3rd Annual Conference Review: What new tech imaginaries did we dream?
Civics of Tech Announcements
Monthly Tech Talk on Tuesday, 08/06/24. Join our monthly tech talks to discuss current events, articles, books, podcast, or whatever we choose related to technology and education. There is no agenda or schedule. Our next Tech Talk will be on Tuesday, August 6th, 2024 at 8-9pm EST/7-8pm CST/6-7pm MST/5-6pm PST. Learn more on our Events page and register to participate.
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by Marie Heath and Jacob Pleasants
NOTE: We are emailing this blog post to all conference participants. Please sign up for our weekly newsletter on our blog page to keep up with Civics of Tech throughout the year. In fact, our next Tech Talk is Tuesday, August 6th. It would be great to see you there and continue this energy into the school year.
We once again felt such gratitude to see so many critical scholars, teachers, and community organizers who showed up and showed out at the 3rd annual Civics of Technology conference. We cannot begin to capture the brilliance of all the critical work seeking to advance new tech imaginaries. Instead, we’ll provide you ways to revisit these sessions:
Our 2024 Conference page is updated, open and available for viewing. Based on presenters’ preferences, we have uploaded either the recordings of sessions or the session slides. In some cases, presenters preferred not to share the recording or, well, we forgot to hit record.
We’d like to provide a special shout out to our two keynotes! Mr. Brian Merchant opened the session with a wide ranging interactive talk on genAI, the Luddites, and implications for education. Dr. Tiera Tanksley challenged and invigorated us with her keynote, Freedom Dreaming in the Digital. Both talks are linked on the conference page. We knew these talks would be powerful, and they both delivered!
We want to remind all presenters that they retain the rights to their work. We are happy to change access to recordings, slides, or anything else. You can use our contact page to request changes.
In this upcoming school year, we hope you find big and small ways—in your personal lives, in your classrooms, through your communities—to find hope in community and dream new imaginaries.
We’re closing out today’s blog with the crowdsourced list of Great things to read, hear, and watch, that came out of an interactive session by Jacob Pleasants. If you’d like to add to the list, you may use the comment feature at https://bit.ly/CoTList.
Civics of Technology
Great things to read, hear, and watch
What are the things that have stuck with you?
What has helped you expand your thinking about tech?
What has given you new resources for your tech imaginaries?
Great Things to Read
Books to Teach With/From
The Glass Room ← A great teaching resource for young people
Voices in the Code: A Story About People, Their Values, and the Algorithm They Made by David G. Robinson offers a very detailed insight into the wide array of considerations for algorithm design. His analysis of the ethics is around kidney transplant algorithms. His main thesis is that these are perhaps the "most fair" algorithms and they still require major ethical considerations that are not always "fairly" resolved for everyone equally.
Searson, M., Langran, E. & Trumble, J. (2024). Exploring New Horizons: Generative Artificial Intelligence and Teacher Education. Association for the Advancement of Computing in Education (AACE). Retrieved March 5, 2024 from https://www.learntechlib.org/primary/p/223928/ ← Great for teacher educators and curriculum theorists, with multiple frameworks for and perspectives on GenAI.
Artificial Unintelligence: How Computers Misunderstand the World offers a good introduction to automation technology for non-technical folks, great for HS and undergrad; this is a great primer for anyone more interested in the mechanics behind how these technologies work and how to implement them in a "human-in-the-loop" design. Also see Meredith Broussard’s more recent book: More Than a Glitch.
McQuillan, D. (2022). Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence. Bristol University Press. ← Good for undergraduate or even HS students.
Crawford, K. (2021). Atlas of AI: Power, Politics, and the Planetary Costs of Artificial Intelligence. Yale University Press. ← Good for undergraduate or even HS students.
Mullaney, T. S., Peters, B., Hicks, M., & Philip, K. (Eds.). (2021). Your Computer Is on Fire. The MIT Press. (academic book of essays on critical tech issues) ← Good for advanced undergraduate or entry-level graduate students.
Academic Articles & Books
Neil Selwyn - The critique of digital education: Time for a (post) critical turn - This is a provocative essay on the value and the limits of tech criticism. I might suggest putting this in conversation with Ruha Benjamin’s Imagination.
Adams & Groten’s (2023) Technoethical Framework for Teachers. It is always interesting to see how educators synthesize and apply the sprawling field of scholarship on technology and ethics. They’ve put together an interesting way to bring philosophical ideas to bear on EdTech. It’s a nice follow-up to Krutka, Heath, and Staudt Willet’s 2019 piece on technoethics in teacher education.
“Beyond AI for Social Good” ← An article from the health tech space
Shannon Vallor, The AI Mirror: How to Reclaim Our Humanity in an Age of Machine Thinking is a wide-ranging consideration of the limits of AI and AI ethics. She uses the myth of Narcissus as her starting point and uses the mirror metaphor in a variety of ways. Expands the range of what many books discuss in terms of AI ethics.
D'Ignazio C. & Klein L. F. (2020). Data feminism. MIT Press. *open access, students can download for free *can assign individual chapters to undergraduate or graduate students (maybe high school, but I don’t know) *great for research methods courses or data management courses, can be used to tie in ethics
I’ll also echo all of my recommendations from my latest set of mini book reviews.
Design Justice by Sasha Costanza-Chock is an essential piece of reading.
Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia ← AI is already enmeshed in so much of our world and here is how.
The Walls Have Eyes: Surviving Migration in the Age of Artificial Intelligence by Petra Molnar has some real-life black mirror scary stuff. Migration control, human rights, technology experimentation on vulnerable communities.
Greenfield, Adam. (2018). Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life. Verso Books. A https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/products/119-radical-technologies A great introductory read providing a landscape for how technology is impacting our spaces and us.
Lindsay Ems. Virtually Amish. MIT Press. https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262543637/virtually-amish/ *discusses the Amish process of deciding when/how/why technologies should be used which helps us get out of the binary of we’re either all in or all against tech, delves into how technologies can either support or diminish our values, also discusses how the Amish are being forced to adopt technologies they normally wouldn’t because of the increasing reach of capitalism (i.e. to pay for water they need cash, to get cash they sell furniture, to sell furniture you need a website), *open access so free to download
Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott ← A classic political science text that also extensively address how technology shapes our lives.
General Audience Books
The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation by Cathy O'Neil discusses the influence of technology on shame and profit, its focus centers a more social policy perspective.
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Noami Klein ← Fun, easy, entertaining, and touches on many issues of tech.
On the subject of labor and tech: On the Clock is an amazing update to Nickel and Dimed that brings issues of work and labor into the digital age. Digital Labor is a more academic book on the subject.
Journalism, Blogs
Shitty Automation - A gem of an idea for our modern times. It pairs quite nicely with Enshittification. More generally, I very much recommend Brian Merchant’s Substack. There aren’t many newsletters that really do it for me, but this is one of them (the other is The Convivial Society).
The Disability Dongle. I was introduced to this idea via this wonderful CoT blog post and I have greatly appreciated it. I’ve used the idea with my students. The “dongle” metaphor really does a lot of work for me, which is why I keep returning to it.
The AI Ethics & Policy News, kept up by Casey Fiesler at CU Boulder.
Fiction
The Planetfall series - Yes, it’s dystopic, but it’s more than just a cautionary tale. It provides a particularly interesting look at AI Assistants. An interesting pairing for this would be the massive paper on the ethics of AI Assistants put forth by some Google Deep Mind people. I do think Sci Fi is an important way to play with technological imagination. I almost always recommend the work of Becky Chambers (the Monk and Robot series is wonderful) and Martha Wells (the Murderbot Diaries).
I know it’s hard to get through, but I think everyone in Tech should read Tolkien’s The Silmarillion. At its core it’s a meditation on the inseparability of creation from the dangers of creation.
Sci-fi series about AI and ethics: Ancillary Justice, by Ann Leckie, and Dune, by Frank Herbert.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein ← Old school sci-fi that features a sentient AI, with plenty of relevance.
A People's Future of the United States: Speculative Fiction from 25 Extraordinary Writers Edited by Victor LaValle and John Joseph Adams
Octavia's Brood: Science Fiction Stories from Social Justice Movements Edited by adrienne maree brown and Walidah Imarisha
Great Things to Hear (okay, it’s mostly podcasts)
99% Invisible: The Leaf Blower Wars - compare this with a Short Wave episode on noise pollution. So much depends on how you frame a technological issue.
Education Technology Society - Neil Selwyn’s podcast that casts a “a critical eye over the world of digital education, education futures and EdTech”
The Volts Podcast - Feeling climate doomy? This podcast is here to help. Learn about the people who are actually developing technologies that address climate change. I was put on to this podcast by Debbie Chachra (author of How Infrastructure Works, about which we’ve got a review and an interview on the CoT site).
Trying to preserve old video games: This is actually part of a 3-part podcast series that The Verge and Polygon put together on the past and future of video games. I grew up with video games and although I really don’t play them any more, I find the industry fascinating. Even if you’re not much of a gamer, the intersections between law, tech, industry, and hackers are kind of awesome. There’s also a neat series on the “five senses of video games” that gets at some interesting accessibility issues.
If there’s one podcast that’s pretty much always a hit for me these days, it’s What Next TBD. I basically never skip an episode.
The Radical AI Podcast has ended, but is still worth checking out.
I love getting international perspectives this pod introduced me to postdigital theory too Meet The Education Researcher also a this link. It is also connected to this pod: Education Technology Society both from Australia. Short but powerful discussions from Australian perspectives, with a variety of issues surrounding ed tech and ed research.
The Better Offline podcast (https://www.betteroffline.com/). Right now the host Ed Zitron is on an anti-AI rant, but he also addresses other issues in Tech centered around what he calls the Rot Economy in Technology.
Great Things to Watch
Obviously, Black Mirror. We did a CoT blog post about it.
Coded Bias on Netflix, companion to Unmasking AI: My Mission to Protect What Is Human in a World of Machines by Joy Buolamwini
A Murder at the End of The World on Disney Plus. A hacker is invited to a tech billionaire’s exclusive resort when guests begin to disappear. This is a short murder-mystery series with interesting perspectives on technology intertwined as the resort is ‘smart’ and heavily reliant on technology.
Welcome to Sodom https://www.welcome-to-sodom.com/?page_id=289 „A dark and sensuous film from a landfill in Ghana, where electronic waste from the West is being recycled. An unforgettable experience, told by the workers themselves.“ ← Great for teaching about tech in high school!
Fong, Joss. (2020). Are We Automating Racism? Retrieved December 17, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ok5sKLXqynQ. (short video, great to use in class)