Marketing yourself as “the tech in edtech” is not at all a flex like Infinite Campus seems to think it is. Like, all edtech is tech—that’s the point. I don’t know that I’d agree with “the ed in edtech” either, but I’d at least get what they’re going for. This just boggles me.

My decision a few months ago to import my Twitter archive into my journaling app has been a mixed bag. I’ve been deleting a lot of orphaned references and truncated posts, but also, now I have a record of the time I picked a fight with an LMS CEO about privacy, and that’s fun.

Ben’s perspective here is useful.

Some important observations by Ian Linkletter in this interview.

Definitely worth bookmarking this for semesters to come. I like Canvas as far as LMSs go, but the sheer scale of dependence here has me thinking about taking other approaches. This first paragraph is a doozy:

Higher education has long been a target of ransomware gangs and data extortion attacks. But never before, perhaps, has a cyberattack against a single software platform so thoroughly disrupted the daily operations of thousands of schools across the United States.

Oh wait, this is worse.

Amazing time of year for this to happen.

Well, this is certainly… something.

Love to get unsolicited AI-generated parenting advice from the communication platform kiddo’s school district has invested in.

Really appreciate this essay. It puts things nicely and has the kind of personal investment that makes it relatable.

Mixed feelings about this. I think there are good reasons to be skeptical of ed tech at this level, but I also think that there is some unwarranted handwringing going on here. I have trouble untangling the two.

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.