Tag: AI
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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.
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OpenAI Has Come for Education
OpenAI’s recent partnership with Instructure’s Canvas Learning Management System furthers its aggressive entry into education. While claiming to support students and teachers, I’m worried about the effectiveness of its tools like study mode and Agents, which fail to remotely address pedagogical needs. OpenAI has come for education, and I think we should be concerned.
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First Impressions of ChatGPT’s Study Mode
ChatGPT has released its new ‘Study Mode’. What is it, and will it actually help students to learn? Or is it simply a way for OpenAI to reclaim territory from third party edtech?
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The Right to Resist
A recent open letter calling for educators and academics to resist AI has divided the education community. But we should be directing our anger at the right people, and not at one another.
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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…
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Stuck Thinking and End-of-School Exams
We think the end of school exam is a lot of things: but is our thinking stuck on unhelpful ideas? If we treat the exam differently, how might it change our assessments and attitudes towards AI?
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Everything I’ve Learned so far About OpenAI’s Agents
This post distills everything I’ve learned so far from testing OpenAI’s Agents, including all available tools and code functions. It includes a 20 minute walkthrough video of a range of tasks.
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“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,…
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Initial Impressions of OpenAI’s Agents: Unfinished, Unsuccessful, and Unsafe
By 12 hours after the announcement I had seen OpenAI’s promo video shared so many times on social media that I could recite the whole thing backwards. I am highly cynical of anything produced by a tech company to advertise a new feature – remember Google’s made up videos? Or OpenAI’s Scarlett Johansson stuff up?…
