Power
Power, Tools, and Autonomy. Educational technology is never neutral. Every platform, every pricing model, every data policy reflects a set of decisions about who benefits and who adapts. The articles in this collection examine the economics, politics, and power dynamics of EdTech: vendor lock-in and what it costs, the gap between what tools promise and what they deliver, who gets to automate whose work, and what it looks like when educators build their own alternatives instead of waiting for the industry to care about their problems.
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Leaving the Back Open
Part 10 of an ongoing series on vibe coding in EdTech. When Spearfish School District started using the Danielson walkthrough tool I’d built, the first thing they did was ask for changes.…
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Simple Tools That Run Offline, and When to Build Them
Part 9 of an ongoing series on vibe coding in EdTech. A course module arrives as a Word document. A subject matter expert wrote it, and it’s good: objectives at the top,…
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Research-Based Is Not a Purpose
The phrase shows up in a predictable spot. A district is deciding whether to adopt a reading program, a behavior framework, or a platform, and somewhere in the second half of the…
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Using Less AI in DIY EdTech
Part 8 of an ongoing series on vibe coding in EdTech. When I started building AI-powered tools for education, my instinct was the same one most people have: send the user’s question…
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An Ethos With a Changelog
Part 7 of an ongoing series on vibe coding in EdTech. Nobody asks a vendor what they believe about teaching. Procurement asks about seat cost, data handling, integration with the student information…
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Teaching Realism
I’ve been noticing something in the way AI tools market themselves to educators. The pitch varies in specifics, but the underlying structure is almost always the same: teachers are overwhelmed, teachers are…
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Who Pays for the Free Tool?
Part 6 of an ongoing series on vibe coding in EdTech. In a recent article, I wrote about the ethics of building automation tools for educators, using Mary Doria Russell’s concept of…
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The Security Case Against Vibe-Coded EdTech
Part 5 of an ongoing series on vibe coding in EdTech. Over the past several months, I’ve been building an argument across multiple articles. I’ve made the case that educators can and…
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What a Homelab YouTuber Can Teach Us About EdTech Dependency
A video about replacing streaming subscriptions with a home server recently crossed my feed, and I haven’t been able to stop thinking about how cleanly its argument maps onto educational technology. The…
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What AI-Assisted Coding & GAS Can’t Do
Part 3 of an ongoing series on vibe coding in EdTech. I’ve spent the last year or so experimenting with, writing, and talking about why educators and districts should consider building their…
