An excellent week.
It was about 13 years ago that the topic of creativity was buzzing with new books and essays, and now people are talking and writing about it again, perhaps because of AI. In this week’s features, find one article on the mechanics of teaching the creative habit within our disciplines and a second one how AI may be fundamentally changing the way scientific discovery is happening. Later in the Creativity section, add in a video essay with a technique for generating ideas.
Elsewhere this week, find articles about ways in which we can find our way out of the culture wars: on finding common ground amidst a DEI backlash, on how we can talk about elections in charged times, and even on Shakespeare in times of literary diversification.
Plus a robust AI section below to boot.
These and more, enjoy!
Peter
“Although historically associated with a more inquiry-based approach, this article focuses on the development of creativity as part of a knowledge-rich curriculum. It describes the role of subject-specific knowledge in the development of creative expertise and highlights effective strategies for nurturing creativity with specific examples from English, Science and Technology, and Creative Arts.”
“These were outstanding and fundamentally human accomplishments, to be sure. But the Nobel recognition underscored a chilling prospect: Henceforth, perhaps scientists will merely craft the tools that make the breakthroughs, rather than do the revolutionary work themselves or even understand how it came about. Artificial intelligence designs and builds hundreds of molecular Notre Dames and Hagia Sophias, and a researcher gets a pat for inventing the shovel.”
“That’s almost three times as many buildings as there are in Manhattan island, New York.”
So much of our discourse around AI reflects a binary “with us or against us” mindset. Many people are “for” AI, and many others are “against” it. This is a mistake, of course, as is binary thinking in most complex conversations. In this week’s AI section, find several posts that aim to help us move away from this kind of binary thinking.
In the features, Maha Bali’s chapter on cake-making as an analogy for how we use AI in the classroom brilliantly offers a spectrum of approaches, from “making from scratch” to buying a cake complete from the bakery. When might we bake from scratch, and why? When might we pick up a cake from the store and why? And the natural analogy: when might learn completely by hand? And when might we learn aided by artificial intelligence? Bali dives more deeply into the kinds of questions the analogy poses for how we practice our learning in schools.
Also in the features, find an edge case that highlights risks of vague AI practices and policies. The conditions for this court case are extreme, but worth considering how outcomes are experienced on a smaller scale in most school cases.
Also this week, find Miriam Reynoldson’s helpful practice of “affirmative critique” as an aid to talking with colleagues about AI, find harrowing evidence of the risks of AI, find a detailed description by Sequoia Capital of agentic reasoning, which promises to be the next phase of AI development, and much more, including one doctor’s reflection on how generative AI does better at the human work of bedside conversations with patients than he does.
Our world is undergoing such extraordinary change right now.
These and more, enjoy!
Peter
“One way is making a cake from scratch, buying all the ingredients and making it yourself. Another way is to get a readymade cake mix (like Betty Crocker) and build the cake. Another way is to buy a good quality cake readymade from a bakery. The last way is to get it from the supermarket, a low-quality version like a Twinkie… What is the difference in quality between what you can bake from scratch and buy from a bakery? When might you do one and not the other?”
“The filing accuses the school of a lack of clarity in its rules about AI use, saying the school handbook did not "have any established rules, policies or procedures for not only the use of artificial intelligence, but what any administrators, faculty or students should do when encountering its use.”"
“For many in Silicon Valley and Washington, D.C., the biggest fear is that China or Russia rolls out fully autonomous weapons first, forcing the U.S.’s hand. At a UN debate on AI arms last year, a Russian diplomat was notably coy. “We understand that for many delegations the priority is human control,” he said. “For the Russian Federation, the priorities are somewhat different.””
“Three years after the 30-year-old South Korean woman received a barrage of online fake images that depicted her nude, she is still being treated for trauma. She struggles to talk with men. Using a mobile phone brings back the nightmare. “It completely trampled me, even though it wasn’t a direct physical attack on my body,” she said in a phone interview with The Associated Press. She didn’t want her name revealed because of privacy concerns.”
Copyright
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