Charles Logan

@charleswlogan.bsky.social

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Learning Sciences PhD Candidate at Northwestern University - Critical Digital Pedagogies and Literacies - Dad Life - he/him/his

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Charles Logan

IN 150 CHARACTERS OR LESS Everything is on fire, but everyone I love is doing beautiful things and trying to make life worth living, and I know I don't have to believe in everything, but I believe in that. From these are the words by Nikita Gill (Macmillan Children's Books, 2022)

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Next week, I'm continuing to learn with some amazing high school students. We'll examine questions at the intersection of AI, surveillance, and school. I've been gathering resources on these issues at the Against School Surveillance Technologies Library: docs.google.com/spreadsheets...

Against School Surveillance Technologiesdocs.google.com Journalism Title,Author(s),Publication,Date of Publication <a href="https://www.edweek.org/leadership/civil-rights-groups-seek-federal-funding-ban-on-ai-powered-surveillance-tools/2024/04">Civil Righ...

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Like maybe just once we could notice FROM THE JUMP that white colleges and people are endowed to program things , while Black ones are endowed to be programmed or programming While being excluded from the other institutions

I think about this quote from Audrey Watters' Teaching Machines a lot: "With the students of Harlem as his test subjects, [B. F.] Skinner could rescue them from a failing system and as an ed-tech savior, he could then convince the rest of the world of the effectiveness of his teaching machines."

Also known as “training your replacement.” 😩

Morehouse to be the first university to use virtual AI teaching assistantswww.axios.com The Atlanta HBCU will have AI teaching assistants this fall.

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“By using AI products we are directly inserting ourselves into the lives of workers dispersed across the globe.”

Meet Mercy and Anita – the African workers driving the AI revolution, for just over a dollar an hourwww.theguardian.com Social media content and AI training data are processed in outsource centres in the global south, where long hours, low pay and exposure to disturbing material are the norm

Buy My Worthless NFT amirite?!?

"[T]he fight against data centers and the generative AI tools they power is gearing up to be essential to determine who gets to chart our social and technological future." Fellow educators and students, let's develop a Luddite praxis and join this fight!

Google’s emissions are up 48% in 5 years. Microsoft’s are up 30% since 2020. Those soaring figures are being driven by mass investments in data centers to power AI tools. Generative AI is a climate disaster and data center expansion must be stopped.

Generative AI is a climate disasterdisconnect.blog Tech companies are abandoning emissions pledges to chase AI market share

Solidarity with everybody who at one point at your BBQ today could no longer listen to the AI hype and had to interject with an "Yes but actually..." and did your best to restrict yourself but really why restrict yourself because damn that friend of a cousin required a lecture and a half.

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MAIHT3k Ep 35: AI Overviews and Google's AdTech Empire … in which the magnificent Prof. @safiyanoble.bsky.social joined me and @alex.bsky.social to situate the problems with Google's AI overviews in the context of Google's history of bad practices. Thx to @whatulysses.bsky.social for production!

Episode 35: AI Overviews and Google's AdTech Empire (feat. Safiya Noble), June 10 2024 - Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000www.buzzsprout.com You've already heard about the rock-prescribing, glue pizza-suggesting hazards of Google's AI overviews. But the problems with the internet's most-used search engine go way back. UCLA scholar and

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Some thoughts on how to navigate this moment.

Take a Deep Breath and Think About What You Need to Doorganizingmythoughts.org How powerful will we choose to become as the world falls down and what will we have the potential to build?

Listening now: soundcloud.com/thismachinek...

351. How AI is Boiling the Oceanssoundcloud.com We get into how the massive global expansion of data centres — thanks largely to demand from training and operating AI — is putting major strain on energy systems and requiring the generation of more

Happy to report the lesson went really well! The students weren't aware of data laborers' working conditions. By the lesson's end, students were brainstorming ways to hold OpenAI accountable and create alternative AI tools that don't rely on extractive, harmful labor practices.

This is such a vital set of resources for educators. I'm using the comic "Click Captives: The Unseen Struggle of Data Workers" in a lesson today with high school students. Find the comic at: data-workers.org/wilington/

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this entire crusade against diversity in hiring and admissions is based on the supposition that all white men are necessarily more qualified than any nonwhite person or woman who might be considered for the job. like, this lawsuit more or less states that outright.

Lawsuit: Northwestern’s law school is biased against White men in hiringwww.washingtonpost.com The lawsuit, filed by a prominent attorney, alleges the university’s law school gives hiring preference to women and people of color.

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Hypervisible

Their rhetoric is always “let AI do the boring stuff so teachers can focus on the important things.” But then they turn around and claim AI can/should do all of the art and practice of teaching. The vision of AI in education is scale, not learning.

Fellow educators, AI isn't, despite Google's marketing, magic. AI is people doing often traumatizing work, and we need to help our students interrogate and intervene with others in these systems. More about data workers' own research and stories at: data-workers.org

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students use AI to generate essays; educators use AI to grade it… AI that is built on the backbone of stolen data and packaged as a shiny EdTech tool that educational institutes have to pay a fortune for… folks, do you see who benefits from all of this?

No matter who says that these tools aren’t intended to replace teachers or how many times it’s said, that’s exactly what will happen. (Or it will be used as a justification for eliminating teacher jobs because now teachers can “grade” more efficiently) www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-t...

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Was invited blurb @remikalir.bsky.social's 🌟 forthcoming book, Re/Marks on Power: How Annotation Inscribes History, Literacy, and Justice. So excited to read this 📘 — which comes @ a the right moment: when we need myriad methods for critiquing, revising + amending "official acts"

Re/Marks on Powerremikalir.com Re/Marks on Power: How Annotation Inscribes History, Literacy, and Justice, my second book about annotation, is forthcoming from MIT Press and will be published in early 2025. Here’s a brief …

I’m back in the classroom teaching high school students again - this time for a six-week program on AI in education, surveillance, and social media - and with everything else that's happening, I am so grateful for their brilliance and jokes and the hope I feel learning with them.

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Google: "We're bringing Gemini to teen students using their school accounts to help them learn responsibly and confidently in an AI-first future..." Also Google: We are endangering students' future through deepening the climate crisis.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. (AP) — Google falling short of important climate target, cites electricity needs of AI.

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EdTech is where higher education institutes, government bodies & tech corps are pushing AI so hard yet with no evidence of the benefits (plenty of evidence against it). this report is another evidence that should caution all pushing AI into education to just STOP and evaluate the evidence

“ai” edtech company collapses after taking six million dollars from the Los Angeles school district to develop an “educational friend” platform.

A.I. ‘Friend’ for Public School Students Falls Flatwww.nytimes.com Los Angeles schools hired a start-up to build an A.I. chatbot for parents and students. A few months later, the company collapsed.

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Given the ongoing challenge of countering AI hype in education, I thought I'd reshare my Civics of Technology post on how educators can use the Baldwin Test to work with students to interrogate the claims of ed-tech companies. www.civicsoftechnology.org/blog/applyin...

Applying the Baldwin Test to Ed-Tech — Civics of Technologywww.civicsoftechnology.org In this post, Charles Logan argues that educators can apply the Baldwin Test to Ed-Tech.

This looks pretty great! Also, XRDS is new to me, and heck yeah, let's have more publications written by students for students. dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/...

Shifting Power Through Resistance: Social Justice in Practice | XRDS: Crossroads, The ACM Magazine for Studentsdl.acm.org

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We’re living through an era when everything needs to be upended yet so many people are clinging tightly to the edge of the pool. I understand why this is: when things feel uncertain, the status quo is a mirage of ‘safety’. But we need people who are willing to swim in the deep end & offer new paths

Paws and Claws is a cat rescue near us with a large front window and you can see cats and kittens snoozing and playing and let me say it’s one of the best things to pause alongside other passersby and watch the cats and coo and laugh before you say goodbye and continue with a little bit more joy.

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I'm proud to be among the engineers, artists, educators, and others resisting and refusing AI that @bcmerchant.bsky.social included in his newsletter today. Here's to the ongoing, collective struggle against these obnoxious machines! www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/the-most-p...

The most powerful takedowns of generative AI, from those who know its impacts bestwww.bloodinthemachine.com It's knives out for AI: Engineers, artists, educators and other workers are raising the alarm more loudly than ever before. Here are 8 of their must-read broadsides against the tech.