The CoT Public Scholarship Award: 3 Outstanding Contributions
Civics of Technology Announcements
Annual Conference: We are holding our 5th Annual Conference on August 6th-7th, 2026! The full program is now viewable on our conference page. Our keynotes this year are Dr. Meredith Broussard (data journalist & author of More than a Glitch among other books) and Natasha Singer (NYT edtech reporter & author of the forthcoming book, "Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools”). You can register here.
Next Book Club: We will be reading the new book, “Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools” by our conference keynote speaker Natasha Singer on September 29th at 8:00 PM EST. Register here and pre-order the book here so you have it when it releases on September 8th! We will discuss the book for 45 minutes and then be joined by Natasha for a 30-minute Q&A.
New Partner Organization: We are happy to announce that the Young Data Scientists League (YDSL) is our newest partner. YDSL is a 501(c)(3) non-profit provider of culturally relevant data science and AI ethics research experiences aligned to K-12. Their mission is to provide every student with the pathways and motivation to use critical research and storytelling skills to shape our world in diverse, creative, and justice-centered ways. As a partner organization, YDSL will be invited to provide updates to our community through board meetings and announcements. You can learn more at https://www.youngdatascientists.org/. You can find all partner organizations on our About Us page.
By Jacob, Dan, and Marie
Civics of Technology aims to be a space for our community to engage in public scholarship, which we define as sharing research (broadly defined) with a non-academic (especially practitioner) audience. Our weekly newsletter and curriculum resources are just two of the channels we use for this purpose, and our community has made many wonderful contributions to both over the past year. In today’s newsletter and at our upcoming conference, we will recognize just a few of those contributions as recipients of our first Civics of Technology Award for Public Scholarship.
During our conference, from 3:05-3:30 PM Eastern Time on Thursday (Aug 6), we will recognize our awardees. Please join us to congratulate them and hear some remarks!
This will be an annual award, presented at our yearly conference, recognizing outstanding public scholarship from our community members in the past year (for this year, June 01, 2025 - June 01, 2026). This time around, our three awards went to outstanding contributions to our newsletter, but future awards could be made for different types of contributions as well.
So, in honor of our awardees, we invite you to (re)visit these excellent contributions. Links to each below, presented in the order in which they appeared in our newsletter, with some choice quotes included.
Stop Calling it “AI Literacy” if it Doesn’t Teach History By Evan Shieh (Young Data Scientists League)
Applying a lens of cultural imperialism to critique neoliberal AI literacy ideas like “bias in, bias out” or “unanticipated consequences” makes the issues with these techno-solutionist framings more apparent, less in terms of what they say and more so what they don’t say…
“Unanticipated consequences” is a cover for corporate decision-making. It is laughable nowadays to suggest that issues like bias in LLMs should be thought of as unintended consequences, when insurmountable evidence in the previous decade suggests otherwise.
Resistance, Rebellion, Refusal: 7 Tips from Librarians for Navigating “AI” by Michelle Reed, Hayley Park, Justin White, and Mike Nason
Confront AI vendor slop in collections. AI vendor slop is low-quality AI-generated material that is not specifically selected by librarians for their collections but rather makes its way in via e-book bundles or large streaming platforms such as Hoopla. Vendor slop (or “slurry”) is often added to library collections without the knowledge of librarians, and over time, it makes up a growing percentage of materials in a collection. What you can do: Share news stories about AI-generated slop with your local libraries. And if you encounter a resource that appears to be AI-generated in your library’s collection, report it to Library Futures in support of our ongoing vendor accountability initiatives.
No AI Gods, No AI Masters, By Olivia Guest, Iris van Rooij, Barbara Müller, Marcela Suárez
Embracing AI products makes what were once serious transgressions now acceptable and even desirable through normalising: stealing ideas from others, erasing authors, infringing authorship rights; while at the same time harming our planet….
All this has had a visceral effect on us as academics, which spilled out in the Open Letter: Stop the Uncritical Adoption of AI Technologies in Academia — a process that involved also inviting on board other Netherlands-based colleagues who wished to lend their words to the text and sign their names.