Author | Lightnews

Todd Battistelli

@fromtherostra.com

470 followers 1.2K following 510 posts

How do our disagreements go? #rhetoric, #writing, and #education. Viewpoints that I express are my own and do not represent the views of organizations with which I'm affiliated. Reposts are not endorsements. he/him

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Todd Battistelli @fromtherostra.com · Nov 13

Hello!

My main interests are writing and learning, particularly as they relate to productive disagreement in rhetoric, organizational & workplace communication, emergent strategy, coalition work, and facilitation.

More here: fromtherostra.com/2023/03/10/w...

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Dave Pagurek @davepagurek.com · 9h

@cowtoolsdaily.bsky.social I am ready for halloween

man dressed as a cow with a table hanging from his shoulders with lumpy cow tools on it

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CAHSR's Strongest Soldier @emoscientist.bsky.social · 9h

Gilded Age ass president

1984 meme but it's 1872 instead of 1984. Middle aged karen-type lady says "Union Pacific is bribing politicians and financing shady construction projects" while her forlorn husband flips the calendar back to 1872

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Rebecca Colesworthy @rcolesworthy.bsky.social · 10h

A useful reminder for me that whatever the discourse about AI taking jobs it’s actually just shitty bosses who take jobs — including AI jobs!

Meta Cuts 600 Jobs at A.I. Superintelligence Labs
The layoffs do not affect Meta’s newest A.I. hires, who are in some cases being paid up to hundreds of millions of dollars. The cuts were focused on correcting an earlier hiring spree.

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👻Frightful Hobgoblin @loukas.bsky.social · 1d

🧵What I'm actually aiming for in my current research on fields, forests and animals is 'multisolving'. I think the present polycrisis is too complex and too unpredictable to be addressed with any one measure, so I'm trying to contribute to things which make improvements along several angles at once.

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Roland Meyer @bildoperationen.bsky.social · 23h

There’s a growing & deeply problematic tendency to use #genAI for political and historical education Take this example from Germany, which translates as: «Hey AI, who should I vote for.» What’s typical here is that AI is not only addressed as pseudo-person but also as a kind of impartial judge
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Landtagswahl.ai

KI-generierte Bilder aus den Wahlprogrammen der Parteien zur Landtagswahl - Ausstellung und Podiumsdiskussion; Materialien für Schulklassen

www.landtagswahl.ai

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Dr. Cat Hicks @grimalkina.bsky.social · 1d

Been thinking about how MAHA in its current articulation is a movement that allows them to harness people's real and justified anger at things like the betrayals of healthcare and insurance and turn it on scientists as scapegoats, by using conspiracy theories

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Caitlin G. DeAngelis @caitlindeangelis.bsky.social · 1d

So many people are trying to figure out what's happening with kids and schools.

I don't know any big-picture answers. But from my n=2 sample, one big problem is the constant jankiness of doing schoolwork on Chromebooks and Google Classroom.

Math apps where you can't see the diagram and the

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Mississippi Free Press @mississippifreepress.org · 1d

OPINION: "[C]ops can’t really prevent violence; they are there to investigate. We expect too much of them. And that reduces resources for actual crime prevention," Donna Ladd writes.

Editor’s Note | The Second Best Time to Prevent Violence Is Now

Donna Ladd writes about the failure to break the cycles of crime and violence using evidence-based methods that help young people succeed.

buff.ly

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Todd Battistelli @fromtherostra.com · 1d

Mr. Scott: Synthetic text?

Lt. Cmdr. Data: Yes, sir. It is a language substitute that inundated 21st century Earth. It simulates the appearance, taste and smell of text, but the meaningful content should be easily dismissed.

A screenshot from Star Trek: The Next Generation showing Mr. Scott sitting at the 10 Forward bar with Data behind the bar and a bottle of green liquor sitting between them.

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Nick Covington @covingtonedu.bsky.social · 1d

Non-certified staff *must be included* in any vision of school success! The classroom stuff is just the tip of the iceberg that is enabled by everyone else doing their part. It *all* contributes to student success, and when one falls apart, so does the rest of it.

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Todd Battistelli @fromtherostra.com · 2d

Learned professors: “Who would have thought higher education would collapse like this?”

Me: (stares in adjunct)

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Denver Museum of Nature & Science @denvermuseumns.bsky.social · 2d

🦖 30 years of dinos, discovery, and deep time! Take a trip back to 1995 with Assistant Archivist Lauren Conrad, who’s digging into the Museum Archives to celebrate the 30th anniversary of “Prehistoric Journey.” #PrehistoricJourney #DMNS #30YearsOfDiscovery #archives

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Todd Battistelli @fromtherostra.com · 2d

Captain Kirk from Star Trek V asks, "What does ICE need with guided missiles?"

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Chrissy Stroop @thebugbeardispatch.bsky.social · 2d

This was, basically, the corporitization of higher education.

The top administrators ran away with all the money, and the faculty lost any real power to push back on administrative decisions

Chrissy Stroop @thebugbeardispatch.bsky.social · 2d

The groundwork was laid by decades of budget-busting administrative bloat, turning most (upwards of 70% nationwide) teaching faculty into contractors with low pay and no benefits, and state cuts to higher ed.

This is bad, but most of those PhDs wouldn't have gotten tenure-track jobs anyway

jon ben-menachem @jbenmenachem.com · 2d

Wow. Harvard nuking its PhD programs

- Science PhD admissions reduced by more than 75%
- Arts & Humanities reduced by about 60%
- Social Sciences by 50–70%
- History by 60%
- Biology by 75%
- The German department will lose all PhD seats
- Sociology from six PhD students to zero

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Colson Whitehead @colsonwhitehead.com · 2d

All these people avoiding m-dashes because “AI uses them” simply means that there’s more for me!

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Alex Brown 🇵🇸 (they/them) @bookjockeyalex.bsky.social · 2d

At the end of the day, you want to improve schools? Stop voting for the assholes who are defunding it. Advocate for UDL and diverse curriculum. Pay teachers and staff better. Hire school librarians and open school libraries. Speak out at school board meetings.

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Roosevelt Institute @rooseveltinstitute.org · 2d

🧵 Yesterday’s AWS failure wasn’t just a massive service disruption. It exposed how dependent our economy and public institutions have become on privatized, centralized systems. 1/4
www.fastcompany.com/91425078/aws...

The AWS outage reveals the web’s massive centralization problem

What happens when key infrastructure providers are too good at their jobs? Everyone relies on them—with catastrophic consequences when they fail.

www.fastcompany.com

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Nick Covington @covingtonedu.bsky.social · 2d

When I asked a group of middle-schoolers in Virginia last week what's one word they'd use to describe school—fun, exciting, mid, diverse, social—the most positive associations with school came from kids in band. That's not an accident.

Nick Covington @covingtonedu.bsky.social · Sep 18

As the parent of a 5th grader who last year described school as a "jail", I've never seen her more engaged and excited about school than after she brought home her baritone for the first time. She looks forward to band (2x/week) more than anything else, and constantly practices at home unprompted.

Nick Covington @covingtonedu.bsky.social · Sep 18

After flipping through it several times, I'm committed to reading The Disengaged Teen in full. Off to a good start:

"We’ve become desensitized to it. We are failing to see it for the crisis it is: Young people, hungry to learn and grow, overwhelmingly associate school with apathy and stress..."

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Nick Covington @covingtonedu.bsky.social · Nov 4

In a national survey of over 21,000 students, "tired", "stressed", and "bored" were the most common words students used to describe how they feel at school.

In an in-depth follow-up with 472 students, "75% of all feelings students reported...were negative."

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Screenshot of table from linked article showing student responses to "How do you feel at school?" Most common responses overall are tired, stressed, bored, happy, anxious, annoyed, sad, lonely, excited, depressed.

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Todd Battistelli @fromtherostra.com · 28d

Mechanisms of deliberation that are unable to handle the weaponization of deliberation.

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Tade Thompson @tadethompson.bsky.social · 3d

Radio 4 interviewed some folks on AI yesterday and one proponent rolled out the usual 'people are scared of new technology' nonsense.

People aren't scared of new tech.

They're scared of the devaluation and loss of jobs, which is happening.

They're scared of thirsty data centres.

This isn't hard.

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Butlerian Jihadist of House Slytherin @shimminykricket.bsky.social · 2d

Hot take: Technology has mostly ruined the process of getting a job and hiring people for a job.

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Tobias Wilson-Bates @phdhurtbrain.bsky.social · 3d

As a 3rd generation academic, my family has been teaching continuously since the 1950s and only the last 20 years involved Learning Management Systems. They’re by no means necessary to the project of learning, and if they demand surrendering autonomy to corporations then they should be discontinued.

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Olivia Guest · Ολίβια Γκεστ @olivia.science · 3d

Pretty sure real science is actually reading the papers, thinking very deeply, and more, before writing, not generating literature review-like objects with no authorial intent or legwork

Iain Cheeseman @iaincheeseman.bsky.social · 3d

Today @anthropic.com released PubMed integration for Claude. No hallucinations. Just real science, real data. As a beta tester, this has been game changing— a supercharged research tool. Here are 6 prompts that will transform how you search the literature. A 🧵

www.anthropic.com/news/claude-...

Claude for Life Sciences

Discover how Claude accelerates life sciences research with new scientific connectors, skills, and improved performance for drug discovery and clinical work.

www.anthropic.com

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John Scalzi @scalzi.com · 3d

If you're a writer/other creator in the United States, consider creating an LLC for your business and then signing up for a local area Chamber of Commerce. Many of them have health insurance plans that pool their members and members of other CoCs to create insurance efficiencies relative to ACA.

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