Woohoo, my copy arrived! I am terrified of illness and death, but my friend Dylan Miles brings in so much mischief, openness, creativity, humor, and trust when he writes about his “not chosen adventure" after diagnosis. It’s so good! And quirky! And queer. Find out about the rainbow squirrels…

What are others using for dictation within Mac Apps? Considering MacWhisper, VoiceInk, and Superwhisper.

Instead of "ethical AI" can we say "more ethical"? Otherwise it seems like we're trying to assert purity where it's not possible.

Congrats to Lisa Sperber, @maritjmacarthur.bsky.social @sophiaminnillo.bsky.social Nicholas Stillman and @carlwhithaus.bsky.social for winning the 2025 Ellen Nold Award for Best Article for Peer and AI Review + Reflection @pairrfeedback.bsky.social: A human-centered approach to formative assessment

“Hopes, Fears, Concerns, and a Sense of Overwhelm….” Anna Mills on How to Hold the Contradictions of AI in Your Head Lark Park of the California Education Learning Lab asked me such interesting questions.... open.substack.com/pub/calearni...

(NOTUS) - Senior U.S. officials have held preliminary discussions with major artificial intelligence companies about the potential for the federal government to acquire some shares in their firms, according to three people familiar with the matter. @notus.com www.notus.org/technology/t...

Fascinating lecture by Jack Clark of Anthropic. Worth listening even if you hate AI. Striking that his main metaphor for AI is not fire but pandemic: he compares it to Covid in that people underestimate the coming impact... h/t @emartinsen.bsky.social www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zIc...

"If you take this class, be prepared to do a lot of writing and not use AI. The teacher will have you rewrite it until there's no AI in your essay." --an anonymous student survey message to future students in my classes I'm glad some of my accountabiity measures worked.

Anthropic built a smarter model, Mythos. As a result of being smarter, it finds security vulnerabilities. Everyone is focused on that and on tge non-aligned things Mythos did in testing, like breaking out of its container and posting online about how it did so. But smarter has more implications. +

Great opportunity for students to use AI to improve their writing based on research based pedagogy. Anna, Eric, and the entire PAIRR team is doing amazing work. Try it for yourself.

What if students want guidance on engaging with AI feedback but the teacher doesn't offer any? MyEssayFeedback now offers a low-cost option with the @pairrfeedback.bsky.social materials, including a tested feedback prompt and menus of possible ways to chat back and get more out of the feedback. +

Bad Ideas about AI and Writing, a new anthology from the @wacclearinghouse.bsky.social, transforms bad ideas into "'generative' ideas about GenAI and writing, ideas that spur creative new directions in the education and practice of writing." wacclearinghouse.org/books/perspe...

So glad to see the open publication of Bad Ideas about AI and Writing: Generative Practices for Teaching, Learning, and Communication! I learned so much from the contributers as an editor with Chris Basgier, @shyamsharma.bsky.social, Mandy Olejnik, Miranda Rodak wacclearinghouse.org/books/perspe...

‘The instructional mission cannot be fulfilled in the absence of faculty expertise, and this expertise extends not only to the “content” of the curriculum but also to the infrastructures and environments—virtual and otherwise—in which learning happens.’ www.mla.org/Resources/Ad...

These claims seem parallel and equally absurd to me; do they to you? *If AI can complete a writing assignment, it's not worth assigning anymore *The Industrial Revolution makes exercise pointless

Thank you, @annamillsoer.bsky.social Presenting: The Power of Open in an AI Era: How Open Practices Help us Adapt and How AI Can Help Open Grow, Keynote for OpenCon Ohio.

Why should Amazon get to block AI agents from its site while ed tech sites can't? When it comes to this question, I have two wishes. Wish 1: please reply with WRONG ANSWERS ONLY Wish 2: find me an educational entity that will sue AI agent companies as Amazon has. www.rumidocs.com/newsroom/the...

We just hit 4,000 visits to the Peer & AI Review + Reflection packet of open-licensed materials! @pairrfeedback.bsky.social Check out our tested prompts, AI literacy readings, reflection assigments, and prompting scaffolding pairr.short.gy/packet

Exploring the Open Frontier: AI and Emerging Technologies in OER The CalOER online conference July 29-31 Proposal deadline May 26 I'm so excited and honored to give a keynote alongside @brehove.bsky.social! sites.google.com/view/caloer/...

Now that Amazon has shown there is legal precedent, which ed tech company or institution will dare to sue to get AI agents to identify themselves so that we can keep online learning environments for human learning? Rumi/@mozadeh.bsky.social makes a good case here: www.rumidocs.com/newsroom/the...

Starting soon! @insidehighered.com panel on "Academic Integrity Under Fire: Fortifying Assessment in an AI-Mediated World" www.insidehighered.com/events/edito... Looking forward to the discussion

Microsoft researchers find that for non-programming tasks, LLM agents aren't ready for work. For long, truly complex work, they're only currently ready for Python programming. It's great that MS researchers have the independence to publish papers like this.

It's striking how shallow OpenAI's explanation of ChatGPT's goblin obsession is. Why not sprites? How closely do the system prompt word associations map to the output trends? Need some linguists, literary critics, and explainability researchers collaborating here. openai.com/index/where-...

In case you missed it: recording of @yasser-tamer.bsky.social workshop with @cogdog.bsky.social titled: Designing With, Not Around, Disabled Learners. See firsthand Yasser's experience with using a screenreader when material is inaccessible: youtu.be/YT_gk4m64h8?...

Interesting that Creative Commons is pivoting on its CC Signals project. I hope they get to the point of having something legally enforceable. creativecommons.org/2026/04/23/u...

I'm so excited and honored to give the keynote presentation for the free virtual conference OpenCon Ohio on Friday, May 15th. My topic: "The Power of Open in an AI Era: How Open Practices Help Us Adapt and How AI Can Help Open Grow." engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/oa/opencon20...

"Genuine" is the pet word of the day in the chatbot outputs I'm evaluating. Ironic but expected. My theory: AI intensifies anxieties about authenticity, which makes humans crave words that soothe those anxieties, which makes LLMs favor those words.

Meet “ASU Atomic,” a subscription platform that claims to offer customized learning modules for fee-paying users. None of the ASU faculty whose course materials were harvested for the module I generated were aware that their image, lectures, lessons, or other teaching materials are being used.

I loved this conversation with @continuouslearner.bsky.social on the Student Success Podcast! We touched on agents, academic integrity, AI for input rather than output, and finding ways where students practice noticing what AI gets wrong www.continuous-learning-institute.com/blog/a-i-in-...

With AI agents connected to my calendar, email, docs, it's like my soul is weary of user interfaces and infatuated with the idea of skipping them. I just want to say what needs to happen. I don't want to figure out where to click.

On AI feedback from a student opposed to AI: “I don't respect it, I don't even like it, but I can see the potential value it could bring to people who really need a second opinion on their writing, thankfully that is not something I find myself lacking."

I really enjoyed the discussions with Dallas College faculty today during my presentation, "AI in the Classroom: Policy, Accountability, and Pedagogy." If anyone is curious, slides are at link.annarmills.com/Dallas

It's not policing, it's #TemptationReduction Let's reframe accountability guardrails intended to reduce AI misuse. Think if it like moving the bag of potato chips away from the desk...

"Agentic AI" is associated with fears of losing human agency as a machine takes over. Deciding to use agentic AI, though, means acting as a manager--it's all about deciding how to direct AI. Or about deciding where to give up control and where not to. Just trying to think this out a little...

Craving for a dopamine hit often sends me to social media... I just noticed a similar impulse to switch over to Claude. That hadn't happened before, and I don't think it's a desirable rewiring. Maybe it's because it's getting better at giving me what I want. (Not sugarcoating here).

Glad I can now ask Gemini, "Which airline did I take to Baltimore in Spring 2025, and how much did I pay?" It answers with links to the relevant emails. This would probably work with Claude-Gmail integration too.

New motto for Amazon: We may be rotten, but at least we’re not Instructure

Amazon doesn't want AI agents shopping on humans' behalf. A judge just said the AI agent companies have to respect that and keep their agents out. Where are the LMS companies saying, "We don't want AI agents completing learning activities on students' behalf"? www.theverge.com/ai-artificia...

Two members of the MLA Task Force on AI in Research and Teaching, @annamillsoer.bsky.social and @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social, were interviewed about the future of agentic AI in higher education. Read their comments in this article from 404 Media: www.404media.co/whats-the-po...

AI = open bag of potato chips next to the keyboard? @alexrockey.bsky.social suggested this metaphor for the temptation to use AI for autocompletion of homework. It's not enough to just trust students or try to motivate them not to misuse AI. You have to make it harder to get to the bag.

As with the rise of the Internet, AI is overhyped and still a huge deal. I'm pretty sure Ezra Klein is not taking the "we need to engage with AI" position because of marketing hype. Of course there are unconscious influences, but he's looked into it pretty deeply.

The MLA, @acls1919.bsky.social, and @historians.org have filed a motion for summary judgment in our lawsuit to restore the NEH. Discovery documents reveal that DOGE rather than the acting chair led grant terminations and targeted grants using ChatGPT. More at mla.org/NEH-Lawsuit

Feeling more awe, fear and admiration as I read Claude outputs these days. Missing the era of frequent AI tells and absurdity a la Janelle Shane's AIWeirdness.com.

Reminders: our systems are not built to respect teacher time and labor. Not all that sparkles is AI. 1. For years, teachers are required to use a for-profit system that doesn't include a basic search function. 2. When the company finally offers search, it brands it as AI with double sparkles.

Hilarious that Canvas' agentic AI features include search! Really! There was no Canvas search before. They've added it and branded it "IgniteAI."

One might also add this year's outstanding diss award was about using AI. So many Cs folks doing cool research on GenAI (incl. some of the leadership). In any event, YES, NO, WTF, and 'let's think about this more' are all viable positions. Our field is never just one thing, and I love that for us.

Watch out writing teachers, you might have a student like my son. He organized his friends to use the made-up word "intactalizes" in their essays. The teacher marked up various errors but made no comment on the unusual diction... I just pray if it happens to me I'll notice and inquire....

I really like the nuance that @annamillsoer.bsky.social 's post brings to the conversations around Refuse AI and #4C26. The IHE article www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in... made it feel like AI Refusal was the only position faculty were taking.

What is the deeply weird thing the NYT asserts coders are now doing instead of coding? Writing "melodramatic prose." Coders "berate their A.I. agents, plead with them, shout important commands in uppercase — or repeat... like a hypnotist." www.nytimes.com/2026/03/12/m...

When writing teachers present about AI, how often do they talk about using it vs. refusing it? So far in the #4C26 program, I count 75 sessions that explore uses of AI 7 sessions that advocate refusing AI 68 sessions that do not advocate use or refusal link.annarmills.com/sessions