A weekly collection of education-related news from around the web.

Educator’s Notebook #486 (May 18, 2025)

INTRODUCTION

  • Excellent writing this week —

    In the features, check out Ezra Klein’s interview with Rebecca Winthrop from Brookings for an informed and thoughtful conversation about school in the age of AI. Also in the features, find an article from 1988 on why it’s important to teach history. (I love reading old articles on topics that are still relevant — sometimes it’s striking how much they are the same as present thinking, and other times it’s extraordinary just how different they are.)

    Also this week, find an excellent post in the Curriculum section on media literacy, a similarly excellent post featured in the AI update on academic integrity in an age of AI, and much more.

    Mostly, I’m reminded these recent weeks while compiling these newsletters how much volatile politics crowd out journalistic writing about the nuts and bolts of teaching & learning, which is where the greatest value for educators lies. High quality teaching and learning come from the small things we do in the classroom every day: building connections, asking good questions, paying attention to students, focusing on embodied learning experiences — and these aren’t as novel or exciting as “the news.” But they’re essential for us to keep at the fore. And perhaps as a reminder — in the midst of our political moment — of how important the nuts and bolts are: while the congressional majority in Washington has seemed fine with the Executive Branch taking authority over Legislative Branch functions, this week, when the Executive Branch sought to take control of the Library of Congress, all of Congress united against it. They’ll give up budget control, international relations, whole federal departments, and more — but not the library. To me, it’s a stark statement: that libraries — information, research, access — matter deeply. In other words: learning matters. Find more on recent events at the Library of Congress in the Government section below.

    Last, the AI Update below is rich both with practical tools and with increasingly divergent future predictions for our AI-infused world.

    These and more, enjoy!

    Peter

    How to use counterclaims in writing, in the Reading/Writing section

     


     

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    • New York Times
    • 05/13/25

    “In 1976, if you asked high school seniors whether they had read any books in the last year for fun, about 40 percent of them had read at least six books for fun in the last year, and only about 11 percent hadn’t read a single book for fun. Today, those numbers are basically reversed: About 40 percent haven’t read a single book for fun… And then — as if we summoned it or wrote it into the script — here comes a technology, generative A.I., that can do it all: that will read the book and summarize it for you; write the essay for you; do the math problem, even showing its work, for them… I don’t know what the economy or society is going to want from [my kids] in 16 or 20 years. And if I don’t know what it’s going to want from them, what it’s going to reward in them, how do I know how they should be educated? How do I know if the education I am creating for them is doing a good job? How do I know if I’m failing them? How do you prepare for the unpredictable?”

    • Atlantic
    • 11/01/88

    “Textbooks would not need to be partisan in order to point out the danger of the partisan skewing of public issues. Left and right so often prefer to cry wolf, or conspiracy, when dull fact says otherwise. And it Is not only in children’s stories that when the facts justify alarm they are not heeded, because alarm has been so often abused.”

ARTS

    • WBUR
    • 05/12/25
    • New York Times
    • 05/11/25

    “It all adds up to the genre experiencing extraordinary reach: the variety of dance music people are producing and enjoying, the places they’re dancing to it, and the amount of media being generated about it. And depending on whom you ask, judging by the many interviews conducted for this article with D.J.s, label heads, bookers and venue owners across the dance music spectrum, that’s for better or worse — often both… The world, as it turned out, wanted to dance. A lot. After over a year of social isolation, people of all ages began making up for lost time.”

    • Slate
    • 05/10/25

CHARACTER

CREATIVITY

CURRICULUM

DIVERSITY/INCLUSION

GOVERNMENT

HIGHER ED

HUMANITIES

READING/WRITING

STEM

    • New York Times
    • 05/15/25

    “The work, they said, began decades ago with federal funding for basic research on bacterial immune systems. That led eventually, with more federal support, to the discovery of CRISPR. Federal investment in sequencing the human genome made it possible to identify KJ’s mutation. U.S. funding supported Dr. Liu’s lab and its editing discovery. A federal program to study gene editing supported Dr. Musunuru’s research. Going along in parallel was federally funded work that led to an understanding of KJ’s disease.”

TECH

WORKPLACE

GENERAL

A.I. Update

A.I. UPDATE

  • What a week.

    In the features, find two wildly divergent forecasts about how AI will affect our lives in the next 3-5 years.  AI 2027 (in both the features and ethics and risk) paint a picture of AI spinning out of control within two years.  And “AI as a Normal Technology” paints something much more mundane. So much depends on the decisions we make — and the decisions we make depend on the conversations we have and the learning they produce.

    Also in the features, find an excellent examination of Academic Integrity in an age of AI. It’s not just about boundaries on assignments — it’s about transparency and explainability, and how those connect to the cultures of our classrooms.

    Also this week, see an excellent post comparing Claude and ChatGPT. I’ve recently switched to a paid subscription to Claude as my primary AI tool for many of the reasons now helpfully articulated in the post in the Education section.

    These and much more, enjoy!

    Peter

    Characteristics of two leading tools
    • New York Times
    • 05/15/25

    “Kokotajlo: Yeah. And here might be a good point to mention that “AI 2027” is a forecast, but it’s not a recommendation. We are not saying this is what everyone should do. This is actually quite bad for humanity if things progress in the way that we’re talking about. But this is the logic behind why we think this might happen. Douthat: Yeah, but Dan, we haven’t even gotten to the part that’s really bad for humanity yet.”

    • Cult of Pedagogy
    • 05/11/25

    “Susan Morrow and Katherine Switzer revealed a different approach to accountability: the power of relationships, transparency, and explainability to ensure the integrity of results. The following steps can help you, and your students, take action to ensure academic integrity.”

    • Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University
    • 04/15/25

    “To view AI as normal is not to understate its impact—even transformative, general-purpose technologies such as electricity and the internet are “normal” in our conception. But it is in contrast to both utopian and dystopian visions of the future of AI which have a common tendency to treat it akin to a separate species, a highly autonomous, potentially superintelligent entity… The statement “AI is normal technology” is three things: a description of current AI, a prediction about the foreseeable future of AI, and a prescription about how we should treat it.”

TECH/AI: EDUCATION

TECH/AI: ETHICS AND RISK

TECH/AI: GOVERNMENT AND LAW

TECH/AI: INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT

TECH/AI: USES AND APPLICATIONS

TECH/AI: GENERAL

    • New Yorker
    • 04/29/25

    “In theory, there’s a third possibility. Observers of A.I. have long noted the existence of “centaurs”—human experts who push their efforts further with the help of computers. Maybe, for example, the first, well-trained cook could use an A.I. to come up with even more inventive recipes. But this optimistic scenario presupposes the continued existence of well-trained cooks.”

Issues

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

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