond because you won’t be paying attention.
We made our first (of what will be many) donations today. I stand with the LGBTQ+ community.