Leon Furze

In About, With, Through, Without, Against: Five Ways to Learn AI, Leon Furze pushes back against simplistic binaries about whether AI helps or harms learning. He argues that young people are adaptable and capable, and proposes five overlapping approaches to thinking about AI in education. Learning about AI covers AI literacy—how to use and understand the technology—but Furze warns against making every teacher responsible for teaching AI skills. Learning with AI includes tutor chatbots and using AI for feedback, though he remains skeptical about personalized learning claims. Learning through AI treats the technology as a conduit or medium, like semantic search engines. The post About, With, Through, Without, Against: Five Ways to Learn AI appeared first on Leon Furze.

In Open Source AI is Going Mainstream, Leon Furze explores the growing significance of open source artificial intelligence beyond the GPT-5 hype cycle. He begins by clarifying what "open source AI" actually means, noting that the term has become contentious—many so-called "open source" models from companies like Meta are more accurately described as "open weights," since their underlying architecture, training processes, and datasets remain proprietary. True open source projects expose their entire codebase to public examination and adaptation. The post Open Source AI is Going Mainstream appeared first on Leon Furze.

He explores how learning management systems already constrain pedagogy by forcing educators to systematize learning into predetermined formats, and questions what happens when OpenAI's chatbot takes control of content production across these platforms. Furze is particularly concerned about OpenAI's study mode—which he found pedagogically flawed despite claims of expert input—and sees it as part of a larger strategy to position the company as the solution to problems it helped create. The post OpenAI Has Come for Education appeared first on 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 generative AI in assessment. The piece invites educators to reconsider what exams should do (and when), rather than automatically preserving the status quo. The post Stuck Thinking and End-of-School Exams appeared first on Leon Furze.

SynopsisLeon Furze lays out his practical workflow for POSSE—Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere—so your website remains the hub and platforms are just spokes. He explains how he posts first on WordPress, lets Jetpack push to Bluesky (and occasionally LinkedIn), uses the ActivityPub plugin to make his site part of the fediverse (with comments […] The post Publish (on your) Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere appeared first on Leon Furze.

Leon Furze argues that the real tension with AI and writing isn’t “death of writing” but purpose. When schools prize the product over the process, generative AI flattens the whole writing cycle, letting students jump from “I need a piece” straight to publication. That shortcut may be fine for functional emails or content farms, but in education the process is the learning; flatten it, and you flatten learning too. The post AI in the Writing Process: A Problem of Purpose appeared first on Leon Furze.

Leon Furze contrasts Tim Berners-Lee’s 1989 vision of an open, decentralised World Wide Web with the “Narrow Web” of 2025—an internet funnelled through half-a-dozen corporate platforms that monetise surveillance, lock users into walled gardens and invert the original principles of universality and non-discrimination. The post The Narrow Web appeared first on Leon Furze.

Leon Furze argues that “lesson planning” is a dynamic act of design and reflection, yet AI platforms from Google, Microsoft and start‑ups like Magic School keep packaging it as a downloadable product: click a button, get a plan. That noun‑based mindset, he says, feeds compliance paperwork and short‑cuts the messy thinking, collegial dialogue and classroom experimentation that turn curriculum into learning. The post Lesson planning is a verb: why does tech keep treating it as a noun? appeared first on Leon Furze.

Leon Furze dismantles recent headlines claiming AI can “save teachers six weeks a year.” He shows how time‑saved tallies in the Walton Foundation/Gallup survey and Microsoft’s Copilot pilot gloss over what tasks are being sped up—and why they exist in the first place. Measuring efficiency, he argues, ignores the deeper causes of burnout: relentless compliance work, eroded autonomy and a culture that treats teaching as piece‑work. The post “Time Saved” is the Wrong Measurement for Teacher Workload and AI appeared first on Leon Furze.

Leon Furze sets aside the chatbot hype to show how the underlying components of AI—image recognition, speech-to-text, text-to-speech and transformer language models—already power a growing suite of assistive technologies. He argues that genuine progress depends on lived-experience design, open standards and a focus on specific user needs, not generic “GPT in everything” solutions. By mapping near-future advances—offline multimodal models, speech-to-sign avatars, adaptive reading platforms and low-cost robotics—Furze invites educators and developers to steer AI toward accessibility rather than spectacle. The post Artificial Intelligence and Assistive Technologies: A Practical Guide appeared first on Leon Furze.

Responding to newspaper calls for tighter controls on generative-AI in senior-school “take-home” tasks, Leon Furze argues that the real culprit is the assessment format itself, not ChatGPT. The article shows that home-based essays and projects have long privileged students with money, tutors or stable study spaces, while disadvantaging those with caring duties, disruptive households or limited technology access—long before large-language models entered classrooms. The post Take-home assessments: AI is not the problem appeared first on Leon Furze.

SynopsisThis post expands Leon Furze’s earlier “expertise problem” argument by introducing a three-dimensional model of expertise for working productively with generative AI. Drawing on Punya Mishra’s domain × technology matrix and adding insights from Dreyfus & Dreyfus, Lave & Wenger and James Paul Gee, Furze distinguishes domain expertise, technological expertise, and a newly foregrounded situated […] The post Three Dimensions of Expertise for AI appeared first on Leon Furze.

This first instalment in the Teaching AI Ethics 2025 series revisits the theme of bias in generative AI. It explains how data bias, model bias and human bias interact to produce skewed or discriminatory outputs in large-language and image-generation systems, illustrates those problems with up-to-date research and examples, critiques the limitations of current “guard-rail” fixes, and closes with practical ways teachers can embed critical discussions of AI bias across English, Mathematics, Civics, Visual Arts and other subjects. The post Teaching AI Ethics 2025: Bias appeared first on Leon Furze.

The opening article in Leon Furze’s new “How I Use the AI Assessment Scale” series demystifies what the AI Assessment Scale (AIAS) actually is—a conversation-starter and design lens for assessment—and, just as importantly, what it is not (an academic-integrity detector, a tech checklist, or a universal benchmark). Leon explains why the latest iteration drops colour-coding in favour of clearer descriptors, stresses the need for discipline-specific judgement alongside AI literacy, and offers a step-by-step preview of how he deploys the scale with teachers before any task is set. By clarifying scope, common misconceptions and practical workflow, Part 1 lays the groundwork for the hands-on demonstrations that will follow in the series. The post How I use the AIAS: Part 1 appeared first on Leon Furze.

Leon Furze answers a reader’s simple question—“Why do you have a blog?”—by invoking nostalgia for the free-form GeoCities era to argue that writers need a “little plot of land” online that they truly own. Adopting the POSSE model, he shows how a single post can be syndicated to LinkedIn, Bluesky, Mastodon, Substack and Medium while the blog remains the canonical source. Furze warns that AI-driven search and “AI slop” content farms are eroding discovery and trust, yet insists that personal blogs still offer control over platform whims, spam filters and intrusive AI assistants. In a GenAI-saturated web, keeping a blog is both an act of digital self-reliance and a teaching tool for open, authentic communication. The post Why Blog? appeared first on Leon Furze.

Leon Furze asks whether platforms and multimodal AIs are steering us toward the “death of communication,” moving from Metal Gear Solid 2’s dystopian monologue through Dead-Internet theory, DARPA’s LifeLog and Google’s “Selfish Ledger,” to Luciano Floridi’s idea of “distant writing.” He argues that while data-hungry algorithms and bot-filled timelines have eroded trust, authorship is not dying so much as shifting from execution to design across text, image, audio and video. Drawing on Molly White’s call for “a different web,” Kress and Van Leeuwen’s multimodal theory and Arendt’s stewardship ethics, Furze concludes that human intentionality—slow newsletters, long-form blogs, careful multimodal design—can still create authentic context, keeping communication alive despite AI’s encroachment. The post AI and the Death of Communication appeared first on 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 creative trade-offs of large language models, explain why I now use image generators far less often, and argue that teachers must rethink “writing” as a multimodal practice rather than a solo keyboard activity. The post Artificial Intelligence Has Changed The Way I Write Forever appeared first on Leon Furze.

Technologies only look “inevitable” in hindsight. From electricity to the internet, their shape was steered by economic interests and historical contingencies—not destiny. The same applies to AI today: claims of its inevitability mainly serve corporate ubiquity strategies. Educators and citizens still have agency to question, constrain and reshape AI rather than accepting it as fate The post The Myth of Inevitable AI appeared first on Leon Furze.

Leon explains why his Teaching AI Ethics series needs a 2025 overhaul, recaps the original nine issues, and invites readers to help deepen the conversation. The post Teaching AI Ethics: Introduction appeared first on Leon Furze.