Interesting Reads This Week
Pendulum swings, gravitational pulls, and some loose associations
Glenda Morgan
November 22, 2025
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I’m enjoying a couple of days at home in between attending OLC Accelerate in Orlando and heading to the Midwest for Thanksgiving. Here’s a copy of my OLC presentation available for download. The conference itself was ovely opportunity to catch up with old and new friends. That said, everything around Disney increasingly reminds me of a humid Las Vegas with ears.
I did manage to find some excellent knife-cut noodles in a strip mall away from the action.
But what did I read this week?
The platform giants want your homework
I’ve been thinking quite a lot lately about Big Tech and its role in EdTech, and a few things I read this week added some grist to that particular mill. Some of it was sparked by watching the Instructure announcement about new AI features that Phil wrote about yesterday. One of the things the presentation brought home to me was the constant pendulum swing between what’s provided within the LMS and what users supplement with external tools. One of the features announced was AI-assisted grading, something folks have traditionally looked for in external tools. This has always struck me as a pendulum pattern: functionality is provided within the LMS, then new tools add features or usability and users adopt those, and then the LMS upgrades its native tool set and users swing back.
But I wonder if AI changes that. What got me thinking about this were two posts. The first was from Wess Trabelsi on Google and EdTech. Apart from the substantive content, he had me right out of the gate with this disclaimer.
This is the third or fourth rewrite of an article I started in September. After largely unplugging for the summer, and battling a prolonged fit of procrastinitis in the early fall, I finally sat down to write. But every time I did, new developments emerged that demanded I add on to what I was saying.
I’ve been struggling with that more than a little myself this week.
