ableism

Three military men appeat to play a video game, but the man on the screen is a soldier they are fighting. Cover of Amazing Stories, 1936.

Breaking What Was Already Broken: AI and Writing Assignments

This week’s post shares a bunch of intellectual air with John Warner’s thinking about AI writing and undergraduate assessment. There’s often a lot of alignment between my thinking and John’s when it comes to talking about writing assessment, but he published first, so let me point you to his excellent piece, ChatGPT Can’t Kill Anything…

Amazing Stories Cover, 1927. Here a writer looks on at an animated robot of a woman. He wears headphones and it is not clear who is controlling who.

Losing the Plot: From the Dream of AI to Performative Equity

A question I have been thinking a lot about this week is whether there is any equitable use of artificial intelligence, given all we talked about in last week’s post about algorithmic bias. Is there any way to imagine ourselves into a future where artificial intelligences really can do the work of decision making more…

A multi-coloured brink wall sports a sign reading "Accessible Entry," but no door is visible.
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Is Anyone as Cruel as a Normal Person?: Disability, Access, and Why I Refuse to Go “Back to Normal”

And of course, Western chauvinism drips from the preceding paragraph: to be even at this stage of this unending trial is due to the accident of birth of vaccine privilege, which the richest countries in the world seem determined to horde like Gollum’s ring (and you know what happens to hobbitses who horde rings). But with the wealth of opportunity we have had to protect and care for ourselves and each other, it’s all the more disheartening to see how quickly the collective solidarity of the early pandemic days has fallen away. We’re heading “back to normal,” which I guess means “everyone for themselves” — because the normal we had before didn’t work for an awful lot of people. If there’s one thing this moment has made achingly clear, it’s that the ableism baked into how we do business in the post-secondary sector will take a lot more than a global pandemic to unseat. And that if we don’t use this moment to imagine something a damn sight better than normal, it’s hard to imagine that we ever will.

How depressing. Let’s dig in.

Blue neon off-set at the top right of a blue wall. Text reads, "Work harder."

Digital Detox #4: Habits, Data, and Things That Go Bump in the Night: Microsoft for Education

Today, I want to spend some time looking at a tool that has become just about ubiquitous in education: the Microsoft Office365, and particularly Microsoft Teams.  For most of us working in post-secondary, the Office suite has traditionally been wallpaper: it’s just there, used in our offices and offered to our students, but not part…