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Fabiola Torres
Fabiola Torres
Fabiola Torres serves as AI Fellow for Academic Affairs at the California Community Colleges Chancellor's Office, where her job is to help faculty across all 116 colleges think more clearly about AI, pedagogy, and the students caught between them. She is also an Ethnic Studies professor — meaning she has never once separated equity from instruction and does not intend to start.
She built Edna because no cape fits every superhero, and no generic template serves every student. Like Edna Mode, Fabiola wears the glasses — not to center herself, but because the best designers keep their eyes on the person standing in front of them. Her learning environments are built to bring out the superpowers of her students. It was never about her.
It still isn't.
AI Use Disclaimer
AI Use Disclaimer
This project was inspired by the UC Irvine AI in Higher Education program. The ideas explored throughout reflect the program's emphasis on evidence-informed teaching, ethical AI use, and designing learning experiences that keep human thinking at the center.
I used three AI tools to build this project: Claude Sonnet 4.6, Playlab Design, and the Playlab Assistant.
Claude Sonnet 4.6 helped me draft, organize, and translate. I came with the ideas — Friction by Design, trust over surveillance, the convergence argument, the Edna Mode concept — and Claude helped me build language around them. I pushed back constantly. I redirected. I caught what was missing. The thinking was mine. The drafting was a collaboration.
Playlab Design is where Edna lives. I used the Playlab platform to deploy the bot and the Playlab Assistant to refine the system prompt — testing the workflow, adjusting the guardrails, making sure the Socratic process held.
None of these tools made a single pedagogical decision. They did not choose the framework, name the bot, design the phases, or decide that student voice is worth protecting. That came from years of teaching Ethnic Studies, from Puente, from watching what happens to students when systems treat them as problems rather than thinkers.
AI handled the production. I handled the authorship.
That distinction is not just how I built this project. It is what this project is about.
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