Ed & Tech must-reads 140426

Sam Altman May Control Our Future—Can He Be Trusted? from The New Yorker

As with many of us, I suspect, the first time that I really paid attention to Generative AI was when OpenAI’s ChatGPT was released at the end of 2022. I had played with some very primitive image generation tools in the lead up to this, but for the most part, coming out of the COVID era switch to online, it wasn’t really on my radar. Those were the days. This lengthy article from Ronan Farrow and Andrew Marantz provides a pretty forensic breakdown of what OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was doing in the decade or so leading up to this release and also provides a rather compelling character evaluation of someone that Elon Musk came to find a bit much. It’s a fascinating and horrifying journey from some classic tech bros taking a quasi-moral position of ‘we need to set up a non-profit to protect the world from the power of this technology’ to what seems to be a step or two before reaching full Bond villain mode. The power of big tech and its Gollumesque influence on Silicon Valley types has been well known for decades but this really feels like something altogether new. For all the stories and promises of new productivity and cancer cures, I’m increasingly left wondering if it is worth it.

The question of efficiency: teaching and technology in higher education from Higher Education Research & Development

Now watch me pirouette flawlessly back from techno-Marxist to ed tech bro. (I contain multitudes). I do actually quite like this commentary piece from Gravett, Bearman, Dawson and Jensen, which raises some fair questions about the extent to which ed tech is purposed by institutions with achieving efficiencies and what harms this might be doing to learning and teaching. I agree that education done well needs to take time and should be given space, even when this doesn’t always align with institutional financial imperatives. BUT, I do take issue with the inference that this is the primary focus of using educational technologies because it ignores the many real benefits that using technology in teaching and learning have brought us. Creating opportunities for people to study from places or at times that didn’t previously work with their lives and physical campuses, giving more control over how someone watches (and rewinds and rewatches) a lecture, facilitating simulations, enabling connections, and supporting creation and meaning-making. These are also reasons that educational technologies are used and while the drumbeat of higher ed discourse of late is all about corporatisation and managerialism, helpful ed tech increasingly gets thrown under the bus.

Join us at Open Education Week 2026 from UTS Education Express (Mon April 20th to Fri April 24th)

The University of Technology, Sydney has been hosting Open Education events for several years now and they just seem to be getting bigger and better. Read this blog post for full details but among the events there is a debate about whether GenAI is fundamentally incompatible with Open Educational Practices featuring Sarah Steen and Lauren Halcomb-Smith (Deakin) against Claire Ovaska and Nikki Andersen (USQ). Also a quiz event about copyright and licensing trivia - what more could you need?