seedlings
Smart glasses, marketed as innovative learning tools, pose serious ethical and safety risks in schools, including covert surveillance and misuse. Arantes and Welsman urge regulation, transparency, and public discourse, warning against normalising wearable tech without consent safeguards—especially as it intersects with online misogyny, AI misuse, and influencer-driven promotion.
If a student can livestream a teacher’s response without their knowledge, what happens to trust in the classroom? As surveillance becomes wearable and invisible, are we sleepwalking into a future where education serves data markets over learning—and where safety is sacrificed in the name of innovation?
Arantes highlights the urgent threat of cyberabuse and AI-driven deepfakes targeting teachers. As legislation against doxing emerges, teachers remain vulnerable to viral attacks that devastate careers and mental health. Arantes calls for trauma-informed research, stronger protections, and systemic action to safeguard educators in the age of AI.
When a teacher’s face can be turned into viral abuse with a single click, what protections truly exist? In a world where algorithms amplify harm and deepfakes blur reality, can we afford to delay redefining teacher rights? If we don’t act now, who will be left to teach?
Arantes argues that smartphones should be banned in schools—not due to disruption, but to protect students from unchecked data collection. Drawing on ACCC, AHRC, and CSIRO reports, she warns that children cannot give informed consent and schools must act as data stewards. Restricting smartphones helps safeguard digital rights.
If schools ignore the hidden data economy behind student smartphone use, are they complicit in the exploitation of children’s privacy?
A seedling does not begin the story, it merely appears at a moment in the cycle. Like all living things, it emerges, unfurls, withers, and returns to the soil, not in linear time but in rhythm. To speak of a seedling is not to name a beginning, but to notice a becoming. In Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, knowledge spreads horizontally, unpredictably, refusing fixed origin or hierarchy. Haraway’s sympoiesis reminds us that nothing makes itself alone—ideas, like organisms, co-evolve in entangled ways, and Freire’s pedagogy teaches us that learning is not a product but a process, an act of becoming more fully human, always incomplete, always collective. These seedlings, whether original insights or repurposed talks, articles, and media, are offered not as answers but as invitations. They are fragments, provocations, starting-again points. They ask us to think with, to think otherwise. They are gestures of social impact.
The Australian government’s decision to include LGBTQIA+ data in the 2026 census marks a critical win for visibility and data justice. This reversal enables more equitable educational research and automated governance systems, helping ensure LGBTQIA+ communities are no longer sidelined in national policy, education, and digital infrastructures.
If data defines who counts, then what happens to those left out? In an age of automation, invisibility isn’t just erasure—it’s exclusion from the future. Whose needs are we programming into our systems, and whose realities are we still choosing to ignore?
In this chapter the presence of AI technologies in shaping contemporary childhood experiences is critically considered utilizing the concepts of Hiraeth (a deep, nostalgic longing for something lost or unattainable), Poiesis (creative making) and Mimesis (imitation). This paper engages with AI in three key educational encounters: adaptive learning platforms, AI-powered voice assistants, and critical public engagement. An investigation of AI-driven adaptive learning platforms, analyse how they personalize education while subtly conditioning both teachers and students to accept AI's authority without question. Next, explorations of the interactions between children and AI voice assistants, reveal how these technologies shape children's identities and communication styles, positioning AI as a respondent to their queries. Finally, an examination of the growing public awareness of AI's societal impacts, highlighting how critical engagement can lead to a more nuanced understanding of AI's role in daily life.
This paper focuses on our experiences as higher education workers and the changing work culture that has resulted in the move to online digital labour. Through a nomenclature of ‘postdigital presence’ we discuss how there has been a fundamental change in how we experience academic work, and narrate how it has (re)formed our working worlds. As future projections, we situate notions of the Slow University and Quiet Quitting as counter hegemonic tactics for policy makers to consider, by reflecting on three ‘interruptions’ around Remote and Isolated work, Job Demands, and Digital Fatigue. We conclude that there is a need to engage in critical questioning around digital labour as an emergent social, anthropological and technological phenomena, not only for improved academic well-being, but also due to the financial risk to institutions of academics being always ‘on standby’.