Students, if you’re thinking about dropping a note to that teacher or professor about what their class/project/mentorship has meant to you, but you worry it will be cringe or cheesy, let me just tell you they will coast on the fuzzy feelings prompted by that note for months, if not years

Good news, everyone www.cnn.com/2026/05/14/h...

Something something late stage capitalism

the urge of elite journalistic institutions to devote a ton of space to deeply unimportant and petty gossip, purely because it takes place at elite universities, is just deeply strange and embarrassing

Guy who has built his career on writing airport nonfiction books complaining about how kids are coddled gets an entire NYT piece written about how horrible it is that a handful of students wrote a letter saying they don’t like him. Did I get that right???

Al Filreis, author of THE CLASSROOM & THE CROWD, makes a case that progressive digital pedagogy is not a contradiction in terms. Listen to his interview with Trevor Aleo on Becoming Literary. @afilreis.bsky.social @mraleosays.bsky.social @columbiaup.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/trevoral...

I follow some brilliant ed policy folks on here who really need to help me out. Is the field THAT out of ideas or is this just a NYT reporting thing? Did everyone memory hole the entire ed-reform movement flop? The level of accountability era amnesia is *insane*. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/13/u...

in 2016 I made a comic titled “Mr. Gotcha” that would become most viewed and circulated image I’d create. Now it is the subject of a book by @glennf.com examining its history in online discourse. That One Matt Bors comic is live on Kickstarter—back it here: www.kickstarter.com/projects/gle...

Our summer creative writing program for teens at the museum had 3x the usual number of applicants this year. Make of that what you will.

Business is “a new liberal art for our time.”

I don’t usually jump on too many kickstarters, but I will be low key devastated if this doesn’t get funded. Support real authors writing real books (about political memes)! I feel like the #literacies crew should be all over this. 👀 www.kickstarter.com/projects/gle...

Put our May #literacies Slow Chat on your calendar!

Happening in one hour!

I recommend being a breathless booster hype man for people and friends and ideas you very much actually like.

Best seller over in the USA? ● Teaching Meaning: What Works When Telling Isn't Enough

Some thoughts on why and how teachers can maintain our reading lives, inspired by my experience in collaboration with @marcusluther.bsky.social and our little group reading Bleak House. open.substack.com/pub/declarat...

Everyone (rightly!) organizing against EdTech in K-12 organizations must also be organizing against the corporations and “nonprofits” who are working VERY HARD to redirect all the money being spent on screens/apps into highly scripted, top down “Knowledge Rich Curriculum (Now With Analogue™️!)”.

Don’t run universities like a business run it as a public good

This week the New Yorker & NY Mag competed to out-disaster-pr0n each other w the genre of "students using chatbots to college." Yet over the last 3 months alone students from Oregon to MA reached out to me to help them fight AI at their unis & high schools. Journalists should write that article.

In the span of three months we’ve seen the Einstein agent chasing SSO credentials, ASU Atomic slopping instructor videos, & now the ShinyHunters hack. Maybe it’s time for us the recognize that what makes Canvas a “matrix of vulnerabilities,” as Marachi & Quill put it, is getting worse.

What I wish for everybody to remember when Canvas comes back online: The reason OUR data can be held for ransom is because Instructure, their owners (KKR private equity & Dragoneer venture capital), & our own employers (see ASU Atomic) monetize it. It's Canvas that hacked education & stole our IP.

My Roman Empire is that the daycare I send my 2 and 5 year old to rebranded its “Arts & Crafts Room” to a “STEM Lab” last year.

This is very depressing and very true.

Regardless of your discipline, I highly recommend Christian’s work. His book offers actionable approaches that eschew false instructional dichotomies and emphasize the importance of meaning making. It’s the perfect counterpoint to the rise in neo-traditional pedagogies masquerading as “scientific.”

Since @damonyoung.com.au pointed me to this bullshit, I am obligated to tear it down. First, Dewey’s commitment to education wasn’t to churning out white collar workers. Indeed, Dewey has some SCATHING invective for white collar folks, college educators in specific, who abandon their fellows.

"aims to rejuvenate the study of literature in schools and universities by researching, facilitating, and championing creative-critical teaching practices. These include writing in style, recreative writing, writing-in-role, adaptation, and many others." #HigherEd www.nate.org.uk/2026/05/06/b...

If the movement they represent wasn’t so pernicious, it would be kind of hilarious how dumb these pseudo-intellectual LARPers are.

Excited to share my dialogue with @afilreis.bsky.social about his phenomenal book & the ModPo course that inspired it. It’s a perfect follow up to my musings about how humanities Ts/scholars might take up digital tools while resisting EdTech™️! #literacies #edusky open.substack.com/pub/trevoral...

What’s frustrating about Obama using the “college seminar” as a foil is that he very obviously means the humanities. Yet ”college seminars” in math or physics are actually completely unintelligible to the layperson and that’s a good thing. Complex ideas and specialized vocabulary are good.

My article on my old professor, the late Rick Roderick, appears in Spectre today, right on time for Marx's birthday. spectrejournal.com/on-rick-rode...

fighting drought by harvesting energy. you love to see it

Ah, yes. John Dewey's obsession with instrumentalized forms of education focused on fueling the capitalist machine is well documented. Famously had nothing to say about fluffy stuff like art or nature. Certainly didn't write books about those things!

here's our most recent BURNS THEORY seminar on the topic of cognitive mapping in Fredric Jameson with the wonderful @roberttally.bsky.social we do visiting seminars every month, so get involved if you wanna hang out and learn cool stuff from smart humans. burnstheory.com/posts/cognit...

I was fortunate to be part of the brilliantly conceived & organized event earlier this week. This is @cnewf.bsky.social’s contribution (not including the excellent Q&A that followed). AAUP TV is going to have video sometime soon & I will be releasing at least one episode from the proceedings.

Brazilian educator Paulo Freire died on this day in 1997. “To alienate people from their own decision-making is to change them into objects.”

Lovely Ursula Le Guin. ❤️

My next book, a practical guide for how to write for mass media, publishes four weeks from today. I hope you'll consider ordering it now, inviting me to speak, and to tell others. Here's what @tressiemcphd.bsky.social said about my work. Pre-order here: www.press.jhu.edu/books/title/...

I got a kind note from an English teacher who’d been looking for ways to analyze images in comics & found my resource page on my visual analysis/annotation project. It was lovely to receive because a) it wasn’t ai spam & b) a reminder of why I share all this stuff spinweaveandcut.com/visual-analy...

When academic contents - lectures, assignments, papers - are treated as assets that means they become objects of financial concern. Valued not for their actual contents, but their economic yield into the future.

RIP Roland Barthes you would have loved adversarial hermeneutics

If you haven't listened to the podcast "What's Left of Philosophy" (@leftofphilosophy.bsky.social), please do so. The first two episodes of their Marxism and Religion series have been both thought provoking and deeply affirming of a shared humane spirit. So good.

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