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benpatrickwill.bsky.social
Ben Williamson
@benpatrickwill.bsky.social
6.5K followers 1.4K following 1.3K posts
Researching data, tech, futures, and biological sciences in education | Senior Lecturer and co-director at the Centre for Research in Digital Education | University of Edinburgh | Editor of Learning, Media and Technology @lmt-journal.bsky.social
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benpatrickwill.bsky.social
The exhibition is Retrofutures in Eindhoven. I loved this picture my colleague also sent from it of an "Autotutor" imagines in the 1960s to do "homework" and "teach users how to operate automatic machines" 😀 nextnature.org/en/museum/re...
Image of an "autotutor" design from the 1960s, showing people sitting in booths facing several screen and interfaces. The text describes how the autotutor would help with homework learning to operate automatic machines.
November 3, 2025 at 7:36 PM
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
Yes, Liz, that would be good data to see! here's how my halloween workload at the LMT reviews desk is looking 🫣
Screenshot of the interface of a journal submissions portal showing 111 new submissions
October 31, 2025 at 10:12 AM
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
It was only months ago that a big South Korean delegation came to show off their AI textbooks at BETT in London, where England's education secretary did a big speech about her "vision" for AI in schools. Can only dream that such visions are now being revised after the reality of AI rollout in Korea.
Image of the Korean Ministry of Education product stand at BETT show, with a large computer screen on a tabletop showing a lesson planning software application
October 17, 2025 at 8:24 AM
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
The South Korean case of AI in schools is routinely cited as an exemplar for other nations to follow, so let's see if other countries now revise their approach or just continue going along with the tech industry hype and promotion
Screenshot of text reading: Governments around the world are betting that AI will revolutionize education. Big tech firms including Meta, Google, and OpenAI are aggressively promoting initiatives in schools worldwide. Some countries have embraced AI tools to solve teacher shortages and bridge the gap between urban and rural students. In others, AI chatbots and other tools have worsened student performance and increased the workload for teachers.
October 17, 2025 at 8:08 AM
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
The situation with Blackboard - now its owner is bankrupt and it's coming under new private equity ownership and control - is serious enough the UK agency for HE tech is advising all affected universities to seek assurances regarding data security inspiringlearning.jiscinvolve.org/wp/2025/10/s...
Data protection (UK GDPR) Obtain confirmation that Anthology will continue to meet its UK GDPR Article 28 obligations as your data processor throughout the process. Get clarification of sub processor stability (no changes planned; if changes are anticipated, please provide advance notice and details). Confirm that no organisational changes arising from the restructuring will alter how your personal data is accessed, processed, or transferred; if any changes are envisaged, please outline controls, locations, and safeguards.
October 3, 2025 at 6:25 PM
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
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.
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"
October 2, 2025 at 11:21 AM
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
If your institution requires you to use Blackboard for teaching (like me), be aware its parent company is broke and it's getting new private equity owners whose plans for the platform, and how they'll capitalize on it, remain unknown (bet it includes "AI") onedtech.philhillaa.com/p/anthology-...
What This Means for the LMS and EdTech Markets For campus leaders: Blackboard will continue operating through the case, but the ownership and investment thesis behind the LMS are changing. This could affect long-term product direction and stability. For EdTech executives: This is a textbook example of distressed-debt control in our sector. It shows how private equity cycles, first driving aggressive expansion, now dictating asset sales, reshape vendor landscapes.
October 1, 2025 at 12:49 PM
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
These parents should probably all keep their chequebook in their pockets. It might be like buying the Tesla that locks you and your kids in as it careers out of control.
Another parent, Andrey Svirsky, a software engineer who lives in the South Bay, noted that because the school’s pedagogy is so new, there’s no evidence — anecdotal or statistical — that shows how it might prepare kids for adulthood. This gave him pause — the idea of experimenting with his kid’s childhood like that. After all, he said, “you cannot really redo it if it doesn’t work out.”
September 19, 2025 at 5:34 PM
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
AltSchool is the right parallel. Not just because it was super-surveillant for-profit schooling based on moulding the classroom to fit the latest automation tech, but because all these founders mostly see education as something to get out of the way fast to make time to be an apprentice entrepreneur
'Education 3.0’ In 2013, a school promising a similar education revolution, AltSchool, came to San Francisco. Founded by a former Google executive and backed by Mark Zuckerberg, Peter Thiel, and Andreessen Horowitz, it shut down in 2019. Ben Riley, a cognitive scientist who studies AI, wonders if Alpha School will face a similar fate. “Everything feels like we’ve seen this before,” he said.
September 19, 2025 at 5:31 PM
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
He obviously misspoke about the "hallucination rate" of its "dynamically generated content" but given Alpha's backers, like that Bill Ackman guy, maybe they really do plan to make it hallucinate more?
At one point, though, candor broke through, and Liemandt admitted that the technology is not yet complete, and does get things wrong. “Today, our hallucination rate, or quality of our dynamic generated content, is not enough, which is why we don’t release it into the wild,” he said. “We do expect in 2026 we will have enough guardrails.” At the end of the Q&A, Price gave the opportunity for Justin Caldbeck — a venture capitalist who has been embroiled in his own controversies, and the father of three of the 10 children enrolled at SF’s Alpha School — to talk about his experience. Caldbeck said his kids come home every day talking about how much fun it is. “It’s been, like, the best decision we’ve made,” he said. The kids have been in class only since the beginning of this school year.
September 19, 2025 at 5:22 PM
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
We last had an "edtech goldrush" in 2020-21, then a brief edtech winter in 2022, and it's been AI-edtech prospecting ever since, with Alpha hitting the perfect seam of on-brand politics and billionaire class largesse
The opening in San Francisco, the heart of the AI boom, comes at a crossroads for education. While 60% of teachers used AI in the 2024-25 school year, according to a Gallup survey, not everyone is on board with the tech replacing human educators altogether. However, in April, President Trump signed a wide-ranging executive order greenlighting the use of AI in education, from teaching “critical thinking” skills to funding grants for “AI-based high-quality instructional resources” and “high-impact tutoring.” Critics worry that could spark an ed tech gold rush, at the same time raising concerns about how AI is affecting children and teens.
September 19, 2025 at 5:16 PM
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
Now *this* is how to do reporting on the latest for-profit edtech-AI snake oil outfit to promise hyperaccelerated learning through fully surveillant clasrooms and teacherless schooling all the way to big investor injections of capital and raids on families' incomes sfstandard.com/2025/09/19/a...
About 70 moms and dads gathered Tuesday at Alpha School in the Marina District to hear a sales pitch for why they should drop $75,000 a year per kid on an education that sounds like the plot line of a “Black Mirror” episode. Alpha School’s promise is bold and not backed by evidence: Just two hours of academic work per day, with the rest of the day spent developing “life skills,” from building a sailboat to managing an AirBnB to traveling internationally. The school’s founders, podcaster MacKenzie Price and her tech executive husband, Andrew, make incredible claims, such as that Alpha students learn 10 times faster than those in traditional education — with the use of AI only. One mother asked the K-8 school’s principal, the Trilogy Software founder, investor, and multibillionaire Joe Liemandt, how children can learn virtues and values from a computer.
September 19, 2025 at 5:07 PM
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
Who remembers BrainCo, the "brain-reading" startup out of Harvard that ran the creepiest marketing for its school-targeted neurotech headset about 8 years ago? It's now a major Chinese brain interface "dragon" - this is a pretty wild account of BrainCo's origins and evolution
hntrbrk.com/brainco/
Image of children wearing white clothes and black brain-reading headbands in a school classroom environment. From BrainCo marketing materials in 2017.
September 17, 2025 at 6:37 PM
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
My mind almost exploded when I saw a consultant at my kids' school do a PPT including the infamous growth mindset "brain" image, and telling us "the growth mindset brain literally lights up" as if we are actually phosphorescent beings. I was told I was a "smarty-pants dad" for politely pushing back.
An image comparing a "fixed mindset" brain to a "growth mindset" brain, coloured to the latter seems to be glowing.
September 13, 2025 at 7:21 PM
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
Well you know the state of the "evidence" saying there is! A very very good article on AI education evidence is forthcoming by Ilkka Tuomi - he just shared the abstract below
Front page of forthcoming article about evidence in AI educstion research. Sorry no full alt text possible.
August 22, 2025 at 9:23 PM
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
Notably it was during a visit to South Korea last August that one of England's education ministers claimed they wanted to learn from Korea's innovations in AI for education. Hope they're following this latest development as closely www.gov.uk/government/s...
The new UK government wants to learn from other nations’ approaches to Artificial Intelligence, as well as share our thinking. Optimising AI in education will support our mission to spread opportunity to every child in our country. AI has lots of applications. There’s so much excitement about how it’s already transforming many aspects of our lives. But I think the best reason to be excited is the reason we’re here today. AI is not just about streamlining transactions or optimising chatbots. AI has the power to enhance education - the best thing a society can give its children. If we can enable it, AI will add value to young people’s futures.
August 12, 2025 at 6:09 PM
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
Those of us studying edtech platforms and infrastructures in education talk a bit about vendor "lock-ins" - how schools can't get out of a platform once they're on it. This is a magnificent paper about that by @lucascone.bsky.social and Signe Sophus Lai www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1...
1. Data lock-in: Schools become dependent on Google's systems,which collect and use data from students and teachers. 2. Political lock-in: Digital solutions have become part of politicalmodernization projects—and are therefore difficult to roll back. 3. Regulatory lock-in: Legislation lags behind technology, and it isdifficult to enforce rules on global players. 4. Discursive lock-in: The debate is characterized by an "eitherChromebooks or blackboards" rhetoric that makes alternativesinvisible. 5. Temporal lock-in: The longer the technology has been in use, theharder it becomes to switch to something else.
August 8, 2025 at 8:51 PM
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
Any academics keeping track of how your papers are being used by publishers to create value as data for AI companies, here's the latest financial report from T&F on its further "Data Licensing Agreements" for access to its "content archive" www.informa.com/globalassets...
We continue to deepen relationships with AI companies, as we further embed the technology into our internal systems and processes to drive efficiency and innovation, but also as we target further Data Licensing Agreements. In 2024, we generated $75m+ of non-recurring Data Licensing Agreements, with some additional forward recurring revenue streams. In 2025 we have delivered further non-recurring Data Licensing Agreements, underlining the value of our data and content archives."
July 23, 2025 at 8:26 PM
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
New report on AI in HE relevant far beyond the US - hope @ucu.org.uk working group on automation and academic work in the UK takes note
- Preexisting work intensification and devaluation are the main reasons respondents give for using AI to assist with academic tasks. - Implementing AI in higher education adds to faculty and staff workloads and exacerbates long-standing inequities. - AI raises concerns around bias, discrimination, and accessibility because of the untested and uneven impacts on students and student learning.
July 22, 2025 at 4:43 PM
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
Nearly 10 years ago I wrote a whole book about "big data" in education and while much has changed technically, the (always-unrealized) promises of data/AI/edtech have really not. Yet the main protagonists remain the same. sk.sagepub.com/book/mono/bi...
HackingEDU is an important event with which to start this book for a number of reasons. It locates education as it currently exists as a problematically broken system which is in need of revolutionizing. It proposes that the solution is in the hands of software developers and hackers who can write code. It suggests that the availability of masses of educational data can be used to gain insights into the problems of education, and to find solutions at the same time. And it also demonstrates how private sector technology companies have begun to fixate on education and their own role in fixing it. Incubators and accelerators such as Imagine K12 and Y Combinator can then step in with entrepreneurial experience to grow new products into successful startup businesses, to enable programmers to fine-tune the code and algorithms required to make their product run, and to gain financial investment required to push it out into practice. The promise appears simple. Take a model like Uber, the mobile app that has transformed taxi services by harvesting locational data from its millions of users, and then translate that model into a template for educational reform. Fund, incubate and accelerate it until it performs optimally. All it takes to revolutionize education for the future is a few million lines of software code and big piles of digital data.
July 19, 2025 at 11:23 PM
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
Did you ever see the Instructure CEO'S claims about its Canvas data back in 2019? All talk of "assets" and value for investors from designing new algorithms and models. Not much about *educational* value eliterate.us/instructure-...
We have the most comprehensive database on the educational experience in the globe. So given that information that we have, no one else has those data assets at their fingertips to be able to develop those algorithms and predictive models.
July 19, 2025 at 7:21 PM
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
Brain science has attained special status to explain how we learn. Itvquantifies and visualizes learning in the body. That helps explain why "Your brain on ChatGPT" has circulated so much - it's the negative version of what I was getting at here... codeactsineducation.wordpress.com/2025/05/28/e...
Line drawing of a person at a laptop wearing a brain-scanningbpair of glasses, with text beneath explaining they are wearing Enubio "AttentivU" headset with BioSignsl recorder
June 21, 2025 at 11:49 PM
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
Anyone still excited about that EEG study of the degradation of the learning brain on ChatGPT, you possibly also tweet-hated these EEG neurotech-spectacles for student brain scanning and bone-conduction biofeedback prototype 6 years ago (they're related)...
Photo of a person wearing spectacles at a desk, with a diagram below of how the device captures brain data to turn into bone conduction biofeedback.
June 21, 2025 at 8:34 PM
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
Edtech and AI in education are big issues, but it often seems like few know where to turn for critical expertise. Well, here are 200 researchers who gathered for our European Critical Edtech Studies conference this week...
Image of a crowd of people posing for a photograph in front of a building with reflective windows
June 21, 2025 at 7:47 PM
benpatrickwill.bsky.social
Presumably Obama was a bright enough guy to know the code.org hat he had to wear for the photo shoots was marketing for "Hour of Code" and knew that was led by the venture capital investor Partovi twins? VC was obviously a big influence on "learning to code" becoming a policy problem.
Photo of former president Barack Obama wearing a code.org hat during marketing for "Hour of Code"
June 7, 2025 at 11:15 PM