I have Claude check my inbox for important emails, summarize them, work with them, and send out replies if necessary. I caught Claude again simply not reading the email thread to the end and just ignoring the latest emails.
I assume the “important emails” were also written by AI. Which makes me wonder what these two AI instruments say about the unnecessary human criticizing them when they talk to each other l.
In other technology-related news, I am very happy that I am not teaching in the fall because my university switched to a new version of our learning management system. Some upgrades make things better. Others do the opposite. This is the situation of the opposite. I spent 20 minutes with the new LMS yesterday, and it gave me a headache. The color scheme is an unrelieved milky gray where everything bleeds together. Changes in federal law already took the most useful functions of the LMS out of play. You can’t upload most of the .PDFs and PowerPoints with images.
The change in the LMS is unfair to people who have to teach in the fall. They have under a month to master the new system, even though they’re not on contract and nobody is paying them for their time until the week before classes start. Then they’ll have to spend the first month of class trying to teach students how to use the new LMS because nobody will know where to find anything in the update.
Some technology is very useful. I am eagerly anticipating the automation of our scheduling. In theory, it was great that people could choose their own teaching schedule. That system was heavily abused, however. Everybody insisted on scheduling themselves at 12:30 on Monday and Wednesday, which meant that crucial, higher-level courses would often have to be canceled. I begged people for years to try to be reasonable about it, with no results. Now we will lose one of the biggest perks of our job, which is fair, because if you can’t be responsible with your privileges, you deserve to lose them.
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