Category: Podcast
-
OpenAI Has Come for Education
He explores how learning management systems already constrain pedagogy by forcing educators to systematize learning into predetermined formats, and questions what happens when OpenAI’s chatbot takes control of content production across these platforms. Furze is particularly concerned about OpenAI’s study mode—which he found pedagogically flawed despite claims of expert input—and sees it as part of…
-
Stuck Thinking and End-of-School Exams
In Stuck Thinking and End-of-School Exams, Leon Furze examines the assumptions that anchor our current model of exam-based assessment—and argues that many of them are “stuck thinking.” He questions why we let the high-stakes end exam dictate upstream assessments, curriculum priorities, and even our trust in students. He suggests we treat exams differently: as one…
-
Publish (on your) Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere
SynopsisLeon Furze lays out his practical workflow for POSSE—Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere—so your website remains the hub and platforms are just spokes. He explains how he posts first on WordPress, lets Jetpack push to Bluesky (and occasionally LinkedIn), uses the ActivityPub plugin to make his site part of the fediverse (with comments…
-
AI in the Writing Process: A Problem of Purpose
Leon Furze argues that the real tension with AI and writing isn’t “death of writing” but purpose. When schools prize the product over the process, generative AI flattens the whole writing cycle, letting students jump from “I need a piece” straight to publication. That shortcut may be fine for functional emails or content farms, but…
-
The Narrow Web
Leon Furze contrasts Tim Berners-Lee’s 1989 vision of an open, decentralised World Wide Web with the “Narrow Web” of 2025—an internet funnelled through half-a-dozen corporate platforms that monetise surveillance, lock users into walled gardens and invert the original principles of universality and non-discrimination.
-
Lesson planning is a verb: why does tech keep treating it as a noun?
Leon Furze argues that “lesson planning” is a dynamic act of design and reflection, yet AI platforms from Google, Microsoft and start‑ups like Magic School keep packaging it as a downloadable product: click a button, get a plan. That noun‑based mindset, he says, feeds compliance paperwork and short‑cuts the messy thinking, collegial dialogue and classroom experimentation that…
-
“Time Saved” is the Wrong Measurement for Teacher Workload and AI
Leon Furze dismantles recent headlines claiming AI can “save teachers six weeks a year.” He shows how time‑saved tallies in the Walton Foundation/Gallup survey and Microsoft’s Copilot pilot gloss over what tasks are being sped up—and why they exist in the first place. Measuring efficiency, he argues, ignores the deeper causes of burnout: relentless compliance work,…
-
Artificial Intelligence and Assistive Technologies: A Practical Guide
Leon Furze sets aside the chatbot hype to show how the underlying components of AI—image recognition, speech-to-text, text-to-speech and transformer language models—already power a growing suite of assistive technologies. He argues that genuine progress depends on lived-experience design, open standards and a focus on specific user needs, not generic “GPT in everything” solutions. By mapping…
-
Take-home assessments: AI is not the problem
Responding to newspaper calls for tighter controls on generative-AI in senior-school “take-home” tasks, Leon Furze argues that the real culprit is the assessment format itself, not ChatGPT. The article shows that home-based essays and projects have long privileged students with money, tutors or stable study spaces, while disadvantaging those with caring duties, disruptive households or…
-
Three Dimensions of Expertise for AI
SynopsisThis post expands Leon Furze’s earlier “expertise problem” argument by introducing a three-dimensional model of expertise for working productively with generative AI. Drawing on Punya Mishra’s domain × technology matrix and adding insights from Dreyfus & Dreyfus, Lave & Wenger and James Paul Gee, Furze distinguishes domain expertise, technological expertise, and a newly foregrounded situated…