Human/Life-Centered
Approaches that prioritize the needs, preferences, and autonomy of humans in experiences. Life-centered re-centers the larger eco-system ahead of the needs of humans.
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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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Surveillance Refusal – Chrome Extension for Canvas
Canvas records a great deal about students that has nothing to do with their schoolwork. It logs when a student last logged in, how long a session lasted, how many times they…
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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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Decision Rights Mapper
A note before you start The Decision Rights Mapper is released as a free, open tool under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. That openness is intentional, and it carries a corresponding responsibility for…
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I Know a Grackle
My dad kept a bird book with a life list penciled inside the front cover. I don’t think he updated it very often. It was one of those things that surfaced years…
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The Unwavering Band of Light
Early in my career as an instructional designer, I took on a project that should have felt like meaningful work. We were building a train-the-trainer program for people who would be supporting…
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Designing for Human Judgement in AI-Powered EdTech
Part 4 of an ongoing series on vibe coding in EdTech. The first version of my course builder had a problem, and the problem was me. I’d been building a personal tool…
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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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“Flow” in Course Design: Organic, Alternative Approaches
For most of my career I have designed courses the way I build Canvas templates, which is out of parts. My atomic design system breaks a course into atoms (colors, fonts, buttons),…
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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…
