Florida’s Board of Governors is made up of “political appointees from the business world, from insurance executives to roofing contractors, who are dictating how professors must teach their courses and even providing state-created textbooks for doing so.”
My new piece in @truthout.bsky.social
Finally, TC DH has three great calls: Latinx DH as emancipatory praxis; liberatory archives & digital resistance; and DH in a time of political retrenchment: mla.confex.com/mla/2027/web... (3/3)
Next up, @eliterature.bsky.social has a call out for talks on "Creative Responses to Coding and AI: from Infrastructure to Output" -- this includes open weight models, thinking about open source futures, and approaches to agents / claws / skills, etc. mla.confex.com/mla/2027/web... (2/3)
If you're thinking about heading to #MLA27, there are several session calls I'm involved with that could be of interest to DH, electronic literature, and games folks: first up, the MLA Committee on Information Technology has calls on AI in DH & language pedagogy: mla.confex.com/mla/2027/web... (1/3)
"The sizable negative impact of techno-optimist beliefs on willingness to contribute to addressing climate change highlights the importance of discussing the role of technology in addressing climate change without implying that socio-economic & behavioral transformations aren't necessary."
From 🧵👇
Academia is the worst for this. I don't think I've booted up my university-issued machine all school year since it doesn't permit any of my current research.
Agreed, along with some overdue discussions about faculty & administrative writing 😅
👇‼️👇‼️👇‼️👇‼️👇🥳🥳🥳
Someone pull that lever, please. The new requirement to have syllabi with readings & assignment details posted 45 days in advance in Florida is ludicrous on many levels, but particularly absurd for my Humanities AI class--last time I taught it Claude Code Web dropped midsemester.
Years ago I wrote this essay about protest bots, which is exactly how I would describe @nps-uncensored.bsky.social.
The 2nd Critical Code Studies Digital Humanities Quarterly is now online! ed. w Jeremy Douglass
Feat. Kevin Brock, Evan Buswell, Zachary Mann, Briana Bettin, Jeffrey Moro, Zachary Horton and Levi Burner, Matt Burton and Joris van Zundert, and Mace Ojala
dhq.digitalhumanities.org/preview/inde...
That should pretty much finish the "Grammarly is fine" policy writing I've seen thus far in higher education, assuming anyone is still paying attention.
Cardinal staring directly at you.
Cardinal posing to the side with hazy water distortion
For your #birdscrolling break, this cardinal took glamour shots in our birdbath.
A digital drawing of author Maia Kobabe, a white nonbinary person with short brown hair wearing a patterned blue shirt, who scowls while holding up a copy of eir book GENDER QUEER: A MEMOIR. Maia is saying: H.R. 7661 is a national book banning bill which seeks to remove any book that "involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism" from all public schools in the US. This would ban my books, and any other book with trans themes, from public schools. PLEASE call your House Reps and say: NO ON H.R. 7661!
H.R. 7661 is a national book banning bill which seeks to remove any book that "involves gender dysphoria or transgenderism" from all public schools in the US. This would ban all my books, & any other book with trans themes, from public schools. PLEASE call your House Reps & say: NO ON H.R. 7661!
🌟 "Professor Superstar: Fandom and Anti-Fandom of Academia🌟
Mel Stanfill explores how academia acts like a fan culture, with admiration, critique, and microcelebrity shaping how higher education is seen...
@melstanfill.bsky.social
@uofmpress.bsky.social
Discover here: bit.ly/4qzdLVw
Submissions to this year's virtual Electronic Literature Organization conference close at the end of the day (AOE) on the 28th! This includes submissions for performances and exhibitions of experimental work engaging the future of narrative as well as our academic track with papers and workshops.
I would like to thank Companion AI for helping promote my latest in @mcsweeneys.net. I had worried my satire was too dark. This Einstein product reassures me that it was optimistic sunshine.
www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the...
Via @simonwillison.net the term "claw" is taking off to describe "AI agents that generally run on personal hardware, communicate via messaging protocols and can both act on direct instructions and schedule tasks" - simonwillison.net/2026/Feb/21/... - likely already active around your campus. (2/2)
This part is critical - Einstein is just a task-specific wrap of what OpenClaw and its ilk represent, and the OpenClaw founder is joining OpenAI (www.reuters.com/business/ope...). Similar capabilities for working with any software or website will be integrated into mainstream tools rapidly. (1/2)
If Apple can kill Flash, agentic AI can and should kill PDFs with their bloated, frequently inaccessible, file structure. Here's hoping DOCX is next.
Screenshot of an article header from a website. The title reads "Writing As Thinking—By Proxy" in bold serif font. Below it, the author's name "by Jon Ippolito" appears as a red hyperlink, followed by the date "Wednesday, February 18th 2026" in gray monospace font. The article preview shows a photo of a cream-colored t-shirt on a hanger printed with cartoon robots and the text "The Transformers: Writing Instructors in the Age of A.I." alongside an italic abstract that reads: "In this provocation, Jon Ippolito questions what human capabilities AI extends and what capabilities it removes. In doing so, he charts the evolution of human writing processes alongside technology while speculating on what future human writing practices will look like."
Will “writing as thinking” survive the AI age? A provocation from Jon Ippolito, followed by a conversation among the other "Transformers," Mark Marino, @anetv.bsky.social, @mahabali.bsky.social @marcwatkins.bsky.social Jeremy Douglass, and me.
preview.electronicbookreview.com/gatherings/t...
There's no magical technical solution university IT can enable, no AI-proof LMS, and agentic AI won't go away even if the big companies do all lose money at this point. If we can't convince students the work of learning is worth doing, they have more tools to avoid it than ever before. (5/5)
I find this to be the most depressing example of agentic AI adoption out there (as someone who does see real value in agentic coding tools for DH), but I'm even more depressed by the "abandon Canvas" solutions I see folks posting in response. This impacts anything involving a computer, period. (4/5)
Students can also roll their own solutions pretty easily at this point with OpenClaw (with some additional exciting security risks) and its browser relay functions (see - www.boringappsec.com/p/browser-re...) - I assume this is what Einstein is using, given their Telegram & Discord options. (3/5)
From Perplexity.AI Comet as of 2/23/26 - A new browser by Perplexity The AI browser built for Students | Comet is an AI-powered browser that acts as a 24/7 sidekick, study buddy, and tutor.
When I'm showing folks agentic AI I usually demo Perplexity's Comet, which similarly can manage most tasks in Canvas directly - also, unsurprisingly, marketed towards students, with only a little more subtlety. (2/5)
From companion.ai/einstein as of 2/23/26: How it works Einstein has a full virtual computer with a browser — anything you can do, he can do. Has his own computer Einstein isn't a chatbot. He has a full virtual computer — he can browse the web, watch videos, read PDFs, and interact with any site just like you would. Logs into Canvas for you Einstein connects to your Canvas account, sees your assignments, and submits completed work — automatically. Watches lectures & videos Einstein can watch recorded lectures, pull out key concepts, and use them to answer assignments accurately. Reads & writes essays Give him a reading assignment and he reads the full text, understands it, and writes original essays with proper citations. Participates in discussions Discussion board posts, peer replies, forum responses — Einstein reads the thread and contributes thoughtful responses. No more copy-pasting Forget switching between ChatGPT and your LMS. Einstein reads the assignment, solves it, and submits it directly. Every subject covered Math, physics, CS, history, literature, econ — if it's on Canvas, Einstein can handle it. Works while you sleep Set him up and forget about it. Einstein checks for new assignments and knocks them out before the deadline. Telegram & Discord too Optionally connect Telegram or Discord to message Einstein on the go — check deadlines, ask questions, or tell him to skip one.
I've spent too much time today grumbling about the Einstein "AI Homework Agent" that's making the rounds even though this is just rebranded, banal AI agent stuff. Most of this is already simple to do without buying someone's specific course plagiarism agent. (1/5)
Open source all the things 🤣
Looks like a lazy wrapper for an OpenClaw equivalent to me, given everything it describes is already possible with that (or more slowly with agentic browsers, of course)
But really kids, at least set this up yourself with NanoClaw or something. Learn some transferrable skills for pretending to work in the future, assuming those still exist.
...it's the "watch lectures" part that gets me. Universities can continue to surveil how many "people" watch Canvas lectures, but those numbers will mean even less than they did before.
