Nazi tat affair useful because anyone doing bizarre prevarications atm re how its totally normal to have a Nazi tattoo, good actually, not a big deal that'd matter in an election, if anything its cringe you care, etc etc, has revealed you never need to take their politics opinions seriously again.

I'm constantly shocked by the number of baseball fans I ended up following on here. Go sportsings!

I know it's not the point, but I'd really like to see what their definition of viewpoint diversity is. It always seems like they mean "people like me should be the majority, even though we aren't" or "we should hire based on ideology not ability". But both of those should be laughed at.

Anyone ever feel like Kant would have really loved trains? Dude really missed out by just a few decades. The thoughts you have when reading philosophy at night...

The conventional wisdom that "AI is inevitable" is the least helpful frame for thinking about teaching and learning and the experiences that are meaningful to students. Listen to your common sense! Maybe my book can help: www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/john-...

Remember the Year of the MOOC from a decade ago? The one where tech bros predicted the end of all but 3-4 universities because who needs campuses when everyone can just take MOOCs and learn everything? Hits a little different now after pandemic pedagogy, huh? The tech hype cycle is a helluva drug.

We have had this precise discussion many times before, with the invention of the book, radio, TV, the internet, etc. Knowledge of these discssions are freely available, but apparently the WSJ can't find it or doesn't understand its relevance. Might this kind of thing be what professors are for?

Didn't Americans have a problem with general warrants being used to catch small numbers of actual criminals? I'm pretty sure there's some important thing they wrote because they hated them so much.

In which I analyze the new report of the Alberta Post-seocndary panel. It's mostly pretty good, though a couple of bits don't seem especially well thought-through.

Conference proposal submitted! Of course the system for actually paying for my membership is down, but hopefully that's fixed soon.

ICYMI Kamloops cfjctoday.com/2025/10/12/b...

I used to live somewhere that we got fewer than 30 kids and I loved giving out full size bars. Now we get ~150 so we don't anymore.

I'd watch that

Seeing people appropriate Indigenous rights to protect their own interests is horrible. "In its statement, the Syilx Okanagan Nation said, "After reviewing the document, the Syilx Okanagan Nation can confirm definitively that it was not issued by our Nation.” " www.cbc.ca/news/indigen...

Mourning those murdered by Hamas isn't incompatible with mourning those murdered by the Israeli state. Demanding that the hostages return isn't incompatible with naming & demanding an end to genocide. Naming the power imbalance & impact thereof doesn't desecrate those murdered two years ago today.

Reposted with alt text. Also, from a cursory look, this appears to basically be true, which is pretty funny. Philosophers... debate.

If you go back to the 1950s, there were earnest debates around the world re: whether growing public funding of universities was a Good Thing because government might one day try to dictate what univesities could teach. By the 90s this was considered laughable. No one is laughing now.

A concept I'm rattling around in my head is how to explain the move from neoliberalism to authoritarianism. I'm considering it as neoliberalism is the government putting their thumbs on the scale for capitalism broadly (think of a casino where even when you win, in general the house wins more)...

A great overview of where postsecondary stands on the TRC recommendations. I especially liked Mark's distinction between Nice Symbolic Things and what was recommend. #cdnpse

I have too much to get done today so I gotta nope out of the news but I will say that someone once said we needed to keep a scoreboard of how often pundits/columnists are absolutely wrong and it should be published with all their future work to give proper context

It's never a good sign when the pacifists are called dangerous. This type of talk has proceeded atrocities many times.

AI tools can be useful, but they're not magic and the companies selling them seem to be on incredibly shaky ground financially. What happens after they collapse? Will the public orgs who have signed contracts with them be on the hook to pay for something that stops working?

I get how this is basically just an attempt to portray anyone who doesn't love Trump as evil, but I am very curious what "extremism on... race" means.

Kick off the Canadian Student Affairs Assessment Institute with a panel of Senior Student Affairs Officers exploring “Assessment in Action.” Discover strategies to integrate assessment with equity, diversity, inclusion & decolonization. Don’t miss out: cacuss.ca/events/Eve...

"Canada’s levels of investment in higher education are going the wrong way, because governments of all stripes at both the federal and provincial level have thought that higher education is easily ignorable or not worth investing in." #cdnpse #cdnpoli higheredstrategy.com/education-at...

Fat Bear Week time everyone!

Nothing is going to improve in Canadian higher education until the political class accepts that we need to make it better rather than cheaper. How will we know they have accepted it? When they are prepared to put institutions ahead of voters and raise tuition.

This week UBCO welcomed the 1st cohort in the Bachelor of Secwépemc Language Fluency program, UBCO's 4th & final Interior Salish degree. Thanks to Minister @spencerch.bsky.social for attending this important milestone for Indigenous language revitalization in BC news.ok.ubc.ca/2025/09/18/u...

I've used this a few times, and it's always amazing.

Sometimes it's nice to remember that even Marcus Aurelius was like "you don't have to comment on everything bro"

This is why data is important. I suspect that the single best thing for making education affordable in Canada has been the rising minimum wage.

If we stop using 'performative' the wrong way we could make 'affected' a star

A hallmark of a police state is the need to carry identification documents at all times, just sayin’

It's swimming lesson season and I see a lot of parents in #Kamloops talk about how they couldn't get into lessons. Our public pools run ~1,000 spots a session, 3x a year. There are ~12,000 children 5-14 in town. So if every kid only did one set of lessons a year we still have 3/4 of kids without.

Ooooohhhh... they're going for the Big war crimes this time. Got it.

I'm looking forward to the first conference where there's a session titled something like "Takedown: Communicative action and demon hunting".

Good from Paul Wells, as usual. Note that among the "builders" invited to the cabinet retreat, there is exactly one sci/tech person. What kind of economy are we meant to be building, exactly? It's almost as if Carney thinks that knowledge-intensity is irrelevant to modern economies. Wild.

Something I've seen a lot in ed tech over the years is it's priced higher than needed. I don't know if this is to make it seem more premium because of the cost, or because they want to get maximum $$ in minimum time. But every time software has an annual fee higher than a person's salary, I cringe.

Our annual statisical publication, The State of Post-Secondary Education in Canada is out today. The book is very pretty: the state of postsecondary education in Canada isn't.

This. And when Edmonton responded by treating the order as if it were in good faith and laid out how they would apply the pure text of the order the whole thing unraveled faster than a UCP campaign promise.

I suspect they discovered that many conservative voters also disagree with book bans. They also realized that school divisions were not going to interpret "sexual content" to mean only 2SLGBTQ+ content. www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

Every time the automotive industry, or oil and gas, or the tech sector, faces challenges you're told (and the media repeats) just how important that sector is as a driver of the economy. Well, there's no bigger driver of the economy than the post-sec ed sector. Why don't we ever point this out?

In happy news, today is publication day! doi.org/10.47678/cjh... What Is Prohibited? Non-Academic Conduct Policies in Canadian Universities I really enjoyed writing this one, and learned a lot about the impacts on non-academic conduct policy across the country.

1: Maintain an interest in what younger people are up to. Avoid fossilizing. 2: Read for fun. Audiobooks totally count. 3: Take up a physical activity that promotes goal setting. You'll stay interested longer and benefit from the exercise. Win win! 4: Never cook with wine you wouldn't drink.

It is a strange Fall in post-secondary in Canada with budget cuts and layoffs across the country. Unfortunately this has impacted me as well and my five amazing years at Thompson Rivers University has come to a close.

Ask anyone who lived under Franco. The most common benefit they'll tell you is 'safety'; except for being safe from someone in the government deciding they didn't like you.

Kinda funny that "woke" is now basically officially an all purpose term for "thing I don't like" among conservatives, it's losing even a moral connotation. reason.com/2025/08/22/c...

My statement on Ai from the mini-comic as syllabus i made for new class I'm teaching that starts tomorrow! It robs you of your decisions & struggles - and the joy of being surprised. We won’t to be robbed of our learning - this is essential. This & the full mini at post: bsky.app/profile/nsou...

If the government puts out standards and a school district follows them to the letter, the government then saying that they went overboard seems like either the law is bad (it is) or they didn't want to have to be up front that they're banning books in libraries.