Thursday, April 2, 2026

• 23:26 I am on annual leave from work, but seemingly never(!) from the phd. I am looking at reframing my research, working out a more accurate narrative to talk about the work, rather than just ‘how AI is shaping education’. This is because I think that people don’t fully understand my unique positioning on this, and it falls too readily into hype/doomer/boomer conversations of AI which bores me very much. NUANCE is important, I want my research to speak to this.

Research Focus

This research sits at the intersection of speculative design, creative computing, and critical AI. The organising question is: what might learning and teaching look like after the current assumptions about intelligence, knowledge, and technology are opened up and challenged?

Rather than studying AI in education from the outside, the research proceeds through making; by building LLM-based tools, interactive systems, and participatory learning environments as the primary mode of inquiry. Each prototype is both a technical artefact and a theoretical proposition.

Key questions include:

• What assumptions about intelligence and knowledge are embedded in generative AI systems, and what do those assumptions mean for how we learn and teach?
• How can speculative design methods help us imagine and build alternatives to dominant AI narratives in education - not just critique them?
• How does working with generative tools change the practice of thinking itself?
• How can the conditions of live, performative practice (from live coding to the open research process of PhD-Live itself) offer different models for learning and knowledge-making?