EdTechSR Ep 354: Beyond the Town Square

Welcome to episode 354 (“Beyond the Town Square”) of the EdTech Situation Room from June 25, 2025, where technology news meets educational analysis. This week, Dr. Jason Neiffer (aicentrist.com) and Dr. Wesley Fryer (wesfryer.com) open with a quick check-in and the episode lineup, then dive into Creative Commons in the classroom via Flickr’s move to CC 4.0—and why explicit instruction on copyright, fair use, and open licensing belongs in digital literacy for every student . From there, they unpack free-speech narratives on U.S. campuses through a media-literacy lens—highlighting News Over Noise’s interview with Bradford Vivian and reflecting on universities as places for genuine intellectual diversity and debate . The conversation pivots to AI and assessment: what a recent MIT study using EEG really suggests about “brain-only” writing versus hybrid, tool-supported workflows (spoiler: copy-paste LLM use shows low cognitive engagement, but a structured fourth session with LLMs boosted recall and distributed cognitive effort) and how this translates into practical classroom policy, including the growing role of lockdown browsers for in-class quizzes . They also examine the civil-liberties side of edtech—biometrics, surveillance, and border device searches—through a sobering case study of a journalist’s deportation linked to online writing, and what that means for educators and travelers managing their digital footprint . To wrap up, Geeks of the Week spotlight a handy local-AI platform for Mac/Apple-silicon and API users (Witsy) and a dead-simple booklet-printing utility (BookletCreator) that Wes’ classroom is already putting to work.Our show was live-streamed and archived on YouTube Live via StreamYard.com and auto-archived to YouTube. We are now publishing from Substack too! Subscribe to us with your favorite podcast listening app, or directly on or https://www.youtube.com/@edtechSR. Follow our EdTechSR page on Facebook, mastodon.education/@edtechsr on Mastodon for updates, and join LIVE on Wednesday nights if you can. All show notes are available at edtechSR.com/links.🔗 Links We Discussed* Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task (MIT; 10 June 2025)* Ethan Mollick on LinkedIn* Reports of Bluesky’s Death Have Been Greatly Exaggerated (MATHEW INGRAM, 18 Jun 2025)* Facebook Group Admins Complain of Mass Bans, Meta Says It’s Fixing the Problem (TechCrunch, 24 June 2025)* AI is ruining Pinterest. Here’s why it’s such a big problem (ZDnet, 11 March 2025)* The High Stakes of Biometric Surveillance (Tech Policy Press, 24 June 2025)* How My Reporting on the Columbia Protests Led to My Deportation (The New Yorker, 24 June 2025)* News Over Noise [PODCAST] Episode 308: The Campus Free Speech Panic: Who’s Fueling the Misinformation Machine? (Bradford Vivian)* Creative Commons 4.0 Has Arrived on Flickr! (Flickr, 18 Jun 2025)* Geeks of the Week* Jason: https://witsyai.com/* Wes: Wes’ Pinboard - Creating Cool Websites (June 2025 media camp) - BookletCreator🧭 Links We Did NOT Discuss* This Year’s Hot New Tool for Chefs? ChatGPT. (NYT; 2 June 2025 - Gift Link)* Hardfork Interview with Pete Wells* AI Company Anthropic Sued Over Use of Copyrighted Books to Train Chatbots (AP News, 25 June 2025)* From Threads to Thoughts: How Social Media Is Shaping Public Dialogue (Deliberative Citizenship Initiative, 24 June 2025)Episode 354 is also available on YouTube. Get full access to EdTech Situation Room Podcast at edtechsr.substack.com/subscribe