Serial Failure Sal Khan Wants to Take Over Higher Education And anyone who cares about human-centered education should hope he fails.

How many times will this guy attempt to “reinvent” education?

The use of digital platforms in education has rapidly proliferated with schools adopting a range of tools to support them with everyday administrative, pedagogical, and communicative functions. This has resulted in intense forms of platformised education and the reshaping of compulsory schooling in multiple ways. Digital platform use is seen to create a range of opportunities, but it also raises urgent questions about how platformisation is changing schooling. Drawing on findings from a qualitative study, this paper explores how platformisation is experienced by school leaders, teachers, students, and parents in two secondary schools in England. While the streamlining of administrative and teaching and learning operations, organisational effectiveness and the ease of communication appear to be valued, our findings show how school platformisation can also normalise monitoring and surveillance, contribute to the professionalisation of parenting, resulting in digital exclusion, and impacting teachers’ digital wellbeing. This paper provides valuable empirical insights on how schooling has become entangled with platformisation in complex ways and the implications this has for teachers, students, and parents. It contributes to the growing body of research in the field of platform studies and offers critical accounts that can inform future policymaking, research, and practice.

🟨 New Publication in #LMT 🟪

Anastasia Gouseti and Patricia Shaw ⬇️ investigate how digital platforms are adopted in two secondary schools in England and how they change the way schooling is done.

Read the article here: lnkd.in/gX8bT58Z

New article in Discourse journal (by Marita Ljungqvist, Anders Sonesson and Neil Selwyn) Article title: Fixing teachers’ problems? exploring teachers’ repair and maintenance work around generative AI technologies Abstract: The promise that AI tools will relieve teachers of tedious tasks and liberate time for more ‘valuable’ work with students has become a dominant narrative. However, the implementation of automated technologies raises questions around how human labour is implicated and situated in these processes. From the perspective of maintenance and repair studies we approach the often-hidden labour that teachers undertake when engaging with generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) technologies. Drawing on interviews with Swedish teachers we expose the tools’ inherent limitations in teaching contexts, and highlight the pedagogical, social, and moral dimensions of educational practice. We argue that these essentially inexplicable and ungeneralizable aspects of teaching – grounded in teachers’ situated awareness, professional experience, and tacit knowledge – cannot be codified or reduced to training data. Our results demonstrate the need for a radical rethinking of the forms of AI that education could benefit from – and those it should resist

"Exploring Teachers’ Repair & Maintenance Work Around GenAI Technologies" ... new open access article from our Swedish research on the considerable behind-the-scenes repair work that teachers end up having to do when using GenAI tools to 'assist' them!

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

At least their “weapons of mass instruction” are “innovative” and “scalable”…whatever that means.

A large poster with blocky type that features the Melvin quote ‘our animals make us better people. And if we’re better people, the world’s a better place’.

Happy National Pet Day to everyone, and especially astronaut Leland Melvin, who famously snuck his dogs into his official NASA photo. This poster is a combo of wood type and little metal ornament animal faces. #letterpress
www.starshaped.com/postersprint...

Is “PreK to Gray” how VC’s view education now?

MacBook sitting on top of 1962 vandercook proof press.

Next in a series called ‘one of these things will last another 100 years.’ #letterpress

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...

I hate how stupid everything is.

Field Notes branded cardboard box with ornamental designs printed in red all over it, sitting on top of cases of metal type ornaments.

Always a pleasure to work with @fieldnotesbrand.bsky.social. Designed a box using scans of metal type ornaments and they took it from there. #letterpress

Open Letter: End the University of Edinburgh's Contract with OpenAI Dear EDINA Leadership Team and those responsible for the University's contract with OpenAI, We are publicly writing to you as the University of Edinburgh's contract with OpenAI is coming to an end, a...

"In the name of the University's final AI principle - responsiveness to the stakeholders involved (i.e. all of us ...) - we ask that the University of Edinburgh not renew its contract with OpenAI and stop using OpenAI as a supplier."
docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...

Our Spring Limited Edition is “Lucky,” which celebrates the noble and doomed American Penny.

fieldnotesbrand.com

How Cal State Became Ground Zero for the Fight over AI in Higher Education California's largest public university system struck a deal to integrate OpenAI's products into classrooms, stoking backlash, Chris Mills Rodrigo reports.

A deal to integrate OpenAI's products into classrooms in California’s biggest public university system has sparked backlash from students and faculty, presaging similar battles over AI in higher education around the country, Tech Policy Press fellow Chris Mills Rodrigo reports.

Print that looks like a field of protest posters on sticks with text that says ‘you survived another day in an authoritarian regime’ with other various well-wishing comments.

A new print for the folks doing front line work ensuring democracy doesn’t die. $10 of each sales goes to @icirr.bsky.social

www.starshaped.com/8x10prints/y...

As a registered voter in Kiley’s redrawn district, I agree. He is absolutely trying to save his job. It wasn’t that long ago that he was afraid to host a town hall 🙄

Everything going on in the US at the moment rams home the point that tech has politics ... so listen here to Dr. Morgan Anderson talk about the politics of US ed-tech in these times of Trump 2.0 (spoiler: she uses the phrase 'cognitive dissonance' at least once):

www.buzzsprout.com/1301377/epis...

quote from Mark West: "“My own background is history. And I'll tell you what changes history - pandemics change history. People like to forget that. But looking forward 100 maybe 200 years in the future, the COVID 19 pandemic will be seen as be a major turning point in education. So, we need to be clear about how the pandemic has changed narratives about education … and we also need to be clear about what lessons we can draw from this”

Six years on since COVID hit us all, and it is wild how most people in ed-tech now act like *nothing* happened. I got to talk with Mark West about how the pandemic fundamentally changed our dependency on ed-tech, and what we can learn from the COVID experience.

www.buzzsprout.com/1301377/epis...

Gotta love how academic books don't earn you money, but LLMs can make money off of stealing them in the aggregate and if you write enough, they can also profit from stealing your personality after you are dead.

CAH has done a bunch of things like this over the years and it's great.

FTC policy statement endorsing age verification. Community Note: Contrary to their claim, using age verification has numerous issues, including but not limited to: 1. Easily bypassed wired.com/story/robloxs-… pcgamer.com/hardware/someo… anapolweiss.com/blog/roblox-ju… 2. Risks of security data breach newamerica.org/oti/reports/ag… fortune.com/2026/02/24/dis… 3. Inaccuracies (Placing adults into underage groups, vice versa) usatoday.com/story/tech/202… theguardian.com/news/2025/sep/… And many more... (sigh, I need a break).

The Twitter notes people are tired.

If this is the expensive version, imagine what’s considered “good enough” for everyone else.

The Next Innovation in Higher Education: Vibe-Teaching™ As the associate vice provost for the Office of Asynchronous Online Courses for Student-Centered High-Impact Learning (OAOCSCHIL, an office we crea...

"In Vibe-Teaching™, faculty are no longer required to read the AI-generated slop that students themselves have not paused to read. ... Every assignment is now an unverifiable collaboration between a stressed undergraduate and a VC-backed robo-parrot." www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the...

Welcome to the Plutocracy

“Re-imagining textbooks for every learner. Learn Your Way transforms content into a dynamic and engaging learning experience tailored for you.” 🤨

Hey, Propaganda Barbie:

We aren’t moving on from people trafficking 10-year-old children and this administration covering it up.

Ever.

Local police aid ICE by tapping school cameras amid Trump’s immigration crackdown Local police assisted federal immigration agents by repeatedly searching school cameras that record license plate numbers, data show

Tell me more about how school surveillance is about safety.