Technology

Welcome to the #AInthropocene

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A giant robotic limb made of crumbling stone dominates the left side of an image, while in the background, a shadowy human figure standing facing away in rocky landscape, looks out on a moon or asteroid caught hurtling over distant light blue water.

"The AInthropocene" by Nate Angell was created using the DALL-E 2 generative AI service with the prompt "Picture a future geologic age in which humans and artificial intelligence coexist and collaborate to shape the Earth and its ecosystems in ways that were previously unimaginable" and is dedicated to the public domain via CC0.

Inspired while reading Tressie McMillan Cottom’s 20 Dec 2022 NY Times post, “Human This Christmas“, I tweeted about the “AInthropocene”, which I thought would be an already existent portmanteau word that combines the idea of the Anthropocene geologic age with the “AI” abbreviation for artificial intelligence — putting the “AIn’t” in the Anthropocene if you … Read more

Annotation & EDU Trends

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A bunch of tree swallows lined up on tree branches trying to stay warm in a snowstorm.

Seemingly Surreal Swallows in a Spring Snowstorm by Keith Williams, licensed CC BY-NC-ND.

This post expands on a Twitter thread of mine that tried to lay out a concise argument that collaborative, digital, interoperable annotation can play a key role in the major strategies that higher education is using to meet the significant challenges it faces today.

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Mothering Digital

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A black and white screengrab from the recording of Douglas Engelbart giving the "Mother of All Demos" in 1968.

Screengrab of Douglas Engelbart from the recording of the 1968 "MOAD".

Today folks are gathered at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Mother of All Demos (“MOAD”). Held in 1968 in San Francisco’s Civic Auditorium, SRI’s Douglas Engelbart and others demonstrated networked computer systems they were developing, including the mouse, hypertext, and real-time collaborative editing. The MOAD has become a notorious event in computer and internet history, both presaging and shaping the digital technology environment we live in now.

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Marketing Hypothesis

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Man in red sweater holding a notebook with overlaid text saying "My notebook lives with me."

I’m incredibly excited—and deeply honored—to be joining the team at Hypothesis, the organization behind the capabilities that enable everyone to take digital notes, everywhere. At Hypothesis, I’ll be leading marketing: telling the stories that engage people to add a new layer to the web.

Buttons that activate Hypothesis.

If you haven’t seen Hypothesis before, look in the upper right corner of my blog and you’ll see buttons that let you create and add to your own digital notebook of annotated links. For your further travels, the easiest way to use Hypothesis everywhere is with our Chrome browser extension.

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Post-Fact Fictions: Let’s Get REAL About Information Literacy

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Graphic showing overlapping petals labelled information literacy, data literacy, statistical literacy, critical reasoning, visual literacy, technology literacy.

Literacy Rainbow (6/6) by Justin Grimes licensed CC BY-SA.

Read more posts about Renewable Experiential & Applied Learning (REAL)

I’m still thinking about the 2016 US election and what it means for the people, ideas and future I care about. One thing that is clear to me is that understanding and participating in such an election calls on all of us—regardless of our point of view—to increase our information literacy and use it to inform our critical reasoning. How’s your statistical and data literacy doing?

Folks are saying we now live in a “post fact” world, but I recognize that “facts” have always been generated within cultural, political, economic, and social contexts. If anything, we are drowning in facts, not sailing away from them. To survive, we need to get better at understanding how facts are now made, circulated, and given value.

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