Saunter

Broken Record

I often feel like I’m repeating myself here, because in fact I am. I am, in part, because ed-tech entrepreneurs and evangelists keep repackaging the same ideas, desperate to sound innovative instead of stuck in some Cold War science fiction fantasy. “Intelligent tutoring systems” become “adaptive learning” then “personalized

Broken Barriers

Foolin'

Kin and I have a nice little collection of vinyl -- mostly jazz, but music from other genres too, including a few beloved albums from our teens and twenties. He had just set the needle down on one of these when I walked in the door, home from my morning

The Pigeons Come Home to Roost

Stuck Character Service

"It's still early days," some guy splutters in anger, peeved that people like myself are cackling loudly at Sal Khan's admission that Khanmigo has been a big flop. "It's simply too soon to say" anything about "AI" in

The Productivity Software Way of Thinking

I was supposed to give a 20-minute presentation this morning, but alas, it is 2026 and our household, once again, has COVID. So I’m skipping the part where I read this piece of writing aloud to a Zoom audience, even though there’d be no chance of infecting them

And I Would Have Gotten Away With It Too If It Weren't For Those Pesky Kids

I realize that you just received an email from me yesterday, and that it's far too soon for more Audrey in your inbox, but I'd feel a bit negligent if I didn't send out my weekly round-up of ed-tech (sigh, "AI") news.

Derailleur of the Mind

Software engineer and educator Greg Wilson recently invoked Steve Jobs’ famous quotation, expanding the metaphor to argue that, “if a computer is a bicycle for the mind, then LLMs are like e-bikes.” They let a lot of people go distances and tackle hills that they couldn’t before, and they’

Illegal Check to the Head

Miseducative Experiences

"Tell me, what is it you plan to do/ with your one wild and precious life?" Arguably and more than a little ironically, this may be one of the most frequently invoked lines of poetry on social media – I won't add "for better or worse,

Anti-Magic

You Do Not, In Fact, Have to Hand It to Them

Way back in 2016, Mark Zuckerberg made a surprise appearance at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, memorialized in a photograph of him striding to the stage past rows of men with the Oculus Rift VR headsets strapped to their faces: Fast forward a decade and now the founder of

Placeholder People

Something I Can Never Have

"AI isn't lightening workloads," The Wall Street Journal reported last week. "It's making them more intense." Well, yes. This is, in fact, how "workload" works under capitalism: labor is perpetually squeezed to do more, to generate more surplus value, to

False Spring

The Final Boss

This morning I attended one of the new NYC Chancellor's public "conversations," his administration's initiative to "engage directly with communities to reflect on what safety, academic rigor, and true integration look like in practice." There were about one hundred folks in attendance,

Spring Forward, Fall Apart

There is No "Human-Centered 'AI'"

Two recently-published reports use the same phrase – “human-centered AI” – urging schools to adopt automated and predictive technologies that, as The 74’s Greg Toppo reports, “serve human-centered learning [and] that doesn’t simply push for more efficiency. To do anything else risks creating a generation of young people ill-equipped for

"AI" is Yesterday's News

I gave this talk yesterday to the Massachusetts Teachers Association, as part of the MTA Retired First Wednesday Speaker Series. Thank you very much for inviting me to speak to you today. I’m honored that you’ve asked me here, as I strongly believe that “AI” marks one of

The Recipe Change

Secret Agent Man

Some weeks, the education technology news is incredibly grim, and sorry to say this was one of those weeks. (Warning: this is a long email.) Indeed, anytime education- and child-related tech stories fill a Garbage Day newsletter as they did on Monday -- Garbage Day describes itself as a publication

Spring Was Never Waiting for Us

The Broken Record

I was amused to read Dan Meyer’s account of the recent AI+Education Summit at Stanford, particularly the remarks made by the university’s former president, John Hennessy, who asked the audience if anyone remembered “the MOOC revolution” and could explain how, this time, things will be different. The