I just signed a petition calling for Norwegian universities to use research expertise on AI when deciding how to implement it, rather than having decisions be made mostly administratively. , If you are a researcher in Norway, please read it and sign it if you agree – and share with anyone else who might be interested. The petition was written by three researchers at UiT: Maria Danielsen (a philosopher who completed her PhD in 2025 on AI and ethics, including discussions of art and working life), Knut Ørke (Norwegian as a second language), and Holger Pötzsch (a professor of media studies with many years of research on digital media, video games, disruption, and working life, among other topics). This is not about preventing researchers from exploring AI methods in their research. It is about not uncritically accepting the hype that everyone must use AI everywhere without critical reflection. It is about not introducing Copilot as the default option in word processors, or training PhD candidates to believe they will fall behind if they do not use AI when writing articles, without proper academic discussion. Changes like these should be knowledge-based and discussed academically, not merely decided administratively, because they alter the epistemological foundations of research. Maria wrote to me a couple of months ago because she had read my opinion piece in Aftenposten in which I called for a strong brake on the use of language models in knowledge work. She was part of a committee tasked with developing UiT’s AI strategy and was concerned because there was so much hype and so few members of the committee with actual expertise in AI. I fully support the petition. There are probably some good uses for AI in research, but the uncritical, hype-driven insistence that we must simply adopt it everywhere is highly risky. There are many researchers in Norway with strong expertise in AI, language, ethics, working life, and culture. We must make use of this expertise. This is also partly about respect for research in the humanities, social sciences, psychology, and law. Introducing AI at universities and university colleges is not merely a technical issue, and perhaps not even primarily a technical one. It concerns much more: philosophy of science, methodological reflection, epistemology, writing, publishing, the working environment, and more. […]
Francois Lachance
And Lars just recently turned 32 too.
Such events in some distibuted communities used to be celebrated online with synchronous reunions online using MOO space.
Makes me wonder about how tools for the presentation of blog entries might accomodate synchronous collective viewing/writing/discussion via MOO sessions through clients such as enCoreXpress. (Permalinks help. There is a show URL function with such a client. It’s the screen realestate and stylesheet question that brings up for me design issues for multi-channel delivery.)
A party could enjoy a selected reading by a model reader of entries from Lars and Jill and other birthday bloggers. A kind of guided tour of the best of… And as well the birthday people can present their happy selections from the blogspheric offerings.
A read-in!
Happy 32 and may 2003-04 be a good year.
Jill
Presumably there have already been blogmeets in MOOs?
Francois Lachance
A search has revealed that meet ups tend to be face to face affairs. If there are meet ups on MOOs they haven’t published lots of logs of the encounters.
This makes me wonder if the debates about the relative value of synchronous and asynchronous interaction in online pedagogy were more about a fear of the loss of frequency of exchange rather than the lag between responses.
Aside: it was the appearance in your recent comment roll of a link to a comment to a June 28th entry on the final definition for weblog that led my thoughts towards frequency as a key factor [I activated the link and reread the entry you authored]. The anonymous comment referenced two bodily products with a particular child-like nomenclature (and that was the sum total of the comment). On another occasion on another blog a cryptic string of characters was the comment that triggered the appearance of a link in a recent comments roll and which led me to an interesting entry. In both cases the link would have been missed if my visits were timed later.
Always puzzled as to how noise serves signal.