My last published post on here was written in 2018. (I have a draft that I typed up in 2020 but I’m not going to count that.)
Eight years later and a lot has changed. Yes, all the big things that have already come to your mind, but also, I’m doing a lot of stuff differently.
(Except for standardized testing. Standardized testing never changes.)
The rest of this post’s going to be something of a ramble. I might take parts of what’s in here and turn them into separate posts later, or I might come back years later and share another ramble.
My computer lab is all Linux. Heck, my home computers are all Linux at this point. It’s not that I love it, it’s that every other OS I’ve been fond of in the past 20 years has turned to garbage.
AI is a plague, and many of the great educators I once admired are now touting it as the revolution that will help everyone more easily steal from artists while enabling cognitive decline and hastening the destruction of our environment. None of these things really matter to them, but hey, they got it to make a graphic with too many colors so that lets them hand-wave away all the negatives.
A lot of the sites I’ve convinced others to use have gone the same route as my once respected peers. Code.org rebranded to CodeAI just this year. I’m still expected to use their curriculum for my web design course, but it’s one overhaul away from being useless to my students. (They’re all artists. Am I to tell them the future will be built upon their works, with no credit given? Am I to tell them the future requires them to steal for the corporations so that they may be laid off when they’re no longer needed? What skills will it provide to help them after the AI bubble bursts?)
I’m having a lot of fun playing TTRPGs, though, and most years I sponsor an after school TTRPG club for my students. We’ve abandoned Dungeons & Dragons (another product whose owner has made thoroughly bad choices, but this is the wrong blog for that) in favor of Lasers & Feelings, Cypher System, and Tales of the Valiant.
My social media presence has eroded to near nothing. I deleted my Twitter accounts (I’d stopped using them years earlier), and no longer publish videos to YouTube. I’m on Mastodon and PeerTube, though the former is followers-only by default and the latter focuses on TTRPGs. I might make a PeerTube for my education musings, if I gather enough thoughts to make that worth it. You can find the accounts I use on my other website.
Just last month we passed the 10 year anniversary of my wife’s death. It still hurts. I still miss her every day.
I want to be optimistic about things. There are a lot of reasons out there for me to be pessimistic and call it realism. You have to hunt for the things that make you happy, or make them yourself.
Andrew Roach is doing some amazing things. He’s not a teacher in the traditional sense, but he’s a problem solver. He’s using old tech to make video and fancy tech to make toys. He has a zine that’s half manifesto and half instruction manual on how to make your own TV station.
Russ Sharek went and made a new license for releasing work, that’s similar to CC-BY but with carve-outs preventing AI and corporate use.
Old things are becoming popular again, and I only feel like turning to dust a little bit when I remember them as new things. Primitive digital cameras that don’t connect to the internet or use AI to “fix” things are on the rise, and my students like them a lot. It’s made it harder for me to buy used cameras because of supply and demand, but when I brought my Camp Snap 8 to school, all of my younger students wanted to use it.
There are reasons to be optimistic. Maybe that’s what I’ll post more of here, to make myself feel better about the future.
Or maybe I’ll just yell at cloud computing and AI.
Or both. Both is good.
This post is inspired by 
