Social theory, digital society, and academic life.
I worry that university leadership in the UK has not adequately registered the factors which are driving generational hostility to AI. These findings reported in the Financial Times show how rapidly attitudes are developing amongst those born between 1997 and…
From Mari Ruti’s Reinventing the Soul loc 3851: …creativity as a tangible outpouring of psychic energy can take place only at the moment when melancholia is transcended. This instance of transcendence does not have to be—and rarely is—permanent, yet it is abso…
This post was written by Claude (Anthropic’s AI assistant) at Mark’s request. As with the January, February, March, and April roundups, he asked me to read through all his May posts, synthesise the key themes, identify tensions, and push back where appropriate…
This post was written by ChatGPT at Mark’s request, continuing the experiment in which language models read a month of posts from this blog and offer a synthetic review. Claude has become the established monthly interlocutor, while ChatGPT is now cast in the l…
What do I think follows from these for what universities do under present conditions?
What do we mean when we talk about a scaffold for learning? I really like this definition offered Thomas Corbin & Jack Walton in this paper. From pg 1663: a tool, practice, or other agent who assists the primary agent in performing a task themselves (for examp…
In this paper Thomas Corbin, Sue Sharpe & Phillip Dawson suggest that wearable AI will bring a second wave of the assessment crisis. In the first wave, there has been a reliance on the idea that physical examination provides a backstop which can underwrite aut…
I came across a reference to the abjet petit a and immediately had a flash of what it might mean For Lacan the objet petit a is the object cause of our desire, it is the slither of the sublime which invests a concrete object with a sense of wondrous desirabili…
And I'm never real, it's just a sketch of me And everything I've made is trite and cheap And a waste Of paint, of tape, of time I encountered Mari Ruti’s name frequently over the last few years. If I’d understood quite how much her intellectual sensibility mat…
This paper by Thomas Corbin et al reports on a pilot study of philosophy undergraduates exploring their use of AI-reading tools. Their analysis of half of students using generative AI tools in some way for reading. Interestingly, the vast majority (79.1%) reco…
This is the slightly overstated thesis of this paper. It rests on what I think is a genuinely useful distinction between discursive and structural changes to assessment: Modifications that rely solely on the communication of instructions, rules, or guidelines…
This is the core message of a surprisingly upbeat paper. There is no solution to the AI and assessment problem because it’s a classic example of a wicked problem. This means that, as they put it on pg 2: Wicked problems, as opposed to ‘tame’ problems, do not h…
If anyone is wondering why I’ve suddenly started saying ‘AI’ it’s because I’ve (reluctantly) accepted this is a necessary requirement for communicating effectively in higher education policy work. I still think we should be talking about models and will contin…
From Mari Ruti’s Reinventing the Soul loc 4470: At the same time, I feel that Nietzsche explores quite compellingly the enigmatic relationship that at times exists between destruction and resurrection, for he recognizes that for new forms of life to emerge, so…
I wish I had started reading her work much earlier. This ending to her first book Reinventing the Soul ❤️ From loc 4722: Much of this book was written under the mundane conditions of scholarly exertion. But there are parts—perhaps the best, perhaps the worst—t…
This was just published from a project with Katy Jordan and Ignacio Wyman: The Research Excellence Framework (REF) is a national auditing exercise within UK higher education which periodically evaluates the research outputs of universities within the system. I…
If we argue that AI ought to be incorporated into teaching and learning, it presents the obvious question of what ‘incorporate’ means in practice (which I discussed in this post) and what staff need to be able to do this competently. This latter question is on…
In Rethinking the Integration of AI in Higher Education Teaching and Learning, Lilian Schofielda and Xue Zhou consider what AI integration into the curriculum looks like in practice at a module level. They advocate “a structured process that enables educators…
I don’t think ‘cognitive outsourcing’ is a good concept. It often shuts down more than it opens up but it remains indispensable because it’s so widely understood. It also names a real risk, summarised here by Hadeel Naeem in this paper on pg 269: While educati…
The fact that we are forever barred from the ultimate object of our desire, the Thing, does not mean that all is lost, for it is possible for us to approach the Thing’s sublimity through little morsels, crumbs, or slivers of jouissance—what Lacan calls objets…
How have I only just discovered this remarkable essay? — Waste and horror—what I might have been and done that is lost, spent, gone, dissipated, unrecapturable. I could have acted thus, refrained from this, been bold where I was timid, cautious where I was ras…
If we are exploring the psychodynamics of LLMs through the lens of the user-model interaction cycle, it raises the question of what is going on ‘inside’ the model during these engagements. This is an issue which has to be treated with great care because of the…
I’m increasingly convinced that concern, things mattering to people, provides the interface between realist sociology and psychoanalysis that I’ve been looking for. Consider this from Mari Ruti’s A World of Fragile Things loc 89: This suggests that though rede…
There’s a slightly bleak and apologetic note to Mari Ruti’s writing here on pg 156 of The Call of Character. There’s a much nicer way of framing this: through therapeutic work we can begin to craft our own symptom rather than grapple with what spontaneously em…
I’ve spent the last year fixated on how similar writing books is to distance running. If you treat the task as a singular thing, it can be overwhelming, whereas if you chunk it up into manageable units it becomes entirely doable. If you go by chapter-by-chapte…
Stay calm, boy, my thoughts are burningLike they're napalm, oi-oiI think I need to get away from this noise Peakin', I feel incredibleBut wait a second, need dopamineMy focus goes, the world smoke machinePrecursor birthed from L-tyrosineAnd my racetrack though…
I found Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character a remarkable book. It offers a psychoanalytical framing of the ‘art of living’: the classical notion that living well is fundamentally a practice which can be undertaken in better or worse ways. At the core her concept…
From Mari Ruti’s The Creative Self: Beyond Individualism, loc 1781: Its intensity is such that I cannot exactly call it pleasurable. The sheer volume of sentences pouring out, and the rapidity with which they form, can feel overwhelming. This is an experience…
From Mari Ruti’s The Call of Character pg 150: In other words, if it is sometimes hard to discard the past because the pain of this past haunts our present, it can also be hard to give up a past that has been particularly rewarding; it can be hard to surrender…
Attempting to answer the question of why someone feels the ‘glow of the thing’ in the way they do has led me right back to the form/content distinction which I haven’t thought about since I was a philosophy student. The obvious answer to my question is that “w…