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12 December 2024

By Guy Roberts-Holmes

Commercial early childhood education (ECE) digital platforms have expanded rapidly since the Covid-19 pandemic. Thus far, there has been a lack of critical research on their growth and consequences. The aims of this blog are, firstly, to open a critical space to think about the political economy of commercial education platforms and, secondly, to ask questions about their impacts upon the experiences of educators, families and children. (more…)

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17 September 2024

By Wayne Holmes

This commentary is adapted from Wayne’s contribution to the ESRC Education Research Programme event, More or less technology in the classroom – the value and purposes of technology use in schools. Watch the event recording on UCL Mediacentral.

Technologies have long been designed for use in education. However, the ‘potential’ of this EdTech, especially AI-enabled EdTech, has been frequently overstated and its limitations underexplored. In any case, while EdTech offers ‘solutions’ to a variety of educational problems, not only do they rarely actually ‘solve’ the problems that they target, it isn’t even clear whether they are the ‘right’ problems in the first place. (more…)

Rose Luckin.
Sunday 15^th October saw the publication of Growing the Artificial Intelligence Industry in the UK, the report of the independent review announced as part of the UK Digital Strategy in March. It also builds on the recognition in the Industrial Strategy Green Paper published in January that Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a major, high-potential opportunity for the UK to build a word-leading future sector of our economy. The two chairs of the review Dame Wendy Hall, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southampton, and Jérôme Pesenti, Chief Executive of BenevolentTech, have done a great job in raising the profile of UK AI and highlighting the tremendous opportunities and the significant challenges we face. They urge the government to help the UK become the clear world leader in the development of AI – “to boost productivity, advance health care, improve services for customers and unlock £630bn for the UK economy.” (more…)