Edtech: the Fyre Festival cheese sandwich
My question for you all is this: how can we reconcile school phone bans with the obsession educators have with social media and devices?
Is edtech just the education Fyre festival?
My motivation for writing this came from reading the free part of the 404 media article that discusses how educators feel about the changes wrought by LLMs. I want to add the extra detail that this article missed. Because we need to deepen the discussion. Education is at risk, knowledge itself is at risk. We cannot discuss these risks as though they are new, unstudied and there is no action plan thought out. 404 should know this, and it is disappointing that they did not reference existing scholarship and advocacy around edtech risks and harms.
I spoke about edtech as the ultimate APT at BlackHat USA in 2020. I have supported the work of many who began before me, work alongside me and I want to amplify those voices here. Because there IS organised educator,parent and non profit opposition to Edtech nefariousness, and the latest Ai hype. Before I begin, here are some of the organisations and individuals who have worked on anti -edtech hype and equality in education for years:
I compare edtech hype to the Fyre festival: it was supposed to be luxurious and instagrammable and we ended up with the limp cheese sandwich as the emblem of the event. I believe that in years to come, we will have similar situations with edtech, and especially LLM. The many promises of edtech influencers: innovation, disruption and change-revealed as just a limp confection of surveillance tech and lies.
There is a huge PR apparatus behind Edtech and AI for schools. This began with the Apple/ Google educator badge cult. Then to free gifts like chromepads and iPads to participating schools lucky enough to have such “innovative” educators on board. There is significant government pressure to implement technology in schools, to the extent that it often goes completely ungoverned. It is wildly unregulated by the ICO etc, who tend to be reactive and do more security by demand than design. In the UK,DSIT, NCSC and ICO have a current remit to foster growth. Sounds uncomfortably like move fast and break things. There is https://organizingmythoughts.org/some-thoughts-on-techno-fascism-from-socialism-2025/also a lot of work done to cover up the inevitable security incidents too.
Huge edtech conferences promote dreams more common to the corporate world: “innovate” “elevate” etc. Then there are the influencers, the social media stars, mostly born on twitter around 2017. They now host blogs, are well paid public speakers and are often affiliated to Google or Apple or Microsoft. They have now moved to selling AI dreams to schools, running dubious sessions on “implementing AI”, or “AI literacy”. I agree with Audrey Watters that much of this “AI literacy” or “digital literacy” is just using the tools of the oppressor
Isolation over community
What this means is that staff and students are being taught how to use vendor tools by willing vendor reps. “Here’s how to use a prompt so that you can get a job”. Or “use this LLM to assess work or create resources”. Instead of a more critical and governance led approach to tech implementation. This replaces a human rights led, collective and collaborative approach. This blog elaborates on this eloquently, and the risks we face if we continue to let tech isolate us.
When I first qualified to teach,we shared resources, ideas and support across districts and at conferences. Now the tech ecosystem wants you alone in front of a screen, begging an LLM to create a great worksheet for tomorrow. Or setting LLM generated inaccurate hw tasks that are then marked incorrectly by AI.None of this is helping teachers or students. It is the same outside education: Google ads now reassure us that if we need someone to talk to, we can chat to Gemini, or ask a chatbot for a recipe. As an aside, that Gochujang pasta sauce/ cookie recipe actually demonstrates how AI does not help. Have you thought about why you’d want cookies instead of pasta, or why you wouldn’t just use a cookbook or call Dad or Grandma for advice? Why are we happy being isolated from community and collective support as long as it comes via a device and promises “productivity”? But yet we scream about how dangerous tech and devices are for young people.
I believe that education welcomes people to do teacher CPD because they are deliberately uncritical of technology, of tech leaders, of harm. We want the filters, the instagram perfect lies about technology, we want the internet faves to come to our schools, post about us on socials. All while we also complain how that influencer, fake life culture is damaging the mental health of the young people we teach.
And it goes even further than this: many schools are now TikTok /Instagram etc obsessed. Unable to see the hype or that the emperor has no clothes, because they are so addicted to the ecosystem.
It is my opinion that this obsession with social media metrics stems directly from the edtech obsession with data, metrics, engagement etc. Everything has to be in the panopticon to matter.
We have school principals making TikToks with students, trying to capitalise on the latest trend the app demands. The entire SLT team doing a dance, or teachers recording audio and video in their classrooms. Some becoming so well known that they get invited to Downing Street to discuss education. It is astonishing. Not just that the safeguarding issues relating to showing children online are ignored for likes,but that “likes and shares” matter in the first place. Who is the audience? Are people selecting a school based on the principal’s TikTok? I doubt it. This is more a sad reflection of schools as catalysts for harm: teaching young people and the wider community to dance for an invisible puppet master: the algorithm.
I say all the time that my corporate work outside of education saw many legal teams throw out vendor pitches during procurement, because they spotted exploitation or risk. In education,it is not the same. Everything is about being a cool kid, being “onboard” with tech and not “scared”. There are awards, rewards and accolades for the education staff who load their schools with the latest AI and edtech. Where are the awards for the safeguarding and governance? The accolades for the careful technologists?
So that is why I compare it to the influencer led Fyre Festival. We now have laws that require paid or promotional social media posts to be clearly flagged. Because so many well followed people on social media promoted the Fyre Festival without disclosing that their endorsement was paid. It was acknowledged that the public can be easily manipulated unless promoted posts are disclosed. Education as a sector, is despite this, incredibly easily coerced into buying and using edtech. Even when it is clear that someone is not independent, they are invited in like the horse into Troy. I strongly believe that schools would benefit from fact checking workshops.I feel that the lack of discernment in onboarding tech into schools is by design. Make of that what you will, but the PPE scandal in the UK in 2020 should have showed us all how things work.
And ultimately all this leaves us with is a soggy cheese sandwich of surveillance tech and de-professionalisation.All we show is our allegiance to the tech CEO and their puppet jesters. I don’t think today’s students will thank us for embedding surveillance tech into a system they were told to trust. Or for modelling social media likes as credibility. Just worth thinking about.