fixed that for you

Must read reporting on Alpha School, their misleading promises about the power of AI in education and mastery learning, and the harm their obsession with metrics and their devaluing of human teachers inflicts on children. www.wired.com/story/ai-tea...

This one-pager from the French ministry of education contains more useful guidance for teachers than the entire document we recently got in Ireland. It is understandable that policymakers might not be able to answer all the questions that arise with AI. But how refreshing it is to see them try!

I'm reading a preprint and put a new Lord Of The Isles record to play in the background. I didn't expect the second track to match the situation so perfectly: www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ubv...

📝 Latest Publication Alert! 📝 "AI-based research mentors: Plausible scenarios and ethical issues" Daniel Crean, Michał Wieczorek, Bert Gordijn & Alan J. Kearns → doi.org/10.1080/0898... #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #ResearchIntegrity

Today was my first day as an assistant professor at @ucddublin.bsky.social. I look forward to working with my new colleagues at the School of Education. You can watch the actual, unedited footage of my first day at the office here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=zj4j...

In this new paper led by Danny Crean and with contributions by me, Alan Kearns and Bert Gordijn, we use anticipatory methods to explore how GenAI tools are likely to affect research mentorship, research integrity and research culture. Have a read here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Last day of #SPT2025 and I am SO excited to start the day with a Dewey panel because philosophers of technology need more Dewey!

If you are around Nijmegen next week, consider coming to my talk at iHub, Radboud University. It has a very modest aim: discuss everything that's wrong with educational AI. Thanks to Tamar Sharon for giving me this chance to collect all the ideas I have been exploring the past few years.

Our literature review on the ethics of using AI in schools is now available in open access in AI & Ethics. It should provide a comprehensive entry point for folks interested in the ethical dimension of educational AI. Thanks to my wonderful coauthors @mhmdhsini.bsky.social and Bert Gordijn.

This Saturday at the Society for Philosophy and Technology conference, I will moderate a symposium on Dewey's philosophy of technology which includes talks by four excellent scholars: Sebastian Weydner-Volkmann, @coeckelbergh.bsky.social, Ibo van de Poel and @olyakudina.bsky.social. Come join us!

I have a new article out in Learning, Media & Technology. Using scenario planning, I sketch out four scenarios for the deployment of AI in schools, highlighting that the futures that the futures of educational AI are morally ambiguous, unlike the binary claims made by AI boosters and AI doomsters.

Why AI will not Democratize Education: a Critical Pragmatist Perspective link.springer.com/article/10.1...

"[T]here are good reasons to believe that by individualising learning, focusing on mastery, automating teachers’ tasks and increasing the influence of private companies, [AI] will have a negative impact on the democratic dimension of education," writes Michał Wieczorek.

Have you seen all the promises that AI will make education more democratic? Have you always been a little sceptical of them but couldn’t say exactly why? Try my new paper in which I discuss the mismatch between the goals and values of democratic education, and contemporary educational AI tools.

If you’ve got $20,000 a month to spend on a “PhD level” ai agent, just hire a person.

Our AI Literacy Training in the Classroom Online Course for teachers is now live with some great insights on AI and AI ethics tailored specifically to educational contexts. Also, check the website for details on workshops in Ireland early next year (including my talk on AI ethics for teachers).

A year deeper into this, and this still seems utterly perfect

I'm in the @irishtimes.bsky.social today, writing with @eam0.bsky.social about educational AI and why it won't work (if it's going to work at all!) so well in multilingual educational systems, like the one in Ireland. www.irishtimes.com/ireland/educ...

yes, we boiled the planet, but it was worth it to make a machine that, instead of adding two plus two, takes the statistical average of every answer to questions containing "what" "is" "two" and "plus" from a database of illegal cell phone transcripts and returns a fake nude pic of a high schooler

Being “ai” free is already becoming a selling point.

They keep pitching this, but it never gets more coherent or makes more sense. Logistics and capabilities aside, companies aren’t sinking money into these things so you can spend more time with your family (unless that’s achieved by firing you).

This feels like one of deadliest flaws in Khan's sales pitch: his "treatment of teaching is insulting as much as anything. He claims to want to provide technology to teachers and schools that will help them without bothering to understand what teachers do or how teaching works."

Highly paid developers with huge amounts of private capital produced this. Ordinary people working for nothing more than the common good produced Wikipedia.

back in my day we called this spyware

The big AI push we’re seeing right now feels like nothing so much as a bunch of executives realizing the bottom is about to totally drop outta this thing because the product sucks and no one likes it, so they’re either desperately trying to make fetch happen or wring the last drips of value from it

The events of May alone make clear that generative AI, as it is packaged and sold as an idea and a service enterprise, is rotten to the core. The product is unethically produced by people who have no respect for creators or artists—and it's just pain bad. Who, as they say, wants any of this?

I recently had a chance to talk about my current work (together with Mohammad Hosseini), so I did the reasonable thing: talked so much that they had to split the episode in two. Enjoy! www.buzzsprout.com/1896915/1489...

New paper out in Philosophy & Technology, in which I answer one of the fundamental philosophical questions: Would John Dewey wear a Fitbit? There's also some discussion of habit formation, epistemic justice and constitutive impact of tech, I promise! link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Props to Rolling Stone for giving this monster the treatment he deserves www.rollingstone.com/politics/pol...

Folks: what are the school surveillance technologies that make you curious or alarm you nowadays?

The Left got a lower share of votes than I expected or the polls indicated, but the results of the elections in Poland are wonderful news and fill me with hope. It’s a great feeling to be able to look at the future of the country with optimism. ***** ***

One of the best parts of the WGA deal: AI has now hit a brick wall in Hollywood, *and that includes adaptations.* Based on the deal, AI can't be source material. So if you're a publisher, AI novels or graphic novels or whatever just became that much less appealing because *they can't be optioned.*

Credit to Utrecht University for not participating in the university ranking game. Good research is built on collaboration, not competition. www.uu.nl/en/news/why-...

Fifteen of my books are apparently being used to train AI without my permission using the Books3 dataset. Fucking hell.

Weirdly, an AI telling you how to teach is going to positively address none of these things. 🤦🏿‍♂️

Sigh. Gimme better threading so I can long form why this sucks.

most downsides of AI could be solved with this one weird trick!

In general, asking if you really need technology X for doing Y seems like a smart thing to do.