Post-16 Educator

It was a great day today. Packed Picket lines followed by a rally at Trent Courtyard. The media was there, here are some of the pics I had time to take. West Entrance @UoNUCU

Colleges (#FE/#adulteducation) used to be part of their communities - community resources; places to meet, mix & learn. Now, far less so. Has the loss of community-based ed. contributed to the sense of lost community, and helped fuel #Reform's toxic interpretation of community?

@BTnewsroom Against the myth of tech. neutrality, ask who designs & benefits in whose interests, & who's excluded? Can we 'rescue the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan from the enormous condescension of posterity'? E.P.Thompson ucpress.edu/books/the-mech…

Billionaire ex-CEO of Google Eric Schmidt fails to read the room, championing artificial intelligence’s restructuring of society at the University of Arizona graduation ceremony Friday night in his speech as commencement speaker. Schmidt was met with merciless boos and jeers from the graduating students at every mention of AI. AI is expected to replace around 15 million U.S. jobs by 2030.

@Emem_snz @kirawontmiss Peak luddite is exactly what we need! The young are rebelling against technology threatening to replace their jobs and their purpose in life. They've been raised on tech from birth and see, first hand, how tech enslaves us, capturing our attention and monetizing our creativity.

@LovesZeester @Emem_snz @kirawontmiss Can we 'rescue ... the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan ... from the enormous condescension of posterity'? E.P.Thompson ucpress.edu/books/the-mech…

Bachelor of Arts graduates started BOOING their graduation speaker after she praised AI and called it “the next industrial revolution” 👏

@GlenWilsonIA @Emem_snz @kirawontmiss Can we 'rescue ... the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan ... from the enormous condescension of posterity'? E.P.Thompson ucpress.edu/books/the-mech…

Eh, I'm okay with their booing. For one, LLMs are not AI in the sci-fi meaning of AI. LLMs are navigate your way to McDonalds through a construction site and private property. Honestly, people who treat LLMs as AI are just as dumb as the luddites. It's a good tech, that isn't wrong. However, if you think that shit is intelligent, then I really don't know what to tell you except to prepare for epic amounts of disappointment and failures.

@Emem_snz @kirawontmiss The Luddites were right! They cherished high quality craftsmanship and fought for fair labor practices and ethical technological advancement that would not concentrate power in the hands of a few.

@SatireSleuth @Emem_snz @kirawontmiss Who designs? Who benefits? Whose interests? Whose assumptions? Who gets excluded? Can we 'rescue ... the Luddite cropper, the “obsolete” hand-loom weaver, the “utopian” artisan ... from the enormous condescension of posterity'? E.P.Thompson ucpress.edu/books/the-mech…

@BladeoftheS If #AI - hype aside - will touch EVERY aspect of our lives, education & work included, leaving this tech. in the hands of private interests - tech. companies, hedge funds - is fundamentally negligent, monumentally stupid. The need for democratic social control is self-evident.

Google CEO tries to tell University students to love AI. They tell him to BOO off. This is what most people think of the hated AI, we don't want it.

@lil_doza This video plus thread: great resource for #post16 educators. Instead of addressing the politics of the so-called 'patriotic' far right, its underlying causes, how it spirals into violence, we have classist comments about hair styles, make up, bodies, accents, teeth, voice. Why?

The protectors of women bullied a woman out of the unite the kingdom rally today for not looking too far right.

Useful resource for #FE and Sixth Form College tutorials. What makes a source reliable or unreliable? Are we equipped to really evaluate sources like this? What effect does this kind of material have on public debate?

British Journalists take note - this is how you question Reform Mp's. Watch and learn! This young man annihilates Robert Jenrick #bbcquestiontime

🚨 University professors have been saying AI is completely destroying learning and that we'll soon have an AI-powered, semi-illiterate workforce. Here's a glimpse into the educational apocalypse: "Sarah, a freshman at Wilfrid Laurier University in Ontario, said she first used ChatGPT to cheat during the spring semester of her final year of high school. (...) After getting acquainted with the chatbot, Sarah used it for all her classes: Indigenous studies, law, English, and a “hippie farming class” called Green Industries. “My grades were amazing,” she said. “It changed my life.” Sarah continued to use AI when she started college this past fall. Why wouldn’t she? Rarely did she sit in class and not see other students’ laptops open to ChatGPT. Toward the end of the semester, she began to think she might be dependent on the website. She already considered herself addicted to TikTok, Instagram, Snapchat, and Reddit, where she writes under the username maybeimnotsmart. “I spend so much time on TikTok,” she said. “Hours and hours, until my eyes start hurting, which makes it hard to plan and do my schoolwork. With ChatGPT, I can write an essay in two hours that normally takes 12.” - "By November, Williams estimated that at least half of his students were using AI to write their papers. Attempts at accountability were pointless. Williams had no faith in AI detectors, and the professor teaching the class instructed him not to fail individual papers, even the clearly AI-smoothed ones. “Every time I brought it up with the professor, I got the sense he was underestimating the power of ChatGPT, and the departmental stance was, ‘Well, it’s a slippery slope, and we can’t really prove they’re using AI,’” Williams said. “I was told to grade based on what the essay would’ve gotten if it were a ‘true attempt at a paper.’ So I was grading people on their ability to use ChatGPT.” - AI in education is a serious topic, and many schools and universities are blindly jumping into the "AI-first" wave without considering short and long-term consequences. It would be great to hear more from teachers and educators to understand potential solutions. This might be a great opportunity for rethinking the education system and how students are assessed. - 👉 Link to the full article below. 👉 To learn more about AI's legal and ethical challenges, join my newsletter's 94,700+ subscribers (link below).

During the Nuremberg Trials, Hermann Göring gave an interview to psychologist Gustave Gilbert and said: “Of course the people don’t want war. Why would some poor farmer want to risk his life in a war when the best he can hope for is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, people don’t want war. No one wants war in Russia, England, America — not even in Germany. That’s obvious. But in the end, it’s the leaders of a country who determine policy. And it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it’s a democracy, a communist state, a parliament, or a fascist dictatorship.” Gilbert objected: “But there is one difference in a democracy — the people have a voice through their elected representatives.” To which Göring replied: “That’s all well and good, but whether the people have a voice or not, they can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and for exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” — Nuremberg Diary, April 18, 1946 Doesn’t it sound familiar?

A scene from #MichaelMoore's 2018 "Fahrenheit 11/9" maps the rise of #fascism in Nazi Germany onto the rise of fascism in the USA. Does this speak to the UK also? youtu.be/wfszwkoSdQA?si…

What are the implications of this for #post16 and #FE especially for youngsters channelled along vocational routes? #vocationaleducation #skills

Sometimes, a nickname comes along so excellently unkind that you know it’s going to stick. One such is “MattGPT” – which will, I suspect, follow former academic and failed Reform candidate in the Gorton and Denton by-election Matt Goodwin to his grave. ✍️ Sam Leith Article | spectator.com/article/the-il…

@andytwelves Been asked whether your comments on the book are available on any other platform.

EXC: .@GoodwinMJ’s new book “Suicide of a Nation: Immigration, Islam, Identity” is out now, and I’m only 5 chapters in and have found a huge amount of what appears to be false quotes and basic misinterpretations of data, that appear to be AI hallucinations. Matthew, can you explain the claims you made in the book that I’ve outlined in the below thread?

Politics Without Politicians: The Case for Citizen Rule. Hélène Landemore. Review tendancecoatesy.wordpress.com/2026/03/14/pol… via @Pabloite