Flyer for ASU+GSV with an endorsement from Forbes reading "ASU+GSV is the Davos of Education"

The "Davos of Education" 🤪🤡

Yeah, that's been the GSV Ventures thing for a while now - "Prek to Gray" and "Weapons of Mass Instruction"!

When public policy ‘fails’ and venture capital ‘saves’ education: Edtech investors as economic and political actors Educational technology (Edtech) investors have become increasingly influential in education; however, they remain under-researched. We address this deficit and introduce the grammar and landscape o...

The only reason ASU+GSV Summit exists is so venture capital investors can shape education to suit their ROI expectations of the financial cut they can get from that global $8-10 trillion education pie. www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Education is experiencing the biggest evolution since the printing press was invented in the 15th century,” says Stephen Byrd, Morgan Stanley’s Global Head of Sustainability Research. “Today, as then, the use of technology in education allows faster spread of information and democratizes learning. It enables a myriad of new methodologies that improve the quality of learning, and it makes the educational system more efficient and less costly.”

The future of education always seems to rely on ahistorical, fictional expectations of the value of the sector that are calculated by the finance sector. And then investors act on those expectations, and the future gets made in the ways finance imagined. www.morganstanley.com/ideas/educat...

$10 Trillion Global Education Market in 2030 Education in 2030

For years the edtech investing industry has been circulating these massive calculations about the $8-10 trillion education market. These numbers aren't real, surely. They're fictional estimates intended to incite investment with expectations of future returns. www.holoniq.com/notes/10-tri...

GSV Summit was founded in 2010 and, in partnership with ASU, launched the ASU+GSV Summit—the premier global convening for innovative leaders transforming the $8 trillion education and skills sector. The Summit’s mission—that ALL people deserve equal access to the future—is grounded in the belief that scaled innovations across PreK to Gray learning are critical to achieving this goal.

It's the edtech investors' annual party and deal-making event at ASU+GSV this week so expect crazy speculative discourse and even wilder value claims.

This $8 trillion valuation of the global education sector (and the implied mega returns possible), for example - where does that come from?

NEW Just a few years ago Sal Khan was predicting that AI was poised to revolutionize education. But his experience launching an AI-powered tutor, Khanmigo, has been sobering, he says.

The hope that it would quickly become a super-tutor still seems a long way off.
www.chalkbeat.org/2026/04/09/s...

AI glasses are catching on in China, from shopping to cheating Early adopters are renting AI glasses for $6 a day for navigation, translation, and school exams.

Students in China are renting AI glasses for $6 a day to scan exam questions and get answers in real time restofworld.org/2026/china-ai-glasses-ch...

The technical architecture of academic publishing looks like being re-engineered rapidly with "agentic AI" developed in partnerships between publishers and big tech. Really, all academics and editors want is a *functioning* system of publication. Is it too much just to ask for that?

Will AI agents and automated editors be the first readers of your next academic journal submission?

"The system makes preliminary evaluative judgments that humans then review. The human role shifts from doing the assessment to auditing the assessment." scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2026/04/08/a...

Co-sign this whole thread with the addendum that forced usage of LMS, especially Canvas, will help goose lagging AI diffusion rates for the industry’s next capital raise.

“AI is still poised to shake up American education in many ways — by making cheating easier, reshaping how teachers approach their work, and changing the broader economy in ways that affect schools.”

But hey don’t worry it’s not totally ineffectual, it still does all the bad stuff!

Thanks again @benpatrickwill.bsky.social - we owe you an update.

Scienmag and Bioengineer have been removed from the Altmetric dataset.

AI has a role to play in the world, but AI-journalism slop, concealed or not, is not it.

New attention page: www.altmetric.com/details/1845...

British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants The British Academy/Leverhulme Small Research Grants are available to support primary research in the humanities and social sciences. These awards, up to £10,000 in value and tenable for up to 24 mont...

May I interest you in £10k for humanities or social science research? Our small grants scheme is open. Apply by 3rd June.

We allocate through partial randomisation - awarding randomly between all applications that meet our quality threshold
www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/sche...

The education of Sal Khan and the limits of his chatbot Khan Academy’s founder says its AI chatbot was a “non-event” for most students.

“So far I am not seeing the revolution in education,” admits chief learning officer of organization responsible for generating much of the hype about genAI in education www.chalkbeat.org/2026/04/09/s...

Management consultants are ruining UK universities Relentless off-the-peg commercial rewiring has undermined British higher education

It's me in the Financial Times, detailing the deep and pernicious influence of one-size-fits-all management consultancy in our universities... Take a look! 👇
www.ft.com/content/5032...

The above post is the script for a keynote at the European Conference on Educational Research @ecer-eera.bsky.social and doubles as a summary of our research funded by The Leverhulme Trust @leverhulme.ac.uk analyzing the emergence of "educational genomics".

The birth of the bio-edu-data-sciences Photo by Federico Lancellotti on Unsplash This post is the script for a keynote lecture at the European Conference on Educational Research (ECER) at the University of Belgrade, Serbia, on 10 Septem…

Genetic data are increasingly used in research on educational outcomes, with proposals even being made to use DNA for policy and practice. It's already controversial science, and its potential applications pose many risks.
codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2026/03/27/t...

Hallucinated citations are polluting the scientific literature. What can be done? Tens of thousands of publications from 2025 might include invalid references generated by AI, a Nature analysis suggests.

Good piece on "Frankenstein citations" in academic publishing, illustrating why the scale of the problem has proven hard to quantify, and why coming up with technical fixes like submission screeners remains more troublesome than it would first seem
www.nature.com/articles/d41...

My university: "Copilot is Microsoft's AI-powered productivity service that uses large language models (LLMs) to help you create content, analyze information, summarize documents, and complete tasks more efficiently."

Microsoft: LOL

What is the public purpose of the #University in an age of #AI everywhere?

I had a go at answering this whopper of a question in the latest issue of the Journal of the British Academy @britishacademy.bsky.social
#democracy #discernment

doi.org/10.5871/jba/...

Why MAGA fears human teachers Melania Trump’s robot stunt opens a new front in the GOP's war on education

Melania Trump's robot stunt was unsettling, but here reason is worse: to promote replacing human teachers with robots.

This is no one-off. It's the newest front in the GOP war on education.

Conservatives hate kids learning to think for themselves.

www.salon.com/2026/03/30/w...

The use of genetic data has proliferated in social and behavioural genomics research, leading to proposals for genetically-informed social policy. In particular, in the domain of ‘educational genomics’, researchers using ‘polygenic scores’—summary statistics used to calculate social outcomes from genetic data—have generated scientific knowledge claims about the potential to predict educational outcomes from biological samples. These polygenic scores have become the basis for proposed experimental interventions in education policy and practice. In this article analyzing a large corpus of scientific texts, we develop an original conceptualization of five techniques associated with the use of polygenic scores in education. We identify the underlying scientific base for claims of the policy-relevance of educational genomics, and develop a conceptual vocabulary explaining the implications and significance of polygenic scores in education. We conceive of polygenic scores as bio-social policy instruments that fuse biological knowledge to social policy objectives. Educational genomics represents an experiment in genomic social policy, amplifying policy commitments to rating, sorting, evaluating, stratifying, and valuing students in education through promissory claims of biological authority. Polygenic scores have thus become the basis for educational genomics to exert policy influence as a significant and controversial source of educational intervention and governance.

New article just out exploring how "educational genomics" scientists propose using polygenic scores as the basis for policy and practice interventions, and what this geneticization of education entails. doi.org/10.1177/1474...

Grammarly shows how prototyping turned into an excuse for not thinking The industry is in the grip of directionless urgency, and users are paying the price. Strategy has been replaced with half-baked features.

Grammarly made an AI to sell shitty writing advice with famous writers' names on it.

This bullshit illustrates a trend in the tech industry: shipping features as quickly as you can write lines of code, with no way to tell if they are any good until something breaks or someone sues you.

We're in with the same folks: "Scotland’s largest university has turned to Nous Group at the same time as it is making savings that could lead to nearly 2,000 job losses. Staff say they were misled about the extent of its work."
www.theferret.scot/consultancy-...

Predictably, Matt Goodwin's GB News debate was a disaster. He opens with defending the idea "everyone" uses AI tools for research now, and it's entirely legitimate. So the book is undeniably a product of using LLMs on some level. 1/

A Day in Class With Plato, the Melania Trump–Mandated Robot Teacher The first lady told us to imagine a future of humanoid instruction … so I did.

"Human teachers...had disagreed with the things the State had wanted them to teach. Sometimes they had wanted their students to read books." www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/...

Color-Coded Austerity and Shades of Gray Decision intelligence and program cuts at Portland State University.

@psuaaup.bsky.social's David Kinsella writes in #Academe about the spread of AI-enabled tools in higher education consulting: “The experience at PSU suggests that what is being sold as decision intelligence is better understood as a new frontier in academic austerity.”

Since today is officially National AI Literacy Day, I think it might be helpful to share work that challenges “literacy” as the best framework for teaching about and against AI and other technologies. 🧵

So what kind of response to AI do we need? Rather than just turning to literacy for the answers, we need to carefully consider what kind of ‘text’ AI is. Is it amenable to a literacies response? The stakes are high if we do not think carefully about an appropriate educative response. Not only will we not use AI effectively, ethically or well, we will stop looking for a more suitable and perhaps more robust response to it. We also risk literacy being coopted for compliance and productivity purposes, so it operates as a kind of ‘soft governance’ for participation in the digital economy (Pangrazio and Sefton-Green Citation2024), just as it did in the late nineteenth century when it was used to teach values and morality. If literacy is the right response, then it needs to be more nuanced in how it is operationalised. Currently, it is used in ways that are both too narrow to capture the digital platforms and political and economic systems it is embedded in, but also too broad to capture the huge variations of how it is employed.

On "AI Literacy Day" I suggest reading "The (im)possibility of AI literacy" by @lucipangrazio.bsky.social questioning whether "literacy" is even the right response to AI and, if so, how a meaningful AI literacy could build on the history of "critical digital literacies" doi.org/10.1080/1743...