Neither the genie nor the bottle

Read the conference programs, the policy updates and the petitions of the past few months together, and a pattern emerges. The conversation has moved away from platforms toward a focus on pedagogy. As someone who has spent years arguing that the tool is the least interesting part of the question, I welcome this. I am also watching it carefully, these shifts in focus rarely happen gently.

Where the signal is coming from

The signal is easy to find. ASCILITE has themed its 2026 conference The Future is Connection: Collaboration, Creativity and Compassion in a Digital Society, with sub-themes including Human-Centred Learning Design and Rebalancing the Algorithm, the latter asking how compassion, ethics of care, human agency, equity and diverse knowledge systems can guide the adoption of digital technology. That is a sector setting its 2027 agenda around people rather than products.

Schools are moving too, though from a different direction. Victoria’s digital learning policy will cap device use at 90 minutes a day for Years 3 to 6 from 2027, keep Foundation to Year 2 use minimal, and require planned device-free time in secondary classrooms. The federal Education Minister has talked publicly about pen and paper, long-term memory, and possibly returning the NAPLAN writing test to handwriting (Clare, 2026), a conversation the Guardian covered as a national digital detox. Close to 29,000 people have signed the Heads Up Alliance petition calling for device-free primary schools, largely non-digital secondary learning, and the exclusion of generative AI from school learning.

Is a swing to pedagogy a swing away from technology?

So here is my question: is a swing from platform to pedagogy the same as a swing away from technology? It should not be. We conflate the two because “screens are bad” makes a far better sound bite than “it depends on the task, the age, the design and the teacher”.

The research says the picture is mixed rather than damning. Jason Lodge (2026) points out that simply exposing students to technology does not build digital literacy; this is supported by recent reports finding that only half of Year 6 students and 37% of Year 10 students met the national digital skills standard in 2025. Beckman and Apps (2026) make the equity case: the students who stand to lose most from blanket restriction are those with the least access and the weakest digital literacy at home. Mason et al. (2025) argue that a minutes-per-day rule treats purposeful creation and passive consumption as the same activity, and signals distrust in teacher judgement.

My judgement is that bans appeal precisely because they are measurable. Ninety minutes is auditable. Judgement is not. We cannot put the genie back in the bottle, and pretending otherwise leaves students to meet these tools alone, unsupervised and unprepared.

What students already meet online

Consider what students already meet when they jump online. Internet searching is the most frequently reported study activity for both Year 6 and Year 10 students (Friedman et al., 2026), and search now answers rather than points: a study by Oumi found that only 39% of Google AI Overviews proved both correct and fully supported by the sources they cited (Webb, 2026). Cheng et al. (2026) found that AI systems affirm users around 50% more than other humans do, including when the user is in the wrong. Wang and Zhang (2026) found the poorest outcomes not among students who avoided AI, but among those half-using it, spending more effort for less depth. I wrote about the same pattern in reading when I asked who is reading for you now.

Absence solves none of this. Instruction does.

The human in the loop needs a job description

Being present is not the same as being vigilant. The human in the loop verifies a claim against a source, recognises when a system is agreeing rather than informing, decides what to delegate and what to own, and notices when an answer arrived too easily. Miner (2026) calls the deliberate preservation of that struggle pedagogical friction: designing learning so the cognitive work still has to happen, whatever the finished product looks like. Teacher librarians have built this for decades under the name of information literacy. My recent research, co-authored with Dr Kasey Garrison, with primary teacher librarians points the same way, suggesting that the strongest foundations come from curriculum-embedded work, often using non-digital resources, long before AI enters the room.

Refusing the choice

The pendulum swinging in this moment says choose: connection or technology, pedagogy or platform, print or screen. I would rather we refused the choice. The most human capability we can teach is not avoidance. It is discernment: knowing what a tool is for, what it costs, and when to close the laptop and think.

If this is your work too, you might also like Tuning in: taking your attention back and Drowning in a storm of synthetics.

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