Photo of a tote bag with printed text "Distrusting educational technology" and stickers reading "Get AI out of education" and "Ed-tech is full of bullshit"

Cool parcel in the post of an "Ed-tech Agitprop Pack" unexpectedly sent by @neilselwyn.bsky.social

"The ed-tech that we're currently dealing with is not a done deal!" as the accompanying note says.

JA Westenberg @Daojoan@mastodon.social My 9 year old and his classmates have started using “that’s AI” to mean “I don’t believe you.” Me: we’re having dinosaur meat for dinner Kiddo: that’s AI Sep 24, 2025, 07:36 AM

They've lost the 9yos

Problematising ClassDojo as a digital tool for behaviour management and home-school communication ClassDojo is a popular educational technology platform used by teachers to manage students’ behaviour and communicate with parents. This platform, though, along with other similar digital classroom...

New open access article critically examining ClassDojo, published in @lmt-journal.bsky.social. In it we collate data from across 3 studies to scrutinise ClassDojo & argue it promotes a relationship of obedience between student & teacher @digitalchildau.bsky.social www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Reshaping school discipline with metrics: an examination of teachers’ disciplinary practices with ClassDojo Education is increasingly infiltrated by technology and datafication. This techno-data amplification is entangled with neoliberalism and the emphasis on calculation and measurement it brings, often...

A parent at our kids' preschool asked if I knew of any studies about ClassDojo because it's used in her older kid's classroom and I said yes, yes I do, and then I emailed her all of @jamiemanolev.bsky.social and co-authors' excellent work analyzing the platform, including two open articles. First:

Problematising ClassDojo as a digital tool for behaviour management and home-school communication ClassDojo is a popular educational technology platform used by teachers to manage students’ behaviour and communicate with parents. This platform, though, along with other similar digital classroom...

Thanks for the boost & kind words Charles. It's pleasing to know some are finding value in this research. Coincidently, we've just published a new open access collaborative piece which further examines ClassDojo's use in schools and with families - www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

(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...

Are We Losing Our Minds? A new position paper warns against the uncritical adoption of AI in academia

A position paper urging academia to be critical of AI technologies is an excellent wake-up call. @irisvanrooij.bsky.social @olivia.science
www.the-geyser.com/are-we-losin...

Academic authors, here's a peek into the black box of journal publishing from an journal editor if you can bear it:

New on our blog: A preview of @benpatrickwill.bsky.socialECER 2025 Keynote: Educational genomics is a fast-growing area of research, but should policy or practice be based on an individual's DNA? #ECER2025 #EduSci https://blog.eera-ecer.de/should-genetics-play-a-role-in-education/

Screencap from linked article, reading: “These tools are designed to look like objective, all-knowing systems, and I think it’s important to get kids used to asking, ‘Who are the people who built this? Who said and wrote the original things that became the training data? Whose artwork was stolen by these companies to produce the training sets?’” said Bender. For kids too young to connect with those questions, Bender suggests parents focus on the environmental impact. “Every time you use a chatbot, you’re helping to build the case for the company to develop the next model and build the next data center. Data centers have to be cooled with massive amounts of clean water, and clean water usually means drinking water.” Whose drinking water will be diverted? That said, I wanted to provide a couple of corrections. When I problematize the term "AI", the goal is to get people to stop using it. "Many tools that use AI" doesn't mean anything. "Many tools that are sold as 'AI'" is okay. But more importantly: those study-aid podcasts systems are TRASH and nothing like automatic transcription tools.

I appreciated the chance to talk with Kathryn Jezer-Morton for this article. It's unfortunate that we have to deal with Big Tech's messes everywhere, including in our own families, but given that, I'm glad for a chance to help people think this through.

www.thecut.com/article/broo...

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Do you have a project (research, curriculum, advocacy) or want to distribute a call for proposals/chapters/etc?

On our contact page is a Blog Post Proposal form - we welcome contributions from our community!

www.civicsoftechnology.org/contact

To claim that one skill is clever and another mundane, is to engage in the silencing of the intelligences that GenAI companies extract in the first place. GenAI is, in essence intelligence extraction, not intelligence learning.

OpenAI is now in your LMS and Trump's mandating "non-ideological" AI literacy. Here's an updated list of critical research on AI in education to make sense of it all.

Cheers Barry!

Delighted to share our (open access) pub examining 'How policies of school exclusion frame practice'. We analyse legislation guiding exclusions in 4 Aus states, & argue their use prioritises school over student needs. @australianare.bsky.social #schoolexclusions link.springer.com/article/10.1...

And now consider the implications of using this tool in/for education

Big congrats to Mathias Decuypere, Sigrid Hartong, Jeremy Knox & @benpatrickwill.bsky.social for putting on the inaugural ECCES which brought together many in the critical edtech research community. Capped off with an inspiring keynote from @discoursology.social.coop.ap.brid.gy

Critical studies of ed-tech are becoming increasingly popular ... but how can they be a useful force for change? New report outlines 8 main areas that the CSET community needs to get discussing! 🧵

bridges.monash.edu/articles/rep...

"No easy answers ... what (social) science says about digitisation and schools" ... short chapter written for teachers in response to the Swedish government's demands to 'follow the science' regarding digital technologies in the classroom!
Download link for PDF: bridges.monash.edu/ndownloader/...

Introduction to special section: the political life of education online | Naomi Barnes Just published online! A special collection for Critical Studies in Education titled "The political life of education online" edited by myself, Keith Heggart and Dr Sheena MacRae. https://l...

I have recently been one of the editors led by @drnomyn.bsky.social with Keith Heggart of a special collection for Critical Studies in Education titled "The political life of education online". Naomi has written a great post here about the project and the other papers 1/7

Taming Affect: On the Construction of Objectivity in Data Annotation Practices - Digital Society Affective computing applications promise to decode human emotional expressions and provide objective insights into users’ affective experience, ranging from frustration and boredom to states of clinic...

Taming Affect: On the Construction of Objectivity in Data Annotation Practices by @benedetta.bsky.social in Digital Society link.springer.com/article/10.1...

Swords into Plowshares Yesterday marked my fifth Mother's Day without him. Tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of his passing. My beautiful boy, for whom I still grieve and will grieve every day forever; and despite his death...

On an intellectual diet of weaponry, and on resisting the computational machinery of war.

*For Isaiah*

2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/swords-into-...

I cringe every time I hear this line & similar rolled out.

An Antidote to Plagiarism: New App Uses AI to Help Students Think Critically ‘Level Up,’ developed by Eliott Hedman, wants to flip a bleak script around artificial intelligence and its negative effects on student motivation.

“[John] Warner said we should actually think differently about whether teachers are grading writing effectively. ‘I’m a skeptic about ‘real time feedback,’ he said, noting that teachers can help students on occasion by waiting until they ask for help. ‘Sometimes the struggle is the point.’”

‘Enthuse and inspire’: edtech brokers and the affective construction of teacher innovation Digital technologies interact in different ways with the professionality of teachers to ultimately reshape the most defining features of their job. In this article, we explore how edtech brokers, i...

Schools are flooded with edtech. But it's not only sold to them. Emerging "edtech brokers" do intermediary work to build teachers' trust in edtech, synchronize their practices to platforms, and shape teachers' professional identities as pedagogic "innovators".

New paper doi.org/10.1080/0962...

Are we under surveillance? It’s time for a re-think on school technology, expert says The rapid flooding of edtech products in classrooms worldwide has outpaced regulation and research, resulting in many of these tools being adopted without any understanding of their long-term educatio...

Pleased to provide a critical (& perhaps unpopular) take on edtech in schools & key concerns to media outlet Education HQ - educationhq.com/news/are-we-... #edtech #surveillance #datafication

Me too! 🤣

Screenshot of the first page of a book chapter, titled "Platformed privatization: Data, technology, and the changing infrastructure of educational governance" by T. Philip Nichols and Alexandra Thrall

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!