This is part two of a long read reflecting on my PhD journey, which began just before the release of ChatGPT in 2022. The articles look at the ways in which AI technologies, and our attitudes towards them, have shifted and changed in the past four years.
Cover image: Yutong Liu & Digit / https://betterimagesofai.org / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Rage Against the Machine
By early 2024, my writing on this blog was characterised by an angrier but perhaps more confident position on the technology. Those posts are more likely to name names, calling out specific companies. I wrote about Microsoft’s apparent contempt for teachers, offering them sparkle emojis and push-button lesson plan generators. I wrote about the myth of the AI first draft. I wrote the first of many articles on why detection tools are a dead end and an insult to the relationships between students and teachers. I wrote a response to those who were saying that AI democratised creativity, pointing out that creativity and the arts are already pretty damned democratic — unless you scoop up the combined works of anyone who’s ever published online and churn them up into a profit-making chatbot.
I think doing the PhD gave me permission to be angry. I have had, and still have, two competing interests: my academic self, with the theme of AI ethics and critique, and my consultant self. I think that tension is important to acknowledge (if I were using Claude to write this article, I’d say it’s a tension worth naming). I also think it has been more productive than not. Schools and universities bring me in because I understand that educators are professionals. They’re entitled to learn about the good and the bad and make their own informed expert judgements.
By mid-2024, I was using Anthropic’s Claude to build apps, rekindling a long-lost love of coding in the early hours before my children were awake. Using AI voice technologies to dictate blog posts whilst out for a run on the farm. The irony of using OpenAI’s Whisper transcription model to capture my spoken thoughts and then running them through Claude to add the HTML formatting before posting them onto my blog, in articles where I am discussing the many and varied ethical concerns of the industry, is not lost on me.
In the community of practice conversations and on the subsequent blog posts that many of the participants were writing, I was seeing the same kinds of friction. Teachers were engaging with the technologies in many ways, frustrated by student use but dabbling with it for their own purposes. Coming to terms with the implications, as writing teachers, of a technology which could produce writing incredibly well suited for the standardised, formulaic responses we’re often required to teach. Several of the participants commented on their own aversion to the technology as writers, both fiction and nonfiction, whilst simultaneously using the technology to write functional texts like CVs, job application cover sheets and mandatory lesson plans. The participants spoke of AI guilt and the feeling of doing something naughty when using a technology that their school had, quote-unquote, banned.
In late 2024, I expressed some of these tensions in an article where I said it’s uncomfortable on the fence, but at least the view is nice. I’d fly in to help a school understand how to use AI for administrative and communication tasks on a Monday, and then I’d be back at my desk writing articles about the human labour involved in data classification on a Tuesday.
We make these kinds of ethical micro-decisions on a daily basis, sometimes consciously and sometimes unconsciously. The billionaires that control these technologies are abstract. The environmental impact of data centres seems overwhelming. And much like invitations to reduce, reuse and recycle in the face of multinational corporate pollution, it can feel a little like an individual’s use of ChatGPT is a drop in the ocean. But whether we choose to use the technology or not, I think as educators we have a responsibility to tango with that discomfort and talk about it openly with our students.
Viva la Resistance
If the start of 2024 was characterised by anger against the way technology companies were insinuating themselves into education, January 2025 was an opportunity to concentrate and direct that anger, because I felt like it was starting to go in the wrong direction. In education, much of that growing wave of discontent was presenting as teachers taking it out on other teachers. When I wrote the article Resist, Refuse or Rationalise — Just Don’t Roll Over, I pointed out the potential harms of teachers chastising one another for their use or non-use of AI. Browbeating a colleague into using AI with the vague threat that if they don’t they’ll be left behind, or even worse, their students will somehow be harmed, is in my opinion just as offensive as attacking a colleague because they’ve used AI to respond to an email whilst feeling like they’re sinking under the pressures of a thousand administrative paper cuts.
This technology is not a problem that we’ve wrought upon ourselves. It’s part of a system that we all live and work in. And if there is a necessary anger, then I think it should be pointed outward and away from our colleagues, towards the politics, the governance or lack of, and the companies responsible. Artificial intelligence is not an inevitable technology. And I still defend the right of people to refuse to use it entirely, in and outside of education. But I’ll continue to use it myself and will continue to write about that experience.
Writing Near AI
This article is a prime example of the process I use for writing articles with GenAI. I took an archive of my blog posts from 2022 onwards, as well as extracts from my PhD thesis, and had Claude generate a series of interview-style questions. I’m verbally responding to these questions and I’m answering them off the top of my head, not having read them prior. I’m recording my responses for transcription and I’ll pass it through a large language model, probably Claude Opus 4.6, with the instruction to clear up formatting, repetitions, redundancies and mistranscriptions but otherwise leave the language untouched. And then I will edit the old-fashioned way.
The article that you’re reading now will represent several hours of effort. It will be 100% my words but facilitated by three or four different types of technology before it reaches you. At some point in the future I’ll probably read it aloud and re-record it for the podcast, at which point it will have come full circle. Verbal draft turned writing, turned voice.
Being able to use technologies in this way has probably saved the blog more times than I can count. Like many PhD students, I rode the highs of novel territory and new research and the crashing lows of burnout, particularly on completion of the first and final drafts of my PhD thesis. The feedback I received on one round of drafts was particularly rough, demoralising to the point where I could barely think about picking up a pen or putting my fingers to a keyboard. Talking things through, literally into a voice memo, was a way back into writing in those moments.
Reflections on the PhD
If I were to summarise the contributions of the PhD in a single sentence, it would be understanding the implications of GenAI for teachers and writers at that liminal period in time immediately post the release of ChatGPT.
Like all PhDs, the research questions evolved over the three years. But the pace of change of the technology I was studying frequently threatened to outstrip my ability to respond. It was a disorienting, energising, frustrating, wild journey. Eventually my theoretical and methodological lenses settled on structures of power, on Foucault and resistance, on James Paul Gee and identity through language, and on Wenger and the community of practice model. I worked with teachers for nine months. And one thing that will always stay with me from that experience was when one of the participants said she felt that her journey through education had never prepared her to be “online people”.
What are online people? If we dismiss the idea of digital natives, what does it mean to grow up surrounded by technologies like AI? To write with them and against them. To teach them. To be taught by them. To work with young learners who sometimes simultaneously detest AI and feel compelled to use it. My thesis will be published in the Deakin University library in due time. So, if you’re interested in these questions too, I invite you to read it when it’s available.
After the PhD
I submitted my PhD for examination three years to the day from when I started, on November 15th, 2025. It was returned to me in February for thankfully minor revisions, and I was certified complete in May. In mid-June 2026, I will walk across the stage to receive my scroll of paper and silly hat.
A lot of people have asked me what I plan to do now that the PhD is complete. And my answer is simply to carry on what I’ve been doing for the past few years. The first Practical Strategies blog post in January 2023 marked a transition from a guy who was going to do some literacy consulting and a PhD in some kind of AI to full-time writer and consultant working with AI in education.
And I will of course be continuing on the blog. This blog was really the starting point for everything. My first window into a world outside the classroom where I could start offering professional learning and advice to English teachers, and a space throughout my PhD where I could say what I wanted and not have to give APA references. With over a million and a half readers and a global audience, the blog is what keeps me connected to the classroom.
Now that I’m out of the PhD woods, I also have time for bigger projects. In 2026, I’m working with organisations like AITSL and ACARA on what this technology means for teacher accreditation, professional standards, and the Australian curriculum. And I’m looking forward to working with organisations like EARCOS and researching how this technology is being used across their network of international schools.
Now that I don’t have the brain drain of the thesis, I’ll also write more about some of the tangential aspects of the technology, including my own experiences with it as an AuDHD adult. The dopamine chase, the hyperfocus, the addictive pull of all technologies and especially AI. That particular angle of neurodivergence and AI in education I feel will prove incredibly fruitful for future writing.
And the technology will continue to change. AI sands shifting beneath our feet as we lurch from one tech release to the next. No one could have predicted any of this in early 2022 when I started this journey. After three and a half years of writing about this stuff, if I could go back to late 2022 and tell myself one thing, it would be this: buckle up. This is going to get a lot crazier than you might think.
Thank you to everybody who has taken the time to read this blog over the past few years, and especially those of you that have been with me since the English teacher days. Thank you to my PhD supervisors and anyone who contributed to the PhD in any way, but especially the participants of our community of practice. My wife and kids, for superhuman levels of patience while I work, study, travel and spend far too much time interacting with chatbots. And thank you to the thousands of educators I’ve had the pleasure of interacting with and working alongside since this all kicked off in 2022.
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