Articles
Writing about educational technology, learning design, and the questions that sit underneath both. Articles are organized into three threads: Tools & Power examines the economics and politics of EdTech, Other Lenses draws on speculative fiction, natural systems, and contemplative practice to think differently about design, and Design Practice covers the day-to-day work of building learning experiences that hold up in real conditions.
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What a Fictional Physicist Taught Me About Ethics in Technology
There’s a character in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars Trilogy I think about occasionally. His name is Sax Russell, a physicist and one of the first hundred scientists sent to colonize Mars, and…
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The “Other” Training and Delivery Modalities
When it’s time to teach something or share information, most people default to building a presentation. It’s familiar, it’s comfortable, and it works often enough that the habit sticks. But comfortable isn’t…
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Paywalls, Lock-Ins, and Bugs in Educational Technology
Revised September 2026. The original version of this piece made a number of claims without sources, borrowed a passage from Martin Weller without crediting him, and described a lawsuit that had already…
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A Review of AI Literacy Books For Kids & Families
Educators and parents looking for AI literacy books for kids will find everything from carefully researched materials to hastily produced content, and a fair amount of the latter was written by AI…
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Outdoor PD for Educator Wellness and Innovation
Working with educational systems across the Great Plains, I keep running into the same pattern: the way we usually do professional development doesn’t touch the problems educators are actually carrying. Here in…
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The Hidden Cost of EdTech Complexity
There’s a habit in educational technology of celebrating how many tools we can chain together. The lesson lives in the LMS, the collaboration happens in a shared document, the reflection gets recorded…
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You Should Offer PD as a Gift
Revised September 2026. The original version of this piece started from Robin Wall Kimmerer and ended up making a business case, treating free help as relationship capital that turns into contracts. That’s…
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Action, Information, Rest: Cycles of Design
I keep returning to a single line from Ursula K. Le Guin that has quietly shaped how I approach both learning design and my own professional development: “When action grows unprofitable, gather…
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Thought Technology: The Arguments Inside Our Frameworks
Revised September 2026. The original version of this piece treated concepts, symbols, and frameworks as neutral tools and recommended a handful of them, including “pipeline” and “return on investment,” without asking what…
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Generative AI and the Plastic Waste Problem
When I talk with districts about generative AI, the pace of adoption reminds me of another material that arrived as a miracle: plastic. Plastics were invented early in the twentieth century and…
