What if AI is "normal" technology? If we don't have to fear being "left behind", and if AI will change education not in years, but in decades, how might we rethink our approaches, policies, and pedagogies? The post GenAI is Normal Edtech appeared first on Leon Furze.| Leon Furze
When the AI bubble bursts - and it will burst - CEOs will be dethroned. Companies will lose billions. The economy - particularly in the US - will take a catastrophic hit. Data centres will suddenly need to downsize their operations and close down entirely. And in education, we'll need to take yet another long hard look at ourselves, and ask, what's next?| Leon Furze
In Stuck Thinking and End-of-School Exams, Leon Furze examines the assumptions that anchor our current model of exam-based assessment—and argues that many of them are “stuck thinking.” He questions why we let the high-stakes end exam dictate upstream assessments, curriculum priorities, and even our trust in students. He suggests we treat exams differently: as one piece of evidence rather than the organising point. He also links this critique to the challenges and opportunities posed by ...| Leon Furze
Technology is great: it's the tech industry that's the problem. This post explores why we need to reject the Big Tech myth of inevitability. The post Technology is Actually Pretty Great appeared first on Leon Furze.| Leon Furze
The AI Assessment Scale (v2) has officially been published in the open access Journal of University Teaching & Learning Practice (JUTLP). Read more here!| Leon Furze
This is the fourth post in a series exploring the practical and creative implications of multimodal generative artificial intelligence (GAI). The previous posts covered image generation with Adobe Firefly, audio generation for voice, music, and sound effects, and text generation with chat plus search. Over the last couple of weeks, Microsoft has upgraded their Bing […]| Leon Furze
Rethinking Assessment for Generative AI: Orals and discussions| Leon Furze
In our new commentary for the Journal of Applied Learning & Teaching, we explore everything we have learned after two years of working on the AI Assessment Scale AIAS The post How (not) to use the AIAS appeared first on Leon Furze.| Leon Furze
The concept of "digital plastic" in generative AI highlights its characteristics: cheap, malleable, ubiquitous, and persistent. This framework promotes critical AI literacy through classroom strategies, encouraging purposeful use, awareness of implications, and fostering critical judgement in synthetic media creation.| Leon Furze
ChatGPT has released its new 'Study Mode'. What is it, and will it actually help students to learn? Or is it simply a way for OpenAI to reclaim territory from third party edtech?| Leon Furze
This post distills everything I've learned so far from testing OpenAI's Agents, including all available tools and code functions. It includes a 20 minute walkthrough video of a range of tasks.| Leon Furze
Deep Research is the title of a new mode in several GenAI apps, including Google’s Gemini, OpenAI’s ChatGPT, and most recently, Perplexity. In this article, I will be focusing on the currently most hyped of these: OpenAI’s Deep Research. Although they weren’t first to release a product with this title (that was Google), they have […]| Leon Furze
I recently asked a group of around 3000 educators from my mailing list what they’d like to learn about GenAI. I’m incredibly lucky to have feet in a couple of camps as both an early career researcher and a consultant/author. It means I have access to the training and skills for working with lots of […] The post What Do Educators Want to Learn About GenAI? appeared first on Leon Furze.| Leon Furze
PD for GenAI isn't a "one and done" event - it needs to fit with teachers' existing disciplinary expertise and their deep, contextual understanding of what it means to teach. The post Professional Development for AI in Schools: A Three-Dimensional Approach appeared first on Leon Furze.| Leon Furze
What is Critical AI Literacy, and how might metaphors be used to teach it? We explore these questions in a new Open Access article in JIME. The post Using Metaphors to Teach Critical AI Literacy appeared first on Leon Furze.| Leon Furze
The Vocational Education and Training (VET) sector is the ideal place for experimentation with GenAI, both for educators and for small to medium enterprise owners.| Leon Furze
Flash Fic Friday: Volume 1| Leon Furze
These stories were originally published in June-August 2025 on LinkedIn, a platform which is, frankly, best suited to marketing experts telling other marketers how to market. For some reason I thought it would be funny to start posting flash fic about the future of AI, digital technologies, and education on the world’s best B2B Marketing platform.| Leon Furze
These 5 Principles for rethinking assessment were important before GenAI, but now they're even more relevant. In this article, I explore why validity, authenticity, transparency and trust are key to assessment.| Leon Furze
Learning about, with, through, without, and against AI are all important for students and educators.| Leon Furze
A few interesting things are happening around open source artificial intelligence, and even if you haven't been paying much attention to generative AI beyond the big name brands like ChatGPT, I think this is something that you should take a look at.| Leon Furze
GPT-5 has been released - but does it live up to the hype? In this article, I'm going to run through some of the key moments from the launch and compare it to my initial experience using the upgraded AI. I have also made a video demonstrating the updated capabilities, and showing the differences between the free and paid models.| Leon Furze
OpenAI Has Come for Education| Leon Furze
I'm Leon Furze, and in this free PD video, I walk through the features of both the free and paid versions of ChatGPT. From Study Mode to Deep Research, I explain how educators can get the most from the tool. Subscribe for more videos throughout August.| Leon Furze
OpenAI's recent partnership with Instructure's Canvas Learning Management System furthers its aggressive entry into education. While claiming to support students and teachers, I'm worried about the effectiveness of its tools like study mode and Agents, which fail to remotely address pedagogical needs. OpenAI has come for education, and I think we should be concerned.| Leon Furze
With growing dissatisfaction about the state of the internet, I spent a few months in 2025 digging into things like the fediverse (Mastodon etc.), self-hosting, and other ways of reclaiming the internet from companies like Google. On my travels, I came across the term POSSE, which stands for Publish (on your) Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere. Here's how it applies to my writing.| Leon Furze
In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee created the World Wide Web at CERN, establishing principles like decentralisation, non-discrimination, and universality. However, by 2025, the internet has devolved into a “Narrow Web,” dominated by major platforms, characterised by centralisation and discrimination. To reclaim the open web, users should prioritise independent websites and open-source solutions.| Leon Furze
Generative AI is a multimodal technology, with applications in text, image, video, audio, and code. Unfortunately, up until now, the actual usefulness of GAI in schools has been limited by technical and practical barriers. ChatGPT, for example, is easy to access but problematic in the classroom due to its obscure terms and conditions and dubious […]| Leon Furze
In this post, I run through the end-to-end workflow that now underpins almost all of my writing. I show how analogue note-taking (pocket notebooks, fountain pens) and spoken drafting (iPhone Voice Memos → Otter/Whisper transcription) feed into successive passes through Claude for clean-up, ChatGPT o3 for link-insertion and live research, and finally a quick HTML export for one-paste publishing in WordPress. Along the way I weigh the productivity gains against the environmental, ethical and ...| Leon Furze
This article, part of a series updating "Teaching AI Ethics," explores the environmental impact of artificial intelligence, particularly generative AI. It emphasizes the need for transparency in AI's energy usage, highlights the resource-intensive nature of training and using AI models, and prompts educational discussions on sustainable technology practices.| Leon Furze
This post initiates a nine-article series revisiting the "Teaching AI Ethics" resources from 2023 exploring bias in GenAI.| Leon Furze
Over the next few months, I’ll be updating my 2023 Teaching AI Ethics collection. In this post, I’ll explain why the updates are necessary and give a recap on the nine original areas from the series. When I wrote the original series in 2023, ChatGPT was only just on people’s radars. I had started my […]| Leon Furze
OpenAI's recent updates to DALL-E 3 aim to enhance its image generation capabilities, but the focus on relaxing restrictions for "offensive" content raises concerns. The integration of more violent and explicit imagery could contribute to misinformation, and doesn't contribute to the future of the technology.| Leon Furze
