Study confirms experience beats youthful enthusiasm
: Research shows productivity and judgment peak decades after graduation
Resources
Close Screens Open Minds | Challenge the adoption of EdTech
Close Screens Open Minds is building a comprehensive evidence-based resource for parents, press, and policymakers to challenge the adoption of EdTech in schools.
How Inquiry-Based Freewriting Can Deepen Student Writing
Adding freewriting to a unit can build students' writing confidence and make their writing more authentic, fluent, and complex.
Coaching That Clicks with Micro-Teaching
Micro-teaching isn't just another ed tech trend. It has the potential to accelerate or even double the rate of professional learning!
Ed tech is profitable. It is also mostly useless
Independent research identifies few learning gains
When Wanting Never Stops: A Humanist View of Schopenhauer and Billionaires
"Success does not end wanting, and therefore cannot be trusted to regulate itself."
Humanism
ICE Is Going on a Surveillance Shopping Spree | Electronic Frontier Foundation
We need to have a hard look at the surveillance industry. It is a key enabler of vast and untold violations of human rights and civil liberties, and it continues to be used by aspiring autocrats to threaten our very democracy. As long as it exists, the surveillance industry, and the data it generates, will be an irresistible tool for anti-democratic forces.
Court Rules That Ripping YouTube Clips Can Violate the DMCA
A federal court in California has ruled that YouTube creators who use stream-ripping tools to download clips for reaction and commentary videos may face liability under the DMCA's anti-circumvention provisions -- a decision that could reshape how one of the platform's most popular content genres ope...
10 Policy Recommendations To Address Cellphone Use in Schools - Center for American Progress
As school leaders raise concerns about student cellphone use in schools, policymakers can look to domestic and international examples to create student-centered policies.
Screenity - Screen Recorder & Annotation Tool - Chrome Web Store
The free and privacy-friendly screen recorder for everyone. Capture, annotate, edit videos and more - all with no sign in needed.
The Four Desires Driving All Human Behavior: Bertrand Russell’s Magnificent Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech – The Marginalian
“Nothing in the world is more exciting than a moment of sudden discovery or invention, and many more people are capable of experiencing such moments than is sometimes thought.”
Encrypt It Already
End-to-end encryption protects the privacy of your data.
AI “digital helper” Lena Health breach exposed some Houston Methodist patients’ medical info (1)
On June 1, 2025, the California Applicants' Attorneys Association reported that Serviceaide, a provider of AI-powered healthcare software, had suffered a data b
SoundCloud Data Breach Impacts 29.8 Million Accounts
A data breach at SoundCloud exposed information tied to 29.8 million user accounts, according to Have I Been Pwned. While SoundCloud says no passwords or financial data were accessed, attackers mapped email addresses to public profile data and later attempted extortion.
ICE knocks on ad tech’s data door to see what it knows about you
: Agency looks to understand the extent of identifying information available to its masked agents
Double Commander
Double Commander is a free cross platform open source file manager with two panels side by side. Works on Linux, Windows, etc.
Double Commander is a free cross platform open source file manager with
two panels side by side. It is inspired by Total Commander and features
new ideas.
The Rise of Degree Apprenticeships
Degree apprenticeships, programs that let students earn a college degree while gaining paid work experience, are a fast-growing model in education and workforce development. But new research from the …
Reject the Evidence of Your Eyes and Ears
A classroom-ready guide to the liar’s dividend, propaganda tactics, and teaching media literacy in high school and elementary.
The TikTok privacy debate did not end with the US agreement. It has escalated. TikTok has updated its US Privacy Policy. It is now one of the most aggressive data collection regimes of any mainstream… | Clara Hawking | 164 comments
The TikTok privacy debate did not end with the US agreement. It has escalated. TikTok has updated its US Privacy Policy. It is now one of the most aggressive data collection regimes of any mainstream consumer platform.
It explicitly acknowledges the collection and processing of sensitive personal information under US state privacy laws. Named directly:
• Racial or ethnic origin.
• Religious or philosophical beliefs.
• Mental and physical health data.
• Sexual orientation.
• Transgender or nonbinary status.
• Citizenship or immigration status.
• Precise location data.
The policy goes further.
TikTok is collecting far more than what users consciously share.
Under the updated policy, it gathers what you provide, what it observes automatically, and what it receives from third parties. That includes account details and identity verification documents, private messages, drafts and unpublished content, AI prompts and interactions, clipboard content, purchase and payment data, contact lists and social graphs, and an extensive set of technical signals such as device identifiers, keystroke patterns, battery state, audio configurations, and activity tracked across devices.
This is not incidental data leakage. It is formalized, permitted, and documented.
Images and video are treated as analyzable environments. TikTok states that it "identifies objects and scenery, detects faces and other body parts, extracts spoken words, and collects metadata describing how, when, where, and by whom content was created."
Post a photo near the Golden Gate Bridge and you are not just sharing a moment. You are generating structured data about place, time, environment, and your body, or body parts.
Photos and videos are not just content. They are raw material for computer vision, biometric analysis, and location inference.
Tik Tok will use all of the collected data, and maintains the right to sell all of it to interested third parties, from vendors to the federal government.
Leaders must act on this immdiately. Privacy policies are not background reading. They are power documents. When they change, accountability shifts with them.
If you are a user, a parent, a school, a youth facing organization, nonprofits, and public institutions that use TikTok as a communications channel, the update changes the governance calculus.
Engagement is not a neutral act. It carries serious legal and ethical obligations tied to data protection, duty of care, and institutional risk.
The new policy deserves close reading. At this stage of platform power, and scale of data collection, policy literacy is a governance responsibility, not a personal preference.
Read the policy here: https://lnkd.in/ejbm8THx | 164 comments on LinkedIn
Teachers Like Cellphone Bans—But Not for Themselves
Without access to an authenticator app on their phones, some teachers said they can’t even log into their work emails, in a robust social media discussion in response to an informal poll by Education Week.
The poll asked if teachers should be included in their school’s cellphone policies. More than half the 1,668 respondents said teachers don’t need any rules to govern their cellphone use, while 31% believed that such restrictions should exist. Fifteen percent said “it depends.”
Meanwhile, nearly 350 readers of the Savvy Principal newsletter weighed in on whether they have rules for how teachers can use their phones during the school day. Forty-nine percent said yes.
Ed tech is profitable. It is also mostly useless
"Although ed-tech companies tout huge learning gains, independent research has made clear that technology rarely boosts learning in schools—and often impairs it. A 2024 meta-analysis of 119 studies of early-literacy tech interventions, led by Rebecca Silverman of Stanford University, found the studies described programmes that delivered at best only marginal gains on standardised tests. The majority had little effect, no effect or harmful ones. Jared Horvath, a neuroscientist and author of a book called “The Digital Delusion”, has reviewed meta-analyses covering tens of thousands of studies. His verdict: “In nearly every context, ed tech doesn’t come close to the minimum threshold for meaningful learning impact.”
The prevalence of tech in schools owes less to rigorous evidence than aggressive marketing. Teachers are now flooded with daily offers for free tech. In 2024 American schools spent $30bn on education technology. Globally, it is a $165bn industry.
Technology does save money on textbooks and streamline lesson planning. But licensing and training costs add up, and many teachers feel burdened rather than liberated by all the admin and dashboards.
Long-term trends raise the possibility that the rise of in-class devices is responsible for an alarming decline in performance in reading and other subjects. Scores on 21 nationwide benchmark tests rose from 1994 until peaking in 2012-15, when screen use started to soar; they then began to sink(see chart 1). In major assessments for maths, science and reading from 2011 to 2019, greater in-school computer use for learning correlates with lower scores. In contrast, students in classes with rare or no computer use at all typically score highest (see chart 2).
Distraction is one likely culprit. Another is that some tools emphasise gamification at the expense of education, meaning that children focus more on winning points than mastering concepts."
https://www.economist.com/united-states/2026/01/22/ed-tech-is-profitable-it-is-also-mostly-useless
EdTech #Education #Schools #Gamification
The Triple Boot #1: The #FOSS Foundation #Android
“Ownership begins where the telemetry ends.” Terminal Input – Digital Sovereignty Unboxing the Samsung S25 Ultra is a lesson in contradiction. You’re holding perhaps the most soph…
Security Companions on the Road to Android
To ensure I didn’t spend endless hours getting back up to speed on Android, I made lists of my favorite iOS apps and then found Android alternatives. Three apps that made that journey easier?…
Gemini Langoliers, Part Two: Practical Day One Settings and Gestures – Another Think Coming
I asked for a handy list of things to know how to do on Samsung. I imagined screenshots (I always forget), and got this list instead: Mastering Screenshots Samsung offers more ways to capture your …
Gemini Langoliers: Three App Picks on Android
Over the weekend, I decided to replace my aging iPhone with an Android device. People who know me, know I switch between iOS and Android every few years to keep my knowledge fresh. I also get so ut…
This open-source app freed up 160 GB of duplicates I didn't know I had
My cloud backup habit left me with 35,000 hidden duplicates, until I found this free app.
Microsoft Gave FBI Keys To Unlock Encrypted Data, Exposing Major Privacy Concern
Thomas Brewster reports: Early last year, the FBI served Microsoft with a search warrant, asking it to provide recovery keys to unlock encrypted data stored on
Surrender as a service: Microsoft unlocks BitLocker for feds
updated: If you're serious about encryption, keep control of your encryption keys
Stop paying to edit PDFs: This free Windows app is all you actually need - PDF Gear
I used to depend on Adobe for far too many things, but this free replacement won me over
New ChromeOS tools to support classroom collaboration
Modernize your classroom with AI-powered Chromebooks, Gemini in Chrome, and new ways to engage and collaborate with students with powerful Class tools features and a new…