TikTok Theory

Educational Theory on TikTok: What Changes in Sixty Seconds?

What happens to theory when it leaves the pages of an academic paper and enters TikTok? It has less time, fewer words, and a very different audience. It must now travel through voice, movement, captions, images, humour, and the personality of the person communicating it. Professor Casey Fiesler’s TikTok feed offers an interesting example of this movement. Her videos bring scholarly ideas about artificial intelligence, ethics, policy, and education into a public space where they become easier to encounter but also considerably less detailed.

Fiesler is a professor of information science whose work focuses on technology ethics, policy, online communities, and computing education (Fiesler, n.d.-a). Her TikTok profile, @professorcasey, had approximately 122,300 followers and 3.8 million likes when I viewed it. The feed includes collections such as “How LLMs Work,” “AI Risk Taxonomy,” and “AI/Ethics” (Fiesler, n.d.-b). Fiesler calls her TikTok-based technology ethics collection the “60-second at a time version” of her course (Fiesler, n.d.-a). Her feed begins to operate like a public micro-course, carrying ideas normally encountered in universities into everyday spaces where people scroll, comment, question, and sometimes learn without deliberately entering a classroom.

Fiesler talks about generative AI, algorithmic bias, copyright, consent, environmental concerns, classroom policies, and the social consequences of technology. She addresses students, educators, researchers, content creators, technology companies, AI users, and those who choose not to use AI. Comments and video replies allow viewers’ questions to redirect and extend these discussions.

What, then, makes this educational theorizing? Educational theory can ask what education should value, how knowledge is formed, whose voices count, and how power is distributed among learners, educators, institutions, and technologies. Should students be required to use AI because institutions consider it an essential future skill? Might refusing AI represent an informed ethical decision? These theoretical questions about agency, authority, and responsibility become practical when their answers shape classroom policies and assessment.

This connection is visible in Fiesler’s video discussing “Why We’re Not Using AI in This Course, Despite Its Obvious Benefits” (Fiesler, 2025b). Rather than treating AI adoption as inevitable, the video presents non-use as a reasoned educational decision. The instructor’s responsibility is not simply to ban or promote AI, but to explain the values and consequences behind that decision.

A related clip discusses students who object to animal dissection and the existence of student-choice laws (Fiesler, 2025b). It suggests that educational participation does not always require compliance with every tool or activity. Placed beside the discussion of AI resistance, it raises a wider question: when does refusal become part of students’ epistemic and ethical agency rather than evidence that they are unwilling to learn?

The clearest example of theory moving across media appears in Fiesler’s video about “AI veganism” (Fiesler, 2025a). Behind her is David Joyner’s article comparing resistance to AI with ethical, environmental, and personal reasons for veganism. Joyner draws partly upon Wells et al.’s (2025) mixed-methods study of why experienced users avoid generative AI in particular contexts, including concerns about output quality, ethics, and the loss of human connection.

Fiesler remediates the argument once more. The original study contains methods, evidence, categories, and qualifications. Joyner’s article turns the research into an analogy for a broad readership. Fiesler then places these texts visibly behind her and translates their main ideas through speech, captions, expressions, and gestures. Theory does not move unchanged from one medium into another. At each stage, some aspects become more visible while others recede. The TikTok makes the argument easier to approach, but much of the depth through which the original research establishes that argument is left behind.

This loss of depth does not necessarily make the TikTok intellectually empty. I usually do not enjoy watching TikTok, yet I enjoyed watching Fiesler. Reading an entire paper requires sustained attention, while her combination of voice, captions, visible texts, and changing images made it easier for me to focus. Within a few minutes, I could understand the essence of a paper I may not otherwise have opened. The TikTok does not replace the paper, but it can open a door leading towards it.

That door does not open equally for everyone. When I shared a clip with a family member unfamiliar with current debates about generative AI, much of its meaning remained inaccessible. The scholarly argument was simplified, but it still didn't fully explain it to a lay audience. Fiesler still assumes some familiarity with AI, higher education, and technology ethics. TikTok therefore lowers the threshold for encountering theory without completely removing the knowledge needed to understand it.

Fiesler’s bright glasses, earrings, gestures, and expressions also become part of the remediation. On TikTok, the scholar’s body enters the theory. Her recognizable style creates continuity, while the bookshelves and research displayed behind her reinforce her scholarly presence. Authority is built not only through citations and credentials, but also through familiarity, personality, and repeated attempts to make difficult ideas understandable.

TikTok offers other tools that reshape theorizing. In one clip, Fiesler compares students’ objections to generative AI with the history of ethical resistance to frog dissection (Fiesler, 2026). The familiar image of a frog makes the question of ethical refusal immediately recognizable. Educational participation, the clip suggests, does not always require compliance with every tool or activity. The video is itself a response to a viewer’s comment, showing how one comment can become the starting point for another theoretical explanation. Unlike the apparent finality of a published paper, theory on TikTok can remain unfinished and responsive.

Yet the platform also restricts what theory can become. Short videos favour a clear, memorable point over methodological explanation, uncertainty, historical context, and competing interpretations. TikTok’s algorithm may also give greater visibility to ideas that are immediate, personal, surprising, or emotionally engaging. “AI veganism” travels more easily than “drivers of non-use,” although the latter represents the original research more precisely. TikTok does not merely carry theory into the world; its tools and expectations determine what parts of theory can travel.

Fiesler’s feed shows that theory on TikTok is not simply academic knowledge made shorter. It becomes more visible, embodied, conversational, and connected to immediate educational decisions. At the same time, it becomes selective, compressed, and vulnerable to separation from the evidence that produced it. TikTok can bring theory out of the journal and into everyday life, but it cannot carry everything with it. It allows more people to encounter the doorway to an idea. Whether they walk through that doorway towards deeper understanding remains another question.

References

Fiesler, C. (n.d.-a). Hi there, you found me on TikTok. Retrieved October 6, 2026, from https://caseyfiesler.com/tiktok-links/

Fiesler, C. [@professorcasey]. (n.d.-b). Professor Casey Fiesler [TikTok profile]. TikTok. Retrieved October 6, 2026, from https://www.tiktok.com/@professorcasey

Fiesler, C. [@professorcasey]. (2025a, August 7). AI vegans? Some thoughts on generative AI refusal and non-use [Video]. TikTok. https://www.tiktok.com/@professorcasey/video/7535972050272308511

Fiesler, C. [@professorcasey]. (2025b, August 14). Why we’re not using AI in this course, despite its obvious benefits [Video]. TikTok. https://www.tiktok.com/@professorcasey/video/7538579704975166751

Fiesler, C. [@professorcasey]. (2026, August 25). How generative AI is like a frog: Student resistance and ethical objections [Video]. TikTok. https://www.tiktok.com/@professorcasey/video/7677753192024673566

Joyner, D. (2025, July 29). “AI veganism”: Some people’s issues with AI parallel vegans’ concerns about diet. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/ai-veganism-some-peoples-issues-with-ai-parallel-vegans-concerns-about-diet-260277

Wells, T., Steffen, J., Hughes, A., Richardson, B., Meservy, T., & Schuetzler, R. (2025). Resistance to generative AI: Investigating the drivers of non-use. Proceedings of the 58th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. https://aisel.aisnet.org/hicss-58/cl/machines_as_teammates/5/