Real Syntactic
Literary and media historian focusing on the long 19th century. Not my employer’s account. She/they/punk rock tomboy. Settler on xʷməθkʷəy̓əm and Sḵwx̱wú7mesh land. Setter of types, maker of typos. A person whose first object in life is a joke.
so my uni just subscribed to a universal in-class audio record system that will also provide all students with AI transcriptions. I’m so gobsmacked I don’t even know how to think about this. In rare classes (150+) where I lecture, I post all slides, mostly quotes, images, key points & questions, in advance—morning of. All other classes are workshop-based. Just what is this going to record, and why should I believe promises about how it will be used? It’s Palantir for classrooms. #highered #ai
RE: @MaryAustinBooks@mstdn.social
This is the literal reason why late eighteenth-century Britain created the #canal system (which by the 1820s was twice as extensive as Britain’s coastline and carried everything from heavy goods—coal, roof leads, printed books and reams of paper—to excursion and business passengers.) #transportation
How am I only now learning of Jurgen #Habermas’s passing? I can’t properly account for his importance to my own intellectual development. I can trace his impact on my PhD supervisor’s scholarship more clearly than anyone’s save for maybe Adorno, Gramsci, and Raymond Williams. His account of how the culture industry grew out of “a culture-debating public” (or its self-image) was prescient and, taken together with the work of his many creative interlocutors, offers crucial hints toward a way back.
So this is good. Out of Victoria. The cedar taste is exquisite. Brewer’s 10-year-old child does the cedar harvesting. #craftbeer
I have been stalking this book for 3 years. I finally found it and it arrived today from Boulder. These aren’t photos but litho’d sketches on glossy stock. Photos of Vancouver (including Hastings Mill) and Victoria harbours circa late 1870s among numerous other super detailed images. #localhistory
RE: @emilymbender@dair-community.social
Important consent issues. This technology is being imposed on my #highered classrooms, where 9 on this list is especially salient, but I am deemed to have consented by staying in my employment, and students by remaining enrolled. The same is true in MD offices in Canada: to turn down the AI scribe is to refuse care (in my latest case for a torn cruciate ligament; this being Canada, it’ll be a year+ before I know which ligament, but the AI hurdle was required before I could get on the MRI list.)
RE: @Linkletter@mastodon.social
I would however be grateful if my complete online course design in Canvas, which took about 500 hours to build and includes a full textbook, were not lost forever.
the mayor of #Vancouver told a lie about opposition city councillor Sean Orr to Mandarin-language media, prompting an ally to repeat the lie on a Mandarin-language social channel, cynically creating division around an issue (social housing) that hurts poor people most. Orr—a dishwasher by profession—is suing the millionaire mayor for defamation. Please consider donating to the People’s GoFundMe to show the lying, pro-police, anti-poor mayor that actions have consequences. https://gofund.me/704f9db93
the one thing missing from this reporting “on the ground” of text-based clasrooms now that unis are actively encouraging undergrads to use ChatGPT in coursework, throwing professors under the bus: the clear fact that use of these tools doesn’t enable students to do the work of humanities study, but only to produce simulacra of the work, performances of thought without thought. In process-oriented disciplines, it’s the end of the line: not “replaced,” but killed. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ng-interactive/2026/mar/10/ai-impact-professors-students-learning #highered
And another #flosstodon. On old Main Street concrete on the way to this week’s risograph workshop. Halcyon? Cerulean? Bright blue?
RE: @briankrebs@infosec.exchange
In 2023 I spent 30 hrs/wk on top of regular working hours for 13 weeks (i.e. sleeping 2-3 hours/night for 3 months) building a fully online version of the flagship history course for the media studies program. My version mixes theory/history reading and a commonplace book, an ecologies/networks online exhibition project, and hands-on analogue/digital book arts projects and a process notebook. No textbook exists, so I wrote one. It’s all required to be in #Canvas. For me this is research piracy.
giving this talk to the Annual Jane Austen Day held by the Jane Austen Society, Vancouver Region, on the 16th: on confinement, the oceanic world, and settler mobilities. The Vancouver iteration of this group includes lots of academics and retired academics in other disciplines. They were the first audience for my work on Austen, Atlantic chattel slavery, and the history of paper. They are a skeptical and engaged delight. #publicscholarship
Somebody hit and runned my (secondhand but still newish to me) Prius in the East End of Vancouver sometime between Wednesday and this morning (I don’t drive all that much.) Damage is fairly minor—lots of deep horizontal scratches from some kind of side swipe—but my car loan requires me to have it fixed. Can anyone in #Vancouver recommend a body shop? Thanks.
I was thinking about the flosser a student photographed for me last week (because my ancient phone had no battery) and then forgot to text me, walking along imagining a networked map of Vancouver flossers and then, in front of me, there it was: a #flosstodon bearing the marks of vehicle traffic, on the pathway behind the wing with the large lecture halls.
A #Flosstodon by a mossy stone/ Half-hidden from the eye. (Seen and photographed by my daughter on her way home from ballet class this evening.)