When people show you who they are, believe them.

• Maya Angelou¹

Over half of a country looked at a racist, sexist, rapist, convicted felon, petty, vindictive useful idiot and enthusiastically said “OH HELL YEAH HE’S OUR GUY!!!” They know who he is, and who his handlers are. And handed him a decisive victory.

I’d bet that almost nobody was swayed by policy. It looks like it was mostly decided by apathetic citizens choosing not to vote. That’s maybe more shocking than a corrupt proto-fascist convicted criminal getting elected? A third of people say “HELL YEAH!” a third said “not really, I guess” and another third said “I just don’t care enough either way” (or, more likely, “I don’t care enough to vote against Him when the alternative is voting for a woman of colour”).

And we’re almost certainly going to be following in their footsteps in a few months. Awesome. But, at least, while our premier and probably-soon-to-be-PM are racist, sexist, petty, vindictive useful idiots, they aren’t also rapists or convicted fraudsters? 🎉

Anyway. Sure, I’m shocked and saddened and disappointed in the results south of the border. But, much moreso, I’m just bracing for the same wave of regressive bullshit to continue getting entrenched here as well. The Beaverton pretty much nailed it.

⚙️ Work

Anna announced her new role - moving from our team in the TI to work in the Technology Integrated Learning Team in the Faculty of Nursing for a 2 year secondment. It’s a great opportunity, and she’ll have a blast working with the team in Nursing.

The call for proposals for the 2025 UCalgary Conference on Learning & Teaching just went out. Next year’s conference theme is “Reassessing Assessment in Postsecondary Education”.

I spent most of Monday and Tuesday in sessions to plan a possible campus MS 365 Copilot implementation. Then I was able to step out of those long sessions on AI to participate in our Academic GenAI Working Group. I may have reached AI saturation…

What really gets to me isn’t the overselling of what LLMs can do (and glossing over what they can’t, despite generating compelling text that assures you that they, in fact, can). It’s the focus on “efficiency”.

You can do more! With less! Just imagine how you will be 18-215% more efficient in your role! You will impress colleagues and influence people with your efficiency!

And it’s also a naked attempt to capture (in our case) scarce public tax dollars to redirect them to companies valued in the trillions of dollars.

VERY little of what I do, what our team does, what instructors and students do, is about efficiency². Huge swaths of teaching and learning are intentionally inefficient. Are intentionally difficult, slow, intense processes. And cutting through those ways of teaching and learning - being efficient - just doesn’t serve anyone other than the people selling the digital pickaxes and shovels.

Anyway. Yeah. I’m still feeling a little uncomfortable at the pitch from a giant global company to have a public post-secondary institution redirect significant (as in .5 - 20x what we pay for our also-expensive LMS each year (which is used by a community of 40,000 people every day to enable online and blended learning)) funds to get access to generative AI tools. Especially given the nature of these specific tools not directly enhancing teaching or learning. But, productivity! Efficiency!

🔗 Links

AI

• Tim Maughan @ NOEMA: Not My Problem. (via Brian Lamb) Shockingly plausible possible futures.

• Angela Gunder @ Opened Culture: Dimensions of AI Literacies (via Tom Woodward and JR Dingwall) - building on Doug Belshaw’s Essential Elements of Digital Literacies

• Audrey Watters @ 2nd Breakfast: It’s Mourning in America

  Their technologies are not technologies of human flourishing. Their politics are not a politics of human flourishing. I mean, look around you, ffs. I want us to imagine, to build a world for human agency and freedom, not one engineered to achieve some weird vision of computational autonomy.

LMSes

• Russo, D. (2024). Under the lens: Learning management system (LMS) platforms and DEIA components : Moving past the rhetoric and into reality. First Monday, 29(11). https://doi.org/10.5210/fm.v29i11.13345

📚 Reading

• ★★★★☆ The Mercy of Gods - James SA Corey (2024). I finished book 1 of his/their new trilogy. I needed this - well-written and interesting. Can’t wait for books 2 and 3 to be released.

🧺 Other

I need a couple of weeks offline on a beach somewhere. Which won’t be possible for the foreseeable future.