Amy J. Ko

Today I'm grateful to share a brief written version of my SIGCSE TS 2026 keynote, "Love, Learning, and Computing Education". I'm trying to get better at this every day in my teaching and I hope to talk to you about how you are soon. doi.org/10.1145/3831...

Today I'm grateful for all the great feedback on the trans rights map I made! Here's an update, now on the web: amyjko.com/trans-rights... It now uses icons for categories, is interactive, and is linked to the ground truth legislation and executive orders, with helpful excerpts.

Today I’m proud of voting no on trans sports bans, no on forced outing, no on repealing our new wealth tax, yes on robust investments in transit, and yes on progressive representatives up and down our ballot who will move us forward. Our state is full of bigotry, but I hope too little to win.

I get invited to many things around the U.S. and often need to check loss of trans rights to assess safety, rights, and replies. To help, I converted the curated content at translegislation.com into a map 2022-2026 map of rights loss. (It's not an accident that it looks like pox on America).

Today I’m grateful for a beautiful day in South Hadley on the Mount Holyoke campus! What a stunning view from the Fimbel maker space.

Today I'm grateful for a beautiful 73º October day of governance, debate, teaching, and community, and the millions of students, taxpayers, and givers that made it possible.

Today I’m grateful for liquid chocolate, hot and oaty, in a tiny cup, in my hand, on a foggy brisk fall morning.

Today I enjoyed reflecting about reflecting about teaching about learning about teaching about information in my doctoral course about teaching and learning :P

Today I’m grateful to possess the freest of speech and the courage to use it. If only speech were enough to convince the bigots.

This morning Im grateful for a beautiful morning walk in West Seattle!

Today I’m grateful for our little snarky Boomy! She’s the best hyper verbal tail-free elder tuxie on planet Earth

Today I’m grateful for author Christina Soontornvat giving the annual Spencer Shaw lecture on her adventures in writing! I learned so much about her hunger to tell stories, fiction and non-fiction alike, to youth and adults of all ages.

Today I’m grateful for the unbounded possibilities of universities. These are not easy times, and there is much to reimagine, but those infinite futures and the better worlds they can bring give me eternal hope for better days.

Today I’m grateful for the 7.25 hours of uninterrupted sleep that kept me sharp, patient, and calm amidst the resource gaps, uncertainties, and threats of federal chaos.

Today I’m grateful for a breezy walk, train, and bus home from volunteering that took an easy 23 minutes. It’s lovely to be in a city that can be human scale when it tries.

Today was a delicious Sunday sandwich of flu and COVID vaccines, foggy lakes, Jessica Pratt, Espresso Vivace, gender diversity training, fresh tortillas, blue skies, and bringing the weather to Wordplay theming.

Today I'm proud of canvassing against I-001 and I-638 in Greenwood, ensuring turnout against bills that would out queer and trans kids to abusive parents, force genital inspections on all girls who want to play sports, and ban trans girls from playing at all. Not gonna happen MAGA mega donors.

What a fun kickoff for our Autumn Wordplay meetup! We have twenty eager undergrads helping out with design, development, localization, research, teaching, and more, ready to help us get to a 1.0 launch by the end of the quarter.

Today I'm tired of AI generated slop in my editor-in-chief journal inbox, but grateful for an editorial board that can shepherd the real stuff into progress. Thanks for being awesome, ACM TOCE Associate Editors!

Today I’m grateful for a chill day of research writing, leadership, reconnection with colleagues, and teaching about teaching. For all the uncertainty, this was a good day in academia.

Indeed. This point can't be stressed enough. "Sex-based" is a term we've always used to describe *discrimination*, and its sudden mainstreaming as pseudo-feminism in the UK reveals it as a poison that unravels the entire liberal democratic architecture of civil rights. I wrote about it here.

Today I was grateful to welcome students, faculty, and staff to the start of the 2026-27 academic year. It was a joyful salve while processing yet another pointless murder of a trans person in the U.S.

Today I'm grateful for a generous amount of time to think, write, and collaborate on the future. It's such a central part of my job as a professor, yet one of the hardest things to make time for!

Thank you Big Thief for cozy Friday night on the farm.

What a lovely student welcome event this afternoon! Thanks to the staff who helped organize it, and the many student leaders for welcoming our 2026-27 classes to campus for the start of the quarter.

Thanks to Shibuya Hi-Fi and friends for a transformative listen to Steely Dan’s Aja (and a deliciously mercurial mocktail) www.shibuyahifi.com

What a fun afternoon of teaching prep! I’m teaching another quarter of our Wordplay undergrad research studio and a new required PhD course on teaching. I have no idea how either will go and that’s the way I like it :)

What a lovely night in the city! Good community, great walks in the hood, and a surprisingly tasty pasta and brownie. I’m full of love and gratitude.

Yep!

I have some thoughts on "AI" doomerism. amyjko.medium.com/flawed-premi...

Today I'm grateful for the lively day at Wesleyan! Thanks to Yuxuan Mei for hosting and to everyone for the rich conversations about creativity, learning, and AI. Slides for my talk: "A Means to Know End: Generative AI and the Many Futures of Learning" faculty.washington.edu/ajko/slides/...

Today I’m grateful for a vibrant faculty kickoff before our Autumn quarter, for ~80 amazing colleagues, and our radically trans disciplinary collective. It’s going to be a bumpy year, but I believe in this group’s capacity to come out the other side smarter and stronger for it.

Today I’m grateful to be able to vote in Washington state without the !#$&@“ing federal government trying to stop me by banning mail in ballots (the only way we vote here!).

Today I’m proud of our SIGCSE TS papers being accepted! We have so much to share about joy, accessibility, stereotypes, and culturally sustaining pedagogy. See you in Sacramento in February.

25 years ago today I was installing a car seat for my 2-day old daughter at the hospital. I turned on the radio while I assembled bits and pieces, only to hear of towers crumbling. When I returned inside, my baby girl was quiet in my wife's arms while hospital staff stared in silence at a nearby TV.

Today I'm grateful for a lifetime of hard-won resilience, which I've needed for navigating continued attacks on trans people by the right and the predictable abandonment by cowards on the left. It's going to get worse before it gets better; resilience is how I stay alive, and help others live too.

Today I'm proud of my collaborators and mentees for finalizing a wonderful set of CHI papers! We're excited to share the work and hope the community likes them. More importantly, we hope they advance understanding of what the world things is possible and necessary.

Today I'm proud of finally adding epub/ebook export support to bookish.press! Want to read Bookish books on your ebook reader? Now you can, no DRM. See criticallyconsciouscomputing.org and bookish.press/tac for examples. Fully tested on my little xteink x3, Kindle, and Apple Books.

Today I’m grateful for the bus, light rail, tram, and train that brought me to and from Tacoma for a lovely day of cafes and dreaming, and the breezy sunshine above it all.

I'm so excited to launch this pilot! Lots of positive feedback so far, but the coming year will teach us a lot.

Today I'm proud to announce the public beta of Reciprocal Reviews, a platform for sustainable peer review by linking publishing to reviewing: reciprocal.reviews Check out our newsletter for background on the launch and next phase. reciprocalreviews.substack.com/p/reciprocal...

Today I'm grateful for this planet. The end.

Today I'm grateful to have a job and workplace where I needed to leave work early to stave off depression with a peaceful 3 mile walk home in the sunshine. That should be a universal right, but isn't in our exploitative system that puts profit over people.

Today I'm grateful for the energetic, creative, committed Information School staff! They make the research, teaching, and service missions of the school possible every day.

Today I'm proud of reporting the Department of Education for posting hate speech on its social media accounts in all of my feeds. Truly the best of timelines!

Today I’m grateful for every academic that remains committed to truth, progress, and transformation over status, compliance, and resources. The former is the only reason for us to persist, and the moment we forget it, we are done.

Today I’m inspired by the courage of this goose, boldly crossing the street in the middle of traffic, with a calmness and boldness I can only aspire to in my life and work. You go, goose.

Today I'm grateful to be home from Sweden. I wish I could walk/metro/train anywhere in Seattle to get anything at any time without having to smell a tailpipe as easily as in Stockholm, but I do like my kitty, wife, work, and dormant volcanoes!