{
  "version": "https://jsonfeed.org/version/1",
  "title": "Education on F L O T I S S E R I E  🕳️ 🐇",
  "icon": "https://avatars.micro.blog/avatars/2026/32/1504092.jpg",
  "home_page_url": "https://flotisserie.online/",
  "feed_url": "https://flotisserie.online/feed.json",
  "items": [
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/10/13/a-deep-dive-and-new.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>🎵 : <a href=\"https://youtu.be/7F9jdEHA6rk?is=PjYi66k42Nv--tJu\">Education - Freddie Gibbs</a> <br />\n🎵 : <a href=\"https://youtu.be/jgckiSiDTKs?is=T0rnamR7Vb40Xx3J\">Each 1 Teach 1 - Iomos Marad</a></p>\n<p>A deep dive and new reporting angle on <a href=\"https://www.wired.com/story/mississippi-state-testing-reading-comprehension-literacy/\">reading programs in public schools</a> from WIRED. <a href=\"https://captimes.com/news/education/a-madison-native-built-an-ai-tutor-now-it-s-being-put-to-the-test/article_08f5b46c-0726-4b99-b8bd-f12eb416d52a.html\">Also related</a>.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-10-13T07:38:15-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/10/13/a-deep-dive-and-new.html",
        "tags": ["Education"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/10/11/firstperson-account-of-how-one.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>First-person account of how one scientist uses <a href=\"https://daniellakens.blogspot.com/2026/10/how-i-use-ai-in-my-work.html?m=1\">AI in a research and academic setting</a>.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-10-11T13:18:21-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/10/11/firstperson-account-of-how-one.html",
        "tags": ["Education","AI","AI in Practice"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/10/10/why-write.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p><a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/10/opinion/writing-thinking-students.html?unlocked_article_code=1.HlE.xLcE.yIe3mJUBfWWR&amp;smid=nytcore-ios-share\">Why write</a>?</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-10-10T17:56:13-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/10/10/why-write.html",
        "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Education","Writing \u0026 Language"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/10/10/some-blog-notes-im-doing.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>Some blog notes:</p>\n<ul>\n<li>I’m doing most of my writing here via iPhone apps, and tinkering later. This means I’m making a lot of post-publish edits, <a href=\"https://youtu.be/ab0NvAlFqX0?is=zE9RMQT2r9MNHS3t\">buyer beware</a>. (Welcome to the indie web where things are forever unfinished.)</li>\n<li>Remember that what makes songs, poems, writing, books, and games <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meme\">mimetic</a> - and websites and platforms - is that they function something like a mirror. Their meanings emerge through interaction and reflection, and you drive (unless an algorithm, or author, or designer, or coder, or instructor drives), while you iterate through your own perspectives and relationships. And today, virality tends to happen when something produces outrage, especially when units of content are removed from their original, and often more local, context.</li>\n<li>Original blogs were considered something in the spirit of <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem-based_learning\">“problem-based learning” praxis</a>, and pro-tech, fwiw. A lot of <a href=\"https://er.educause.edu/articles/2004/9/educational-blogging\">early ed tech</a> started here, all in good faith and tech optimism. Today many blogs are self-marketing machines, but that’s not what I intend to do here. I don’t want a new, glittering platform, I enjoy several already; I’m here to <a href=\"https://youtu.be/UdHCcoKuBKY?is=SmSrDlGrIX_DlKTb\">ponder and learn</a> while welcoming comment and critique within open, defined web parameters.</li>\n<li>I’m rusty in this area, though I hear there’s a <a href=\"https://video.wttw.com/show/reading-the-world/\">new Freire documentary</a> online. The neighbors are hosting a yard party with a group showing of Minecraft after dark. I hear kids laughing through the roar of cicadas. There will be a fire. Life is good.</li>\n<li>In my experience: when I read to diagnose rather than understand, I have <a href=\"https://youtu.be/2BNUV9SiEVg?is=9shAL2yKR1vMr7bz\">probably lost the plot</a>.</li>\n</ul>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-10-10T13:54:28-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/10/10/some-blog-notes-im-doing.html",
        "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Education","Music","Writing \u0026 Language"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/10/10/a-detail-i-find-interesting.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>A detail I find interesting about the education landscape are how <a href=\"https://www.nu.edu/blog/education-statistics/\">many K-12 teachers end up in higher ed</a>, as both professors and administrators. In my experience there are also a glut of former journalists in higher ed communications, though I’m struggling to find <a href=\"https://www.bestcolleges.com/news/education-department-cuts-could-leave-colleges-without-critical-data/\">good stats</a>.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-10-10T09:14:56-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/10/10/a-detail-i-find-interesting.html",
        "tags": ["Education"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/30/case-study.html",
        "title": "Case study",
        "content_html": "<p>🎵: <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7s65Zc6ULbo\">Before the Water Gets Too High - Parquet Courts</a></p>\n<p><strong>Access to tech:</strong> Pro level. Claude Pro plus added tokens (~$40 out of pocket after I ran through Claude Pro’s compute). Gemini for initial list of authors.</p>\n<p><strong>Process:</strong> Gemini pulled a roster based on the <a href=\"https://www.jezebel.com/how-the-internet-killed-feminism-1839983896\">Roberts article in Jezebel</a>. I strongly suspect my call for a &ldquo;roster&rdquo; shaped the inputs and outputs, making this cohort of writers look like a crew of fantasy football players or Marvel characters. All stats.</p>\n<p>I asked Claude to analyze the data from my perspective, which includes people and details that aren’t part of the formal record, allowing for compare and contrast. I <a href=\"https://flotisserie.cool/2026/09/03/in-honor-of-gloria-steinems.html\">chose the subject</a> because it’s well-trod ground and makes for a sizable corpus. The first round of findings was wild. To get <a href=\"https://claude.ai/artifact/BGQENXPUPdoJWZTbkZY67K\">here</a>, I had to publish and republish the asset <em>almost forty times</em> to better anonymize the data while protecting the writers included.</p>\n<p>The &ldquo;thickness&rdquo; heuristic applied is totally made up - Claude took my thoughts about Donna Haraway and McMillan Cottom&rsquo;s work and wove them through my thoughts about information architecture that I first learned from Dr. B.</p>\n<p>Claude scanned the final draft for legal and privacy concerns. Everything here is publicly available online today, because it is currently live or lives somewhere as a <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s8EU5Sm9GQY\">ghost in the machine</a>, whether via Wikipedia or the Wayback Machine or otherwise.</p>\n<ul>\n<li>Blog note: Because of how my blog is set up to automagically find Wayback links for old URLs, if I publish my reference list, it would open a social and informational can of worms. So the (extensive) reference list will continue to live on the Claude report rather than being indexed into my link library.</li>\n</ul>\n<p>I gave Claude permission to look across public data, crack windows and open doors, and to annotate and proceed as it worked, rather than keeping the decisions with me, then shaped the final strawman into what’s here. This took about half a day to pull together - yammering at the data within the Claude interface until it looked reasonable. It was funny how any specifics were captured in pedantic notes.  Imagine having resources and a data scientist apply themselves here, with long reach and memory, with implications for trust, safety, consent and memory in every direction.</p>\n<p>This was my first go with the tools in a more ambitious way, choosing the question of our long-tail value as a cohort as the subject. I’m still processing the experience but was surprised at how much was publicly, readily available and how little it required of me.</p>\n<p>In the meantime Claude shut me down for the week (too much compute). I had to wait until this morning to ask Claude how much energy it took to run this report as I did, as a rookie and everyday practitioner.</p>\n<img src=\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/uploads/2026/5e75ac2f-4162-4b44-9afb-d492aa751241.jpg\">\n",
        "date_published": "2026-09-30T08:49:53-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/30/case-study.html",
        "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Education","Blogs","AI","Photos","Cybersecurity","Digital Rhetoric","Blog History","Search \u0026 Discovery","Journalism \u0026 Publishing","Indie Web","Internet Culture","First Amendment","Donna Haraway","Tressie McMillan Cottom"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/25/two-steps-forward-one-step.html",
        "title": "Two steps forward, one step back",
        "content_html": "<p>While I still go back to Haraway&rsquo;s <a href=\"https://www.jstor.org/stable/3178066\">&ldquo;Situated Knowledges&rdquo;</a> for the argument that every view comes from somewhere, these days, the writer I read most closely on technology is <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tressie_McMillan_Cottom\">Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom</a>.</p>\n<p>Haraway asks where a knowledge claim is standing, while Dr. Tressie asks who pays for it. <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lower_Ed\"><em>Lower Ed</em></a> traced how for-profit colleges sold credentials to audiences the rest of higher education had shut out. In a <a href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@black_was_genius/video/7426166861240323370\">TikTok mini-lecture on AI, politics, and inequality</a>, she carried that analysis forward using <a href=\"https://logicmag.io/distribution/the-access-doctrine/\">Daniel Greene&rsquo;s &ldquo;access doctrine,</a>&rdquo; which holds that the answer to economic inequality is more skills rather than more support, and which universities facing their own precarity have leaned into. <a href=\"https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/when-knowledge-is-dangerous-but-information-is-power/\">Audrey Watters</a> and <a href=\"https://ghost.edandclass.com/ai-politics-and-inequality-from-tressie-mcmillan-cottom/\">Ed &amp; Class</a> both wrote it up.</p>\n<p>Her <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/opinion/ai-tech-innovation.html\">March 2025 <em>Times</em> column</a> argued that the fantasy appeals to risk-averse organizations because it promises control and oversight. <a href=\"https://criticaledtech.com/2025/05/13/acknowledging-the-mid-ness-of-educational-ai-notes-on-tressie-mcmillan-cottom-2025/\">Neil Selwyn&rsquo;s notes on the column</a> apply it directly to educational AI.</p>\n<p>Her question fits my work life better right now while AI begins to show up in procurement, policy and training decks, and her ongoing attention to pedagogy keeps the conversation tied to what happens between a teacher and a student. <a href=\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/11/01/returning-to-haraway.html\">I read Haraway for the epistemology</a> and <a href=\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/06/reaching-back-to-to-put.html\">Dr. Tressie for the current evidence</a> of how it plays out in real classrooms.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-09-25T09:43:11-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/25/two-steps-forward-one-step.html",
        "tags": ["Education","AI","Platforms","Donna Haraway","Tressie McMillan Cottom"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/09/extra-credit.html",
        "title": "Extra credit",
        "content_html": "<p>The university is back in session, so <a href=\"https://www.cityofmadison.com/dpced/economic-development/street-vending/vending-areas\">the city&rsquo;s lineup of food trucks are back</a> in formation. Some tips:</p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https://www.elwiscorican.com/\">El Wiscorican</a> is a perennial fav, offering a short but very customizable menu. Vegetarian and vegan options are regularly available for those among us who like to keep it light. They&rsquo;ll ask if you want it spicy &ndash; but whatever your expectations are around spice levels, dial it back. The great north is suspicious of the <a href=\"https://groveatlantic.com/book/the-core-of-the-sun/\">virtues of capsaicin</a>. (I recommend the fried plantains.)</li>\n<li><a href=\"https://saigonsandwichwi.square.site/\">Saigon Sandwich</a> has one of the best banh mi sandwiches in town, which is pretty wild given that this sandwich is produced by a single person in a box trailer. But with fresh bread and ultra-fresh ingredients, it&rsquo;s a really good one. Nothing beats a fresh banh mi with good bread and snappy veggies.</li>\n<li>Madison boasts (at least) two great fresh juice trucks &ndash; <a href=\"https://freshcooldrinks.com/\">Fresh Cool Drinks</a> and <a href=\"https://isthmus.com/locations/natural-juice/\">Natural Juice</a> &ndash; and you&rsquo;re as likely to find them at the end of State Street as you are at the <a href=\"https://dcfm.org/\">Saturday farmers&rsquo; markets</a>. They both make excellent juice concoctions on the spot, and sell delicious, fresh vegetable spring rolls packed with fresh, local produce.</li>\n</ul>\n<p>Several years ago, many people were <a href=\"https://isthmus.com/food-drink/window-of-opportunity/\">weighing the possibility that the Madison food truck economy would struggle to recover after the long shutdown</a>, worried because this scene is one of the things that makes the urban food desert more livable during the workday and supports a great deal of local culture with it. This makes your participation in <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/16/business/gen-z-treat-spending.html\">the little treat economy</a> practically a civic responsibility.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-09-09T12:40:59-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/09/extra-credit.html",
        "tags": ["Education","Food","Madison","Midwest","Essays"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/03/in-honor-of-gloria-steinems.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>In honor of Gloria Steinem&rsquo;s passing (rest in power), an article on <a href=\"https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/09574042.2021.1973698#abstract\">the business and activist tensions present in, and the long-tail value of, feminist publishing efforts</a>. And a 2019 dissertation on <a href=\"https://ir.library.louisville.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4469&amp;context=etd\">organized literacy education as a civil rights effort</a>. A <a href=\"https://roomofonesown.com/\">trip to the bookstore</a> is in order.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-09-03T12:25:45-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/03/in-honor-of-gloria-steinems.html",
        "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Education","Gender","Writing \u0026 Language","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/01/a-composition-teacher-friend-shared.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>A composition teacher friend shared this paper on social media: <a href=\"https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/67eacca6-b113-4241-b057-5e830ab29348/content\">Lester Faigley&rsquo;s &ldquo;Literacy after the Revolution&rdquo;</a>, the essay version of his 1996 <a href=\"https://cccc.ncte.org/\">CCCC</a> Chair&rsquo;s address. In it, the author argues that the economic impacts of the digital revolution had begun to undo an older commitment, formed in the Civil Rights era, to teaching literacy as a path toward equality. He further argues that writing instruction was being reorganized around tools owned by a few firms (then: Netscape, Microsoft) at a moment when wealth was concentrating upward. Faigley left us with the question of whether educators can hold onto literacy-for-equality while the tides run against it.</p>\n<p>Thirty years later, the worry has a new face: AI will do young people&rsquo;s writing for them and their thinking with it. Ultimately, Faigley believed the need for <a href=\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/08/my-undergrad-experience-in-college.html\">the skills that composition teaches</a> will keep growing, not despite, but because of our need to convey information in and around that technology and the humanity it serves in a complex society.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-09-01T18:49:32-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/09/01/a-composition-teacher-friend-shared.html",
        "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Tech","Education","AI","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","Digital Rhetoric","AI \u0026 Writing"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/28/students-who-spoke-to-espn.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>&ldquo;Students who spoke to ESPN said that betting is an accepted part of day-to-day life and that they learned about their school&rsquo;s gambling culture immediately after arriving on campus. A 2023 NCAA survey of 18- to 22-year-olds found that <a href=\"https://www.espn.com/sports-betting/story/_/id/49547066/sports-betting-gambling-poker-addiction-college-campus-youth\">51% of the women and two-thirds of the men have bet on sports</a>.&rdquo;</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-08-28T13:09:01-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/28/students-who-spoke-to-espn.html",
        "tags": ["Tech","Education","Platforms"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/27/grose-covers-how-scandinavians-approach.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>Grose covers how Scandinavians approach AI and ed tech by <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/26/opinion/ai-norway-schools.html?unlocked_article_code=1.8lA.QIsd.IZvMBOUHIQTR&amp;smid=url-share\">emphasizing peer review and removing the profit motive</a>.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-08-27T09:28:55-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/27/grose-covers-how-scandinavians-approach.html",
        "tags": ["Education","AI"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/08/18/chester-argues-that-universities-should.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p><a href=\"https://dispatches.timothychester.com/p/ai-governance-is-a-human-judgment\">Chester argues that universities should govern AI by classifying data by sensitivity rather than approving specific tools</a>. Public data goes anywhere &ndash;&gt; regulated data requires an institutional contract &ndash;&gt; sensitive data requires a local system. He also makes a renewed case for MS Copilot.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-08-18T11:54:13-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/08/18/chester-argues-that-universities-should.html",
        "tags": ["Tech","Education","AI","AI in Practice","Cybersecurity","AI Policy \u0026 Law"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/07/22/uwmadison-communication-professor-catalina-toma.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>UW–Madison communication professor Catalina Toma argues that <a href=\"https://onwisconsin.uwalumni.com/the-upside-of-online-relationships/\">technology-mediated communication more often supports human connection and well-being than harms it</a>, provided people use it intentionally.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-07-22T13:52:16-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/07/22/uwmadison-communication-professor-catalina-toma.html",
        "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","Education","Madison","Midwest"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/07/21/a-colleague-hosted-a-nice.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>A colleague hosted a nice discussion of the work of David Dylan Thomas, who advocates for <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTmSqxu3kWg\">using human-centered design concepts to bring humanity back to tech</a>. New and novel approaches abound, especially on whether and how to let engagement metrics drive decisions on design teams.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-07-21T11:51:53-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/07/21/a-colleague-hosted-a-nice.html",
        "tags": ["Tech","Education","Platforms"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/06/25/among-other-disappointing-scotus-announcements.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>Among other disappointing SCOTUS announcements today: <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/25/us/politics/supreme-court-weedkiller-roundup-bayer.html?unlocked_article_code=1.s1A.jEVb.qgoshQC5WmrZ\">Supreme Court Rejects Lawsuit Alleging Roundup Weedkiller Caused Cancer</a>. In a previous life, I worked in the same college as <a href=\"https://vet.purdue.edu/wcorc/news/screening-scottish-terriers.php\">a cancer researcher who developed twenty years of conclusive research that Roundup causes cancer in dogs</a> by studying Scottish terriers. Scotties, it turns out, tend to be susceptible to bladder cancer, and thus make good candidates for related research when cancer is present. For several years, I got to witness a veritable army of Scottie dogs dressed in bowties and plaid jovially trotting in and out of our veterinary research hospital to seed her research during their cancer treatments in West Lafayette.</p>\n<p>What I learned during that time is that a great deal of veterinary research is about looking for health patterns across species. While not all carcinogens act identically across species, most known cancer-causing agents affect both dogs and people in similar ways. Because dogs share our homes and have similar biological responses to toxins, scientists <a href=\"https://ccr.cancer.gov/comparative-oncology-program\">track canine cancers</a> as an early-warning system for human health risks and to research viable interventions to treat them.</p>\n<p>In any case, while I don&rsquo;t know the ins and outs of the specific laws in play here, this is a disappointing outcome when it comes to the science.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-06-25T10:42:22-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/06/25/among-other-disappointing-scotus-announcements.html",
        "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Education"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/05/27/i-attended-the-clayman-institutes.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>I attended the <a href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FcF60P73eDQ\">Clayman Institute&rsquo;s talk on Gender, Power and Artificial Intelligence</a> earlier this month. They now have the session shared on YouTube for posterity. There are many topics and ideas here to chew on as this AI moment develops, and I recommend giving their angles some consideration.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-05-27T10:51:12-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/05/27/i-attended-the-clayman-institutes.html",
        "tags": ["Tech","Education","AI","Gender"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/05/14/gender-power-and-ai-wrestling.html",
        "title": "Gender, Power and AI: Wrestling for the soul of the network, again",
        "content_html": "<p><a href=\"https://gender.stanford.edu/\">Stanford&rsquo;s Clayman Institute</a> ran a virtual panel this morning called &ldquo;<a href=\"https://gender.stanford.edu/events/gender-power-and-artificial-intelligence\">Gender, Power, and Artificial Intelligence</a>,&rdquo; with <a href=\"https://safiyaunoble.com/\">Safiya Noble</a> (UCLA), <a href=\"https://dusp.mit.edu/people/catherine-dignazio\">Catherine D&rsquo;Ignazio</a> (MIT), <a href=\"https://www.angelechristin.com/\">Angèle Christin</a> (Stanford), and moderator <a href=\"https://haas.berkeley.edu/faculty/genevieve-smith/\">Genevieve Smith</a>, a Clayman Institute Postdoctoral Fellow. The panel applied principles from <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feminist_science_and_technology_studies\">feminist tech studies</a> to the current moment, and covered how gender norms get encoded in data and reproduced by AI systems, and discussed whether the technology has real capacity for equitable design and implementation at scale.</p>\n<p>Noble&rsquo;s argument throughout is that the governance conversation has gotten too high-level and universalizing while the actual outputs of these systems have profound day-to-day consequences for specific people today. She named <a href=\"https://time.com/article/2026/05/11/ai-redistricting-gerrymander-congressional-map-district-midterm-election/\">the role of AI in the recent gerrymandering of Louisiana and Indiana</a> as examples, and called for tripling down on long-term social science research about AI&rsquo;s impacts. She also pointed out that philanthropy is retreating from feminist academic and organizational work because that work originates from the same dynamics that critique philanthropy itself, precisely at a point when this research is sorely needed. A lot of money is moving in AI, and very little of it is funding the people best positioned to study how it impacts everyone downstream.</p>\n<p>D&rsquo;Ignazio was asked directly whether feminist generative AI at scale is possible. Her answer was no, with caveats, given who owns the technology today and the current emphasis on profit motive. She suggested it is more important to consider how to organize around our relationship to technology, and how we might approach questions of profit and ownership, policy and decision-making, and data and tech governance.</p>\n<p>She provided an example of a reasonable use case by walking us through a project from her <a href=\"https://dataplusfeminism.mit.edu/\">Data + Feminism Lab</a>. The example is documented at length in her recent book &ldquo;<a href=\"https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5767/Counting-FeminicideData-Feminism-in-Action\">Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action</a>,&rdquo; where her team partnered with activists who scour news reports to document <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Femicide\">the gender-related killing of women and girls</a>, including cisgender and transgender women. The lab built a very lightweight AI-based approach that streamlines the scanning and identification of news stories as possible cases to include in their project, supercharging their work (note: very similar to <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/07/reader-center/how-new-york-times-uses-ai-journalism.html\">how the NYT uses AI to analyze data for reporting</a>). In this example, the AI’s job is task-scoped, democratically co-determined with the people who use it, and small. Smith picked this up: there is an idea baked into the current LLM moment that AI must scale to make it marketable, and the alternative is using purpose-built models that are right-sized against a body of work.</p>\n<p>Christin spoke at length about how embodiment is one of the primary focuses of feminist theory, and how AI perpetuates the &ldquo;disembodied&rdquo; illusion of technology, and how this dynamic shows up in everything from the marketing to UX to user comprehension. This spoke to my thoughts on how <a href=\"https://medium.com/data-science/the-god-trick-in-data-and-design-4ec71e19811\">the single-interface design of LLM chat reproduces Haraway’s “god trick,”</a> knowledge that presents as universal while concealing the specific and situated position it comes from.</p>\n<p>The parallel I kept returning to, listening to this, is one I think about often with <a href=\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/13/when-i-started-building-websites.html\">my own cohort of early bloggers</a>, women who grew up alongside the rise of the internet — and then the rise of <a href=\"https://epom.com/blog/ad-server/ad-tech-101\">ad tech</a>. The internet of the late 1990s and early 2000s was being shaped by several camps: writers, students, information architects, and user-centric researchers who saw it as an information access network and a space of possibility; entrepreneurs and opportunists who saw it as a channel for marketing, monetization and extraction; and a smaller boycott camp that wanted to limit and refuse the whole personal computing and digital revolution altogether.</p>\n<p>It was generally considered weird to be a girl on a computer or a woman on the internet — so weird that <a href=\"https://geekfeminism.fandom.com/wiki/Where_are_the_women_bloggers%3F\">many of our peers didn’t recognize us at all</a> — and we were there anyway, making stuff, witnessing, learning, advocating, producing, influencing. So when I watch some of my old peers, many of whom are professional writers and academics today, <a href=\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/18/there-are-many-hyperbolic-essays.html\">treat LLMs as a question of refusal rather than a condition to engage with critically</a>, I worry we are abdicating a responsibility at precisely the moment when our technical and rhetorical expertise applies. Their refusal has good logic: user-centric researchers and communities engaged extensively with the early internet and the extractive camp won anyway, so why expect a different outcome here?</p>\n<p>But <a href=\"https://nyupress.org/9781479837243/algorithms-of-oppression/\">Noble&rsquo;s work on algorithmic bias</a> attributes that failure not to engagement, but to the institutional and financial disadvantages that user-centric approaches operated under relative to gargantuan commercial interests. David and Goliath. That gap does not close through abstention. Understanding the trade-offs around tech, producing knowledge and analysis that does not depend on investors and marketers to frame the platform and the questions, requires presence. Refusal cedes so much ground.</p>\n<p>Overall, the recommendations from the panel were practical. Noble called for people with capital (and the political will to spend it) to consider how to put money toward socially responsible research and development. D&rsquo;Ignazio called for alternative funding infrastructure outside of venture capital logic, and pointed at <a href=\"https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/report/digital-sovereignty-europes-declaration-of-independence/\">European digital sovereignty models</a> as worthy of consideration here. She also gestured at the popular <a href=\"https://buttondown.com/ai-skeptics-reading-group\">AI Skeptics reading group</a> as one current example of mad-and-commiserating-as-organizing that is creating safe psychological space for people to talk about AI and its tradeoffs. Christin&rsquo;s recommendation was community organizing, on the grounds that <a href=\"https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/12/key-findings-about-how-americans-view-artificial-intelligence/\">LLMs are unpopular with a lot of people who feel there is no space to say so</a>, and that finding those spaces is itself worthy because it provides shared language and awareness of others’ knowledge and experiences.</p>\n<p>Personally, it was refreshing to hear reflections on the work (and the feelings) of being inside institutions that are being reshaped by AI, and being responsible for some of how that reshaping gets communicated and absorbed. I’m thinking about the incredible value of interdisciplinary governance, and how the commitment to governance is a specific position, and all the margins to consider.</p>\n<p><strong>Further reading:</strong></p>\n<p>Catherine D&rsquo;Ignazio and Lauren Klein, <a href=\"https://data-feminism.mitpress.mit.edu/\">Data Feminism</a>. The foundational text on applying intersectional feminist thinking to data science practice.</p>\n<p>Catherine D&rsquo;Ignazio, <a href=\"https://direct.mit.edu/books/book/5767/Counting-FeminicideData-Feminism-in-Action\">Counting Feminicide: Data Feminism in Action</a>. Extended case study of the grassroots data activism project D&rsquo;Ignazio described on the panel.</p>\n<p>D&rsquo;Ignazio et al., &ldquo;<a href=\"https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35845842/\">Feminicide and Counterdata Production</a>.&rdquo; Research paper on the counterdata methodology behind the femicide tracking project.</p>\n<p>D&rsquo;Ignazio et al., &ldquo;<a href=\"https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3630106.3658543\">Data Feminism for AI</a>.&rdquo; Conference paper extending the data feminism framework to questions specific to AI systems.</p>\n<p>Safiya Noble, <a href=\"https://nyupress.org/9781479837243/algorithms-of-oppression/\">Algorithms of Oppression</a>. Noble&rsquo;s study of how commercial search engines reinforce racism and sexism through their ranking systems.</p>\n<p>Donna Haraway, &ldquo;<a href=\"https://www.jstor.org/stable/3178066\">Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective</a>&rdquo; (1988). The original essay where Haraway introduces the god trick and the case for situated, embodied knowledge against the view from nowhere.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-05-14T19:59:40-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/05/14/gender-power-and-ai-wrestling.html",
        "tags": ["Tech","Education","AI","Gender","Platforms","AI in Practice","Essays","Donna Haraway"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/05/13/a-look-at-the-national.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>A look at the <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/upshot/test-scores-school-districts-us.html?unlocked_article_code=1.iFA.bhkJ.SYIr76nEDx3p&amp;smid=url-share\">national decline in student test scores</a>. It&rsquo;s important to consider this alongside <a href=\"https://www.oecd.org/en/about/news/press-releases/2023/12/decline-in-educational-performance-only-partly-attributable-to-the-covid-19-pandemic.html\">global trends in education</a> as well.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-05-13T13:36:34-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/05/13/a-look-at-the-national.html",
        "tags": ["Education"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/05/11/reflections-on-teaching-fiction-writing.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>Reflections on <a href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/may/10/fiction-writing-professor-ai\">teaching fiction writing in the age of AI</a>, from a professor with ten years of classroom experience teaching writing at MIT.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-05-11T11:16:51-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/05/11/reflections-on-teaching-fiction-writing.html",
        "tags": ["Tech","Education","AI","Writing \u0026 Language","AI in Practice","AI \u0026 Writing"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/22/a-professor-asked-students-to.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>A <a href=\"https://www.purdueexponent.org/campus/general_news/ai-panic-causes-campus-uproar/article_fdb604d1-206a-4883-bbe1-fe7631a2e083.html\">professor asked students to self-report AI usage</a> on their homework, leading to lots of confusion and uproar. Points aside, it&rsquo;s clear people want more clarity up front about when and whether to use LLM tools. In the meantime, treating students like they&rsquo;re guilty until proven innocent is a bad MO.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-04-22T17:10:00-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/22/a-professor-asked-students-to.html",
        "tags": ["Tech","Education","AI","AI in Practice"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/21/timothy-chester-suggests-that-just.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>Timothy Chester offers some thoughts on the place of AI-assisted software development in a modern research university, and suggests that <a href=\"https://dispatchesinternetpioneer.substack.com/p/when-the-code-works-but-the-decision\">just because you can doesn&rsquo;t necessarily mean you should</a>.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-04-21T10:40:52-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/21/timothy-chester-suggests-that-just.html",
        "tags": ["Tech","Education","AI","AI in Practice"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/04/testing-a-new-feature-i.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>Testing a new feature I created using a mix of open source code and Claude, hoping I didn&rsquo;t break my own site. I pulled together a <a href=\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/link-archive/\">dynamic link library</a> using a Hugo partial and some shortcode that automatically catalogs all of my outbound links into sortable lists.</p>\n<p><img src=\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/uploads/2026/llexample4.png\" alt=\"A screenshot of a Link library webpage displays a list of four links along with their titles and dates, sorted by Newest first under the category Higher Ed.\"><img src=\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/uploads/2026/llexample3.png\" alt=\"A webpage lists blog-related links in a library format, sorted by newest first with dates.\"><img src=\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/uploads/2026/llexample2.png\" alt=\"A webpage titled Link library displays a sorted list of links related to arxiv with titles and dates.\"><img src=\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/uploads/2026/llexample1.png\" alt=\"A webpage displays a link library interface with a search result for hacker, showing one link titled Searching for Suzy Thunder from theverge.com dated 2020-01-22.\"></p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-04-04T10:36:44-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/04/testing-a-new-feature-i.html",
        "tags": ["Education","AI","Platforms","Photos","AI in Practice","Indie Web","Site Notes"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/04/01/what-midjourney-ai-thinks-university.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p><a href=\"https://www.reddit.com/r/midjourney/comments/131ebyk/what_midjourney_thinks_professors_look_like_based/\">What Midjourney (AI) thinks university leaders look like</a>. Of course, the technology reflects old ideas about expertise and leadership, but AI adds the ability to reproduce these biases times infinity.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-04-01T11:21:01-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/04/01/what-midjourney-ai-thinks-university.html",
        "tags": ["Education","AI"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/30/a-couple-of-weeks-ago.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>A couple of weeks ago I had an <a href=\"https://www.threads.com/@flotisserie/post/DVv1fzwkRaO\">interesting convo with Jessica Grose on Threads about the rise of the &ldquo;Luddite teen&rdquo; trend</a>. I largely suspect <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neo-Luddism\">neo-Luddism</a> is a class-related trend and will not be durable. In short, I remain unconvinced that the concern of white collar professionals and parents about the attention economy can be universalized to everyone in the actual economy. This weekend, the NYT reports that <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/29/technology/chromebook-remorse-kansas-school-laptops.html\">the &ldquo;one laptop per child&rdquo; goal we&rsquo;ve been living with in public education may be on the way out</a>, like I hinted in that thread. As the anti-AI backlash develops in real time, it will implicate other tech trends like so.</p>\n<p>I&rsquo;ve been dismayed to find out how much schoolwork happens in Google Classroom in 2026, especially since <a href=\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/05/08/why-im-broadly-skeptical-of.html\">the COVID shutdown accelerated the shift</a>. My kiddo has received a good deal of math instruction through digital modules, and I&rsquo;ve learned that if I want her experience to be different, I need to be prepared to pay out of pocket for a private tutor (a scenario taken for granted by much of the commentariat). At the same time, I learned that our local school district  is struggling to keep up with the costs of all the hardware and software it committed to over the years, ostensibly for educational continuity, equity and access. Do we need the tech or not? Who decides what it means and how it&rsquo;s applied? Chicken, egg.</p>\n<p>I think it would be foolish to throw up our hands and say the kids need paper and pencil and nothing else, and yet that&rsquo;s where the discourse is going. I have low confidence that our current landscape will produce a sane and reasonable solution to this tangle &ndash; <a href=\"https://www.readtpa.com/p/a-conversation-with-siva-vaidhyanathan\">even Haidt is selling you a product here</a>. Until then, we need to consider what it means to offload the costs, accountability, and responsibility for this technology onto school districts, parents, and children, many of whom do not have the time, resources, or know-how to curate an ideal tech experience on nights and weekends.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-03-30T12:44:04-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/30/a-couple-of-weeks-ago.html",
        "tags": ["Education","AI","Kids \u0026 Tech"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/15/i-misused-pesos-below-cest.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>I misused PESOS below, c’est la vie, I’m doing a POSSE model. Here’s <a href=\"https://elizabethtai.com/2023/07/02/posse-and-pesos-better-ways-to-publish-content/\">someone smarter than me on POSSE v PESOS</a>.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-03-15T13:11:33-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/15/i-misused-pesos-below-cest.html",
        "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Education","Indie Web"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/06/reaching-back-to-to-put.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>Reaching back to 2025 to put this article on the pile of AI commentary: <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/29/opinion/ai-tech-innovation.html?unlocked_article_code=1.RFA.I2mL.DtNYw7gyLZfI\">Cottom&rsquo;s argument here is that AI, for all the breathless hype around it, is a &ldquo;mid&rdquo; technology</a>, one that makes modest augmentations to existing processes while its loudest boosters use it to justify employing fewer people and delegitimizing expertise. Around the time the article was published, she supplemented with <a href=\"https://www.tiktok.com/@black_was_genius/video/7487676933073915178\">some additional video commentary worth watching</a>.</p>\n<p>She <a href=\"https://mitsloan.mit.edu/ideas-made-to-matter/lure-so-so-technology-and-how-to-avoid-it\">draws on Acemoglu and Restrepo&rsquo;s concept of &ldquo;so-so&rdquo; technologies</a> and traces a pattern from MOOCs to DOGE, where each iteration promises transformation but delivers incremental improvements at best and labor displacement at worst. The real danger, she argues, is that AI&rsquo;s most compelling use case in the current political environment is threatening, <a href=\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/03/05/this-new-report-from-anthropic.html\">demoralizing workers and justifying cuts</a>, not revolutionizing how work gets done.</p>\n<p><a href=\"https://tressiemc.com/\">Cottom</a> has been <a href=\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/09/25/two-steps-forward-one-step.html\">one of the writers I keep returning to</a> because she is not dismissing the technology or retreating into reactionary nostalgia. She looks past the product announcements to the political economy underneath them. Who benefits from the hype cycle? What happens to the institutional infrastructure (education, research, public expertise) that AI claims to augment and simultaneously threatens to starve? She&rsquo;s <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/tressiemcphd/\">also very active on Instagram</a> (and <a href=\"https://www.instagram.com/powertothepeopleyall/\">promoting a new documentary</a>) and tracing the news around AI and higher ed in real time.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-03-06T15:20:00-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/03/06/reaching-back-to-to-put.html",
        "tags": ["Education","AI","Platforms","Tressie McMillan Cottom"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/26/where-are-the-women-a.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>Where are the women? <a href=\"https://studentorgs.kentlaw.iit.edu/ckjip/where-are-the-women-a-detailed-history-of-women-in-computer-science-and-how-it-impacts-the-modern-day-industry/\">A brief history of women in the computer sciences</a>.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-02-26T15:06:41-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/02/26/where-are-the-women-a.html",
        "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Education","Gender"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/30/crunching-for-clarity.html",
        "title": "Crunching for clarity",
        "content_html": "<p>In 1999, academic and theorist <a href=\"https://www.theguardian.com/books/1999/dec/24/news\">Judith Butler famously won an award for the worst academic sentence</a>, raising good questions about how we read difficult texts, who gets to access academic ideas, and the role of academic and plain language in and around the academy:</p>\n<blockquote>The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.</blockquote>\n<p><a href=\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/08/my-undergrad-experience-in-college.html\">This was my era in college</a>, and I remember feeling challenged and overwhelmed as an undergrad trying to read theory for the first time. So today, I asked Claude.ai to put it in plain language, just to see what would happen. Here&rsquo;s the after:</p>\n<blockquote>Scholars used to think that capitalism shaped society in consistent, predictable patterns. But newer thinking focuses on how power works—how it repeats, overlaps, and gets reshaped over time. This brought time into the picture and moved away from older theories that treated social structures as fixed. Instead, recognizing that structures can change opened up a new way of understanding power: it's tied to specific moments and strategies, and it's always being renegotiated.</blockquote>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-01-30T12:12:00-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/01/30/crunching-for-clarity.html",
        "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Books \u0026 Reading","Tech","Education","AI","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","AI in Practice","Essays","AI \u0026 Writing"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/26/french-overlooks-how-smartphones-and.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p><a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/25/opinion/college-thinking-illiberalism.html?unlocked_article_code=1.HlA.H8Jj.Kpu9fJdESs9m&amp;smid=nytcore-ios-share\">French overlooks</a> how smartphones and social media raised the stakes on debate and discussion, transforming campus discourse. Today’s students worry that one viral misstep (in countless directions) may define them forever.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-01-26T19:40:52-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/01/26/french-overlooks-how-smartphones-and.html",
        "tags": ["Education","Platforms","Internet Culture","First Amendment"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/21/rules-without-lessons.html",
        "title": "Rules without lessons",
        "content_html": "<p>If you spend time around cycling and pedestrian advocates, the <a href=\"https://captimes.com/news/government/e-bikes-similar-devices-spark-concerns-backers-want-rules-not-bans/article_fa327b41-1c31-4664-ad32-c668e0d9460a.html\">debate between bans and regulations</a> is familiar territory. When I got deep into road biking, where I learned to ride long distance through a red state with almost no bike infrastructure outside tight urban and exurban areas, one of the best things I did was take <a href=\"https://bikeleague.org/ridesmart/\">road classes through the League of American Bicyclists</a>. You learn the rules of the road from a cyclist&rsquo;s perspective and practice skills like riding with car traffic under expert guidance, including how to change a flat on the side of the road in the height of summer, gritty with sweat and road grime.</p>\n<p>The challenge is that bike education isn&rsquo;t standardized, so most cyclists never learn the fundamentals anyway. Many of us learned as kids and haven’t had a refresh since. I get stomach pain when I see people riding at night without a light, going too fast on a dedicated path, and adults riding their bike on a pedestrian sidewalk. But when I think about e-bike bans and pedestrian right-of-way debates, it strikes me that outside of getting a driver&rsquo;s permit for car drivers, there&rsquo;s essentially no infrastructure for learning how to share roads and paths safely. We&rsquo;re trying to regulate behavior most of us didn&rsquo;t learn in earnest.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-01-21T09:23:47-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/01/21/rules-without-lessons.html",
        "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Education","Kids \u0026 Tech"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/01/20/uwmadison-is-among-universities-seeing.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>UW-Madison is among universities seeing federal terminations of international student visas. Public research universities have come to rely on these students to offset funding cuts. The losses are both <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/19/us/politics/uw-madison-international-students-visas-trump.html?unlocked_article_code=1.F1A.iJhr.dJK1U9EnrlSz&amp;smid=url-share\">financial and cultural</a>.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2026-01-20T15:33:14-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2026/01/20/uwmadison-is-among-universities-seeing.html",
        "tags": ["Education","Madison","Midwest"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/11/15/this-book-isnt-in-epilogue.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p><a href=\"https://www.changecommsbook.au\">This book</a> isn’t in Epilogue so I can’t log it properly, but it’s an okay primer on change communication. For higher ed, the emphasis on engaging leadership and governance is handy. 📚</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2025-11-15T15:02:40-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/11/15/this-book-isnt-in-epilogue.html",
        "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Books \u0026 Reading","Education"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/11/09/what-is-this-site-and.html",
        "title": "What is this site and why am I doing it?",
        "content_html": "<p>In recent history I stopped posting on most social media and moved to the <a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fediverse\">fediverse</a>. I still browse the social platforms to keep up with trends and friends, but I only post on my private IG and here.</p>\n<p>What I share here is separate from but related to my professional life — I&rsquo;m thinking out loud and making room for rough, unfinished ideas. I write mainly for myself, but if others find it useful, that&rsquo;s great. The practice of reading and reflecting makes your thinking stick, and I am from a certain time and place, so this is how I approach learning and communicating about what I&rsquo;m learning. It&rsquo;s a habit.</p>\n<p>While this is my preferred approach, I acknowledge that sharing unfinished ideas publicly is risky and you have to accept accountability for the messiness that comes with that. But I also know that working through your vulnerability through the act of writing lets you tap into your most creative, innovative self and test your ideas against an evolving sense of what&rsquo;s good. The potential for an audience, however real or implied, keeps you more honest and less self-indulgent. Despite the trade offs, I think it&rsquo;s worthwhile.</p>\n<p>As I add to this page, I&rsquo;ll be <a href=\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2026/02/08/my-undergrad-experience-in-college.html\">thinking out loud about digital rhetoric and communication</a> alongside emerging technology, and linking back to foundational ideas I see reflected online today. Occasionally I&rsquo;ll say something longer.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2025-11-09T14:12:00-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/11/09/what-is-this-site-and.html",
        "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","Education","Platforms","Writing \u0026 Language","Digital Rhetoric","Indie Web","Site Notes"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/11/09/writing-for-the-public-in.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p><a href=\"https://compositionforum.com/issue/41/going-public.php\">Writing for the public in an age of anxiety</a>: &ldquo;This article identifies five topoi of this new rhetorical landscape—presence, persistence, permeability, promiscuity, and power—describing the anxieties and affordances they present for student writers, the dispositions toward writing they foster, and the challenges and opportunities they pose for composition. This framework provides a critical vocabulary for compositionists seeking to help those who negotiate emerging networked publics.&rdquo;</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2025-11-09T12:36:11-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/11/09/writing-for-the-public-in.html",
        "tags": ["Education","Writing \u0026 Language","Digital Rhetoric"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/10/28/wisconsin-watch-profiled-the-pulaski.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>Wisconsin Watch <a href=\"https://wisconsinwatch.org/2025/10/wisconsin-pulaski-school-newspaper-student-teen-journalism/\">profiled the Pulaski News</a>, the newspaper of record in a ~3500 person village in northeast Wisconsin, run by high school students.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2025-10-28T12:10:46-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/10/28/wisconsin-watch-profiled-the-pulaski.html",
        "tags": ["Education","Midwest","Journalism \u0026 Publishing"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/10/15/a-difficult-number-for-so.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>A <a href=\"https://www.wpr.org/news/uw-madison-decline-international-freshman-students?fbclid=IwdGRjcANc8mRleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHl29fnF6zVpyi7U0KF6Wpkic9KLL_lOr5-O687QYaSIYgu8wRe0bAdUCnY67_aem_YcW_jP5pzdaN66DhkbcYBg\">difficult number</a> for so many reasons.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2025-10-15T16:33:38-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/10/15/a-difficult-number-for-so.html",
        "tags": ["Education","Madison"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/10/13/what-happens-to-college-towns.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p><a href=\"https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/what-happens-to-college-towns-after?utm_source=www.garbageday.email&amp;utm_medium=newsletter&amp;utm_campaign=the-great-dumbening&amp;_bhlid=390372c9a850e5b8a2eac6483fc5132e41fc4b6c\">What happens to college towns</a> after they’re hit by the so-called enrollment cliff?</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2025-10-13T15:43:06-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/10/13/what-happens-to-college-towns.html",
        "tags": ["Education"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/09/25/from-propublica-on-how-publiclyfunded.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>From Propublica, on how publicly-funded private school vouchers are <a href=\"https://www.propublica.org/article/segregation-academies-public-schools-amite-county-mississippi\">funding a segregation academy dynamic</a>.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2025-09-25T08:46:39-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/09/25/from-propublica-on-how-publiclyfunded.html",
        "tags": ["Education"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/08/20/hey-chat-how-is-pedagogy.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>Hey chat, how is <a href=\"https://lithub.com/what-happened-when-i-tried-to-replace-myself-with-chatgpt-in-my-english-classroom/\">pedagogy changing in an age of AI</a>?</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2025-08-20T11:35:20-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/08/20/hey-chat-how-is-pedagogy.html",
        "tags": ["Education","AI"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/08/17/ais-last-mile-problem-in.html",
        "title": "⚡ AI's last mile problem in higher ed",
        "content_html": "<p>I graduated from college right before the 2008 recession and bounced through some unpromising temp jobs until an opportunity emerged for a permanent position. Sometimes you just need to get in where you fit in, and so I did. That&rsquo;s how I came to work for a regional cable company that used federal money to expand the new national broadband network, extending out to the rural communities dotting central Indiana.</p>\n<p>It was a front row seat to the national broadband expansion efforts of the early 2000s. Our business ran right across the state, spanning the 80 or so miles from Attica to Kokomo, which included several small cities with large manufacturers, two public research universities, and several community and liberal arts colleges. The strip of broadband fiber at the core of our service followed existing highways and electrical lines that split the corn and soybean fields from town to town, feathering out to more rural areas from there.</p>\n<p>I worked a variety of roles there that put me face-to-face with a classic technical problem: <strong><a href=\"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_mile_%28telecommunications%29\">the last mile</a></strong>. On many occasions, someone would come in looking pensive, and explain that the fiber had been extended <em>all</em> the way from town to their hamlet, and yet there was no plan to connect their property to the pole. Over time the pattern was clear: while the network was expanded, the cost of running a physical line to each individual property was too expensive and specific at scale. These customers often left without a path forward despite all their efforts and ours.</p>\n<p>The &ldquo;<strong>last mile problem</strong>&rdquo; refers to the <strong>logistical challenges and high costs associated with the final leg of delivering goods or services to the end customer</strong>. It&rsquo;s often the most difficult and expensive part of the supply chain, despite being a relatively short distance. The pattern shows up everywhere: public transit can get commuters most of the way most of the time, but that final leg of the journey remains specific and individual and problematic. E-commerce companies promise drone delivery solutions, scooter and bike-share apps claim to solve urban mobility gaps, but these technological optimizations remain persistently stubborn at scale, running up against the messy realities of sidewalks, intersections, and actual human behavior.</p>\n<p>Tl;dr: I&rsquo;ve been turning over this suspicion that AI automation will hit a classic &ldquo;last mile problem,&rdquo; especially in the public sector.</p>\n<p>AI systems, particularly LLMs, are like those systems—they work incredibly well in their intended domain, processing and manipulating information. But because they&rsquo;re fundamentally an information-only approach, that creates their own last mile problem when we try to implement them in physical and context-specific environments. <strong><a href=\"https://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/08/15/navigating-ai-in-higher-ed.html\">Public institutions are uniquely specific</a></strong> — they are often the originators and producers of knowledge and the keepers of original policy, tasked with making the rubber hit the road. Additionally, the need for comprehensive data protection required by public workers and institutions fundamentally hamstring potential applications.</p>\n<p><strong>Actually implementing recommendations is where you hit the last mile.</strong> This is the work of public administration.</p>\n<p>Imagine an AI application trained on every facilities management manual ever written and tuned to synthesize best practices for HVAC optimization. It can analyze years of energy usage data and recommend precise temperature adjustments for different zones of a building, but can&rsquo;t feel that the third floor is always stuffy, or know that the facilities manager retired last year and took decades of institutional knowledge with him. Building A&rsquo;s HVAC system was installed in 1987 and has a manual keypad. Building B&rsquo;s system interfaces with the campus-wide monitoring system, but unreliably, and investigation is slated for later, someday, when resources allow. Professor Smith has taught in Room 204 for 25 years and will blow up your spot before moving to a different classroom for maintenance. Your engineers who manage these spaces are balancing human teams, who have time off and training and other priorities they manage in life. So, you need staff who understand the quirks of each area, the history of each system, the politics of which departments will accept changes and which will flood your inbox with complaints. You need someone who knows that the third floor always runs hot because of a design flaw from 1974, and that the solution isn&rsquo;t more precise control but a $50,000 renovation that&rsquo;s been deferred for a decade because a glittering new project across campus takes priority.</p>\n<p>Imagine this tangle of questions and contingencies times infinity on every university campus in existence. Universities are like cities—they&rsquo;ve been built and rebuilt over decades or centuries, with layers of systems and fiefdoms that weren&rsquo;t designed to work together. AI recommendations assume a level of standardization that simply doesn&rsquo;t exist. Every AI implementation in higher ed requires navigating multiple constituencies with different priorities and power structures. It&rsquo;s like trying to redesign traffic patterns in a neighborhood where the residents, business owners, commuters, and city planners all have veto power and conflicting interests.</p>\n<hr>\n<p>So. When looking at efficiency efforts spinning up across the education sector, I&rsquo;m feeling pensive, trying to understand how exactly the house gets connected to the pole.</p>\n<p>The promise of new tech in higher ed needs to more deeply consider the translation costs: the human labor, institutional knowledge, knowledge documentation and local adaptation required to bridge between the usefulness of tech and specific realities of public university work. Public employees want modernization and don&rsquo;t want to fall behind. We want systems that work. We are also balancing a great deal of change and pressure as a sector, with fewer material resources than ever. We need less marketing and more right-sizing in the claims around AI against the political and tech realities of public administration.</p>\n<p>This disconnect between technological promise and implementation reality becomes even more critical as higher education faces increased political scrutiny. When tech vendors promise that AI will solve efficiency problems or reduce administrative costs, institutions are under immense pressure to deliver measurable results quickly. But the translation costs we experience don&rsquo;t disappear just because the political pressure to modernize increases.</p>\n<p>The institutions that thread this needle will be the ones that accurately assess these translation costs upfront and set expectations accordingly—not the ones that assume the technology will magically bridge the gap between digital and physical, abstract and specific.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2025-08-17T09:15:00-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/08/17/ais-last-mile-problem-in.html",
        "tags": ["Art and Craft","Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","Education","AI","Platforms","AI in Practice","Essays"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/08/15/navigating-ai-in-higher-ed.html",
        "title": "⚡ Navigating AI in higher ed communications: A practitioner's guide",
        "content_html": "<p>by Lauren Bruce</p>\n<p>As communications professionals in higher education, we work for institutions built on the pursuit of knowledge and innovation, yet many of us feel uncertain about how to thoughtfully integrate one of the most significant technological advances of our time: artificial intelligence.</p>\n<p>Over the past year, my team has wrestled with questions that didn&rsquo;t exist in our profession just a few years ago. Should we use AI to draft articles and email copy? How do we disclose AI-generated content, or do we? When does AI assistance cross the line from helpful tool to ethical concern?</p>\n<p>These aren&rsquo;t abstract questions any longer. Over the last year, I had to overcome AI resistance of my own to develop practical, hands-on approaches to AI use that align with our institutional values while acknowledging the realities of modern communications work (more on that below). What I&rsquo;ve learned is that the answers aren&rsquo;t found in blanket policies or rules, but in applying our existing professional ethics to these new tools. Here is where I am today on the journey from AI praxis to practice.</p>\n<p><strong>Mission first</strong></p>\n<p>The foundation of responsible AI use in our field starts with a principle we already know: everything we do should advance our institution&rsquo;s educational mission. Higher education exists to create, share, and preserve knowledge while fostering critical thinking and diverse perspectives, in service of students, faculty, researchers, workers and the world.</p>\n<p>The bulk of our work comes from conversations with colleagues, understanding of our campus dynamics and processes, and professional judgment about what our community needs to hear. This inevitably means more work upfront, but it maintains the authenticity and institutional knowledge that our audience deserves, regardless of whether AI tools are part of the process.</p>\n<p><strong>Transparency without paranoia</strong></p>\n<p>Do I need to mention AI every time I use it? The answer isn&rsquo;t simple, but I&rsquo;ve found a helpful framework: consider whether your audience would feel misled if they knew how AI was involved in creating the content.</p>\n<p>When I use AI to polish grammar and shape format, that feels similar to using spell-check – it’s helpful but not something that changes the fundamental nature of the content we wish to communicate. But when AI helps generate the main structure for a story about campus policy changes, that&rsquo;s a different ball game. The audience expects those priorities and framing decisions to come from human judgment about what matters to our community.</p>\n<p>Internally, we differentiate between the two by defining whether or not you are “automating” processes using AI, or “augmenting” processes using AI. Full disclosure, my area of experience is in augmentation, not automation. That said.</p>\n<p>I&rsquo;ve started recommending simple disclosures when AI plays a substantial role in content creation. A line like &ldquo;This article was developed with AI assistance&rdquo; maintains trust while allowing us to thoughtfully benefit from these tools. It&rsquo;s not about being defensive, it&rsquo;s about being transparent with the people we serve, especially as the tech and attitudes around it evolve over time. Additional qualifications can be included here, such as how the information was shaped and shared by AI or not (privacy implications abound).</p>\n<p>Here, it’s important to remember to only use your university-approved tools, because university enterprise AI tools are modified to meet campus rules and requirements related to data handling.</p>\n<p><strong>The accuracy imperative</strong></p>\n<p>Perhaps nowhere are the stakes higher than with accuracy. In higher education communications, we&rsquo;re not just sharing information—we&rsquo;re stewarding public trust in our institutions and, by extension, in higher education itself. In addition, much of the information we are communicating is original, in that it’s new information that cannot be generated using the limitless soup of generative AI.</p>\n<p>Every piece of AI-generated content requires human verification, especially anything involving numbers, research findings, or claims about institutional achievements. This means checking sources, confirming statistics, and ensuring that quotes are accurate and properly sourced. It&rsquo;s more work, but the alternative—publishing incorrect information—could undermine years of relationship-building with community stakeholders and partners.</p>\n<p>The promise of speed and efficiency that comes with generative AI must be balanced with the work of <a href=\"https://classicswrites.hsites.harvard.edu/close-reading-0\">close reading</a>, the skill and practice of carefully analyzing a passage’s language, content, structure, and patterns in order to understand what a passage means, what it suggests, and how it connects to our larger body of work. I firmly believe that close reading, learned in the Humanities and Social Sciences, will become increasingly important to understand, shape and steer AI output, especially with regard to public communication best practices.</p>\n<p><strong>Inclusion as a practice</strong></p>\n<p>AI bias isn&rsquo;t an abstract concern—it shows up in subtle but significant ways in the work. I&rsquo;ve noticed that AI tools often default to formal, academic language that might exclude first-generation college students, or suggest examples and metaphors that assume certain cultural backgrounds, for example.</p>\n<p>This has made me more intentional about prompt engineering—the way I request AI assistance. I build digital accessibility and plain language best practices into my prompts, in alignment with institutional best practices. One tip is to draft the original using my chosen, intentional language, then ask for revisions using as much of the original verbiage as possible. The difference in output is significant and it allows me to focus on higher-order communication strategy while demonstrating both accuracy and inclusive values in our output.</p>\n<p><strong>Privacy and the long view</strong></p>\n<p>Working at a public university means balancing transparency with appropriate privacy protections. We work within strict guidelines about what information can be included in AI prompts, particularly around student data, personnel information, and strategic planning discussions. Again, it’s important to only use your university-approved tools, because university enterprise AI tools are modified to meet campus rules and requirements related to data handling.</p>\n<p>The challenge is that AI tools work best with context, but providing that context can sometimes mean sharing information inappropriately. I&rsquo;ve learned to be creative about how I frame requests to AI tools—giving enough context for useful output while protecting sensitive information about individuals and institutional operations.</p>\n<p>I focus AI prompts on publicly available information rather than including details from internal planning discussions or individual faculty concerns. It requires more thoughtful preparation, but it ensures we&rsquo;re protecting appropriate confidentiality.</p>\n<p><strong>Speed vs. strategy</strong></p>\n<p>The efficiency of AI is seductive, especially when facing tight deadlines and endless communication requests. But I&rsquo;ve learned that speed can&rsquo;t come at the expense of quality or authenticity.</p>\n<p>Authentic institutional voice and authority doesn&rsquo;t emerge from algorithms—it requires the deliberate application of human judgment to ensure our plans and communications reflect our campus culture, embody our values, and resonate with our specific audiences. The strategic thinking we bring—our ability to read context, navigate relationships, and understand the subtle dynamics of higher education communication—cannot be automated.</p>\n<p>Consider my own practice: I frequently engage AI as a collaborative thinking tool, particularly for structural planning and format development. However, AI&rsquo;s default tendency toward comprehensive, multi-layered approaches often produces unnecessarily complex frameworks for university communication realities. This is where professional judgement becomes critical. Strong strategic foundations and institutional knowledge allow us to right-size AI&rsquo;s expansive suggestions into focused, contextually appropriate communication plans that actually serve our goals and communities.</p>\n<p><strong>Looking ahead</strong></p>\n<p>What I&rsquo;ve learned over this past year is that responsible AI use isn&rsquo;t about following a rigid set of rules. It&rsquo;s about applying the professional ethics we already have to new technological capabilities. The core principles that guide good communications work—accuracy, transparency, service to mission, respect for audience—remain the same.</p>\n<p>What&rsquo;s different is that we now have tools that can enhance our ability to live up to those principles, if we use them thoughtfully. AI can help us communicate more clearly, research more efficiently, and reach broader audiences. But only if we maintain our professional judgment about when, how, and why to use these tools.</p>\n<p>As our field continues to evolve, I&rsquo;m convinced that the communications professionals who thrive will be those who can harness the power of AI while maintaining the human insight, ethical judgment, and institutional knowledge that define excellence in our profession. The technology will keep changing, but our commitment to serving our institutions and communities through ethical, effective communication remains constant. That&rsquo;s the foundation we build on, whether we&rsquo;re writing with pen and paper, collaborating in a digital document, or prompting the most sophisticated AI tool on campus.</p>\n<hr>\n<p>*This post reflects my ongoing learning about AI ethics in communications practice and was generated using the assistance of AI (Claude, Gemini). Cross-posted on LinkedIn.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2025-08-15T11:49:12-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/08/15/navigating-ai-in-higher-ed.html",
        "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Tech","Education","AI","AI in Practice","Essays"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/08/14/i-work-in-an-it.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>I work in an IT communications role in higher ed, and AI finally crept into my life in a real way. Coming soon: some reflections on AI from a comms practitioner in higher ed.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2025-08-14T17:40:08-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/08/14/i-work-in-an-it.html",
        "tags": ["Education","AI"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/07/08/in-there-were-a-total.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>&ldquo;In 2024, there were a total of 454 words <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/02/health/ai-chatgpt-research-papers.html?unlocked_article_code=1.U08.fcOF.GhhVp25eL_4E&amp;smid=url-share\">used excessively by chatbots</a>, the researchers report.&rdquo; When does use of AI tip over into something fraudulent? Experts disagree.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2025-07-08T16:56:18-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/07/08/in-there-were-a-total.html",
        "tags": ["Communications \u0026 Marketing","Books \u0026 Reading","Tech","Education","AI","AI \u0026 Writing"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/07/08/the-education-sector-is-one.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>The education sector is a big target for cyber attacks, with higher ed being one of the largest and most sensitive targets for bad actors. A recent study shows that <a href=\"https://www.ecampusnews.com/news/2025/03/31/report-finds-education-sector-unprepared-for-escalating-cyberattacks/\">education is unprepared as a sector</a> and many institutions lack resources to support a thoughtful and robust cybersecurity program.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2025-07-08T12:13:04-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/07/08/the-education-sector-is-one.html",
        "tags": ["Books \u0026 Reading","Tech","Education","Cybersecurity"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/06/18/the-worlds-most-valuable-companies.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>“The world&rsquo;s most valuable companies are based in the United States, built on foundations of government-funded university research.”  <a href=\"https://open.substack.com/pub/edtechnow/p/the-harvard-canary-in-the-innovation?utm_campaign=post&amp;utm_medium=web\">open.substack.com/pub/edtec&hellip;</a></p>\n",
        "date_published": "2025-06-18T12:40:38-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/06/18/the-worlds-most-valuable-companies.html",
        "tags": ["Education"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/02/12/the-hamhanded-relationship-between-governments.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>The ham-handed relationship between governments, trustees and schools as boards get politicized. PBS: <a href=\"https://www.pbs.org/newshour/education/invisible-college-boards-trustees-move-spotlight\">www.pbs.org/newshour/&hellip;</a></p>\n",
        "date_published": "2025-02-12T09:47:26-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/02/12/the-hamhanded-relationship-between-governments.html",
        "tags": ["Education"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2025/02/11/on-institutional-neutrality-a-conservative.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>On &ldquo;<a href=\"https://www.insidehighered.com/news/faculty-issues/academic-freedom/2024/10/10/whats-behind-push-institutional-neutrality\">institutional neutrality</a>,&rdquo; a conservative approach to dampen political speech on college campuses.</p>\n",
        "date_published": "2025-02-11T18:01:30-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2025/02/11/on-institutional-neutrality-a-conservative.html",
        "tags": ["Education","First Amendment"]
      },
      {
        "id": "http://flotisserie.micro.blog/2023/10/26/more-than-onefifth.html",
        
        "content_html": "<p>&ldquo;More than one-fifth of college students are parents, and about one-tenth are single mothers.&rdquo; <a href=\"https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/26/opinion/college-single-mother.html\">www.nytimes.com/2023/10/2&hellip;</a></p>\n",
        "date_published": "2023-10-26T12:40:31-05:00",
        "url": "https://flotisserie.online/2023/10/26/more-than-onefifth.html",
        "tags": ["Education"]
      }
  ]
}
