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pennyjw.bsky.social
Penny Wheeler
@pennyjw.bsky.social
530 followers 1.3K following 53 posts
Education, language, art, humanities, landcare.

Also @teledvisors.bsky.social

ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7856-5093
Posts Replies Media Videos
pennyjw.bsky.social
Winter is coming ... end of UK summer time means #lthechat is at a more Australia-friendly time
Canola fields in bloom to illustrate springtime in eastern Australia
November 19, 2025 at 8:20 PM
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
mkgold.bsky.social
Huge congrats to a real ed-tech hero, @linkletter.org, who survived a five-year legal odyssey after he posted a critique of Proctorio on social media. linkletter.org/update-33-th...

I so admire Ian's bravery in the face of corporate bullying. Kudos and congrats, Ian!!!
November 14, 2025 at 3:35 AM
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
kamakru.bsky.social
Turn off Gemini in Google!
It's been turned on by default.

Go to your Drive, click the gear icon, click settings, go to "manage apps" and uncheck that nasty "use by default" box.

www.zdnet.com/article/how-...
How to turn off Gemini in your Gmail, Docs, Photos, and more - it's easy to opt out
It's a little hidden, but there is a way to remove Gemini from your favorite Google services.
www.zdnet.com
October 27, 2025 at 7:10 PM
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
mikecaulfield.bsky.social
Telling moment: I was walking back from the rally, but a couple miles from it, carrying nothing but my gigantic American flag. An eight year old on his bike sees me with it and yells "No Kings!!" with absolute conviction.

My friends, they have lost the flag.
October 18, 2025 at 11:49 PM
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
ebonyteach.blacksky.app
Class is in session! Thanks, @drlisacorrigan.bsky.social, for this analysis of the importance of this moment.

"This is how you visually dismantle fascist iconography." Yes!
drlisacorrigan.bsky.social Dr. Lisa Corrigan @drlisacorrigan.bsky.social · Oct 19
And from image events, we get POLYSEMIC images that carry multiple forms of ideology into the present. Here, we have the convergence of Shepard Fairey's iconic HOPE poster for the Obama campaign with the frog icon from #NoKings. The is how you visually dismantle fascist iconography.
October 19, 2025 at 2:19 AM
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
frettie.bsky.social
#nokings
Portland frog brigade
October 18, 2025 at 8:40 PM
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
gabriellehecht.bsky.social
Purdue to the rescue of IU student newspaper, whose institution was attempting censorship. Details in alt!
Sara Whitmer • • • 1h • 8 I'm sure many of you have heard by now that earlier this week, IU k*lled the print edition of its student paper, the IDS. The issue that was supposed to print this week contained criticism of the Whitten regime and IUs further slide into scist control, and they couldn't allow that to happen during Homecoming, when all the rich alumni are in town. Enter Purdue! The Purdue student paper, The Exponent, owns its own presses. Yesterday, in an act of tremendous solidarity with their biggest rival school, they printed the forbidden issue of the IDS. They then drove it to Bloomington overnight and stocked all of the IDS boxes on campus, just in time for Homecoming. Solidarity is what makes us stronger, and solidarity will be what ultimately allows us to triumph, if we can ever truly get it together. I hope everyone has a fun, safe day if they're going out today, and I hope we can think about what acts of solidarity we can begin taking to really make this movement MOVE - beyond a permitted expression of upset into more active resistance. 75 12 comments
October 18, 2025 at 7:24 PM
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
aletakesphotos.bsky.social
Giant copy of the Constitution being carried down Pennsylvania Avenue.
October 18, 2025 at 4:13 PM
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
emilymbender.bsky.social
I'd love to see someone try to estimate just how much time and money has gone into research that is either fully undermined by reliance on LLMs or fully pointless --- because obvious if you start from an understanding of what LLMs actually are.

www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...
Screen cap from linked article, with heading Significance and then text: Large Language Models (LLMs) are used in evaluative tasks across domains. Yet, what appears as alignment with human or expert judgments may conceal a deeper shift in how “judgment” itself is operationalized. Using news outlets as a controlled benchmark, we compare six LLMs to expert ratings and human evaluations under an identical, structured framework. While models often match expert outputs, our results suggest that they may rely on lexical associations and statistical priors rather than contextual reasoning or normative criteria. We term this divergence epistemia: the illusion of knowledge emerging when surface plausibility replaces verification. Our findings suggest not only performance asymmetries but also a shift in the heuristics underlying evaluative processes, raising fundamental questions about delegating judgment to LLMs. Sentence starting with "While models often" is highlighted in blue.
October 18, 2025 at 10:11 AM
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
funky16corners.bsky.social
This is wild. I’ve never heard this story before.
wafflecut.bsky.social Waffle 🧇 @wafflecut.bsky.social · Oct 8
Stravinsky saw Charlie Parker play at Birdland
club of all time by performing for Igor Stravinsky at Birdland. Alfred Appel tells it definitively in his book Jazz Modernism: From Ellington and Armstrong to Matisse and Joyce: The house was almost full, even before the opening set - Billy Taylor's piano trio - except for the conspicuous empty table to my right, which bore a RESERVED sign, unusual for Birdland. After the pianist finished his forty-five-minute set, a party of four men and a woman settled in at the table, rather clamorously, three waiters swooping in quickly to take their orders as a ripple of whispers and exclamations ran through Birdland at the sight of one of the men, Igor Stravinsky. He was a celebrity, and an icon to jazz fans because he sanctified modern jazz by composing Ebony Concerto for Woody Herman and his Orchestra (1946) - a Covarrubias "Impossible Interview" come true. As Parker's quintet walked onto the bandstand, trumpeter Red Rodney recognized Stravinsky, front and almost center. Rodney leaned over and told Parker, who did not look at Stravinsky. Parker immediately called the first number for his band, and, forgoing the customary greeting to the crowd, was off like a shot. At the sound of the opening notes, played in unison by trumpet and alto, a chill went up and down the back of my neck. They were playing "Koko, which, because of its epochal breakneck tempo - over three hundred beats per minute on the metronome - Parker never assayed before his second set, when he was sufficiently warmed up. Parker's phrases were flying as fluently as ever on this particular daunting "Koko." At the beginning of his second chorus he interpolated the opening of Stravinsky's Firebird Suite as though it had always been there, a perfect fit, and then sailed on with the rest of the number. Stravinsky roared with delight, pounding his glass on the table, the upward arc of the glass sending its liquor and ice cubes onto the people behind him, who threw up their hands or ducked. Parker didn't just happen to…
October 12, 2025 at 1:35 AM
pennyjw.bsky.social
USA Government is targeting people who just want things to be normal.
Who was Who in Weimar Germany (video) open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p...
When Anti-antifa means Pro-Nazi (video)
Notes from a Presidential "Roundtable"
open.substack.com
October 12, 2025 at 1:42 AM
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
caitlinmoriah.bsky.social
bubble dance party
a person in an inflatable unicorn costume and a person in an inflatable peacock costume dance as a person holds a bubble gun shooting lots of small bubbles over them
October 10, 2025 at 4:32 AM
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
carolecadwalla.bsky.social
We're launched! In my newsletter this week, I write about our new female-founded media collective
@thenerve.news,
the fuck you energy that's fuelling it & why the mainstream media's laundering of Tony Blair is *exactly* why you need to read it 👊👊👊
broligarchy.substack.com/p/the-nerve
The Nerve
We've got it. Do you?
broligarchy.substack.com
October 6, 2025 at 9:28 AM
pennyjw.bsky.social
Speak truth to power, from Professor Tim Snyder.
Speak truth to power
And other thoughts about a difficult week in the US
open.substack.com
September 21, 2025 at 7:41 AM
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
lauraskh.bsky.social
We all needed this right now 👇🏽
Alt text and info about the author are in the replies
stevepeers.bsky.social Steve Peers @stevepeers.bsky.social · Sep 3
Timeline cleanse
September 4, 2025 at 10:42 AM
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
ausconservation.bsky.social
From January 2006. #auspol www.abc.net.au/news/2006-01...
August 18, 2025 at 10:59 PM
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
ryancordell.org
An iSchool colleague who I don’t think is on Bsky shared this article about The Carpentries’ recent refusal of a $1.5 millon NSF grant after they were asked to strip DEI from their programming

This feels like the only ethical way forward
Nonprofit Refuses $1.5M Science Grant Due To New Federal DEI Rules
A coding nonprofit turned down a $1.5M NSF grant after new DEI restrictions, highlighting the clash between federal policy and scientific community values.
www.forbes.com
August 12, 2025 at 8:10 PM
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
Those of us studying edtech platforms and infrastructures in education talk a bit about vendor "lock-ins" - how schools can't get out of a platform once they're on it. This is a magnificent paper about that by @lucascone.bsky.social and Signe Sophus Lai www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1...
1. Data lock-in: Schools become dependent on Google's systems,which collect and use data from students and teachers. 2. Political lock-in: Digital solutions have become part of politicalmodernization projects—and are therefore difficult to roll back. 3. Regulatory lock-in: Legislation lags behind technology, and it isdifficult to enforce rules on global players. 4. Discursive lock-in: The debate is characterized by an "eitherChromebooks or blackboards" rhetoric that makes alternativesinvisible. 5. Temporal lock-in: The longer the technology has been in use, theharder it becomes to switch to something else.
August 8, 2025 at 8:51 PM
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
dingdingpeng.the100.ci
We need a German word for the feeling when you've communicated with another academic in English only to discover that their first language is also German.
August 7, 2025 at 7:22 AM
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
jasonleopold.bsky.social
NEW investigation: DOGE-Pilled

The full story on the transformation of 23 year-old Luke Farritor and how he ended up at the Department of Government Efficiency--slashing, dismantling, undoing--wielding a résumé that "didn’t pass muster”

NO PAYWALL!

www.bloomberg.com/features/202...
Luke Farritor. Portrait of a Young DOGE Coder Dismantling America’s Institutions
July 29, 2025 at 3:54 PM
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
thesaturdaypaper.com.au
“Australian university students are still paying some of the highest fees in the OECD under a system that punishes them for choosing the ‘wrong’ degree. That system has a name – the Job-ready Graduates package – and Labor has left it virtually untouched.” http://satpa.pe/jwqLqCo
How the student debt cut still fails students
satpa.pe
July 30, 2025 at 3:15 AM
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
olivia.science
I split AI into 3 non-mutually exclusive types (see Table 1 above): displacement (harmful), enhancement (beneficial), and/or replacement (neutral) of human cognitive labour. More later possibly, but see Tables 2 to 4 (attached or here: arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19960) for the worked through examples. 2/n
table 2 from https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19960 table 3 from https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19960 table 4 from https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.19960
July 29, 2025 at 11:52 AM
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
warwickrdo.bsky.social
This hasn't dated
'The survival of humanities researchers is a political act in itself'
warwickrdo.bsky.social Warwick Researcher Development @warwickrdo.bsky.social · Dec 4
Best comment ever from CHEF Doctoral Ed Conference
'The survival of humanities researchers is a political act in itself'
(Skov.S & , Bengsten,S & Barbara Grant)
#AcademicSky #PhDSky
July 29, 2025 at 11:29 AM
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
volts.wtf
Rooftop solar power in Australia is the cheapest power available to consumers in the world, full stop. I wish more people knew that.
July 22, 2025 at 8:56 PM