An extraordinary week.
In this week’s features, Julian Girdham writes about Neil Postman’s 1992 book Technopoly. The text is more accurate and more relevant than ever, and Girdham interprets it through the lens of teachers today. Also in the features, see several excellent visualizations and breakdowns of the coming decline in number of high school age students.
With national politics shifting the narrative (and risks) around diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, posts are starting to appear that explore how to re-orient efforts to fulfill organizational mission and values without running afoul of emerging orders and interpretation of law. Two posts this week from Harvard Business Review make the case for data-driven, collaborative efforts that advance workplace inclusion objectives through new lenses that reconcile institutional values with national narratives.
Also this week in diversity and inclusion, find recent posts from the growing body of writing about the decline of boys’ performance in school. See also posts on the fulfilling life, on long form writing, on how adults can manage our own screen time, and catch phrases from Saturday Night Live that have entered the mainstream culture.
Last, I’ll be at NAIS and SXSWedu in the coming weeks, including a session at NAIS sharing insights from ten years (!) of the Educator’s Notebook. Please let me know if you’ll be at either. I’d love to connect!
All this and more, enjoy!
Peter
Browse and search over 14,000 curated articles from past issues online:
“What we need to consider about the computer has nothing to do with its efficiency as a teaching tool. We need to know in what ways it is altering our conception of learning. / This is exactly right; the very idea of efficiency is highly problematic and suggests the user does not understand the principles of learning, and how it happens, instead using the language of mechanistic production.”
“The authors reference the often-invoked concept of a demographic cliff, pointing out that it might overdramatize the changes to come. “While the cliff metaphor is useful to illustrate the impending demographic shift for policymakers, the reality will be a slower and steadier decline, which has important implications for institutions of higher education, workforce training systems, and state and federal policymakers.” …One big asterisk to the decline in high school graduates: It won’t happen everywhere or at the same speed.”
“Over time, LeFauve came to think that her creativity and her anxiety were hitched to the same sled—that her ability to write inventive stories was tied to the way her mind could also spin worries into overwhelming, catastrophic narratives… Instead of making cataclysmic stories all the time, LeFauve learned to redirect her natural energy in more productive directions, like writing the Pixar hit movies Inside Out and Inside Out 2, about the inner life of a girl named Riley, who learns to embrace the full spectrum of her emotions, appreciating that even those she once perceived as negative, like anxiety or fear, can be used to move her life in the right direction.”
“Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoring — choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities.”
“The 70% rule: If you’re roughly 70% happy with a piece of writing you’ve produced, you should publish it. If you’re 70% satisfied with a product you’ve created, launch it. If you’re 70% sure a decision is the right one, implement it.”
“He knew that our triumphs of invention — fire and language he held above all others — are the fruits of our ability to reason, to question, and to make observations, but he believed that nothing has been more crucial, more fertile, more responsible for our evolutionary success than our “powers of the imagination, wonder, curiosity, [and] an undefined sense of beauty.””
“In the essay, Brooks cites a number of troubling societal problems and trends, all supported with extensive research, but the weakness of his argument is that he tries to find a single cause to explain all of them. That common denominator is what he calls “meritocracy.””
“None of this is to say that happy or meaningful lives cannot be a good ones. But both models fail to capture the breadth of human experience. What of curiosity, ambition and exploration? Or failure and resurgence? Thinking about what happiness and meaning leave out, and the traps they can set us, led me and my research lab to sketch out a third route to fulfilment: psychological richness.”
“The finest such moment comes when one participant, Dipo, whom Sam and Mark have tagged for the role of the prince, lands in a chopper, and proclaims a scrap of Act II, Scene 2: “I have of late—but wherefore I know not—” Then, instead of adding the next phrase, “lost all my mirth,” he turns and lobs a grenade into the helicopter, which explodes. Everybody watching bursts into destruction-loving cackles. Mirth regained.”
“Team members would rather not disrupt the community by challenging ideas presented by their colleagues. When AI is used as a thought partner, the results are profoundly different. The end products are stronger because the team spends more time refining ideas, engaging with student data, and developing content based on the rich discussions had.”
“It will take more than long-form high school essays to save the world, but the cognitive endurance they require is one of the few institutional bastions that remain against the all-out melting of the mind into the machine. When students are accustomed to getting answers so quickly — and used to solutions coming through AI and not their own meandering thoughts — they can find it frustrating to sit down and corral a cogent narrative. But in my view, this is about the most worthy and sustainable work that they can do.”
“At midday, the undergraduate poster session buzzed with expositions on topics including lunar time synchronization; the math of piano tuning; loops in four-dimensional space; and a model for wildfire containment, smoke spread and their public health consequences… “Why is it math?” asked Aleksandra Upton, 7, of a geometric puzzle. “Because we can count all the different ways that we put the shapes together,” said her mother, Karolina Sarnowska-Upton, a software engineering manager at Microsoft in Redmond, Wash.”
“Isn’t that special!”
Some big announcements this week.
In this week’s four (!) features, find a summary by AI for Education of recent research showing that the lower student AI literacy is, the more likely they will use it for academic work. This is a key insight for schools as we develop strategies around AI. If your school does not have an intentional strategy for fostering AI literacy in students, it’s time to start developing one.
Also in the features, find a detailed breakdown by the Center for Curriculum Redesign of ways in which generative AI might be accurately described as “reasoning.” As is customary by the CCR, the report very helpfully deconstructs the relevant terminology into nuanced skills and thinking patterns that help educators understand the mechanics of learning and curriculum.
Also in the features, the US Copyright Office has released formal guidelines on copyright and AI. This will be a foundational source for legal battles to come, and it functions as a natural analogy for how we consider the ownership of student work created with AI.
Last from the features, see the excellent piece by Leon Furze reflecting on the nature of resistance to AI — when it is appropriate, why total resistance isn’t wise, and how to balance acceptance with a critical view of AI.
And from the rest of the AI Update, see an excellent section on AI in education. Leon Furze has also released a post outlining how a school might introduce itself to AI today. If you find your school is just getting started, this is a perfect place to find nearly all the resources you need to make meaningful strides now with AI. Then, take a look at the pieces by KeeNote and No More Marking to dive into excellent granular strategies for leveraging AI for learning in the classroom.
All these and more, enjoy!
Peter
“Recent research finds those with lower AI literacy are MORE likely to embrace AI technology, not less. The reason? They're more likely to view AI as "magical" and experience a sense of awe when AI performs tasks traditionally thought to require human attributes.”
“Many of these resistances all have something in common: they are not a resistance to the technology, they are a resistance to power. These resistors do not object to AI per se, they reject the imposition of technological, corporate control into education that is represented by GenAI… This is not an uninformed, “Luddite” response to technology. It mirrors what I suspect is the experience of many classroom teachers, who have been frustrated over the years with the frequent and sometimes aggressive incursion of tech into the classroom… We have to contend with GenAI, but that does not mean we have to do it blindly, or with a passive, broken acceptance that the technology companies have somehow “won”.”
“The goal of this paper is to: 1. Determine which types of cognitive processes and procedures (aka “modes of thinking”) are used in human reasoning. 2. Determine which forms of human reasoning can be mimicked/reproduced by Generative AI–specifically Large Language Models (LLMs). Hereinafter, it will be referred to as “GenAI” unless otherwise indicated (in the case of Symbolic AI, for instance).”
“Based on an analysis of copyright law and policy, informed by the many thoughtful comments in response to our NOI, the Office makes the following conclusions and recommendations: Copyright protects the original expression in a work created by a human author, even if the work also includes AI-generated material. Copyright does not extend to purely AI-generated material, or material where there is insufficient human control over the expressive elements. Whether human contributions to AI-generated outputs are sufficient to constitute authorship must be analyzed on a case-by-case basis. Based on the functioning of current generally available technology, prompts do not alone provide sufficient control.”
“I was intrigued (and admittedly entertained!), and asked them—“How is AI helpful?” They explained that all the feedback was personalized and delivered within seconds. There is no way a teacher could provide such individual attention within a class period. When I walked in, they were in the process of improving their drafts based on the AI input and many students were working with their teacher on the feedback, finding ways to incorporate it or not. Students had to understand what helped them to create their unique voice and what was not part of their thinking. It was the kind of complicated and interesting thinking that all writing teachers want to have with students. This time, technology helped create a moment to have that discussion, and it was really intriguing to watch.”
“Suppose you are learning to drive, and during a lesson, your instructor says very little. At the end, he hands you a lengthy and specific written comment… This is all true, but it is not very helpful. And, crucially, even if you doubled it in length or added even more detail, it would still not be that helpful. What you need – and what the majority of instructors would actually do – is to have another go at parallel parking with the focus on slowing down and checking your mirrors.”
“This post is a (re)introduction to GenAI for those educators who still feel like they’re behind, or for those who experimented in the early days since ChatGPT’s release, but have not gone back to the technology. It’s also for those who have tried to keep on top of every update and advance, only to find that the arms race between Google, Meta, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and OpenAI has left their heads spinning.”
“Across all conditions, engaging in a conversation with ChatGPT-4o significantly reduces belief certainty, indicating that people were amenable to evidence-based persuasion even when they held these beliefs with high levels of confidence. Remarkably, around 29% of the respondents also switched beliefs—reflecting a change from their false or unsupported belief to that same belief’s accurate counterpart post-treatment.”
“Human Authored “isn’t about rejecting technology – it’s about creating transparency, acknowledging the reader’s desire for human connection, and celebrating the uniquely human elements of storytelling,” chief executive Mary Rasenberger said in a statement.”
Every week I send out articles I encounter from around the web. Subject matter ranges from hard knowledge about teaching to research about creativity and cognitive science to stories from other industries that, by analogy, inform what we do as educators. This breadth helps us see our work in new ways.
Readers include teachers, school leaders, university overseers, conference organizers, think tank workers, startup founders, nonprofit leaders, and people who are simply interested in what’s happening in education. They say it helps them keep tabs on what matters most in the conversation surrounding schools, teaching, learning, and more.
– Peter Nilsson