Hi, I’m Ian. I help organizations build real capacity around digital literacy and AI — working with the people who design learning products, set institutional policy, and develop the frameworks educators actually use.
I’ve co-authored the Mozilla Web Literacy Framework and the NCTE Definition of Literacy in the Digital Age. Associate Professor at the College of Charleston. 15 years at the intersection of technology, literacy, and learning. Full background →
Recent Writing
- Karpathy Found the Pattern. Educators Have Been Teaching It for Years.Andrej Karpathy is a well-known AI researcher and educator. He helped build early AI systems at OpenAI and led AI work at Tesla. For me, what makes him stand out isn’t just the tech, it’s how clearly he explains it. He’s one of the people helping the rest of us understand what this new wave… Continue reading
- Writing Is a Process. So Is Losing Your Voice.I’ve been getting a lot of great feedback on my last post about building an AI model of my voice. One in particular surfaces a tension I’ve been having while working with generative AI. Why would I want to create a model that knows how I write? I’m still confused as to the ‘why’ —… Continue reading
- I Trained a Local AI to Write Like MeA few weeks ago, I pulled up a list of models running on my home server and noticed one I’d half-forgotten. It was called ian-writer, it was nine gigabytes, and its entire purpose was to sound like me. That’s a strange thing to sit with. I’ve been publishing the Digitally Literate newsletter for over a… Continue reading
- What Are You Actually Running? How to Audit Your Local AI SetupA methodology for getting honest about what’s on your machine — before it gets complicated. Most people who run local AI tools have, at some point, lost track of what they’ve actually built. Not because they weren’t paying attention. Because the thing grows. I’d been building and accumulating files for months. An IAN.MD, I use… Continue reading
- Building Flynn: A Telegram Bot for Obsidian Using Local AIThis is the technical companion to I Built an AI Chief of Staff to Manage My Life Across Five Domains. That post covers the why. This one covers the how. Flynn is a Telegram bot that captures notes from your phone and routes them into your Obsidian vault using a local AI model. It runs… Continue reading
Digitally Literate
A free weekly newsletter on digital literacy and AI — written for educators, researchers, and anyone trying to think clearly about technology. Over ten years. 400+ issues. No hype.