PhD, former librarian, pessimistic utopian. History of tech, disasters, & doom-saying. Wrote my dissertation on Y2K (currently turning that into a book).
Jan 1 • 39 tweets • 7 min read
The fact that people today feel comfortable looking back at Y2K and laughing is because enough people took the problem seriously and fixed it before anything catastrophic could occur.
It was a real problem, fixing it took real work. Even if many just remember it as a joke. 🧵
At the outset let me state that I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Y2K (which I’m currently working on turning into a book). I’ve spent years reading tens of thousands of pages of documents on this, and talking to people involved, I’m not just making a quick observation.
Jul 25, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
True story, the semester is still more than a month away but I’ve already received many official emails about how to catch them if your students are using AI.
Lots of fear mongering that consistently sidesteps the deeper questions of what are we evaluating students on and why.
I think educators have an opportunity to help students understand how these systems work, to show them the limitations of these systems, and to push back on some of the hype and apocalypticism around these systems.
Jumping straight to accusations of cheating is a missed chance
Oct 28, 2018 • 20 tweets • 4 min read
Like most Jews, I’ve spent the last 24 hours in a state of despair.
I grew up in synagogues: my father was a rabbi and my mother directed a synagogue’s religious school. Though I’m not from Pittsburgh as I read the news I couldn’t help thinking of the synagogues I grew up in.
Beyond the tragedy of this attack, one of the things that has struck me is almost how unsurprising it feels. Even as the synagogue was always like a second home to me, it was also always a space that I knew was a potential target for people who hate Jews.
