Dear 691 fellow-travelers,

Here we go with the weekly email. Please read it all the way through. (I am trying to get it out on a Friday, finally — and I hope without errors, and before midnight).

Just to recap: We had a good discussion of the readings and other topics related to design. The commercials were hilarious. Great job. (Keep humor in mind while thinking of our overall project. Sometimes a cutting meme or joke travels further than a lecture.) Also shout out to EdX for their After Class Reflection (click the link to view). We also kicked off our Meso 2 assignment (due September 22): Perspective has Tech, EdX has Systems, KitKat and Mosaichave Self.

Here is the list of our current tasks:

• Read Schön, “Designing: Rules, types and worlds,” and watch “What is the Design Process?” | details on the September 15 page.
• Post one (max 2) questions to the google doc by midnight Saturday. 
• Perspective (Kit, Shreeya) is up for good/bad design examples in the slides deck.
• KitKat (Enrique, Lindsey, Krupa) has the After Class Reflection.

With respect to our class project, www.knowingai.org is registered. Lots still to be done, but the domain name is ours, and we have a random AI literacy framework generator to give us company  – till we come up with the real thing!

Finally, a few things came through my feed this week and they sort themselves onto our domains almost too neatly.

For Systems: Neil Selwyn argues that digital literacy is not the answer, and that the reason the tech industry is so enthusiastic about it is that it moves responsibility off the people building the thing and onto the people using it. I made a similar point in a post titled: Blaming the parents not the platforms

For Self: at least 200 schools across 19 states have put mental health chatbots in front of students, and it all comes down to counselor to student ratios. One high school has three behavioral counselors for 1,800 students. Meanwhile Common Sense Media’s assessment of chatbot use finds emotional dependency, social isolation and heightened suicide risk, and a California family is suing OpenAI over the death of their sixteen-year-old son.

Then there is David Brooks’ article in the Atlantic that I had mentioned in class (let me know if you have issues accessing it): AI is already changing what it means to be human.

One silver lining: Some digging around led me to the Rithm Project, and their Sparks toolkit, maybe the only serious collection of Self-domain activities I have found. Worth a look. Not a lot but they do have some good ideas we can learn from. 

And last (on a more personal note), technology, meaning-making, travel, memories, and music all come together in a blog post about my recent trip to Brazil. A bit of a tangent, but it does speak to the complex spaces (technological, emotional, social, historical) within which we all live: One day in Ijui.