mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Tech society posts and shares from Dr Pen, Digital Media & Humanities academic based in Malta, from London. Late bloomer, a bit pithy.
#UserExperience #UGC
#DataSociety #DigitalSociety #SmartCities
#smalltech #webdev
#Fediverse #openeducation #knowledgecommons #opensocialweb
World Citizen
Let's play a game.
Don't say PowerPoint presentation, say slidedeck
Don't say Word, say text document
Don't say Photoshop, say image editing
Don't say Excel, say spreadsheet
Don't say...
Language is important. When corporate companies own the names of the tasks or the digital items you create, you have become a cog in their branding machine.
*Break everything, let someone else clean up after us ... if they can*
I truly believe the university community has no idea what they're doing to promote Gen AI in any way at all. Gen AI is absolute chaos, anarchy, in all things concerning information, knowledge, value and trust. Yet universities think their job is to welcome it. Teach idiotically simplistic things like 'use responsibly', 'guardrails', 'ethical policy'. Ridiculous.
#academia #academicchatter #GenAI
https://www.digitaldigging.org/p/how-to-plant-a-nuclear-plant-in-iran
In case folks aren't aware, the Internet Archive now has a scholar version with a huge collection of academic work available.
#academicchatter #academicmastodon #academic #education #open
**AI Assistance Reduces Persistence and Hurts Independent Performance. **A paper from researchers at Oxford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon and UCLA that needs to be seen by everyone in the education community.
Full Abstract in alt text.
#ai #GenAI #chatbots #edtech #education #academia #academicchatter
Why writing with LLM bots misses the struggle, search and refining of the writing process. It's worse than just 'cheating', it's autopilot cognitive stagnation, and a terrible flattening of what each human mind can create.
#academia #academicchatter #AI #education
> "Faultily faultless, icily regular, splendidly null
Dead perfection; no more"
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/may/10/fiction-writing-professor-ai
New article: "Techno-feudalism and the new Luddites"
There's growing frustration around AI and big tech: people scared of losing their job, who don't want so much tech in their education, of abandoning digital tech, or people physically attacking technology - and now attacking the homes of AI company personnel and politicians who are doing the bidding of those companies.
This isn't going to stop, it's going to increase.
#ai #genai #luddites #academia #academicchatter
https://penworks.net/blog/techno-feudalism-and-the-new-luddites
Ben Ws blogpost about LMS and academic content assetisation is spot on but saying LMS "impose templates on how courses can be taught and what content can be used during classes" is *slightly* misleading. In fact dig-learning can be anything you want it to be - but by default is digital. A certain flattening can happen, but can also be very diverse, open & creative. But! The more automated you are, the more extractive the platform(s) are.
Slides for my spot at hcii2026 on Wednesday in the DAPI track.
(Test)
Ongoing electricity crisis in Malta. Im very lucky to not be affected (yet) from long power cuts but the vast majority of people have been without power for 30-50 hours and counting. Infrastructure is not fit for purpose. A big increase in resident population, plus now millions of tourists coming and going. Yet no one can plan for huge increase in demand. Its chaos.
Im now seriously considering return to UK. I might even find a bit of academic/edtech work!
Sweden have started to print loads of textbooks and removed laptops and tech from early years. California have just passed a law requiring teachers to be human. UK? As usual theyre full of techbo corporate zombies.
