Talking with machines

Talking with machines

By Mark Corbett WilsonEducationArtsSelf-Improvement
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Talking with machines episodes

  • Advocacy, access, equity, and support for students and faculty, as AI is adopted in a multicultural urban college.

    A conversation with Chris Weidenbach, an English professor at Laney College in Oakland, California, and the longtime chair of the English department. We are joined by professors Tom Haymes and Bryan Alexander to discuss our experiences teaching, learning and using “AI.” Our conversation started with Chris’s lifelong engagement with human rights advocacy and expanding access and equity in his multicultural urban institution.

    Chris was an early adopter of using WP websites to expand student access to resources and offering different digital technologies, some barriers to entry for students and their hesitancy with many tools and the introduction of “AI.” We discussed professional development and support for faculty, some of their resistance, and creating an AI policy and its application. We finished with ways faculty can offer assignments beyond just requiring text responses and the many ways students can learn.

    Talking with machines by Mark Corbett Wilson @mcorbettwilson on social media

    1 hr 47 min
  • Storytelling, Education, and AI in this Chaotic Political Moment

    A conversation with Joe Lambert, an innovator of telling stories using digital technologies, educator, and co-founder of StoryCenter.org (originally the Center for Digital Storytelling), about his work in these unsettled times. We are joined by professors Tom Haymes and Bryan Alexander to discuss our experiences teaching, learning and using “AI.” Joe reflects on his work designing ASU’s 100 Year EdTech Project and other futures work, past and present. Much of our conversation was about adapting or resisting the new political climate both in higher education and the general culture.

    Joe and his team have brought digital storytelling to nearly 100 countries in circumstances ranging from universities to war torn refugee camps and their traumatized survivors. After more than four decades, this summer he’s looking forward to not seeing his boss in the mirror as he plans the next phase of his life.

    Talking with machines by Mark Corbett Wilson @mcorbettwilson on social media

    1 hr 58 min
  • Artificial Intelligence, Abolition, and Luxury Surveillance

    A conversation with Dr. Chris Gilliard, Co-Director of The Critical Internet Studies Institute, about his approach to writing, privacy, and “artificial intelligence.” We are joined by professors Tom Haymes and Bryan Alexander to discuss our experiences teaching and learning, and Chris starts by explaining his stance as an “AI abolitionist.” He shares his critiques of the many aspects of “AI”: their creation, use, and the culture that produces these digital tools. Chris asserts that ideology is built into digital technology, and he quotes Rob Horning: “GenAI is a tool of power that masquerades as a tool of knowledge.” Chris goes on to observe: “Some of the worst people in the world want us to use these tools.”

    Chris taught rhetoric and composition in community colleges for decades, but left to pursue other opportunities before the explosion of “AI” in academia. This has allowed him to be an absolutist: he hasn’t used LLMs or ”AI” at all. Chris insists that writing must be embodied and cannot be generated by algorithms. He is currently writing “Luxury Surveillance,” defined as “consensual surveillance that users pay for directly, and whose tracking, monitoring, and quantification features are understood by the user as benefits that they are likely to celebrate” on the Critical Internet Studies Institute website. In our conversation, Chris summarized it as “Ankle monitors and Apple watches are essentially the same thing.”

    Resources

    The Critical Internet Studies Institute

    https://www.criticalinternet.org/

    Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities;

    The Writer’s Practice: Building Confidence in Your Nonfiction Writing;
    More Than Words: How to Think About Writing in the Age of AI;
    All by John Warner
    https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/john-warner/more-than-words/9781541605503/

    Defining AI by Ali Alkhatib 06 December 2024

    https://ali-alkhatib.com/blog/defining-ai

    Rob Horning AI - GenAI is a tool of power that masquerades as a tool of knowledge.

    https://robhorning.substack.com/p/practico-inertia
    https://robhorning.substack.com/p/artificial-intentionality

    David Golumbia

    https://davidgolumbia.medium.com/chatgpt-should-not-exist-aab0867abace

    Brian Merchant

    https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/openais-studio-ghibli-meme-factory

    On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? 🦜

    https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3442188.3445922

    Facebook Has a Genocide Problem by Alex Shephard March 15, 2018

    https://newrepublic.com/article/147486/facebook-genocide-problem

    Allies and Rivals: German-American Exchange and the Rise of the Modern Research University by Emily J. Levine

    https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/A/bo22804958.html

    Talking with machines by Mark Corbett Wilson @mcorbettwilson on social media

    1 hr 36 min
  • Intentionally Equitable Hospitality as Critical Instructional Design

    A conversation with Dr. Maha Bali about “Intentionally Equitable Hospitality” (IEH) and how this professional development journey emerged from her earlier projects Virtually Connecting and Equity Unbound. A professor of practice at the Center for Learning and Teaching at the American University in Cairo, we were joined by professors Tom Haymes and Bryan Alexander to discuss our experiences teaching and learning with digital technologies. IEH offers opportunities to engage with marginalized perspectives, encourage critical thinking and accessibility, and create more welcoming and equitable learning spaces. We explored the many literacies needed today, including visual thinking, creating and using images, and the use of “AI” models despite their limitations, especially for language translation.

    Mike Caulfield’s SIFT model to assess information was mentioned and his latest version designed to use with Claude.ai. As always, we approached these issues from both ‘open’ and institutional perspectives, and in the context of our current political climate. Maha’s cake baking and decorating metaphors added the frosting to this episode.

    Intentionally Equitable Hospitality 2025 registration

    https://www.eventbrite.com/e/intentionally-equitable-hospitality-ieh-series-15-april-6-may-2025-tickets-1291237107949
    Intentionally Equitable Hospitality Series for May 2024
    https://equityunbound.org/ieh-series-may-204/
    Intentionally Equitable Hospitality as Critical Instructional Design by Maha Bali and Mia Zamora
    https://pressbooks.pub/designingforcare/chapter/intentionally-equitable-hospitality-as-critical-instructional-design/
    Equity Unbound is hosting MYFest again this year! June through August 2025.
    The “Mid-Year Festival” (MYFest) is a “recharge and renewal experience” exploring community building, critical pedagogy, socially just education, AI in education, open educational practices, digital literacies, and activities that support wellbeing and joy.
    https://equityunbound.org/
    “Visual language: global communication for the 21st century”
    by Robert Horn 1998
    https://archive.org/details/visuallanguagegl0000horn
    MyEssayFeedback uses AI to offer students detailed and fast formative feedback on their essays under the guidance of an instructor or tutor.
    https://myessayfeedback.ai/
    SIFT Toolbox for Claude Released: I don’t know how to explain how much this changes everything, so I’m just going to ask you to try it. By Mike Caulfield Mar 31, 2025
    https://mikecaulfield.substack.com/p/sift-toolbox-for-claude-and-chatgpt

    Talking with machines by Mark Corbett Wilson @mcorbettwilson on social media

    1 hr 17 min
  • Challenges in higher education from a new federal administration

    This episode of “Talking with machines” features a conversation with Professor Robert Brem from California State University East Bay and the College of Alameda community college. I was joined by Tom Haymes and Bryan Alexander as we discussed recent challenges in higher education, the US Department of Education, and the political factions supporting change. We talked abut the structure and administration of our institutions, how they adapt to new technologies, and then compared our different positions, experiences with learners, viewpoints on recent trends, and what the future of education may hold.

    Talking with machines by Mark Corbett Wilson @mcorbettwilson on social media

    1 hr 30 min
  • Augmented Info, Ethics, and the Duty of Care

    This episode of “Talking with machines” featured a conversation with Stephen Downes. I was joined by Tom Haymes and Bryan Alexander as we discussed “Augmented Info, Ethics, and the Duty of Care.”

    Stephen touches on his contributions to the origins of Massive Open Online Courses and Connectivism Theory (MOOCs and cMOOCs) before sharing his ideas on completely open courses like his “Ethics, analytics, and the duty of care” in 2021. He starts with the origins of higher education before discussing some possibilities for using the affordances of digital technologies to offer new ways of thinking about learning and teaching. We share the ways we are all using digital tools and then Stephen discusses his research on ethics and leads the conversation on ethics in educational institutions and the duty of care implied in our learning and teaching relationships.

    Resources from Stephen Downes

    CList: Personal learning and communications application
    Online: https://www.downes.ca/CList/
    Source code: https://github.com/Downes/CList
    Ethics, analytics, and the duty of care report by Stephen Downes 2023
    https://www.downes.ca/files/docs/2023_10_23_-_Ethics_Analytics_and_the_Duty_of_Care_-_Published_English.pdf
    Ethics, analytics, and the duty of care cMOOC: https://ethics.mooc.ca/course_outline.htm

    Talking with machines by Mark Corbett Wilson @mcorbettwilson on social media

    1 hr 24 min
  • Homegrown LLMs and Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) technologies

    In today’s conversation Ruben Puentedura acknowledges the limitations of “AI”, shares his research and experience with Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) technologies, and talks about the affordances of home grown LLMs (Large Language Models) combined with external resources. We are joined by Bryan Alexander and Tom Haymes.

    Dr. Puentedura is the Founder and President of Hippasus, a consulting practice focusing on transformative applications of information technologies to education.

    From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarization

    https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.16130

    Code a simple RAG from scratch

    https://huggingface.co/blog/ngxson/make-your-own-rag

    More from Ruben Puentedura https://www.linkedin.com/in/rubenpuentedura/

    Tom Haymes: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhaymes/
    Bryan Alexander: https://bryanalexander.org/
    Mark Corbett Wilson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markcorbettwilson/

    Talking with machines by Mark Corbett Wilson @mcorbettwilson on social media

    1 hr 11 min
  • The AI Revolution Will Be Small

    In today’s conversation, I’m again joined by Bryan Alexander and Tom Haymes. We started our discussion around Tom’s recent post “The AI Revolution Will Be Small.”

    Tom wrote “Bigger is not better in computing technology. Small tech is where the actual power has been over the last 50 years.
    When we democratize computing power (or power in general), we create the seeds for actual change. In doing so, we have harnessed the power of millions of imaginations. That is where the actual power lies.
    Every technology goes through a phase where people can’t wrap their heads around what the new technology is for, how it works, or how it changes our social and economic paradigms. This is where we are now with Generative AI.”
    https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/ai-revolution-small-tom-haymes-paqac/

    More from Tom Haymes: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhaymes/

    Bryan Alexander: https://bryanalexander.org/
    Mark Corbett Wilson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markcorbettwilson/

    Talking with machines by Mark Corbett Wilson @mcorbettwilson on social media

    1 hr 12 min
  • AI in Culture with Bryan Alexander and Tom Haymes

    In this premier of the Talking with machines podcast, I’m joined by Bryan Alexander and Tom Haymes. Inspired by Bryan’s recent post “Some notes on how culture is responding to generative AI”, we discuss this horizon scan where Bryan asks, “How are we responding to AI through stories, art, religion, relationships, media, and symbols?”

    Link:
    https://aiandacademia.substack.com/p/some-notes-on-how-culture-is-responding
    More from Bryan: https://bryanalexander.org/
    Tom Haymes: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomhaymes/
    Mark Corbett Wilson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markcorbettwilson/

    Talking with machines by Mark Corbett Wilson @mcorbettwilson on social media

    1 hr 6 min
  • The WISR Way

    The Western Institute for Social Research (WISR) is an accredited alternative graduate school in Berkeley, California. I created a RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) using Google’s NotebookLM to collect dozens of documents and ‘chat’ about “The WISR Way” - WISR’s personalized learning method based on on the Dreyfus model of skill acquisition. I generated this podcast using NotebookLM’s podcast generator, edited all the places the ‘hosts’ mispronounced ‘WISR’ and added an introduction.

    Talking with machines by Mark Corbett Wilson @mcorbettwilson on social media

    11 min

About Talking with machines

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Communicating through language, images, maps, and tools