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

A “Semi-Optimistic” Look At The Decline Of Reading In An Age Of Brainrot

“I am not alone in feeling that students who came of age at this time have been harmed, cognitively, by that combination of brainrot outside of school and the loss of a physical connection to classic works of literature in the classroom. Ironically, however, that very literature was once profoundly controversial. What we now call […]

“AI Makes The Humanities More Important, But Also A Lot Weirder”

“Language models are a genuinely novel teaching tool. Their impact is still uncertain. What that means is that now is exactly the time when people who are genuinely passionate about teaching and learning for its own sake — not as a scorecard to judge politicians, not as a source of corporate profit — need to take an […]

AI Can Research, But We Still Need People To Interpret Research

“Generative AI has made it absurdly easy to generate a lot of text or images. But it hasn’t made us any better at subtracting the useful, meaningful, or simply interesting stuff from text and images — isolating the gold from the fool’s gold.”

3 Case Studies For Using GenAI As A Historian

“The headaches that LLMs have caused in the classroom are (I believe) more than counterbalanced by what they can offer as tools for research and self-directed learning. For this reason, I’m now even more optimistic about the long-term impact and utility of AI tools for historical research — and, by extension, for other forms of […]

“How To Use Generative A.I. For Historical Research”

“Being a historian, I’m interested in how this technology might be used to augment primary source research: the act of reading, organizing, and analyzing the data to be found in historical texts, images, and other media. The rest of this post describes four case studies of how generative AI could be used in this way. […]

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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