In an attempt to reduce my reliance on social media apps (e.g., LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram) and their pesky attempts to easily scrape all data for their AI bullshit systems, I’ve decided to try blogging more. I acknowledge this won’t stop the tech oligarchs from stealing my data. However, it makes me feel better that they might need to do a little more to get it (maybe?).

Each month, I am going to try to post two media posts I find interesting and noteworthy (e.g. from blogs, articles, YouTubes, etc.). In Alan Doyle style, so let’s go!

My first “recent media post I think is interesting” is a post from Don Norman titled, “Why Today’s Emphasis on STEM Education Is Wrong” (June 21, 2026).

Don Norman offers a thoughtful critique of current STEM education, noting that it often overlooks how people actually learn and apply knowledge. He thoughtfully identifies four key issues:

• Focusing too much on teaching rather than active engagement
• Neglecting societal needs
• Encouraging overly narrow specialization
• Discouraging collaboration among students

Norman emphasizes the importance of active participation—learning through challenges, making mistakes, and reflecting—rather than just passively listening. Additionally, he highlights how STEM fields tend to isolate technical knowledge from the humanities and social sciences, which are essential for understanding real-world impacts. I must say I agree with him on this, but I also must say that some of us in the Engineering Education world are looking at how to evolve STEM education to address these issues.

For example, at CEEA-ACEG 2026 (the annual conference of the Canadian Engineering Education Association), Brooklyn Coulson, one of my graduate students, and I (representing the University of Regina) helped facilitate a workshop (what CEEA calls a “collabatorium”) with Engineering Educators from the University of Toronto (Morgan Hopper, Lisa Romkey, Lydia Wilkinson), University of British Columbia Okanogan (Laura Patterson), University of Manitoba (Kari Zacharias), Rowan University (Jacqueline Tawney), and Memorial University (Janna Rosales), titled, “Advocating for Institutional Change: Sharing Strategies and Practice in Liberatory Education in a Canadian Engineering Context.”

As part of the collaboratorium, we facilitated group discussion around four perspectives of advocacy, with associated prompting questions, for how we can better integrate liberatory education and, in my view/opinion, the arts and humanities in engineering education:

• Course-Level Advocacy
  • What barriers or opportunities have you experienced when introducing new pedagogies or perspectives within technically-focused engineering courses?
  • What arguments, evidence, or framing have been effective in justifying these approaches to students, colleagues, or administrators?
  • How can community and/or relationships play a role in the effective integration of critical pedagogy and sociotechnical learning?
  • How could you change your own teaching practice to include liberatory pedagogies, or support sociotechnical integration in your classrooms?
• Program/Departmental Advocacy
  • What is the role of critical and/or sociotechnical thinking in engineering curricula? What do we hope that students take from our programs (beyond technical knowledge), and how do current curricula support (or fail to support) this?
  • What successes or failures have you encountered in advancing transdisciplinary, liberatory, humanities-integrated, or sociotechnical curricula at the program level?
  • What factors contributed to this success or failure, and what types of strategies worked to mitigate the challenges you encountered?
  • How can you leverage your role within programs/departments at your institution to work towards reform? Have any possible starting points been revealed in this discussion?
• Faculty and Institutional-Level Advocacy
  • How can reform-oriented and liberatory pedagogies be aligned with institutional missions and strategic plans? What opportunities do you see to create this alignment moving forward?
  • What can we learn about institutional change from engineering or other industries? How do companies or other non-academic entities remain agile in the face of an evolving world, and how can academic institutions balance agility with stability?
  • In what ways can accreditation criteria be interpreted, leveraged, or challenged to support rather than constrain educational innovation?
  • How can institutional-level advocacy drive change at the program or course level?
• Societal-level advocacy and Engaging the Public
  • What is the role of engineering education more broadly, and is our current teaching aligned with this goal?
  • What is the perceived value we offer to our students in a broad sense?
  • How do public, industry, or student perceptions or expectations of “good engineering education” enable or stifle reform?
  • What roles can partnerships with industry, community organizations, or policymakers play in legitimizing educational change?

The collabatorium proved quite successful (well, in my opinion–haha). I really do think the resulting discussion and takeaways provided a deeper understanding of all advocacy perspectives and their associated questions. We are still figuring out how to share the findings with the Engineering Education community and beyond. I promise to share it in whatever form it is when we can figure out the next steps!

Well, although the above is a whopper of a “recent media post I think is interesting,” there is still another one I’d like to share.

While doing my daily YouTube rounds, I came across a video from the Breaking Points Podcast in which hosts Krystal Ball and Ryan Grim chatted with Cory Doctorow about AI hype and beyond.

In the video, Krystal, Ryan, and Cory take a deep dive into the day’s AI hype. Cory shares his view that today’s AI investments are like a bubble. He explains the idea of the “reverse centaur,” in which humans work alongside machine-driven systems (though not so much alongside them as in service of the machines themselves).

Cory also talks about “enshitification” — I love this term — a term he uses to describe how tech companies’ focus on profit can lower the quality of user experiences and concentrate power, making things worse over time. The discussion highlights whether AI is merely overhyped or truly revolutionary, noting that its real impact will depend on how it’s controlled and used. I happen to agree.

I particularly like Cory’s response to Kristal’s question regarding current Industry Management and AI job displacement (with a focus on software engineers), quoted and captured as best as I could here:

“..If you are a boss, you may fancy yourself in the driver’s seat, but if you don’t show up to work, nothing happens, whereas if workers don’t show up for work, the whole shop grinds to a halt. So you wonder if you are maybe in the back seat with a Fisher-Price steering wheel, and that AI sales call is a promise to wire the steering wheel into the car’s drivetrain.

So you have an amazing idea, you tell the ChatBot to make it, and the ChatBot doesn’t tell you that it’s illegal, it doesn’t tell you that you are going to hurt a lot of people, it doesn’t tell you that algae blossom in a pool that you painted dark blue, it doesn’t tell you that it won’t scale, it doesn’t tell you that you are going to get hacked, it just does it.

And then if you fired 9/10ths of your workers, the ones who used to tell you off and be so demoralizing to you, [and the folks left] are so scared of losing their jobs that you can get them to fix the commas and polish it up, and keep it running, and go and skim the pond scum out of the pool everyday

…[These] are the workers that are saying ‘I’m a software developer in aerospace, we are using AI to write code. NEVER get on an airplane again because we are producing the most gastly code at scale.”

In my opinion, this highlights the need to rethink STEM education and how students and educators use these tools to enhance abilities and prepare future workers and leaders. I have some ideas and hope to dive deeper here. I also can’t help but think this discussion is related to my first “recent media post I think is interesting,” about how the focus on STEM education is not ideal, and how maybe a more interconnected approach that integrates liberatory education with the arts and humanities is required for current and future STEM practitioners.

Many thoughts and ideas percolating in the ol’brain.

As an aside, I’ve also just read Cory’s “Enshitification” book, and it was awesome! I look forward to reading his new book mentioned in the above YouTube, “The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI.”

-tMac