UNBOUND: Education in the Age of Disruption
Analysis, resources, and field insights through the lens of Sustainable Learning.
When the Tool Becomes the Threat: What UNICEF's Data Governance Report Reveals About Digital Stewardship
In January 2025, a single cyberattack on one EdTech company compromised student data across 80 school districts in Canada and reached into the United States.
UNICEF Innocenti called it a case illustration — not a turning point.
Their new data governance report, developed across five regions with data protection authorities, civil society, and EdTech companies, confirms what education systems have been signaling for years: tools entering classrooms are optimized for adoption, not learning, and the students bearing the most risk are those who were already most vulnerable.
The latest piece in UNBOUND reads the report through a Digital Stewardship lens. What the policy consensus is finally naming. What it still leaves for practitioners to do.
When “Open” Becomes Extraction
When “open” becomes extraction: the OER–AI conundrum reveals what happens when knowledge is treated as free input rather than shared infrastructure—and why digital stewardship now matters.
Beyond Digital as Usual: Digital Stewardship as Public Infrastructure
Last week I promised an AI field guide. What arrived instead was a manifesto.
This week on UNBOUND, I explore what UNICEF’s strategy gets right—and why digital stewardship must extend beyond tools to include ideas, attribution, and faithful co-creation.
Public Good AI needed to ensure AI strengthens—not weakens—education.
If AI were built as a public good —transparent, governed, and accessible—an entirely new class of educational problems would become solvable. Most importantly, we could finally address a challenge that has undermined learning for decades: how to keep education functioning when systems around it fail.