Researching data, tech, futures, and biological sciences in education | Senior Lecturer and co-director at the Centre for Research in Digital Education | University of Edinburgh | Editor of Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social
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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...
🤖 New in Big Data & Society! Mohammad Hossein Jarrahi proposes an “interviewing AI” framework—using qualitative methods to study how AI systems behave. 🔗 Read here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
The Oxford "partnership" is certainly part of a concerted international effort by openAI to sweeten up the sector through exemplar agreements with high prestige institutions openai.com/index/introd...
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.
"Years of warnings and precedents have highlighted the risks posed by the widespread use of pre-AI digital technologies in education ... the introduction of opaque and unproven AI systems and applications will likely exacerbate these problems" nepc.colorado.edu/publication/ai
And AI likely intensifies rather than reduces teachers' workloads as promised. Time saved with AI is time to be used to also deal with AI's multiple deleterious impacts and unforeseen consequences, leading to exacerbated teacher recruitment and retention challenges time.com/7026050/chat...
AI intensifies opacity in educational institutions. Decisions about students are increasingly made by opaque black boxed tech and calculations, which AI amplifies and makes even harder for students or staff to counter if it's wrong www.nytimes.com/2025/05/17/s...
AI intensifies academic misconduct problems. "Contract cheating" and "essay mills" have become auto-assignments offloaded to AI models, while of course AI is also intensifying the policing of academic integrity www.theguardian.com/education/20...
AI intensifies the effort to measure technology effects on educational outcomes. Edtech research has long tried to quantify tech effects on learning and new efforts to enumerate AI effects fall into the same trap of isolating tech from social factors codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2025/05/28/e...
AI intensifies standardization of teaching. Scripted pedagogy and standardized curricula are not new but AI amplifies the “buttonification” of teaching as lessons can be scripted and lesson resources generated on demand at the push of a button drphilippahardman.substack.com/p/articulate...
AI intensifies commercial influence in education. Big tech companies have been charging into schools for years, but the normalization of AI in pedagogy means they are now not only pushing software services but reshaping teaching itself with new (un-)educational features bsky.app/profile/hype...
AI intensifies right wing control of education. GenAI is appealing to the right as it can be programmed to be “anti-woke” and exert control over students’ access to curricula and other content, decoupling education from educated, "elite," and “liberal” control www.econotimes.com/Elon-Musks-A...
AI intensifies a mechanical, metricized view of learning. AI figureheads talk about education as the statistical pursuit of scores, with AI supercharging statistically significant effects on learning, reinforcing old ideas of learning as measurable acquisition mbs.edu/news/Why-Ope...
AI intensifies student surveillance. Long efforts to securitize schools with cameras, cops, metal detectors and drones are now being supercharged with AI for “proactive threat detection”, making schools resemble mini supermax correctional facilities www.securitymagazine.com/articles/100...
AI intensifies the idea of education as an engineering problem. AltSchool was out of the gates early employing as many engineers as teachers to run its tech- and data-intensive “smart schools”, which eventually parents saw as engineering labs for monetizable products bsky.app/profile/benp...
AI intensifies the idea that schools can be teacherless and educators can be deskilled “guides” doing pastoral work while tech does the heavy lifting. Alpha School is the pin-up poster for this now, realizing decades of fantasies of automated teaching machines www.miamiherald.com/news/local/n...
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
Which best exemplifies the current state of UK HE: social media responses to Warwick's 'Beyond' branding, or social media responses to Oxford's ChatGPT Edu announcement? Discuss. Or, ask a chatbot.
Thanks - wondered what that button was for! Anyway, glad my public service is helpful to you.
I just hope it helps anyone approaching these issues - instead of assuming they've not been looked at before
Error, what are "bookmarks" on here? Glad you find it useful!
Sorry Patrick, it's just a thread I keep adding to
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 ⬇️
AI in education influencers: Problematising, reproducing, or mediating the technological solutionism discourse in UK schools doi.org/10.1080/0142...
‘I hope this email finds you well’: how synthetic affect circulates through MagicSchool AI doi.org/10.1080/1743...
Urrgh, no I hadn't. Ellison is proving a prolific influence in UK, esp funding the Tony Blair Inst, which seems to be blueprinting the AI takeover of our public services, education especially 🤢
These parents should probably all keep their chequebook in their pockets. It might be like buying the Tesla that locks you and your kids in as it careers out of control.
AltSchool is the right parallel. Not just because it was super-surveillant for-profit schooling based on moulding the classroom to fit the latest automation tech, but because all these founders mostly see education as something to get out of the way fast to make time to be an apprentice entrepreneur
He obviously misspoke about the "hallucination rate" of its "dynamically generated content" but given Alpha's backers, like that Bill Ackman guy, maybe they really do plan to make it hallucinate more?
We last had an "edtech goldrush" in 2020-21, then a brief edtech winter in 2022, and it's been AI-edtech prospecting ever since, with Alpha hitting the perfect seam of on-brand politics and billionaire class largesse
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...
Another mooc/genAI parallel is using these "status" partnerships to persuade other institutions to sign up for contracts too - for a fee of course. The ivory tower is great for reputation-rinsing genAI in HE, even as it erodes the tower's foundations 🥶
More details were made about the Bodleian library pilot when the partnership was first announced as part of openAI's big international HE push earlier in the year - there's a very glossy promo video on it here openai.com/index/introd...
"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...
Yes, v true - we've had an institutional "wrapper" interface to chatgpt and all the others since way back. It's the mooc-like marketing around high-status partnerships that strikes me
Noting of course that the VP for education at openAI is a former finance exec from coursera, and the main discourse of personalized, self-directed learning via corporate tech platforms runs strongly through the marketing of both moocs and genAI
I can’t get over the idea that a party called “Labour” is going all-in on an industry that promises to destroy the value of labor. No wonder Starmer is flailing.
A bit like moocs were touted as tearing down ivory towers but actually went real hard to associate with ivory towers first and gain apparent legitimacy from attachment to high-status institutional brands
"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.”
There's also some worrying language about task time allocation, which I can only read as doing more with less 🫣
To top off a day fighting the tendency of education tech to intensify & worsen administrative work, against the awful backdrop of the UK prostrating itself to Trump's Big AI regime, we got the email confirming the staff reductions will continue plus new "efficiency" plans with AI & automation 😭
“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
Inside the world of Kenya’s ‘shadow scholars’ paid to write essays for UK students
💛🚫🤖 No AI Gods, No AI Masters 🤖🚫💛 I am massively excited to share the backstory ACADEMIC SHENANIGANS behind our Open Letter (& so this paper below too) — and as always big thanks to my co-authors {@irisvanrooij.bsky.social & @marentierra.bsky.social}: www.civicsoftechnology.org/blog/no-ai-g... 1/n
Third graders are perhaps too young to gather in the streets to chant, "Fuck the algorithm," but maybe something like, "The algorithm is a buttface" could suffice.
Unlike MOOCs and learning management systems, generative AI entered higher education at the student level. LLMs like ChatGPT essentially appeared overnight & students around the world were suddenly using them. @wayne-holmes.bsky.social on how AI is changing the classroom: www.ie.edu/insights/vid...
My colleague @thejohnsimpson.bsky.social has done a terrific deep dive into the financial links between US tech billionaires and Tommy Robinson Well worth a read observer.co.uk/news/nationa...
Our open-access AIED commentary is out "Artificial Intelligence in Educational Research and Scholarship: Seven Framings" 🙏 Goerge Veletsianos, Victoria I. Marín, Stefan Hrastinski, Ahmed Tlili, Henk Huijser, Sharon Altena, Giselle Ferreira and Jason McDonald open-publishing.org/journals/ind...
Vacuous, generic and scattershot advice for incoming 1st years on the use of AI at university. Especially liking 'Chin recommends giving it class notes and asking it to generate practice exam questions.' Surely we can't be the only programme that supplies students with past & practice exams?
My mind almost exploded when I saw a consultant at my kids' school do a PPT including the infamous growth mindset "brain" image, and telling us "the growth mindset brain literally lights up" as if we are actually phosphorescent beings. I was told I was a "smarty-pants dad" for politely pushing back.
"Growth mindset interventions have little to no effect on academic performance" Not the first time mindset theory has been found wanting, but it'll still no doubt take *years* to get the consultants peddling it out of schools www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-...
“Educational technology has become, in its ontological infrastructures, increasingly centralised, less open and more powerful. Through GenAI, it is less truthful, less trustworthy and more epistemologically nihilistic.” @eam0.bsky.social & @steviegow.bsky.social journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...
🤷🏿♂️
(1/7) HOT off the furnace and pressed into print!!! 🔥 Costello, E., & Gow, S. (2025). Authoritarian EdTech. Dialogues on Digital Society. doi.org/10.1177/2976...
I spoke to the Irish Times for this very good and rounded piece on the real-world effects of C***GPT in the humanities classroom: www.irishtimes.com/ireland/educ...
You can now download the book on the publisher's website: press.umich.edu/Books/P/Publ... (open access of course)
"It suggests that developing a commons-based, scholar-led publishing landscape through [presses] managed by working academics cld offer a productive counterpoint to marketised systems of open access + subscription publishing [—] a counter-hegemonic project based on mutual reliance and care"
This is why I have a deep suspicion of the "AI literacy" workshops being floated to profs by schools mainlining AI. Ed tech has co-opted "AI literacy" to mean "learn how to use our products" rather than "learn how AI works."
In this short piece, I lean on embodied cog sci to argue that we should refuse & resist llms in education (pp. 53-58) unesdoc.unesco.org/in/documentV... "the classroom is an environment where love, trust, empathy, care & humility are fostered & mutually cultivated through dialogical interactions"
Do you work in Europe? Many academic posts are tied to publishing in indexed journals. So publishing in alternative places would not help you get a contract or promotion. It's super sad,but a structural reason for stickiness of existing scholarly infrastructures.
In our last editorial we imagined how bad academic publishing might get, and hopefully how it might come out better www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
Of course. Someone needed to topple Robert Maxwell off the boat decades earlier if we didn't want to be here. I'm sure you know this story www.theguardian.com/science/2017...
Totally appreciate your point. But ... a lot of academics in Europe are rated on publishing in ranked journals, so we'd be fucking their chances of academic advancement by disconnecting from existing publisher infrastructure. External structures are a problem too.
The black box of academic publishing is dark inside indeed - and I've not even mentioned Manucript Central yet - but it also contains other academics doing their best as editors to steward your work with care and respect.
Editors are trying their best to maintain the scholarly infrastructures of knowledge exchange. It's not easy or feasible for most to set up open access elsewhere. Our journals, whatever their myriad faults, have helped sustain fields over years and decades.
Peer reviewers are exhausted. It's common to spend *months* inviting reviewers, getting refusals, inviting more, maybe 12 or more, then 2 agree but 1 doesn't complete, so you go again. That's why your paper is in limbo. I'm very sorry, it's awful, but it's also an untenable academic labour issue.
Despite our pushing as editors, T&F won't reveal its other licensing agreements, or state clearly how they'll ensure proper attribution if content ends up in language models (and it is)
Journal publishers *are* bundling your papers up in "data licensing agreements" for big tech companies to use for AI model training. Our publisher, T&F, got £75m from Microsoft for that last year alone.
The AI authorship issue is real. We've caught papers that looked OK but had references to works by the *journal editors* that *do not exist*. Like, don't send us papers citing papers we know we didn't write, right?
We're experiencing an unbelievable deluge of submissions. At our journal we got ~200 per year in 2020. Last year it was 600. This year it's 800 with several months to go. So that's why we're slower to get stuff out for review.
Academic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:
Critical Studies of Artificial Intelligence and Education: Putting a Stake in the Ground papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers....
What counts as evidence in AI & ED: Towards Science-for-Policy 3.0 www.aup-online.com/content/jour...
Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia zenodo.org/records/1706...
We wrote an editorial a while back about Latin American scholars working on tech, platforms and AI in education and why we should cite them. I'm sure some will be on here for your list (but there are many on LinkedIn I think) doi.org/10.1080/1743...
Ooh we've opened our call for small research grants. £10k for any humanities or social sciences research. Open to independent scholars. We use partial randomisation to allocate the funding: random allocation between all that meet the quality threshold www.thebritishacademy.ac.uk/funding/ba-l...
Before you read this infomercial, maybe check out how the state of Pennsylvania denied licensing to this outfit because "“There is no compelling evidence that Unbound Academic’s proposed programs will enable students to meet academic standards." www.chalkbeat.org/philadelphia...