The alarming aspect of this deliberate "anti-woke" algorithmic biasing of LLMs from an educational perspective is our institutions all bought in to an imaginary of innovation, then got locked in to enterprise contracts, and now the models are being recoded so they undermine educational values

Another brilliant piece by @keanbirch.bsky.social

Platforms, data, and AI are impacting higher education systems and universities internationally. @jkom.bsky.social and I have a short piece on the political economy of digital transformation in HE just out ihe.bc.edu/pub/499eknm0...

I’m looking forward to speak at the @work2025fi.bsky.social conference! I’ll be discussing academic labour and HE in the age of digital rentiership.

Thanks very much for organising this excellent panel and for having me @rachelbrooks.bsky.social! So great to discuss the current matters in HE with @unsocialtheory.bsky.social, @alinecourtois.bsky.social and everyone there!

if you're at the @britsoci.bsky.social annual conference next week, do come along to the session on The Future of Higher Education, with contributions from @unsocialtheory.bsky.social @jkom.bsky.social & @alinecourtois.bsky.social

If you happen to be at the @britsoci.bsky.social's annual conference and if you want to hear something beyond the moan about how "they" are destroying "our" higher education, I'll be speaking (alongside @jkom.bsky.social and @alinecourtois.bsky.social) at the Presidential event on the Future of HE:

Such a great pleasure to work with @keanbirch.bsky.social on this paper. I’m really pleased with it and think it brings important new insights. Check it out!

🟨Volume 50, Issue 1 (2025) of LMT🟪 Let's introduce our new Special Issue! In their editorial @jkom.bsky.social, @keanbirch.bsky.social & Sam Sellar intruduce the dynamics of #rentiership and #assetisation in the digitalisation of education. Read all articles: tinyurl.com/a8bvzkxe

The promise of AI in education is it will save educators time. That's rubbish. It's sapping all our time already in working groups, committees, workshops, and marking anxiety. It's the most time-sapping, exhausting and frankly boring thing I've ever encountered in HE - and it's in my research area.

Our special issue ‘Rents, assets and governance in digitalised education’ is now published! Check it out: www.tandfonline.com/toc/cjem20/c...

The whole thing is amazing and absolutely worth watching until the end. But @meredithmeredith.bsky.social gave the best pitch for @signal.org answering if there are any downsides of using it: "No-none! It's free, classy and we're not shoving and weird #AI shit into it." 🤣 👏

Funny thing about this 360 degree multimodal surveillance classroom is it's absolutely nothing new conceptually, so it's not really to do with "innovative" tech but continuing a much longer history of intensifying student monitoring and teacher automation, eg www.computer.org/csdl/magazin...

New publication: we discuss different ways to think through and map assetization in education. i, we look at the variety of assets in education; ii, the production and monetization of assets; iii, the embeddedness of assets in everyday, mundane practices; and iv, the politics of assetization.

Chuffed our paper on edtech market forecasting - we called it "algorithmic futuring" - made it into this special issue on digital assetization in education doi.org/10.1080/1743...

Just in case you thought everything was hunky dory in UK universities ...

🔥Superb agenda-setting editorial on assetization and rentiership in education ⏬️

Our Introduction article with @keanbirch.bsky.social and Sam Sellar, “Mapping rentiership and assetization in the digitalisation of education” is now published and freely available. It explains how assetization manifests in education, its consequences and how to analyse this dynamic. Check it out

But edtech trade shows - sometimes - invite people like @jkom.bsky.social and me to offer a different, more "sociotechnical" perspective on why edtech, data, and AI are *not* going to inevitably or straightforwardly "transform" education. Hopefully at least a small dent in the industry bandwagon.

And, as expected, the official AI Plan document just makes a couple of refs to "AI assistants" reducing teachers' time spent planning and marking - but quite a lot on educating AI "talent" and wider AI skills training www.gov.uk/government/p...

And if you want to know more about the economic reality behind running high availability, actually innovative tech… signal.org/blog/signal-...

““Everybody thinks that AI will help us with our access and capacity and improve care and so on,” said Nigam Shah, chief data scientist at Stanford Health Care. “All of that is nice and good, but if it increases the cost of care by 20%, is that viable?”” Check out below

Teenager is woken by police in the middle of the night. “As it turns out, a poem she had written years ago triggered the alarms of a software called GoGuardian Beacon, which its maker describes as a way to ‘safeguard students from physical harm.’”

Less than 2 hours to go before my webinar on the assetization of academic content. I think registration is still open. Join me and @liulei14.bsky.social, if you have time this afternoon. See here: tinyurl.com/y2nw6m2w

Universities are trying to make data useful for purposes such as efficiency, while EdTech companies try to generate commercial value from data. @jkom.bsky.social and I will look at the problems of making data useful and valuable at the London BETT show in January!

It doesn’t matter if there are good, honest people inside the corporation. If a course of action will undermine returns, even if it is socially good, then it has to be rejected.

The corporation is not designed to be a “good citizen”. It is designed to be singularly focused on returns. That has to be the starting point of governing corporations.

As @benpatrickwill.bsky.social and I prepare for our talk at the BETT UK in January, I reflect on our recent articles about digital data value in HE. One is on the economic value of data for EdTech start-ups and their strategies and struggles in monetising user data (1): shorturl.at/y4jOw

I’m looking forward to this panel. Come along if you can!

Someone makes the great point in replies to this post that the next big business opportunity will be de-AI technologies (basically tech that unravels the mess AI is creating) #artificialintelligence

Fiona invited me to tell her about why I left X and joined Bluesky. Her piece is now published:

The new OpenAI training for teachers is also a strategy of making teachers into "friendly users" - the intended result is a synchronisation of AI with pedagogic routines and administrative procedures in AI-friendly schools www.norrag.org/making-educa...

Last week I participated in an event organized by CIGI on "The Role of Governance in Unleashing the Value of Data". #datagovernance #datavalue #DataAssets #solidarity #datawealthfund Check out my & others' contributions here: www.cigionline.org/the-role-of-...

Anyone UCU has started on Bluesky, I am trying to be organised as the Twitter connections are lost. I had a go at a ucu starter pack for activist accounts - I think a separate one is being worked on for branch accounts go.bsky.app/8cndNJm

Some bsky tips for newbies! 🦋Hashtags don't trend, they're for finding likeminded posts. There are no trending topics here unless you subscribe to a feed. 🦋You can mute hashtags. 🦋You don't have to censure words like Shadowban etc because there is no censorship. 1/

With regulatory oversight of AI now likely off the table, faculty will continue to be left largely on our own to develop meaningful guardrails about AI's impact on learning. open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

“‘It [NotebookLM] just flattens it — it misses all of this nuance,’… ’It sounds so intimate because it’s a voice and audio is such an intimate medium. But as soon as it was something that you knew a lot about it’s going to fall flat.’”

Do you know if there are starter packs available for critical data studies, critical EdTech, STS, econ sociology and similar? If so, please share. Thanks.

This! I agree very much @lawriephipps.bsky.social. Check out this very useful resource on how to leave X.

Yes, @ddubdrahcir.bsky.social! Great to see you here.

I left X for good. I do not plan to log in again. I feel now more than ever that I cannot support X and its owners. It is hard to leave established networks that are a great way to share news and insights with colleagues and friends. But enough is enough.

This is the EXACT way to leave Twitter, brilliantly done: - pin post redirecting to your website - don’t delete account - avoid saying things that will get the account suspended by paper ego musk - build your comms outside of socials #schools and #teachers need to do this. Locate your nearest X it

Submissions already coming in for this symposium that seeks to bring people to think together and to think otherwise so as to plot critical and creative post-AI educational futures. Please spread the word and come join us: www.hackthiscourse.com/symposium/#/

Last year, in an attempt to escape from Twitter, I tried Mastodon, but the UX didn't click for me. Then a Bluesky invite showed up. It was the Twitter clone I was looking for. I started crossposting as a hedge, I even started sending invites of my own. I was all in. Then I went back to Twitter.

@womened.bsky.social @womenedeastmids.bsky.social @womenednw.bsky.social can you help to ensure the voices of women school leaders are loud and clear in this survey? Share repost fill out?

Thanks for the help, @benpatrickwill.bsky.social

Just created my profile here! What better way to kick things off than by spotlighting the upcoming Critical EdTech Studies Conference? Check out the details below, and don’t forget to submit your abstract! Thanks, @benpatrickwill.bsky.social and colleagues for organising.