"one of the most common prompting techniques: giving the AI a persona... you aren't going to make the AI suddenly more accurate through role-play... This doesn't mean that personas can't be useful - for example, they change how the AI answers questions." www.linkedin.com/posts/emolli...

New #UofT teaching examples added to Teaching with GenAI webpage - our U of T Teaching Examples has been recently expanded to include a diverse range of examples from across disciplines and levels of AI engagement. teaching.utoronto.ca/teaching-uof...

"I believe the 'Police and Punish' model must now be replaced," writes Mike Larsen. "A reliance upon detection was perhaps once a necessary evil but it has never aligned with the fundamental values of higher education." www.downes.ca/post/78534

able to look away because they had looked away from so much other abuse and suffering: financial meltdowns helped trigger, wars pushed, monopolies defended, inequality they turbocharged, housing crisis milked, technologies failed to protect people. the.ink/p/essay-my-d...

www.thecrimson.com/article/2025... "But professors can be more conscientious of how the timing of their deadlines impacts their pupils. a midnight deadline seems unnecessary."

"They’re not necessarily trying to cheat; they’re just being efficient... That kind of cognitive offloading happens when students don’t see value in doing the work themselves." aiedusimplified.substack.com/p/theyre-not...

I interviewed for a TATP (Teaching Assistants' Training Program) podcast. You can check it out here - Short: youtube.com/shorts/1p0d8... Full podcast: www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUn0... TATP website: tatp.utoronto.ca/resources/th...

you know a series is going to rock when this is the parental advisory

Science of Learning has some overlap with "back to the basics", but also key evidence about how brains process and retain information: - Working memory is limited. - Students forget. - Learning requires effort. - Understanding builds on prior knowledge. scienceoflearning.substack.com/p/the-scienc...

Information about risks to the #UofT community around agentic browsers - intelligent assistants that can act on your behalf. Read through good and bad scenarios to understand how this transformation brings new possibilities and challenges. security.utoronto.ca/best-practic...

Unsurprisingly, the misinformation sites are happy to welcome AI while AI-blocking by reputable sites (increased) from 23% in September 2023 to nearly 60% by May 2025... raising essential questions for web transparency, data ethics, and the future of AI training practices." www.downes.ca/post/78392

Friday tee hee - "as these disposable vapes have begun to incorporate more elaborate electronics, these too have become an interesting target for reusability. [BogdanTheGeek] decided to turn one of these vapes into a webserver, appropriately called the vapeserver." hackaday.com/2025/09/15/h...

Asking a More Productive Question about AI and Assessment - "Given that AI exists in the world, and that students are likely to use it, what evidence of learning would I now find persuasive?'" www.downes.ca/post/78140

www.oneusefulthing.org/p/an-opinion... Notable ideas from this article: - the AI doesn’t know “why” it did something, so asking it to explain its logic will not get you anywhere. - Sycophancy: act as a critic. Otherwise, you might be talking to a very sophisticated yes-man.

"it’s a call for balance: to use digital tools to augment our thinking rather than to offload the mental processes that we need to learn and develop expertise. Learners can't think critically with knowledge they don’t have." scienceoflearning.substack.com/p/edu-snippe...

Economic Futures Symposium, interesting observations: "The productivity story looks simple. The cultural story is not." - Roles are shifting: engineers now see themselves as managers of AI agents - Mentorship is eroding: junior staff turn first to Claude for answers www.linkedin.com/posts/adrian...

AI Slop Fatigue and Analog Intelligence - marketoonist.com/2025/09/ai-s...

“We must prepare students for a world where the question is not, ‘Can you use AI?’ But rather, ‘Can I trust your thinking without using AI?’” www.theglobeandmail.com/business/art...

“The Left” and “the Right” aren’t real. They’re made-up clubs, invented and sold to the public by the people in power… and by the loudest people with the most to gain.

- AI use is increasing for cheating, but was high before GenAI. - Students being incorrectly accused leading to unexpected behaviours like using AI so it looks like they didn’t use AI. - Confusion about when AI is permissible (varies from teacher to teacher). www.vox.com/technology/4...

"Sycophancy" - a new term I learned today that describes one of the main things that bug me about ChatGPT / GenAI chatbots - "Sycophancy, in which chatbots agree with and excessively praise users" www.nytimes.com/2025/08/08/t...

This post was very helpful for me to understand why custom GPTs do not always give the greatest results, despite having a clear system prompt asking it to use the included resources. It also points out that well structured documents perform the best - www.linkedin.com/posts/huntde...

"To the class of 2025: Will you let AI think for you, or learn how to think for yourself?: The challenges and frustrations that can come with thinking deeply - a skill that’s more valuable than ever - are a feature, not a bug." www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/arti...

AI Updates for Fall 2025 (University of Toronto #UofT) memos.provost.utoronto.ca/ai-updates-f...

Chapter 3 – Knock Things Over Strategically
"Knock things over strategically. Start with their illusions of control."
📖 MagnaCata.com
#CatLogic #TinyActsOfRebellion #SurvivalLessons

" 'Can I see some ID?' As online age verification spreads, so do privacy concerns " www.cbc.ca/news/online-...

"What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer"

"structural changes frequently involve reorienting assessment from output to process. Rather than evaluating only the final product, which could potentially be AI-generated, assessment may be designed to capture the student’s development and attainment of understanding and skill over time."

My brain had not brained this before 🤯 (re: how to scale education with personalized learning). - "How do you scale a personal trainer? How do you scale a plumber? How do you scale an electrician? You don't. You just have lots of them. Derek Muller (Veritasium). youtu.be/0xS68sl2D70?...

just checking in on the financial revolution that was meant to sidestep banks, tech giants, and the state

"ChatGPT’s vision for campuses. My biggest complaint for universities is the weak response of leaders to meaningfully plan for AI’s impact on learners and on the future of society." George Siemens' Sensemaking, AI, and Learning (SAIL) newsletter - buttondown.com/SAIL/archive...

#UofT Faculty - new resources for your students in GenAI Literacy, integrates into your Quercus course. ocw.utoronto.ca/innovation-p...

How to balance "Student vs Learner" - Student will maximize their grade output within the structure and systems vs Learner who wants to grow their knowledge. Thanks @drjessicariddell.bsky.social for the facilitation at the @uoft-teaching.bsky.social T&L symposium. tls.utoronto.ca/event/hope-c...

"Equity can’t be achieved through good intentions and inclusive practices alone. It requires students build the knowledge they need through explicit teaching, feedback, and practice. If we’re serious about equity, we have to be serious about learning." scienceoflearning.substack.com/p/teaching-f...

Hey Jet Lag crew @thewheatgerm.bsky.social @adamchase.bsky.social @samfromwendover.bsky.social - you were so focused on Ball in the first episode of Hide + Seek NY, you didn't notice the guy absolutely draining this 3-pointer dog poop bag behind Amy in episode 2 😂

With CBC now having called all ridings it's time for the land-vs-people-vote animation.

CTSI resource: Proactive strategies to address unauthorized GenAI use: - Foster academic honesty through thoughtful course design - Educate students on proper attribution and original thinking - Recognize and address potential cases of academic misconduct teaching.utoronto.ca/teaching-uof...

This explains a lot! It only takes 6 times for someone to hear the same lie to start to believe it. @jeffmacarthur.bsky.social's segment on The AmberMac Show today is 🇨🇦🔥. @aaron.bsky.team

CTSI’s Effective Prompting Strategies resource is grounded in evidence-based learning science principles and designed to help students structure AI interactions that both enhance knowledge retention and foster critical thinking. Sample prompts focus on:

State of AI in 10 Charts (from Stanford's 2025 AI Index Report) hai.stanford.edu/news/ai-inde... (Smaller Models Get Better, Become Cheaper, China Catch Up, A Jump in Problematic AI, Rise of Agents, Sky-High Investment, Corporate, Health AI, USA Regulation Moves to States, Asia more AI Optimism)

Elections Canada has a pretty thorough fact-checking page on its website. On one side of the page, there is a list of inaccurate or misleading information circulating online; on the other side, there is a list of accurate information to dispel those myths.

"I’m a recent STEM grad. Here’s why the right is winning us over " [TL:DR - right-leaning tech businesses have more incentives and $ to offer recent grads, and way more out there. Left-leaning employment may have noble goals, but that's all they really offer]

Elbows up, Canada.

"What is the most important thing you have learned from your 50 years of research into learning technologies? I think the most important lesson is that video is greatly underused in higher education teaching."

In 2019, Iceland Approved the 4-Day Workweek. 6 years later nearly 90% working reduced hours (36 hours a week instead of 40), with no loss in pay. Productivity remained steady, but in some sectors it increased. Workers report reduced stress and better work-life balance.

24/7 eyes on the Canadian border 😆 - www.cbc.ca/player/play/...

Learned a new word today - "Hypernormalisation" — a state where everyone knows the system is broken, but we all pretend it’s working anyway.

What happens if you put an AI in charge of national defense? In war games, LLMs tend to escalate & do arms races. Base models are more aggressive & unpredictable. The authors speculate that it is because there is lots of training data on escalation, little on de-escalation. arxiv.org/pdf/2401.03408

The Use of AI-Detection Tools in the Assessment of Student Work [Sarah Eaton]. "Tools to detect text written by artificial intelligence aren’t really reliable or effective. It would be wise to be skeptical of any marketing claims to the contrary." https://drsaraheaton.com/2023/05/06/the-use-of-ai…