[handing my credit card to the kid behind the ice cream bar] keep it open

I found this neat tool that lets you generate text and images just from your ideas. It's really good!

my gf works corporate and is on a training about AI and there's a word cloud for "what do you use AI for." the largest word by far is "Nothing" and the trainer is PISSED

alright time to draft syllabus language instructing students not to use google for coursework

I can't reproduce that. It gives a much different fuck up for me!

The way these "AI checkers" work is very, very simple. It feeds part of the text into an LLM. If the LLM predicts, correctly, the missing text, it scores that as proof the LLM produced the text. And LLM's literally stole *every fucking book and forum post ever fucking written* to train on.

is there forecasting anywhere about how skyrocketing gas prices --> decreased in-person enrollment at commuter schools --> pressure for more asynch courses at commuter schools + increased enrollment in scam-schools like sophia, study(dot)com?

absolutely cursed that i biked past a sign showing gas at $4.29 and thought "wow, cheap"

Asking Claude to summarize the encyclical

Bless Perusall - I had a few fivethirtyeight articles that have been really effective for teaching political psychology + voting and thought they were lost to ABC's greed... found them in my Perusall archives from 2024

update

Tabkistan, beautiful in the springtime

eurovision's pivot to asia further evidence of the u.s. shooting itself in the foot

grades are *in* baby, it's going to take a few days to unhook my brain from teaching teaching teaching but for now: castle danger aurora haze and the start of my 9th annual sex and the city viewing

Do I want my students to find success and do I hope to help them develop skills that might get them there? Absolutely. But that’s not making them into workers. That’s letting them develop with curiosity and freedom.

I am not in the business of just preparing “future workers” no matter how hard they try to make me.

Look I'm on board + implementing these techniques for in-person classes, but 55% of my college's courses are asynchronous. 2-3 of my 5 classes are online each semester. I've been racking my brain trying to think through how to luddify my asynch courses, if anyone's thinking through this hmu

30 hours left and i still have 34 oral exams and a new stack of academic integrity reports to submit. that summer OOO email is going to be so sweet to set up

Formal motion to rename the technology

dammit i got spoiled on survivor again from this website NOOOO

The largest ever settlement or jury award for government violations of constitutional rights to a single person is $100 million, or 1 percent of what Trump demanding for the leak of his tax returns. That case -- a killing by police -- was reduced to $1 million on appeal.

Some of the result of this failure to start at the roots is advice that is little better than pablum. What is "intentional" use of an AI tool? Why would using AI to practice verbal class components be a good use relative to alternatives? What does it mean to "recognize the limitations."

But again that hasn't been true for a long while. Much of "social media" is just television, conventional media. So I think these platforms should demand not a distinctive story. Instead, basically what was said about, say, Fox News or Rush Limbaugh should more or less apply with a few name changes.

Other people have noticed this phenomenon too but danah boyd put the best slogan to it: social media is now parasocial media. Social media hasn't been social for a long while—how long depending on the platform, depending on the milieu. It's not folks sharing equally, but broadcasting and receiving.

Less than 100 hours left of this semester, so close and yet so far

Detail, Family of Tractor Driver, 1975, by Mariya V. Savchenkova (1917-2017) At The Museum of Russian Art in Minneapolis for Doors Open. It was so crowded. But also fun.

i'm trying to read samantha harvey's orbital for book club but can't focus because every other paragraph all i can think about is the podcast about lance bass training to go to space

It’s telling that Alabama took 14 years to implement Brown (you MUST desegregate) and < 14 days to implement Callais (you CAN eliminate Black districts if you call them Democratic, but you don’t HAVE to).

Zongker's Chicken Chicken Chicken leveled up

Minnesota's public colleges+universities are redistributing 5 million dollars from our 54 campuses over the next 3 years to pitch in for WorkDay, which 1) has already cost taxpayers $300 million and 2) does not work

Gotta wonder how much of today's bloated tuition costs go to crappy vendors and contractors exploiting schools for shareholder gain, at everyone else's expense.

They’re gonna close down the predatory learning management system unless we put on the best dang talent show this town has ever seen!!!

new slay the spire boss just dropped on beta!! happy friday

Tennessee Congressional districts, over time. And then the map that got passed in the legislature today. Thanks, SCOTUS. Thanks Tennessee Legislature.

“A Love Letter to the Loon” by Yiqiao Wang will soon be replaced by a new mural on the McKnight headquarters building in Minneapolis. It will be tough to say goodbye to this spectacular piece of art.

If you were putting together a set of critical learning management system (LMS) studies readings, what’d you include?

I had a dream about walking around Osh last night, really vivid image of getting chuchvara at a little spot on the road to the Uzbek border crossing

Kind of surprised that this hasn't been bigger news. It's finals week for a whole lot of universities, and yet, Canvas (a learning/grading platform used by ~9,000 schools globally) is currently inaccessible because of a pay-or-have-your-data-leaked hack. www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

In surveys, nonresponse is often treated as missing data but that overlooks a key pattern. I find when American National Election Survey respondents leave candidate evaluation prompts blank, it’s not missing data, it’s informative nonresponse. Think ghosting… not missing data! cup.org/4cUmoXi 3/

"Killing student writing outside the classroom means an enormous reduction in the volume of time spent writing, and learning more generally: it is a loss of thousands of hours of reading, thinking, puzzling over problems, writing, revising."

Does anyone have a rec for a short reading that lays out the joys/pitfalls of "too much" government? I have my intro polisci students read about the Free Town project + consider data for the claim that libertarianism led to bear attacks in NH. I'd like to pair it with something on the flip side

Our hallway administrative assistant brought bagels in honor of teacher appreciation week. You can tell which faculty members grew up in Minnesota by how they say bagel. It's weird bc we say "BAY-g" for bag but "BAH-gul" for bagel, the vowel swapping doesn't make sense

By popular (?) demand, I've updated (and cleaned up) my suffrage and citizenship timeline with recent events and some additional clarifications. Feedback welcome! I will make the file available on my website (christinawolbrecht.com) by COB.

In college language classes we had to go to a lab to practicing listening and I wonder if we need a reading lab for our classes where students go to read print material with no access to devices

thinking about using my faculty benefits to take welding classes so I can make a giant diesel dino float for next year

Minneapolis May Day Battle Train rolling down Bloomington - the best annual tradition.

Nothing has ever been more For Me than the National Association of Letter Carriers marching in the Mayday parade with anti-war banners

The first photo. Man. (This neighborhood has had a LOT of ICE activity and resistance. Parade route is also very close to the spots where Renee Good and George Floyd were murdered.)

everyone chanting “egg egg egg” for this baby loon to hatch. wow it’s been a long winter and I just love south mpls so so much