I’ve been thinking a lot about techlash discourse & the flattening of what we mean by “educational technology.” I haven’t seen many people critiquing EdTech™️ while also making arguments for creative applications of digital tools/media—so I did! #literacies
open.substack.com/pub/trevoral...
EdTech sucks for so many reasons, not the least of which is that it traps teachers & students in an ecosystem where tools & skills aren't compatible or transferable to non-school contexts. And it's *so hard* to put those two ecosystems in communication with one another!
Teaching kids how to, say, use AV equipment and Adobe Premiere to record and edit a student documentary or learning functions on Google Sheets isn't less of a "real education" than copying lecture notes by hand.
bsky.app/profile/covi...
This article seems like mostly bad faith ragebait from people who should know the difference between the oppressive corporatization and Fisher Price-ification of educational technology for schools and the legitimate value of digital tools.
www.nytimes.com/2026/04/19/o...
There's a nostalgia/romanticization (derogatory) of "real/authentic" education being entirely analog, a call for a return to "traditional" pedagogies that *also* alienated and disengaged students. The worst of edtech encompassed poor tools in serve of poor pedagogies!
👏 "I am, in no way shape or form writing this article as some sort of mealy-mouth apologia for EdTech. I am nervous, however, about the rise of tech-lash inspired, synthetic, and schoolish pedagogies being framed as liberatory for the sole reason that they are analogue." - @mraleosays.bsky.social
2026/27 MEDIAMAG SUBSCRIPTIONS NOW AVAILABLE
You can now subscribe or resubscribe to MediaMagazine for the next academic year! Head over to our website now to find out more: buff.ly/1YC0Rfw
Are these available in the US? I had our librarian reach out via email last year and say she didn’t receive a response about a site license.
Unfortunately any administrator passing policies that virulently anti-intellectual is going to take a lot more convincing. Part of the challenge to all of this is that the people who have their hands on the levers of power are frequently careerist Philistines who aren’t swayed by these arguments.
I think people have a tendency to blame district administrators or policymakers, who, to be fair, often have a bad track record when it comes to stuff like this. Unfortunately, it’s all downstream of the CB testing monopoly. “Who controls English?” might feel more nebulous to a lot of folks.
Signal boosting this because I do think the Next-Gen Dissertations site remains a useful project. The evaluation section in particular may be useful to programs looking to expand their own diss guidelines. Also contains project examples, a resource compendium, & more. nextgendiss.hcommons.org
The book cover for Teaching Meaning: What Works When Telling Isn't Enough.
Release day! The ebook & hardback are live.
The first book for teachers based on *enactive* cognitive science, please consider leaving a review when you're done (it really helps).
(Paperback readers: Amazon is having a glitch, so it's slightly delayed.)
mybook.to/teachingmean...
The college awards aren't much better. Schools like Alabama (115 awards), UT Dallas (100), and Arizona State (85) use "National Merit" to recruit high-scoring students and move up US News rankings.
It's a tuition discount strategy wearing a merit badge.
www.chronicle.com/article/the-...
1000% agree with this. I don’t want to oversell the political implications of small acts of kindness, gestures of micro-solidarity, etc. but it’s important to note that moments like these chip away at the general sense of alienation required for corrosive ideologies to thrive.
A tweet from Pope Leo XIV that reads: “When simulation becomes the norm, it weakens the human capacity for discernment. As a result, our social bonds close in upon themselves, forming self-referential circuits that no longer expose us to reality. We thus come to live within bubbles, impermeable to one another. Feeling threatened by anyone who is different, we grow unaccustomed to encounter and dialogue. In this way, polarization, conflict, fear and violence spread. What is at stake is not merely the risk of error, but a transformation in our very relationship with truth.”
Apparently the Pope has read Baudrillard.
This book was an absolute delight. Highly recommend to anyone in or around secondary/post-secondary English education!
Excited to share the conversation I had with @afilreis.bsky.social about ModPo on my podcast later this week.
Writing Rhetorically by Jennifer Fletcher. Genre Theory by Deborah Dean. Digging into Literature by Wolfe & Wilder. Anything detailing systemic functional linguistics inspired approaches to writing. Good starting point. ⤵️
newlearningonline.com/literacies/c...
Very excited to join @marcusluther.bsky.social & @thevogelman.bsky.social’s Bleak House book club! Made the very unnecessary purchase of the cloth bound edition—because books. Also, thrilled to see Terry Eagleton wrote the forward to this edition.
Message them for details!
"the colleges that dominate the headlines are not the colleges that most Americans attend
their core mission: to serve students from all backgrounds, at a price families can actually afford, prepare graduates for real careers and meaningful lives."
www.geneseo.edu/enrollment-m...
This might be cope, but part of me feels like the EdTech & AI explosion the last few years finally shocked a lot of folks in education out of the status-quo human capital trance they’d been in. Unfortunately, may folks, especially those in power, seemed to double down. Long term though? We win, IMO.
I distinctly remember telling myself “Yeah, man. Good job finding silly little speech patterns. SoOoOo impressive! Ohh, so you found “a theme?” Whoop-de-doo! Anyone can do that. This paper sucks. Re-read Cresswell.”
Prof’s feedback was like “Cool! You have a knack for this.”
It’s the cycle! 😂🫠
This rocks! The terms take time to settle in to place, but your ability to read closely, identify patterns, construct interpretations, etc. will take you way farther than you think. I thought I was absolutely cooked in my qual methods class until I got similar feedback on a project. You got this! 🫡
Yeah, Socrates was really big on the whole “listen and obey” thing.
One of the most important arguments @annieabrams.bsky.social has made: don't cede books to the political right.
Unfortunately, the lack of a progressive answer to the reactionary rhetoric is because we've done just that, but it doesn't have to stay that way!
If you paid taxes for 2025, you likely paid:
$124 — school lunch & nutrition programs
$49 — diplomacy to prevent wars
$19 — USPS
$19 — Federal Aviation Administration
$18 — national parks
and
$4,049 — weapons and war.
These priorities are hurting us all. We need change. #TaxDay
But there will also be versions of the “material turn” that remain critically engaged with the present — and even with AI. Ryan’s essay seems to me important here, marking a path forward for humanistic scholarship that insists on materiality without retreating to become Colonial Williamsburg.
in connection to the past. I’ve long felt that “the humanities” are bound less by a distinct method than by being historical disciplines.
There will be some versions of the analog turn that do verge on neo-traditionalism. That’s where this blog post (recently reprinted in The Chronicle) is headed:
Seems increasingly likely that the humanities will specialize in an approach to culture that requires in-person presence and revels in the physicality of paper &c.
Not the main thing I do, but—it seems healthy? Likely good to have a space free of screens. Also it’s not bad to take pride
Jesus Christ. The tech-broligarchy’s incessant butchering of the *most basic* themes in LOTR is going to turn me into a raging textualist.