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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Vultures, Vibe Coding, and Who Gets to Automate Whom
Part 1 of an ongoing series on vibe coding in EdTech. In Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow, published in 1996, one of the earliest plot points involves a professional role that Russell…
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DIY EdTech: The Basics of Building Custom Web Apps with AI
Part 2 of an ongoing series on vibe coding in EdTech. A few weeks ago, I wrote again about why teachers should learn to code, arguing that basic programming skills give educators…
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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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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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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…
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Known as the Canvas Guy
This article responds to EndVertex’s video “For-Profit (Creative) Software,” embedded above. Somewhere along the way I became the Canvas person. Colleagues introduce me that way, districts call me for that reason, and…
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Let “EdTech” Training Die
The shift in educational technology culture became clear to me through our annual edtech conference here in South Dakota. To my eye, attendance has thinned over the past few years, and the…
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The Machinery of Modern Education
Most of us who work in education got into it because we believed it could change something. I certainly did. Standing in front of my high school English classes, I thought the…
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Let’s Look At This Clearly: AI Hype in Ed Tech
A note from September 2026: I wrote this in fall 2024 and have left the argument as it stood then. The critique of hype still holds, but my view of where AI…
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Yes, Online Learning Can Be a Grift
I have been watching the rise of “guru” courses with growing unease. You know the type: flashy ads promising to teach you everything from digital marketing to life coaching in a few…
