My purpose in this paper is to argue that Jacques Ellul, a 20th century French technology critic, provides important theoretical perspectives for educational researchers as we critically examine AI. In this conceptual paper, I introduce two key concepts from Ellulian thought, his definition of technique and his skepticism of facts, and illustrate their relevance through examples of how they might guide consideration of AI technologies in education. Each of these concepts is accompanied by multiple brief examples as well as an extended (if necessarily incomplete) consideration of one specific issue. I demonstrate how Ellul’s writing on technique invites us to consider broader and more interconnected phenomena than just a single artificial intelligence tool; likewise, I show how his skepticism of facts can be used to evaluate epistemological assumptions and be more critical about media. While Ellul is not unknown in the literatures on education, AI, or the convergence of the two, many references to his work only engage with him and his ideas in passing. In contrast, I provide an extended demonstration of how sustained engagement with Ellul’s thinking can inspire and shape our critical consideration of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in education.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine how higher education students think about educational technologies they have previously used – and the implications of this understanding for their awareness of datafication and privacy issues in a postsecondary context. Design/methodology/approach: The authors conducted two surveys about students’ experience with the ClassDojo platform during their secondary education. In both surveys, the authors included a question asking students to identify which ClassDojo-like platform they used in school. For this study, the authors examined responses to these screening questions, identifying the technologies that responses referred to and sorting technologies into categories. Findings: Students identified a wide range of technologies when prompted to identify a technology similar to ClassDojo. Many responses suggested students have a broad, monolithic understanding of educational technology. This suggests the prevalence of a utilitarian tool perspective (rather than a platform perspective) that may be entrenched by the time that students reach higher education, hampering efforts to inform and educate them in that context. Originality/value: To the best of the authors’ knowledge, there are few studies of students’ conflation of educational technologies in the extant literature. Furthermore, the platform perspective emphasized in this manuscript remains relatively rare in many fields associated with educational technology.