Second Breakfast (Audrey Watters)
Friday, October 9
The People in Your Neighborhood
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Tuesday, October 6
The House that TurnItIn Built
I gave this talk this afternoon at Concordia University, as part of the SkepTech series questioning education technology. Today's bird, which does not appear anywhere in the talk, is the house sparrow, which along with the pigeon is one of the most widely distributed wild birds, thanks in
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Friday, October 2
Present Company Excepted
“Generative 'AI' is here to stay." We hear this a lot. But a reminder: this is not a statement of fact. It is an assertion, but it is merely speculation. The future is unwritten – much to the consternation of those who’d like very
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Monday, September 28
Autumn
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Friday, September 25
To Dismantle Democracy, You Subvert Public Schools
For at least the past fifty years*, conservatives have made substantial efforts to dismantle public education, through a variety of policies, practices, and story-lines: budget cuts, vouchers, charter schools, anti-tax measures, anti-union initiatives, “free to choose” and “failing school” narratives. And of course,
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Monday, September 21
What Does Defiance Taste Like?
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Monday, September 14
Caching Behavior
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Saturday, September 12
Click Here to Comply
Perhaps you’ve read Ben Riley’s exposé on AlphaSchool’s “boot camp” -- along with his follow-up in which the school provides even more creepy details on the bizarre eight-week training program that high school students enrolled in the private school must
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Saturday, September 5
Move Slow, Remake Things
In the prologue to their book Tinkering Toward Utopia, historians David Tyack and Larry Cuban highlight the tensions in how Americans think about schooling: we have, almost since the nation’s outset, believed in the transformative power of education; and yet, despite the importance we grant to education and
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Monday, August 31
This Might Save a Life
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Saturday, August 29
Come Up to the Lab and See What's on the Slab
You could argue, I suppose, that recent chatter in and around the field of education technology is only reliant on cliches because it’s the summer (in the northern hemisphere, at least), and everyone’s brain is in some sort of low-engagement rest-mode. I’m
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Monday, August 24
Take the Cannoli
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Saturday, August 22
A Technology of Unlearning
It's a saying that appears in multiple iterations across multiple slide decks and cited in multiple books, all extolling some sort of highly technological future of education: something about the need to constantly be learning, relearning, unlearning. I roll my eyes whenever I see this, particularly when it&
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Monday, August 17
Reading Notes
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Friday, August 14
(Not) Everything Changes
"This changes everything." I find this cliche about technology to be so exhausting, in no small part because I've heard it over and over and over again. Every new product release, a revolution. After a while, you have to decide whether you're going to
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