if they say something and you say that's not true, your response is still shaped like their frame Your frame has to *contain and explain* their frame, not just contradict it. You have to eat their frame. Like Kirby

One thing that is true in this age of "AI" is that authenticity is going to be prized more than ever before. A single hand-scrawled sign is going have more impact than the smoothest "AI" image because the people seeing it knows it comes from someone's brain, not a tuned algorithm.

Always interesting to see what Fraser Institute is talking about this week. Apparently they feel that to shorten the Ontario teacher education program it should remove the theory classes. #cdnpse www.fraserinstitute.org/commentary/o...

Winnipeg! That was a great conference the other year... 10 years ago... oh wow, am I old now?

When people say they work from an AI first draft I don't know how that works, or if it even can work. That text has been developed without judgment. Information without judgment doesn't make sense to me. "I got this business plan faster because AI" means you got something produced without judgment.

I was wondering when someone would try this and be upfront about it. Because this is going to kill people. And they know it too, they know that safety regulations are written in blood. So this is their statement that making things easier on themselves is more important than your life.

I love it when my research comes out with a different result than I expected. And this is why in policy research its so important to have a good historical understanding of the 'problem' being solved and the methods being used to try to solve it.

/6 Watch, as this unfolds, two key things: (1) how blatantly the Gestapo will lie, and demand that you ignore what you can see plainly, and (2) how uselessly, how pathetically, how impotently the media will treat those lies and dither at this murder, craven publicists to evil.

Anyone else read this as being one step away from 'if Canada doesn't agree to our terms we see no problems with using military force against them'? Fun... /s

Great illustration of something I've seen over and over as I've travelled talking about genAI and learning. Students want experiences that have them interacting with each other and that help them figure out their own lives. They crave agency. We can give it to them. (This was true pre ChatGPT too.)

Threat of implied force is still force yall, this isn't a new concept. We all get it, we've all seen a mob movie, pretending you don't know what Trump means is silly.

Book mail is the best mail!

I asked this before but didn't get an answer, so as it is this time of year I ask again: We all know the many published criticisms of student evaluations, and yet we have to go through this rigmarole again and again. So: does anyone know of good published defenses of student evaluations?

I always taught Letter from a Birmingham Jail when I was teaching English. Its such a powerful piece.

Reminds me of one of my favorite memes:

If a Florida Panther gave me their Stanley Cup ring it would be a nice bauble that I could display. But I did not win the Stanley Cup.

Kids read. But as they get older they are being told to do so many things (work, school, extra curriculars) that reading for fun gets dropped. And since reading full books, as opposed to short stories and excerpts, means less time for testing a wide range of specific outcomes its sidelined in school

I wonder if these people all forget their own schooling experiences, where people relied on Cliff's Notes instead of reading the assigned books - or watched the film adaptations. You know, pre-internet, supposedly "pre brain-rot" lol.

As I work on my lit review, I once again am indebted to @raulpachecovega.bsky.social for his lit review matrix. It's turned what could have been a monumental task into a manageable, scalable, and understandable practice.

Academics’ enthusiastic (and often uncritical) embrace of LLMs and generative artificial intelligence will be a factor in the junkification of research. You can’t outsource thinking nor the cognitive task of gradually absorbing knowledge. Nor discernment and creativity.

"Ideal worker normal shape policies and practices... but I show how they are particularly pernicious for people who are caregivers, disabled, and navigating loss. The result is that these workers experience a workplace that fails to treat them as whole people..." p. 97 Oof, that's a whole thing

I'm really looking forward to presenting at the Dialogue in Democratic Education conference. Come join me.

"obey the state and you get to keep your life" is probably the shortest possible description of fascism you can put together

Can we please teach Albertans that how university campuses work in different provinces is different? I know in Alberta there's a court decision saying campus is public space so you have to allow free expression from non-students on it, but I don't think any other province has done the same.

Canadian unemployment stable at 8.2% but youth (15-24) unemployment now up to 13.3%. Not quite early 1990s levels, but things haven't been this bad for this long for over 30 years.

Expect to see a surge of proud ignorance and proplawganda about what you can say about ICE agent Jonathan Ross, identified by local media as the person who shot and killed Renee Good. In particular, expect a repeat of Rittenhouse-era “accusing him of murder is defamation” rhetoric. It’s not. /1

The problem is the leavers are essentially invisible. The bad apple that spoils the bunch is generally good at convincing others that they're essential. In a store it means they reliably spend money, in a friend group they bring the beer, in a club they volunteer for visible and difficult tasks.

Synopsis: You need to kick more people out. You will actually have a larger base of customers/attendees if you kick more people out. You will make more money. I am dead serious.

/5 Also, I’m not the audience, and even if I don‘t like it, I think politics is better served by sincere expressions of values than by vapid centrist message-neutering. Let a thousand slogans bloom.

Oh no, are the people who believe the scam that SAT scores directly correlate to IQ, and that IQ directly correlates to G, at it again?

The number of tools that get more and more complicated (what the creators call 'powerful') over time shows how broad this problem is. They, or at least their UX team, need to watch more newbies using it, or split the tool into a basic version and an advanced one.

Didn't hit all my goals for 2025, but at least I hit my reading goal.

Not really, no? What we label "AI" came into being long after I reached competence and fluency in my writing. Professionally it's not useful to me, other than to occasionally poke at it to understand its current state. Also there are less environmentally destructive ways to spur ideas/structure.

Merry Christmas all!

I'm not an economist or very knowledgeable about finance in general, but selling a company to yourself to kick the problem down the road kinda sounds like the billionaire equivalent of the old writing yourself cheques between different banks, or paying credit cards off with credit cards.

A small (personal) example of this book’s intellectual dishonesty: My father-in-law is reading In Covid’s Wake, and excitedly told me he found a passage where I’m quoted. The quote in question is me saying the FBI worked to censor speech on social media. Huh? When did I say that?!

As with a lot of things there are those who see freedom as the 'ability for everyone to be free' and those who see it as the 'ability for me to be free' and, while these can look the same sometimes, they are not.

Today I’ve been thinking a lot about GenAI teaching us that writing — words — should not be laboured over. That time spent on words is time wasted. This week I’ve stumbled upon discourse about using ChatGPT or similar to help with writing reference letters, obituaries, and family Christmas letters.

Alberta is going to the Polls in 2026 open.substack.com/pub/duanebra...

Halfway out of the dark!

Haven't these people heard of Streisand effect

A paper that doesn't exist having 42 citations is horrifying. But also this seems like the end result of how we use publication frequency as a stand in for quality in higher ed.

Closing out my year with a journal editor shocker 🧵 Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that's when it got real weird...

"I refuse." This is it. There's no reason we should accept a narrative of an already settled future which marginalizes humans and individual agency. No one wants this. No one asked for it.

my quick look at the province’s new rental vacancy numbers and yes, I did have to wear my novelty cbc christmas sweater, IT’S CALLED GRAVITAS

question - how long would you keep a manuscript submission at a journal before withdrawing the submission and trying somewhere else if they haven't even made a decision on whether to send it out to reviewers?

The main thing I have had hammered home by the past ten years in politics is that we really need pretty much every government office to be run by boring and anonymous nerds who you will never once hear about in the news

It's publication day! My article "Labor Market Need is Not Enough: A Normative Claim" was published today in Prior Learning Assessment Inside Out. www.plaio.org/index.php/ho...

Final paper submitted, and my first semester of PhD studies is done!