Another brilliant piece by @keanbirch.bsky.social

Thanks!

Platforms, data, and AI are impacting higher education systems and universities internationally. @jkom.bsky.social and I have a short piece on the political economy of digital transformation in HE just out ihe.bc.edu/pub/499eknm0...

Huge congrats, Joe. You’ve truly conducted such excellent research!

I’m looking forward to speak at the @work2025fi.bsky.social conference! I’ll be discussing academic labour and HE in the age of digital rentiership.

Thanks very much for organising this excellent panel and for having me @rachelbrooks.bsky.social! So great to discuss the current matters in HE with @unsocialtheory.bsky.social, @alinecourtois.bsky.social and everyone there!

if you're at the @britsoci.bsky.social annual conference next week, do come along to the session on The Future of Higher Education, with contributions from @unsocialtheory.bsky.social @jkom.bsky.social & @alinecourtois.bsky.social

If you happen to be at the @britsoci.bsky.social's annual conference and if you want to hear something beyond the moan about how "they" are destroying "our" higher education, I'll be speaking (alongside @jkom.bsky.social and @alinecourtois.bsky.social) at the Presidential event on the Future of HE:

Such a great pleasure to work with @keanbirch.bsky.social on this paper. I’m really pleased with it and think it brings important new insights. Check it out!

🟨Volume 50, Issue 1 (2025) of LMT🟪

Let's introduce our new Special Issue! In their editorial
@jkom.bsky.social, @keanbirch.bsky.social & Sam Sellar intruduce the dynamics of #rentiership and #assetisation in the digitalisation of education.

Read all articles: tinyurl.com/a8bvzkxe

The promise of AI in education is it will save educators time. That's rubbish. It's sapping all our time already in working groups, committees, workshops, and marking anxiety. It's the most time-sapping, exhausting and frankly boring thing I've ever encountered in HE - and it's in my research area.

Our special issue ‘Rents, assets and governance in digitalised education’ is now published! Check it out: www.tandfonline.com/toc/cjem20/c...

The whole thing is amazing and absolutely worth watching until the end.

But @meredithmeredith.bsky.social gave the best pitch for @signal.org answering if there are any downsides of using it: "No-none! It's free, classy and we're not shoving and weird #AI shit into it." 🤣 👏

Funny thing about this 360 degree multimodal surveillance classroom is it's absolutely nothing new conceptually, so it's not really to do with "innovative" tech but continuing a much longer history of intensifying student monitoring and teacher automation, eg www.computer.org/csdl/magazin...

Check out our article here: www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

This is a recently published editorial that I wrote with Kean Birch and Sam Sellar. We hope this editorial and Special Issue as a whole will offer a useful framework for understanding assetization and rentiership in education and beyond; and for future work on these important processes.

New publication: we discuss different ways to think through and map assetization in education. i, we look at the variety of assets in education; ii, the production and monetization of assets; iii, the embeddedness of assets in everyday, mundane practices; and iv, the politics of assetization.

Chuffed our paper on edtech market forecasting - we called it "algorithmic futuring" - made it into this special issue on digital assetization in education doi.org/10.1080/1743...

Just in case you thought everything was hunky dory in UK universities ...

🔥Superb agenda-setting editorial on assetization and rentiership in education ⏬️

Full article: Mapping rentiership and assetisation in the digitalisation of education www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Our Introduction article with @keanbirch.bsky.social and Sam Sellar, “Mapping rentiership and assetization in the digitalisation of education” is now published and freely available. It explains how assetization manifests in education, its consequences and how to analyse this dynamic. Check it out

But edtech trade shows - sometimes - invite people like @jkom.bsky.social and me to offer a different, more "sociotechnical" perspective on why edtech, data, and AI are *not* going to inevitably or straightforwardly "transform" education. Hopefully at least a small dent in the industry bandwagon.

And, as expected, the official AI Plan document just makes a couple of refs to "AI assistants" reducing teachers' time spent planning and marking - but quite a lot on educating AI "talent" and wider AI skills training www.gov.uk/government/p...