The headline isn’t what I would have chosen, but there’s a lot worth reflecting on in here.

So many horrifying details crammed into a single article. Grateful to be a 404 Media subscriber and angry at ed tech AI grift.

Look, I genuinely appreciate my university employer sending this out in their daily email, but it would be cool if they also acknowledged how much data they and their various platform partners are collecting on faculty and students. Because it’s a lot.

Wish I’d had this to cite in some recent publications. What a great(?) example of saying the quiet part out loud:

One internal November 2020 presentation slide said acclimating children to Google’s ecosystem in school would hopefully lead them to use its products as adults: “You get that loyalty early, and potentially for life.” Another undated slide deck suggested imagining a world where “Parents ask their children ‘Why aren’t you watching more YouTube?’” and “School Administrators shift budgets from Textbooks to YouTube subscriptions.”

Le sigh.

Very happy for Linkletter, but it’s shameful that Proctorio got away with as much nonsense as it did.

Really enjoyed listening to this on my way in to campus today.

Adding some nihilism to my Tuesday morning, just for fun.

“AI is as good as any rubric” (an actual statement I overheard at a campus-wide meeting), if true, is more of an indictment of current assessment practice than praise of AI quality.

Surprised that more isn’t made of the fact that Anthropic was surveilling users’ conversations for its research. Are professors and students thinking about the company’s ability to read everything they type?

Saw an AI “summarize this discussion” button in Canvas today and it was a real downer. It seems to be only instructor-facing, which is better(?) but still makes me angry.

Last week, I read a post from Andrew Heiss on Bluesky that inspired me to take a look at whether/where I was cited on any Wikipedia articles. I knew my research had been referenced on one particular page, but I’d never done a thorough search for this and decided to give it a whirl.

While I can’t claim anything as cool as the page on Hosni Mubarak (where Andrew’s research is cited), my research is referenced on three different Wikipedia articles, which feels pretty cool, actually. It seems like my newer Mormon Studies work is what is getting traction on Wikipedia, as opposed to my historical (and continuing) focus on educational technology research. This doesn’t totally surprise me; I’ve observed for a couple of years (or longer) that while my edtech research gets a whole lot more scholarly attention, my Mormon Studies work tends to get more media and popular interest. I attribute this to doing niche work on subjects where a smaller number of people show a greater amount of interest in what I’m studying.

Thanks to the magic of Bluesky, I came across Paul Musgrave’s essay “Classroom Technology Was a Mistake,” with the subtitle “Hopes that AI will improve higher ed need to reckon with the dashed hopes of the past.” As a whole, I appreciate the essay—I’m sympathetic to Musgrave’s argument, and I couldn’t agree with the subtitle more if I tried. I want to do one of those things, though, where one academic spends too much time quibbling with a minor part of another academic’s argument. In particular, I want to take issue with this part of Musgrave’s essay:

This seems performative to me, and this paragraph gets at why I think so:

AI companies are increasingly pushing into education — perhaps in part to try and fight the reputation that AI tools have acquired that they help students cheat. Features like Gemini’s guided learning mode and ChatGPT’s similar study mode, which was announced last week, could theoretically help with actual learning, but the question is whether students will want to use these modes instead of just using the AI chatbots for easy answers.

Je n’aime pas du tout la présence des IA dans les écoles, mais je trouve aussi gênante la pénalisation à tort des étudiants.

Once again, ClassDojo shows how much of its business model is built on creating feelings of parental inadequacy.

It feels like it’s Big Tech’s world and schools are just living in it.

Bon, je comprends ces soucis, mais je ne suis pas sûr que de telles interdictions soient la bonne réponse. Pourtant, vu que je suis plus ouvert à une interdiction de l’IA à l’école, il faut que je développe un peu plus ma philosophie ici.

Bookmarked this a while ago and am finally reading it. So infuriating.

I hate everything in this article.

I’ve repeatedly referenced 20th century French technology scholar Jacques Ellul on my blog(s) since the beginning of the year. While my interest in Ellul’s work is also personal and political, I wrote back in February that one of the main reasons I’m reading a lot of Ellul right now is to add a stronger theoretical foundation to my scholarly work.

With that context in mind, I’m happy to share that my first Ellul-inspired article has just been published in the Journal of Computing and Higher Education! After I wrote this post on what Ellul had to say about the value of research, Stephanie Moore was kind enough to invite me to expand my thoughts there into a contribution for a special issue of that journal that she was putting together on “The Research We Need” in educational technology.

This video has been on my mind all morning, and it makes me so sad.

I was already planning to voice skepticism about Apple partnerships with universities in a manuscript I’m writing, but now I’ve got this to cite as well.

I feel like half of ClassDojo’s business model is “let’s prey on parental anxiety.”

I intentionally keep receiving ClassDojo marketing emails because I keep thinking I ought to archive them all to write an autoethnography of my (negative) experience with it as a parent with an ed tech PhD, but I keep not doing that and just being angry at the emails.