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

The AI Companion Future No One Asked For

“What we’re seeing in the development space is a sadly typical pattern of reckless deployments that ask users to come up with their own responsible use cases instead of the creators who build and monetize these platforms. The public shouldn’t be the ones left figuring out how best to use this technology safely. What’s worse, […]

Why Trojan Horses And Deceptive Assessment Have No Place In Schools

“When you resort to deception to try and catch students cheating, you’ve compromised the values of honesty and transparency that come implicitly attached to our profession… Faculty are decent people. Students are as well. Both are in the wilderness now trying to navigate how to use or resist AI.”

“AI As A Cultural Technology”

“Generative tools are increasingly impacting how we access and view information in our digital spaces. As Alison Gopnik argues, “these models are “cultural technologies” like writing, print, pictures, libraries, internet search engines, and Wikipedia.” Cultural technologies increase our access to information but also transform how we view technology in our daily lives. Put simply, generative […]

Explore The Wild World Of NotebookLM For Your Classes

“Everyone started talking about Google’s NotebookLM because of their recent podcast update, but the real story is about how Google is using its AI experiments to push our understanding about how people will use generative AI as tools for thought.”

A Case For Not Using AI For Writing Until After The First Draft

“The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and […]

We Are In An Age Of Synthetic Relationships. They’re Growing.

“It is increasingly looking like generative AI won’t become intelligent to achieve true AGI, but human beings will still put their trust into these black box systems and may one day be willing to cede autonomy and critical decision-making to an algorithm. To those who scoff at this, and I imagine there are many, know […]

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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