Penny Wheeler
@pennyjw.bsky.social
510 followers 1.3K following 50 posts
Education, language, art, humanities, landcare. Also @teledvisors.bsky.social ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7856-5093
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pennyjw.bsky.social
governments right at the bottom ...
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
pennyjw.bsky.social
How wonderful, congratulations.
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
lauraskh.bsky.social
We all needed this right now 👇🏽
Alt text and info about the author are in the replies
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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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
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
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.
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
superlinguo.bsky.social
The latest round of cuts at ANU include an outrageous plan to close the Australian National Dictionary Centre (ANDC). ANU has forgotten its vital function as the national university.

Please sign this petition urging ANU to reconsider and protect the ANDC:
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
Why the ANDC Matters?

- The ANDC is Australia’s leading centre for lexicographical research, jointly funded by ANU and Oxford University Press.
- It is the definitive authority on Australian English—documenting regionalisms, Aboriginal English, and producing landmark publications like the Australian National Dictionary.
- Its widely celebrated “Word of the Year” initiative connects Australians with their evolving language and identity.
- For ANU, it provides immense national and international visibility—while operating as a low-cost, high-impact asset.

The Cost of Closure:
- Damage to Australian English: Halting systematic documentation of our unique national language.
- Setback for Indigenous Languages: Undermining efforts to research and preserve Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages.
- Erosion of National Identity: Undermining the role of language in shaping how Australians see themselves, their history, and their culture.
- Damage to ANU’s Reputation: Compromising its mission as a national university and leader in cultural heritage research.
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
hugospiers.bsky.social
🚨This is the most exciting step of my scientific career🚨

25 yrs ago I started a life long interest in navigation, maps & brains

I've collected data from >4 m people in 195 nations in SeaHeroQuest

In 3 weeks we set off on an ocean voyage to study the amazing spatial skills of Marshallese sailors:
leverhulme.ac.uk
‪World-leading scientists will set out on a unique research voyage, joining Indigenous Pacific sailors to investigate the centuries-old skill of wave piloting: www.stir.ac.uk/news/2025/ju...

Photo credit: www.instagram.com/chewy_lin/
Four people sail a traditional outrigger canoe near a tropical island under a sunny sky.
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
rmtownsend.bsky.social
Yes to this a million times over, in so many fields of work and social life
lecagle.bsky.social
In my work, I regularly encounter a desire to solve infrastructure or access or inequity problems with communication alone.
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
hbsj.bsky.social
Here's a #HigherEducationPostcard of Cambridge, showing some of the colleges on a map

Without using the internet, how many of the other colleges can you name?

If you like this card, please share it so that others can see it too - remember, BlueSky has #NoAlgorithm
A colour picture postcard showing a hand-drawn map of central Cambridge, with some of the colleges depicted pictorially. At the bottom left are the University's arms, at the right "Cambridge" printed on a cartouche
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
jessicacalarco.com
In a horrifying article about the dangers of Teslas, one point stands out: Teslas automatically disengage self-driving mode <1 second before an imminent crash--not enough time for the driver to react, but enough for Tesla to deny responsibility for fatal crashes, since self-driving "wasn't engaged."
The real surprise came after the experiment. Fred Lambert, who writes for the blog Electrek, pointed out the same autopilot disengagement that the NHTSA had documented. “Autopilot appears to automatically disengage a fraction of a second before the impact as the crash becomes inevitable,” Lambert noted.
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
ketanjoshi.co
This piece by @timinclimate.bsky.social is a complete banger. I have really never ever read such a comprehensive analysis of Australia's fossil export emissions like this, it is something else.

Go read the whole thing now --->>>

timinclimate.medium.com/australia-em...
While it is true that formal emissions accounting rules attribute the emissions created from the burning of fossil fuels to the places where these are burned, anyone who tries use this fact to entirely absolve Australia of any responsibility is either critically incompetent or critically dishonest. Most likely both.

Like the incompetent/dishonest example, more than one thing can be true at once. Australia shares responsibility for these emissions because without the endorsement of Australian governments these fossil fuels would never have been burned.

And if anyone tries to tell you that if we didn’t sell them, someone else would: kindly ask them to point to which country is politely sitting on its hands with a fossil fuel reserves capable of meeting 50% of the world’s trade in metallurgical coal, one-fifth of the world’s trade in thermal coal and one-fifth of the world’s liquefied gas. If Australia didn’t supply these fuels, there is no country on the planet that could replace it.
Reposted by Penny Wheeler
bencollins.bsky.social
Meredith has always been a G, but it's still exceptionally weird and very refreshing hearing from a tech exec who can see through all of this AI bullshit for what it is at its foundation: a backdoor surveillance tool.
keithfitzgerald.bsky.social
Worth a watch:

Head of Signal, Meredith Whittaker, on so-called "agentic AI" and the difference between how it's described in the marketing and what access and control it would actually require to work as advertised.