How AI is fueling an existential crisis in education https://thever.ge/Q8fJ #Podcasts #Decoder #Tech #AI

All this “ai in schools” and yet I have yet to work in a single school where everyone can use teams or google meet, mute, share a screen. And I am not being unkind. These aren’t things that are taught to staff. So perhaps we could do the basics before we embark on ai ( pls don’t embark on ai )

Ironically we were in a seminar this week on increasing vocabulary that students can use and understand. And the facilitator suggested using copilot to look up etymology. So slop on top of slop instead of showing children the richness of language. But what do I know etc etc

Because they have Twitter It is fascinating to go and have a look at the Twitter relics, all ardently discussing policy with each other and never admitting it is a bubble. And that is a bubble that sadly has outsized influence. And they are in a cult of schools as carceral / drone worker pipelines

The U.K. government has been talking about disinformation education for years but I have yet to see it meaningfully happen. And I mean we need to begin with staff who are wildly swept away by ai hype and EEF and research Ed propaganda. Let alone the news or online sources.

Said this yesterday in a meeting. It is time to go beyond the hype because real innovation is not using gen ai for everything. It is pointing out the harms, and the self de professionalisation that comes with its use.

If your organisation still feels the need to start any questioning of AI with "We recognise that AI has huge potential to help with XYZ, but.." then they're still not free of the hype. It's past the time for fake even-handedness, and the AI emperor has no clothes.

I hope you will all enjoy that today in a large meeting , someone said that they use copilot in teaching and I said “oh lord,NO” out loud, before I could stop myself. And I’m also not sorry.

Anytime a list of experts comes out in the U.K. :

UK education seems to be trapped in cult where you must quote Tom Bennet or Alex Quigley or any white man and then mention that you use Gen ai . And none of it will get you anywhere other than paid less and self deprofessionalised.

One of the best examples of cybersecurity education being out of touch and full of frauds is that we STILL direct Joe Public to a website called “have I been pwned”. Ridiculously named, alienating people right away and they don’t even get advice. Because all tech people want is to mock everyone

I’d also remind us all that there isn’t any edtech that is privacy respecting enough to be used in workplaces and also in the workplace you can’t discriminate or punish people for being Black or forgetting a pen. But sure, schools are trauma informed

I cannot wait for the coming education revolt led by students who have suffered in schools like this and are finally free to speak out. Combine this with the anger young people will have about edtech and you have a looming issue. No reasonable person thinks these policies are ok.

I think more of you should be concerned that LLM are used in education. I have seen many teachers use ai search only to find answers.

Truth

3 weeks until the “lets circle back to this after the holidays” emails begin.

docs.google.com/forms/d/19we...? If you work in education in any context and have five minutes, please could you complete this survey for an EPQ on edtech? Doesn’t matter where you work in the world Thank you

In which Palantir recruits high school students for fellowships by telling them to skip college because its holds little value and then puts them through a cherry-picked curriculum that oddly resembles… college

This is what we need instead of AI This is what people who care about community and children do- no data taken, just positive impact and works with schools to do what they need. Not what gets some tech ceo data to sell.

I do not understand why the teaching unions aren’t making this a priority for educators , instead of going full send on the AI adoption. Teachers will be liable, the U.K. government guidance actually says this.. it won’t stop with your gdpr consultant. You will end up in a class action lawsuit

In my area of England, the council put up their annual poppy on each lamppost but left the facist flags up. Including four outside a fire station which clearly has ladders and could remove them. All of it enables and normalises harm until we get this kind of violence. And then they act shocked

When you think that Diana recorded her tv interview on November 5th… this has never been a good time of year for the monarchy. They need advice from astrologers.

Les IA génératives charrient des intérêts opposés à toute éducation émancipatrice Voici la vidéo de mon passage sur @franceculture.fr le 27 août. (montée par l'équipe des monteurs de l'émission @questionsdusoir.bsky.social - bravo !) Rappel : ma parole porte une réflexion collective

Pour tenter de penser de manière critique IA et éducation Journée formation SNES/SNESUP - DIJON - MARDI 16 DÉCEMBRE - Campus Universitaire - Amphi EICHER 9h-17h Formation animée par François JARRIGE et moi-même Cliquez sur les images pour une présentation détaillée et savoir comment s'inscrire

www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025... Finally the media picks this up- I saw it in the USA and the Uk- a lot of cared for children especially refugees just disappear, and no one seems to worry that children with social media and friends just disappear from the radar. Definitely trafficking

I see a lot of people returning to Twitter and using musk created twitter linked products like this and I think it shows how they never cared about anyone. Or anything. It has always been about ego. I also wish tech journalism had helped the public instead of being mostly obsequious nonsense.

If we taught teachers and admin real Digital rights and disinfo - they’d reject most edtech and schools would be very different. That’s my TED talk for today

If edtech was about children we’d have as standard: -Calendars that showed every religious festival - pronouns and name pronunciation that students could edit -recognition systems that did more than behaviour/praise points that don’t work for many neurotypes -clear digital rights explanations

I am convinced that the employment crisis we have is significantly influenced by edtech data that has been sold to employers.Your school reports and grades have been fed into applicant tracking systems for years, now even faster with ai. All these work experience apps and school apps? Data brokers

I get in trouble for doing basic checks on edtech companies or consultants and pointing out issues. It is astounding that school leaders will just accept some consultant telling them a lie about how they run a company ( they don’t) or are global( they are 3 raccoons in a trench coat in Barnsley)

Some day I hope we'll learn the full story of how AI got into schools in England via consultancies, government contracts, think tanks and big tech cash, but for now here's a brief thread highlighting a few key actors and activities

Do you think Sam Altman goes to Halloween parties and steals the costumes from other people and says they are his idea?

My 13 year old is studying Philosophy and Ethics GCSE and she has been pondering if it is anti utilitarian for some of the local children to take so many sweets each. So our conversation tonight has been deep🎃 We ran out at 18:15. New record. Also people are still knocking the door omg

This is why I don’t trust these companies when they sell tech to education - because this is who they are: criminals who don’t care about digital rights or humans at all. Stop letting them into schools, whoever they are. They lie and can afford the fines. Nothing but jail will make them do better

www.civicsoftechnology.org/events If you are EU timezone and are interested in a book club that discusses ai in education, I hope you will join us for the Book Club in December. We will be looking at the themes in Resisting AI by @danmcquillan.bsky.social link to sign up below!

Please be careful out there tonight as the children must be protected from learning about b2b sales and how to apply trick or treating to cybersecurity. LinkedIn is a gateway drug to nonsense.

I know a few known cyber “awareness” vendors who have lost out on contracts because of the client data they wanted to collect and use. GRC teams blocked procurement. I think of that a lot when I see gen ai given access to data. Or promises that an LLM is confidential

@cloudquistador.bsky.social is honestly making me cry; amazing interview/vodcast. This explains a lot of the dynamics of how the companies have captured educational institutes: www.youtube.com/live/sey7TS4... (more CAIL videos: olivia.science/ai#talks & allies: olivia.science/ai#allies) 1/n 🧵

What we need is more men in tech to loudly mock claims of “AGI” and “Gen ai workflows”. Especially those in cybersecurity or GRC who should be convened that multiple ai tools now read emails and documents. The same people screaming about TikTok and Huawei are hyping ai corp spyware for likes.

Please stop telling people to be “less negative about ai” Ai products are telling children to end their lives, stealing hard work and the cap ex it all sucks up is causing redundancies. I don’t have to be “nice” about products like that. I won’t be obscene or unhelpful but I am not here for nice

Love this, wonderful resource for anyone battling the “kids need ai literacy” groups

I cannot wait for UK edtech people to begin discussing tech harms and risks. Because at the moment we have a very privileged lens on how tech in education works and what the risks might be. It reminds me of speaking to Silicon Valley engineers in 2016.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article... BBC tech journalism has long been disappointing, but one might expect the tech EDITOR to mention TESCREAL, DAIR, @timnitgebru.bsky.social or the work of @wolvendamien.bsky.social. I’d say we should be worried about the BBC journalists writing daily fail level slop.

Teacher Tapp is an app that relies on teachers using the app every day and replying to surveys, and then selling that data on as part of staff surveys. It has become an HR tool, a media plot device to “represent” what people in education think. And it is entirely white led, like HR often is.

Education is a great example of this: we saw clearly how children did well with remote or hybrid learning, away from prison like schools. And they panicked and created pervasive myths about learning loss and damage to skills that became RTO for adults too. Anything but have a human centred system

"All those barely literate rubes using ChatGPT are merely being played like a fiddle by the corporations, and producing worthless slop. Only I, with my towering intellect, have figured out how to make it generate greatness." —every GenAI-using asshole out there

that $500 dollar a month Neo robot is actually tele operated from what I can find out. In simple terms: this humanoid robot will be controlled by a human somewhere. So you have zero privacy or even safety to be honest. Or common sense, if you buy one. www.1x.tech/neo

www.newstatesman.com/politics/202... Oh this is good. The description of William as a deeply incurious, uneducated and ignorant man, with tendencies to aggression…. I don’t think we need a monarch in a nation of 2k foodbanks

You should care about Jamaica and Sudan even if you don't know anyone there and the news isn't covering it. The anti-Blackness embedded in folks' lack of empathy is gross.

Today I met Oreo, he would like you all to admire his Halloween outfit. I can assure you that he is the bestest of boys.