Shea Smith

As a registered voter in Kiley’s redrawn district, I agree. He is absolutely trying to save his job. It wasn’t that long ago that he was afraid to host a town hall 🙄

Everything going on in the US at the moment rams home the point that tech has politics ... so listen here to Dr. Morgan Anderson talk about the politics of US ed-tech in these times of Trump 2.0 (spoiler: she uses the phrase 'cognitive dissonance' at least once):

www.buzzsprout.com/1301377/epis...

quote from Mark West: "“My own background is history. And I'll tell you what changes history - pandemics change history. People like to forget that. But looking forward 100 maybe 200 years in the future, the COVID 19 pandemic will be seen as be a major turning point in education. So, we need to be clear about how the pandemic has changed narratives about education … and we also need to be clear about what lessons we can draw from this”

Six years on since COVID hit us all, and it is wild how most people in ed-tech now act like *nothing* happened. I got to talk with Mark West about how the pandemic fundamentally changed our dependency on ed-tech, and what we can learn from the COVID experience.

www.buzzsprout.com/1301377/epis...

Gotta love how academic books don't earn you money, but LLMs can make money off of stealing them in the aggregate and if you write enough, they can also profit from stealing your personality after you are dead.

CAH has done a bunch of things like this over the years and it's great.

FTC policy statement endorsing age verification. Community Note: Contrary to their claim, using age verification has numerous issues, including but not limited to: 1. Easily bypassed wired.com/story/robloxs-… pcgamer.com/hardware/someo… anapolweiss.com/blog/roblox-ju… 2. Risks of security data breach newamerica.org/oti/reports/ag… fortune.com/2026/02/24/dis… 3. Inaccuracies (Placing adults into underage groups, vice versa) usatoday.com/story/tech/202… theguardian.com/news/2025/sep/… And many more... (sigh, I need a break).

The Twitter notes people are tired.

If this is the expensive version, imagine what’s considered “good enough” for everyone else.

The Next Innovation in Higher Education: Vibe-Teaching™ As the associate vice provost for the Office of Asynchronous Online Courses for Student-Centered High-Impact Learning (OAOCSCHIL, an office we crea...

"In Vibe-Teaching™, faculty are no longer required to read the AI-generated slop that students themselves have not paused to read. ... Every assignment is now an unverifiable collaboration between a stressed undergraduate and a VC-backed robo-parrot." www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/the...

Welcome to the Plutocracy

“Re-imagining textbooks for every learner. Learn Your Way transforms content into a dynamic and engaging learning experience tailored for you.” 🤨

Hey, Propaganda Barbie:

We aren’t moving on from people trafficking 10-year-old children and this administration covering it up.

Ever.

Local police aid ICE by tapping school cameras amid Trump’s immigration crackdown Local police assisted federal immigration agents by repeatedly searching school cameras that record license plate numbers, data show

Tell me more about how school surveillance is about safety.

Learners and educators are AI’s new “super users” Google’s 2025 Our Life with AI survey found people are using AI tools to learn new things.

Google's annual AI survey with Ipsos indicates "learning" is the #1 use of AI, overtaking "entertainment."

But "learning" can mean *anything*. You can learn conspiracies, recipes, videogame cheats, whatever.

This is not "education" as it deliberately blurs it here
blog.google/products-and...

"it’s not clear to me why a union leader would rush into such an arrangement instead of rejecting the premise that tech companies ought to be deciding the future of public education."

Yuuuuup. Continue to be disappointed by @rweingarten.bsky.social's choice of direction with this.

How will Australia’s social media ban impact students this school year? As Australian students return to school under the new social media ban, the impacts on learning, connection and wellbeing are likely to be uneven, and felt most by disadvantaged young people.

Australian teens are now going back to school only a few weeks after the national social media ban.

Social media has traditionally been a vital source of informal learning & education support for *many* young people - this ban clearly has educational implications!

lens.monash.edu/how-will-aus...

👉 “And the technology is often sold to principals and administrators and superintendents who imagine what teachers do all day. So the teachers aren't designing these technologies. These technologies have an imaginary of what teachers’ rules are.”

#211 Silicon Valley’s Vision for Schools is Trapped in a Cold War Fantasy In the schools of the (near) future, teachers will be replaced by robots and learning will be personalized, allowing each student to move at their own pace. AI refuser and self-described ‘ed tech Cass

In the latest episode of @haveyouheard.bsky.social the brilliant Audrey Watters argues that Silicon Valley's vision of education is a Cold War retread. Also, if education is about the future & our tech overlords think we're doomed, how's that going to work out? soundcloud.com/haveyouheard...

"In 2025, many U.S. educators got the first look at what forced adoption backstopped by state coercion is like..." Great essay on AI coercion and look out for the full text of this single sparkling sentence which is 370 characters too long to quote in full.

Seems to me that the Google Gemini Launch Guide for BETT London 2026 is chock full of surveillance tools framed as the “magic of learning” 🙄

Google begins offering free SAT practice tests powered by Gemini Google says more kinds of standardized tests will be added in the future.

Google “ has announced that Gemini can now create free SAT practice tests and coach students to help them get higher scores.”

Action Network petition: Cancel ChatGPT Edu. Invest in Humans. In February 2025, the California State University system announced a $17 million contract with OpenAI to provide ChatGPT Edu to all faculty, staff, and students on its 22 CSU campuses as part of a larger “AI-Empowered University” initiative. This is the largest contract ever established between a university system and an artificial intelligence company. Despite the name, ChatGPT Edu is not educational technology. It is a general-purpose chatbot that is not designed, trained, or optimized for education. Beyond its privacy and security features, ChatGPT Edu is identical to the free online version of ChatGPT. ChatGPT Edu does not use reliable peer-reviewed sources to answer students' questions and is indifferent to whether its answers are correct. Experts argue that ChatGPT Edu is harmful to academic working conditions, diminishes the quality of teaching and learning, introduces new forms of discrimination, and is dangerous to students' mental health. Recent polling shows that CSU students share these concerns, with the majority of students expressing that they are worried about the negative impacts of generative AI on human creativity and the environment.

Cal State University’s deal with OpenAI — providing ChatGPT to all faculty, students, and staff — will expire in June 2026. Amid the prospect of layoffs in the CSU, we’re asking the chancellor not to renew this costly and demoralizing contract.

Link below and anyone can sign:

Wood type in a form for printing with large letters saying ‘hang on’ and a mirrored set of type saying ‘let go’.

New Print Club prints feature type that says ‘hang on’ and ‘let go’. Been thinking a lot about what we hang on to and what needs to be let go of in so many ways. #letterpress

Constructing AI in education Photo by Lachlan Donald on Unsplash Most definitions of “AI in education” start from technical categories. First there was rules-based AI, followed by data-driven predictive AI, and now generative …

"Stakeholders construct AI differently ... in ways that are useful to them ... and these differences have significant social and educational implications.” codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2026/01/16/c...

A felon who married an immigrant is telling a lot of y’all that the problems in this country all stem from felons and immigrants.

But keep buying that stupid red hat that’s made in China.

The people accusing Renee Good of being a domestic terrorist treated Kyle Rittenhouse as a hero.

We are pleased to announce that as a part of our Google Workspace for Eduction we have access to Google Gemini with enhancements for Education. You don't need to sign up. If you access Gemini using your district-issued Google account, you will automatically be connected to our secure, managed Workspace environment. Google Gemini for Education is designed to support teaching and learning by helping educators streamline lesson planning, differentiate instructional materials, create assessments, support multilingual learners, and reduce daily workload. When used within our district's Workspace, Gemini offers stronger privacy protections and education-aligned safeguards compared to public Al tools, making it a safer option for both classroom and professional use.

This morning, I received this email. While I knew the AI integration was inevitable, I’m still not convinced this a positive step for the district. And, I keep thinking about the Thomas Hellman quote, “We used to have technology in classrooms, but now we have classrooms in technology.”

This is where the AI push into schools feels quite parallel to all other reforms of past decades:

1️⃣ introduce new policy/system/tool without evidence
2️⃣ then claim need for data/evidence to support success
3️⃣ THEN blame teachers/schools if it isn't successful

(#3 is already happening, btw)