It’s like the people pushing AI don’t know or care how humans work. We relate through shared effort and shared struggle. Teachers want to be understood, students want to understand. Each learns from and instructs the other. That IS the relationship.

Is AI helping or harming your work? From classroom tools to performance monitoring, over 1,700 UCU members shared how AI is creeping into every corner of post-16 education. Read the full report on how AI is already impacting members’ working lives: tr.ee/rldkpe

There's multiple AI/automation discussions around UK public sector where you can see this simplistic multiplication of "potential savings for a human tasks" by "number of tasks" going on Kinda fine if it's just for PR, but if ppl are building it into business cases then could easily damage services

Just heard from a teacher, because AI can speed up report writing, they are now given less time to do it, and expected to do more. Claims that AI will solve teacher workload crisis needs to look at how automated productivity has played out for workers in the past #luddite #praxis

Another uninvited and unwelcome AI intrusion that actively subtracts rather than adds value. Nobody asked for or needs this! Who benefits from this?

How are we supposed to continue encouraging deep reading, when our library's ProQuest Ebook Central has a 'Research Assistant' AI summary of the book chapter popping up at every moment like an unwelcome and uninvited guest.

We are looking for a Postdoctoral Researcher to contribute to our work on how we can evaluate whether digital technologies have good societal outcomes - the Digital Good Index. We set out some ideas about how the DGI might take shape on our website: digitalgood.net/dg-research/...

The new DfE guidance for teachers stresses that *you* (the teacher) are at all times wholly 'responsible for both the input and output of AI tools'. Who's responsible for the bit in the middle?!

Among the many horrific things I have heard recently - I just discovered that Oak National has an AI lesson planning tool. But my absolute favourite bits are that a) it gets stuff wrong b) it suggests hilariously bad tasks and c) it's literally no help unless you already know the history

AI as a teacher time saver is largely a mirage once you add all the additional work accompanying it

Perfectly succinct statement of the problem with AI fuelled research and learning.

Very interesting counter to all the 'tech/AI will solve education' hype - a small-scale survey found that a majority of US teachers do NOT expect technology to improve pupil outcomes, behaviour, attendance, or teacher satisfaction. teachertapp.com/articles/tea...

Great to see this synthesis of conversations across 5 continents about where critical studies of edtech can inform hopeful change. Pleased that our Bristol #cset edition was one of the many contributions to this bigger conversation.

Oof

There’s a reason every podcast I listened to for the past few months was advertising to college students that chatgpt was “free through finals season!” OpenAI knows most profs won’t fail a whole class… & just like that: new norm for students re: buying & using a bespoke automated plagiarism service.

Education inspectors in England are telling schools they must no longer mention the impact of covid lockdowns on pupils' education, as it's 'an excuse'. Heard this from a teacher today, is this common place?

🔞 Civil society scrutiny unearthed failures in DfE’s data practices leading to a highly critical ICO audit in 2020, and a reprimand in 2022 for a data breach that led to education data being used by betting firms to verify the age of online gamblers. (2/3)

Fab work from Talia Kelly @talia-k.bsky.social here

📣Calling secondary school #teachers & #EdTech companies! We are thrilled to be collaborating with @soebristol.bsky.social for this workshop on designing and using EdTech for equity! Please share widely and hope to see you there! #EdTechEquity #UKEdu #UKedchat

Can tech support equity in schools? Teachers and edtech developers in SW UK - please join us for a workshop on designing and using edtech for equity. Please share!

...Students were concerned about GenAI feedback reliability + contextual / disciplinary expertise and valued relational aspect of teacher feedback. GenAI / teacher feedback serve different functions. It's not either/or.

New open access paper from AIinHE project, led by Michael Henderson www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.... Survey of 7k students from 4 Aus unis. Students valued GenAI feedback ease of access, timeliness, volume, understandability + felt less risky than seeking teacher feedback. But...

Research of the last few decades confirms.

Join us for an exploration of the interaction of datafication and temporality in educational governance at our special issue launch on June 6! Zoom-link in comments 😊

Good morning, y'all! I am thrilled to share the 4th @civicsoftech.bsky.social online conference and our keynote speakers @audreywatters.bsky.social and @hypervisible.bsky.social. This year's theme is especially urgent: communal resistance to artificial systems. Read more about the free event at:

Come and work with us on our exciting new project about students and politics! We are recruiting a post-doc to join our team of @rachelbrooks.bsky.social, @rilleraaper.bsky.social & Tom Fryer! 3+ year role; deadline 9 June; based at @education.ox.ac.uk my.corehr.com/pls/uoxrecru...

The saddest thing here is the explanation that 'struggling readers have given up expecting a text to make sense' - partly of because of how reading is taught as a series of discrete skills and knowledge in which engaging with what a text has to say isn't seen as the purpose of 'reading'.

Wish I could remember which platforms Enter = Post and which ones Enter = line break. Can we have some kind of Universal standard here please??

What will be lost in the move to 'more efficient' AI-supported teaching? (Even if that is an actually-possible thing which it may well not be). Worthwhile reflections on when efficiency isn't always a good thing: @marcusluther.bsky.social thebrokencopier.substack.com/p/the-senten...

From a survey of 57 universities by Universities UK: - 50% have cut courses - 25% have made compulsory redundancies - 20% have cut spending on research - 18% have cut staff time on research - 15% have cut student bursaries or hardship funds From last repost.

Yet again a big "meta-analysis" of the effects of ChatGPT on "learning performance" - largely arguing there are big positive effects - is getting wildly and uncritically promoted by the usual big names and yet again it appears to be a review of seriously bad science...

‘Baroness Smith, the universities minister, said many institutions were failing to rein in spending despite demanding financial support from the government.’ Which institutions are these? We’ve seen absolute carnage in redundancies across the sector, so I’m curious which she is thinking of

I did not foresee the Death of the Author taking this form of AI-generated solipsism

My current bugbear in reviewing papers and essays: claims that something 'raises important questions' without telling us what those questions might be. Ooh, it's a mystery, just what we like in academic writing!

🤠New Pub🤠 “The Dark Side of Affinity Spaces for Teacher Professional Learning” published w/ Spencer Greenhalgh in BJET on how a conservative educator group on a far-right platform drifted into conspiracy & exclusion, & the implications for #edtech. 1/3 Link: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author...

In the article, we show how group admins tried to create a space for conservative teachers. But platform culture quickly took over. Anti-public school rhetoric, COVID conspiracies, & white nationalism seeped in. Of course, affinity spaces have algorithms—and agenda-setting. 2/3

"For capitalism under AI, what constitutes knowledge no longer matters as much as what generates content." Oof. 2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/dishonor-cod...

Yesterday, I joined my brilliant colleagues at #AERA2025 for a panel, "AI and Educational Justice: A Critical Conversation." An audience member asked for more concrete ways to resist the imposition of AI on teachers/students - ahem, Trump's EO on AI - and I wanted to expand on my answer. 🧵

Are you a UK-based technologist interested in joining a body that acts in solidarity against the excesses of extractive platform capitalism? Fill out this survey, and help design the Society for Hopeful Technologists www.careful.industries/blog/2025-4-...

This weekend, we've a little Easter egg for dystopian fiction fans. Or is it? "You are a Year 10 pupil at Horizon Academy. You didn’t sign up for the new system. No one asked for your permission. But your school bought it anyway. What do you do?" Choose wisely in our Twine. #HappyEaster2025 1/8🧵

In August last year the UK government announced a share of £1m to award to AI companies who bring forward the best ideas to reduce teacher workload by March 2025. Anyone seen an announcement of the successful tools? www.gov.uk/search/news-...

This this this! When high-needs schools can’t pay for teachers, they’ll outsource learning to machines and our most vulnerable students will simply get test-prep curriculum.

Call for Papers Greening the Digital Society: Platforms, Sustainability & the Climate Crisis journals.sagepub.com/page/pns/cal...

Wish I could make this. Nurturing hope so important in these times. Hold on to Benjamin's call to "imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within."

This is just going to make it even harder for my students to read, evaluate and discuss academic research in their work. We'll end up marking them down for misrepresenting papers they cite when they've used these incorrect AI summaries provided by publishers themselves.

Remember when academic publishers signed multi-million dollar AI training data deals with big tech and promised great AI-driven transformations to publishing services from looting academic work without notice or consent? Here's how that's going.

I was sort of shook by this story yesterday, thinking about how we're walling students off from mutual human exchange in the name of efficiency and wanted to remind people that writing to communicate is good, actually. www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

A thousand times this.

When even pre-teen kids' comic, The Phoenix, posts an AI satire as their April Fools Day edition, surely the bubble is about to burst. "Just because I'd never live in a brAIck house doesn't mean you shouldn't", Mark Zickerbrick 😆

New chapter with @alliethrall.bsky.social on "platformed privatization" — i.e., how platform technologies smooth the way for private interests to secure footholds in, and control over, public education. www.elgaronline.com/edcollchap/b... Paywalled, but as always, reach out if you'd like a PDF!