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

A History Of Technological Changes: Gains And Losses

“Technological innovations have repeatedly transformed human cognition by externalizing, amplifying, and reorganizing knowledge and skills. While the economic and institutional consequences of technological change have been extensively studied, its long-term cognitive and epistemic effects remain underexamined. This paper conceptualizes technology as an epistemic change agent. It examines how successive technological innovations—from writing and printing to […]

“AI In 2025: A Combinatorial Explosion Of Possibilities, But NOT AGI”

“This list of 23 development vectors not only underscores the combinatorial complexity at play but also pinpoints the areas with the highest transformative potential (highlighted). Whether you’re an engineer, researcher, or enthusiast, these insights offer a roadmap to understanding GenAI’s pivotal transition into its engineering phase.”

“Does Present-Day GenAI Actually Reason?”

“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 […]

Learnoids: How 1 Million Synthetic Students Might Inform Curriculum Design

“Although this research took place more than two years ago, the world of education is only now ready to pay attention to techniques such as synthetic data, thanks to GenAI, hence the release of this work. Its inspiration comes from health care, where synthetic data is used to simulate large numbers of patients, when the […]

“The Frustrating Quest To Define AGI”

“The AI community has been loose in its use of anthropocentric language, using words such as “emergence” rather than “thresholding,” “reasoning” rather than “reckoning” and “retrieval,” “understanding” rather than “pattern-matching,” and “hallucination” rather than “confabulation.” Mercifully, after a couple of years of thrashing around with definitions and counter-definitions of Intelligence, a stasis has been reached […]

A Self-Paced AI Literacy Course For Educators

“This AI Literacy course, designed for all educators, includes: A 20-hour program — asynchronous + office hours, flexible and self-paced — that covers the why, what, and how of AI.”

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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