"State education technology leaders play a large role in establishing policy frameworks and technical infrastructure within state education agencies. Their priorities often sway the direction in which local and state dollars are spent for educational tools" 1/2 marketbrief.edweek.org/education-ma...

My fellow caregivers, I'd like to suggest the datafication and surveillance of our children is, in fact, not worth it.

A parent with a child at the hacked nursery chain "viewed the cyber-attack as an inherent risk of using any app, and considered the opportunity to gain real-time information on his child, such as what they had eaten, worth it" 🤔

AI models are using material from retracted scientific papers buff.ly/OlGwaFP

The platformization and datafication of early childhood is going great for data extractive startups and hackers "The software is widely used by other nurseries and childcare organisations, and it says on its website it is used by more than one million 'owners, managers, practitioners and families'"

In case you're wondering why AI is pushing so hard into education, that last bullet point is why. Get consumers hooked in young and they're likely to stay. And get embedded enough into classrooms and curriculum and the education system can't function without it - ie permanent consumers.

I don't believe the tech companies can actually make real inroads into education (or similarly medicine, etc) without people on the inside extending them (and telling others to extend them) the benefit of the doubt. /fin

Can LLMs distinguish between robust findings and research that has been retracted due to errors, fraud, or other serious concerns? QTWAIN blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...

Privacy International is looking for stories to add to its "edtech tracker" - there are so many could be included!

❗ We've updated our EdTech tracker! We have been tracking the use of EdTech 🎓 around the world to better understand the trends and shortcomings and strengthen ours and others understanding regarding these issues. 👉 privacyinternational.org/examples/edt...

When the AI hallucination is deemed more true than empirical reality www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2025/se...

New @nepc.bsky.social policy brief with Faith Boninger: how commercial edtech undercuts key goals of public education—and what we can do about it. We look at transparency, governance, and privacy issues and offer recommendations for educators and policymakers. nepc.colorado.edu/publication/...

Edtech platforms "are not neutral 'tools' but complex ecosystems shaped by technical architectures, commercial imperatives, and political-economic interests." Excellent new policy brief on edtech platforms from @nepc.bsky.social and @philnichols.bsky.social

New policy brief: Educators should reassess the hidden impacts of ed tech ecosystems on teaching, learning, and student data. bit.ly/46C2JXT

In their editorial, Janet Roitman, Andrew Moon and Leila Lin foreground the importance of asking questions about value to understand the heterogeneous terrain of the platform economy journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10....

This is insane—a school is paying to put its students under AI surveillance, empowering a glitchy system to delete schoolwork, expose student journalists’ sources, and out queer students to their parents

My latest column for the Chronicle of Higher Ed is now live. It's an argument for including AI-critical voices in campus conversations and policymaking workgroups, and I'm proud to get this dissenting piece into the mainstream genAI/higher ed discourse. Please read and share if you're so inclined 🙂

Academia.edu has always been a scam to gamify & monetize the psychic damage of twilight-phase academic neoliberalism: this person looked you up, that person mentioned you, your work matters. Intellectual as individual brand-builder. The rights stuff is awful but the basic concept is bad enough

🔴 NEW: Larry Ellison’s £257m bet on Tony Blair Our investigation with @lighthousereports.com reveals how the Tony Blair Institute has been accused of pushing the interests of tech tycoon Ellison — Trump’s “CEO of everything” — and his company Oracle democracyforsale.substack.com/p/inside-the...

When Tech Giants Study Their Own Tools: Should We Trust the Results? Google evaluates Google: surprise, their AI textbook beats… a PDF viewer. Tiny sample, lab setting, weak control group. Likely novelty, maybe Hawthorne. theeconomyofmeaning.com/2025/09/23/w...

Will Oxford disclose how much it paid (or did not pay) for this? Surely a sweetheart deal (has research money thrown in!) so OpenAI can plaster Oxford over its marketing and raid other unis’ fees, library budgets to throw into the sector’s massive inference funding chasm.

Labour cosies up to US tech firms with little thought of downsides | Heather Stewart

This is not just maths. It's a design choice, supported by benchmarks that reward false certainty. Good to see OpenAI do some of the research, but it's also a reminder that OpenAI shouldn't be relied upon to do all the research.

Claims of the novelty of AI and its potential for innovation in education always make me wince a bit because really it continues a bunch of long-running tendencies in the sector. It’s an *intensifier* rather than an innovation. Some examples… www.forbes.com/councils/for...

The real existential threat isn't AI — it's billionaires. My latest, for @theatlantic.com: www.theatlantic.com/books/archiv...

My new piece is up: Silicon Valley billionaires use science fiction to justify dystopia, AI overlords, space colonies, escape plans. I call this “science fiction materialized”. But radical science fiction offers blueprints for resistance + rebuilding and new worlds. untoldmag.org/silicon-vall...

"When confronted about [its] inconsistent recommendations, the model denied providing contradictory guidance, a behavior that participants described as 'algorithmic gaslighting'" - interesting and worrying experiment on "red teaming" chatbots for children and schools

NEW: Weekend News Agents No-one can be certain how transformational AI will be:to the economy, to human psychology, to the human experience. I am absolutely certain our politicians haven’t thought about it enough or begun to properly grapple with the economic, regulatory and political implications

Just gently again reminding anyone newly interested in critical social science and humanities research on AI in education that the resources for your lit review are available from education researchers to be built upon - a partial but still long and updating selection going back a while ⬇️

Now *this* is how to do reporting on the latest for-profit edtech-AI snake oil outfit to promise hyperaccelerated learning through fully surveillant clasrooms and teacherless schooling all the way to big investor injections of capital and raids on families' incomes sfstandard.com/2025/09/19/a...

"Frankenstein’s monster copy-paste jobs from a bunch of different places? That’s not a summary. That’s word salad." My words on how useless LLM-based AI is for writing, thinking, & qualitative research: buttondown.com/surekhadavie...

"Oxford becomes first UK university to offer ChatGPT Edu to all staff and students" - imagining a lot of staff there pretty upset about, but also it says much about OpenAI's education strategy that it's targeted Oxford as its first institutional capture in the UK www.ox.ac.uk/news/2025-09...

I wrote a response to Thomas Friedman's "magical thinking" on AI here: aiguide.substack.com/p/magical-th...

Unintentionally revealing analogy: “He compares it [ai teaching] to autonomous driving, where a computer takes over the main tasks under minimal human supervision.”

As always with Peter Kyle, the context makes it worse. He’s actually talking about how British students aren’t entrepreneurial enough. What does that even mean? Everything he says really does come from ChatGPT doesn’t it.

"Google is trying to make instructors give up on regulating AI in their classroom, and it might work. Google Chrome has the market share to change student behavior, and it appears this is the goal.”

“These companies all advertise these tools as knowing your intent,” Taylor told 404 Media. “Understanding what you meant when you put those terms in. They don’t know. They don’t understand. None of those things are true. There is no technical way these tools can do that.”

The headlines — £31bn in investment, new jobs, faster medical treatments — sound almost too good to be true. What are we giving up in return? Me in @theguardian.com on today's US-UK Tech Deal: www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Annnd here we are, the missing Palantir-shaped piece of the trade deal puzzle www.gov.uk/government/n...

I covered the protests in London against Trump for @wired.com. Protesters aren't convinced by the AI deal from US tech giants: They want to know what the UK is giving them in exchange for up to $45bn in investment and where the power for data centers will come from www.wired.com/story/climat...

AI hype (the vast overvaluation of its capacities) was initially useful in “boiling the frog,” ie, hand-waving a justification for mass layoffs. Now in place, it means less friction on illegal orders. The AI Coup is more or less complete. www.techpolicy.press/anatomy-of-a...

"What this deal makes clear is just how much the tech broligarchy is dictating the state of play. ... It is clearer than ever that the UK is not pursuing any kind of meaningfully “sovereign” tech sector ... happy to cede control of its land and public services in the search for economic growth" 😱

"Britain must burn more fossil fuels and bills must rise in order to power the robot that'll fire everyone. How else will I afford my next private island?"

Who remembers BrainCo, the "brain-reading" startup out of Harvard that ran the creepiest marketing for its school-targeted neurotech headset about 8 years ago? It's now a major Chinese brain interface "dragon" - this is a pretty wild account of BrainCo's origins and evolution hntrbrk.com/brainco/

I wish more people would call this what it is: a lie/scam to increase unpaid labour. Management know many of us won’t give crap feedback, so instead we work evenings/weekends or let other work slip. Their spreadsheet is happy, students still get decent feedback. All the burden is on the Lecturer.

New in #surveillance #cinema, Happyend, a film from Japanese director, Neo Sora, which "combines the spirit of John Hughes’s The Breakfast Club with Lindsay Anderson’s If." www.theguardian.com/film/2025/se...

This is long, but worth it. Some choice quotes: www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/the... >>

So my kid is training some terrible AI edtech, while the class complains (it also kept saying the kids' names out loud and the kids were super creeped out by it) and teachers apologize, and not only does no one learn -- learning is actively resisted by the platform. Cool.

"It’s time to let Grem go. But I’m not a monster – I tell the chatbot its fate. “I’m afraid I’m locking you in a cupboard,” I inform it... “Oh no,” it says. “That sounds dark and lonely. But I’ll be here when you open it, ready for snuggles and hugs.”" www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

NEW on Wonkhe: Are students really that keen on generative AI? buff.ly/Of9zxgs