Joanna Tai
drjot.bsky.social
Joanna Tai
@drjot.bsky.social

Higher education assessment & feedback researcher. Both kinds of doctor. Knitter and baker. Views my own, reposts are not necessarily endorsements.

Education 72%
Public Health 14%

Reposted by Joanna Tai

What is the future of feedback in the age of Artificial Intelligence? Join our panel, facilitated by Prof Margaret Bearman, to discuss the manifesto for of feedback in the age of #GenAI and kick off our Seminar Series for 2026!

Read more and register: blogs.deakin.edu.au/cradle/what-...

Reposted by Joanna Tai

Let’s not let our analysis stop at the goonerism of it all. I’m begging for our view of this to be wider than some guy’s stained pants.

It’s a labour weapon. A missile to bomb us out of public life. One email to a boss and a woman loses her job, her income, and her independence. That’s the point.

Reposted by Joanna Tai

Getting grok to publicly strip a woman’s likeness online or alter her image isn’t just horrifying at the level of the individual, it’ll be used to get us fired, too. It’s a technique to keep us in the home popping out babies because we lost our teaching job when some guy sent porn of us to our boss.

Reposted by Joanna Tai

Websites need to realise that no one ever, ever wants the site to be able to send them notifications.

Reposted by Joanna Tai

Indexicality lesson for students and others who submit attachments. You need to label your file with your OWN NAME, not "Chapter 6" or "Paris conference presentation". The Paris conference will receive 400 files, 395 of which will have identical/similar names. Recipe for chaos. #academicsky #PhDchat

It seems they had a slight smattering of citrus peel, and nothing else.

Wanted to eat a hot cross bun so dug one out of the freezer. Somehow, they appear to be almost fruitless 🙄 and also possibly homemade. I don't recall committing this atrocity, and yet here I am eating it....
"And I never say no"

We need to have a serious talk about the way "AI companion" apps not only prey on the vulnerable, but are priming their users to ignore consent and to conflate love with control.

We need AI regulations across so many sectors, but this area is particularly horrifying.
Funny Numbers

xkcd.com/3184/
Did you know that from tomorrow, Qualtrics is offering synthetic panels (AI-generated participants)?

Follow me down a rabbit hole I'm calling "doing science is tough and I'm so busy, can't we just make up participants?"
As it turns out, the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun *isn’t* a good guy with a gun—it can be a good guy *without* a gun. Just another NRA lie.

Reposted by Joanna Tai

If you're in Australia - the ebook version of An Academic Affair is currently $4.99 on all platforms! It's got academic rivals,* a marriage of convenience, and staunch unionism, and I'm quite proud of it.

*written by me, an academic
An Academic Affair
The Love Hypothesis meets The Hating Game in a new standalone rom-com from New York Times acclaimed author and romance academic Jodi McAlister.   S...
www.simonandschuster.com.au
More on ARC job cuts & restructure:

ARC’s spending $374k on consultants for organisational “review” & “planning & development”.

They’re also spending $765k on “risk management”.

That’s $1.1 million on consultants being spent over 1 year.

Un. Believable.

Slow clap, ARC.
We're running a very short survey to explore why academics are increasingly turning to GenAI to do things that they know/feel they should probably be doing themselves (e.g. write peer reviews, draft papers, data analysis etc.) - please share (or fill in!): redcap.helix.monash.edu/surveys/?s=L...
Academics' 'grey' uses of GenAI - a scoping study
redcap.helix.monash.edu
Commercial academic publishing profit margins typically in excess of 32% ...
#AcademicSky #HigherEd
#journals #libraries #scholarship
"academic publishing is dominated by profit-oriented, multinational companies for whom scientific knowledge is a commodity to be sold back to the academic community who created it... The dominant four collectively generated... $12 billion in profits between 2019 and 2024."

Wonderful to be at the final AI practice exchange at Deakin led by Sue Sharpe. One thing we can do differently from AI is to acknowledge where ideas came from. Reminds me of what @saraheaton.bsky.social talks about with attribution postplagiarism.com/2025/09/05/p...
Postplagiarism: Understanding the Difference Between Referencing and Giving Attribution
In the talks I give on postplagiarism, I distinguish between attribution and referencing amid evolving academic practices influenced by artificial intelligence. Attribution transcends mere technica…
postplagiarism.com
I cannot evangelize enough for @zotero.org for citation management. It's a game changer. If you're a student, and you're writing a paper right now, and you're NOT using Zotero, I ask you...why? Why are you making things harder than they need to be?
a woman is sitting at a desk with her arms outstretched in front of a map on the wall .
ALT: a woman is sitting at a desk with her arms outstretched in front of a map on the wall .
media.tenor.com

Reposted by Joanna Tai

The upshot is that we were able to knock results from the journal out of our article search and got the publisher's journals removed from Ulrich's. But this is clearly going to be an eternal game of Whac-a-Mole for librarians (and for patrons who contact us to report this stuff)! 4/4

Reposted by Joanna Tai

In another, a student found an article that had seemingly AI-generated fake citations using our institutional article search (which searches our subscription stuff, but also beyond). It got picked up via CrossRef. Another sketchy publisher, but this one with enough oomph to be listed in Ulrich's. 3/

Reposted by Joanna Tai

In one, a researcher told us he'd found himself cited as coauthor on a paper he hadn't written. We found a few years' worth of backlog on the journal's page (hijacked version of a legit journal) was AI-generated abstracts and titles to pad things out for the newer, dubious full-text articles. 2/

Reposted by Joanna Tai

My colleagues and I (librarians at UW-Madison) just ran a two-hour presentation on the impact of gen AI on predatory publishing for library staff this week! It was directly inspired by a few patron interactions similar to what you're describing. 1/
I mean we are absolutely in a place now where the only solution to this information disorder is for everyone to constantly evaluate the source of information. Never trust a chatbot, but also don't believe a video unless you know and trust where it comes from.

Unfortunately... that's a lot of work.
Here's the reality this example illustrates:

It's not even just about people blindly trusting what ChatGPT tells them. LLMs are poisoning the entire information ecosystem. You can't even necessarily trust that the citations in a published paper are real (or a search engine's descriptions of them).

Reposted by Joanna Tai

I used this as a framing example in a recent talk I gave about the "librarian's dividend" which is my probably-far-too-positive spin on this absolute garbage fire -- that at least maybe we're forced into more appreciation and value for the people and institutions who help us evaluate information.

Aargh. It's the first time this year past Jo has dropped the ball on planning ahead for presentations. Got one on Monday but my slides aren't done and it's already almost 5:30 on Friday afternoon 😅

Me too! Mainly in comment boxes on others' writing 😬

Reposted by Joanna Tai

The reality of uncertainty: Dr Nicole Crawford shares her reflections and key takeaways from our last seminar of 2025, where Prof Margaret Bearman discussed the role that feedback cultures play in improving #feedback.

Read Nicole's thoughts here: blogs.deakin.edu.au/cradle/the-r...

Reposted by Joanna Tai

If you've had any tough days during #AcWriMo, I highly recommend adopting Taika Waititi's expansive classification system for writing. Another handy tip from the academia / writing / research meme stash. #PhDchat #academicsky #academicchatter #highered
Nature Sci Rep publishes incoherent AI slop. eLife publishes a paper which the reviewers didn't agree with, making all the comments and responses public with thoughtful commentary. One of these journals got delisted by Web of Science for quality concerns from not doing peer review. Guess which one?
"Runctitiononal features"? "Medical fymblal"? "1 Tol Line storee"? This gets worse the longer you look at it. But it's got to be good, because it was published in Nature Scientific Reports last week: www.nature.com/articles/s41... h/t @asa.tsbalans.se