I offer lectures and educational workshops to public and private entities, including professional organizations, parent groups, schools & school districts, religious organizations, and student groups, with a special focus on facilitating communication and understanding regarding technology and the internet between children, parents, and educators, as well as digital mental health for children.

Underpinning all my work is the core assertion that children have a right to the knowledge that they need to understand and act within their world, free from obfuscation and elision, and presented in a way that affirms their identities and experiences and treats them with dignity, respect, and generosity.

My recent work has focused on the urgent and crucial deficit in comprehension of AI technology and marketing for educators, caregivers, and children. Below is an overview of some of the programs I offer; however, I am happy to adapt or develop any program to the needs of the sponsoring organization.

The Summer I Turned Robot: Strategies For Parents, Educators, and Caregivers For Discussing Artificial Intelligence With Children and its Place in Their Lives and Minds.

At home, online, in school, and in the media, kids are bombarded with endless worried discussions along the spectrum of hysteria regarding AI’s present and future – and indeed, it is quickly becoming one of the chief sources of anxiety for young people (as it already is for adults).

Will it melt their brains? Will it make them rich? Will there be any jobs left for them? Does it watch everything they do? Will it become sentient and destroy the world before they can even ask their crush to prom?

The answers they are likely to find online, or in the words of AI companies, or amongst their peers will run the gamut from misguided to outright and intentional falsehood. Missing from all of these answers (often intentionally) is the simple understanding of what “AI” actually is, how it works, what it is actually capable of, and how those capabilities are presented and distorted by online influencers, the media, and the AI industry.

As such, this course, available as both a single lecture or two- to four-part workshops, in contrast to other approaches treats the subject as a crisis equally of media literacy than tech literacy alone. Participants in the full course will learn:

• How AI works, through a comprehensive and easy-to-understand overview accessible to learners of all skill levels, including its capabilities, hurdles, and future trajectories; includes stepped guidance for discussing the technology, industry, and broader concepts for students of all abilities and ages, from Pre-K through high school.
• How AI fundamentally differs from other technologies with which participants – and their children and students – are familiar, and the crucial skills necessary to reposition oneself in relation to the technology and its output.
• How AI is promoted and discussed by AI companies, influencers, political entities, and the media, and strategies for comparing narratives surrounding AI to the reality of the technology. Participants will learn how to examine claims about AI from any source, use a “wise mind” approach to evaluating them, and get the facts for themselves or their students. Includes example exercises for home or classroom use, including case studies and pathways to knowledge.
• How to identify AI-produced content, including text, images, and video, specific and unique strategies for tracing content’s provenance, and examining contextual information unique to platforms and subcultures where AI may be prevalent to make determinations about authenticity. Participants will learn and practice methods for approaching material of which they are suspect, and will learn strategies for discussing difficult topics related to AI-generated content with children, including academic cheating, AI psychosis or unhealthy attachment, bullying, nonconsensual sexual content, cognitive debt, and more. Participants will also learn to recognize red flags in their children and students for unhealthy or irresponsible AI use, and learn what to look for when monitoring their devices.
• How to ensure our own and our students’ or children’s privacy, safety, and agency in a world of AI tools, and how to discuss issues related to personal content, identifying information, creative work, and data protection with students of all ages.
• How to address children’s fears, anxieties, interests, and questions regarding AI in an understandable, empathetic, and affirming way, including collaborative research, projects for exploring their feelings, and what to do when you don’t have the answer.
• How to use AI responsibly: using a simple, step-by-step method to evaluating whether AI use suits a situation, crafting a prompt that keeps the user in control and mitigates issues with hallucination and sycophancy, and evaluating AI output for accuracy, reliability, and relevance, with adaptive methods for use by adults and students. Stepped guidance and exercises are included for both adult and student use.
• The ability to ask any question the participants wish related to AI subjects, to be discussed either in session or in followup discussions.

This workshop can be held both in-person or virtually. Sliding scale rates are available. For more information or to inquire, please email rbiracree@mac.com.

Hey Ryan, why does your website look like this?

In both my professional and personal work, I seek to educate about and work against the enclosure of the open web and the relentless enshittification and corporatization of internet aesthetics, content, and architecture by a sociopathic and ravenously venal capitalist class.

The crappy, goofy, optimistic, and egalitarian aesthetic of the early internet is an assertion of generosity, whimsy, and humanity in the face of AI slop and the unremittingly dour march to techno-feudalism.