Many great options in this issue —
In the features, find two excellent and timely articles. In the first, Tony Wagner reflects with What Schools Could Be on two experiences that drive his continued motivation to advance the field of education. And in the second, the crew at Cult of Pedagogy look at ways of democratizing participation in class every day. These are two great pieces coming from two great outlets of education content.
Also in this issue, find good posts on Pedagogy, on post-election teaching and learning, on technology and more.
See also the AI Updates for ongoing evolutions in AI’s role in education.
These and more, enjoy!
Peter
Share the Educator’s Notebook with colleagues
“The curriculum didn't engage the kids, several acknowledged. But again, they were not blaming the teachers who were teaching the required curriculum. They blamed the system, their system. “It doesn’t offer kids meaningful choices,” one superintended said. “The world has changed, kids have changed, and the curriculum hasn’t. Most of what’s taught in their academic classes just seems irrelevant to these kids.””
“Education is not simply about gaining more knowledge, but about increasing students’ (and, ultimately, society’s) ability to formulate and solve meaningful problems. This means learning to think together to overcome the limitations of our own experience and logic, to use the diversity of experience, perspective, and intellectual resources to solve the problems that arise in democratic living, and to ratchet forward our own intellectual development.”
“School, at its best, is about creating environments where students can develop into capable, adaptable individuals who are prepared not just to exploit what they already know but to explore, innovate, and grow in the face of the unknown. It’s a mission that feels more urgent—and more essential—than ever.”
“As the actual events of historical decolonisation grow more distant, forms of decolonisation talk increase. Decolonisation was once primarily a scholar’s term that effectively depolarised violent national liberation. Now it ascribes radicalism to projects in the realms of economics, culture, education and ideology – spheres whose purpose is not violent regime change.”
“In her classes on Wednesday and Thursday, Cole gave her students three prompts. Two would be shared anonymously with the class: a one-word description of how they felt about the election, for inclusion in a word cloud, and a “yes” or “no” vote on whether they wanted to discuss the election in class. The third question, just for Cole and signed with their name if they chose, invited students to tell her how they really felt… The discussion was short, only about five minutes, Cole estimated. Should she find another current event capturing students’ attention, Cole thought, she’d take a similar approach. The activity let students see the range of emotions they were all feeling, and put them in charge of the discussion while also giving those who wanted to communicate just with her the opportunity to do so.”
“Tip 1. When spending time with a child, leave your phone elsewhere.”
“We physically delivered files at first. In the early days of Google Scholar, slow, flaky internet speeds made it hard to gather research to build this online research library. As a workaround, the team embraced a low-tech solution dubbed the "Sneakernet.” Instead of relying solely on slow downloads, publishers would load articles on physical hard drives and we would pick up these drives on the way to the office.”
This week, find several posts from Dr. Philippa Hardman on the role GenAI can play in instructional design. This is the year for tools to begin maturing and for professionals to begin finding the valuable use cases. See the features and Tech/AI: Education sections for more on how this is happening in education. On the student side, see OpenAI’s first clear guidance to students on constructive use of GenAI in learning. The guidance sets a good bar.
Elsewhere this week, find several more uses of AI in the landscape, including a thoughtful hot take from Ben Affleck on what AI means for the film industry. It’s worth watching the video of him speak.
These and more, enjoy!
Peter
“What's particularly exciting for us instructional designers is that when GPTs are custom-trained for specific instructional design tasks (like writing learning objectives), they show significant improvements in reliability and accuracy…”
“2. Humans Are Flexible And Self-Repairing”
“Used thoughtfully, ChatGPT can be a powerful tool to help students develop skills of rigorous thinking and clear writing, assisting them in thinking through ideas, mastering complex concepts, and getting feedback on drafts. There are also ways to use ChatGPT that are counterproductive to learning—like generating an essay instead of writing it oneself, which deprives students of the opportunity to practice, improve their skills, and grapple with the material. For students committed to becoming better writers and thinkers, here are some ways to use ChatGPT to engage more deeply with the learning process.”
“LearnLM is an experimental task-specific model that has been trained to align with learning science principles when following system instructions for teaching and learning use cases… When given learning specific system instructions, LearnLM is capable of: Inspiring active learning: Allow for practice and healthy struggle with timely feedback, Managing cognitive load: Present relevant, well-structured information in multiple modalities, Adapting to the learner: Dynamically adjust to goals and needs, grounding in relevant materials, Stimulating curiosity: Inspire engagement to provide motivation through the learning journey, Deepening metacognition: Plan, monitor and help the learner reflect on progress LearnLM is an experimental model available in AI Studio."
“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 number of physical trials is low (tens of people) but the need for statistical analysis is high (tens of thousands).”
“We’re sharing a recap of some of the biggest scientific breakthroughs in recent years brought about by AI.”
“What AI is going to do is going to disintermediate the laborious, less creative and more costly aspects of filmmaking that will allow costs to be brought down, that will lower the barrier for entry, that will allow more voices to be heard, that will make it easier for the people that want to make ‘Good Will Huntings’ to go out and make it… That’s how large video models and large language models basically work. Library of vectors of meaning and transformers that interpret it in context, right? But they’re just cross-pollinating things that exist. Nothing new is created.”
“The chatbot, from the company OpenAI, scored an average of 90 percent when diagnosing a medical condition from a case report and explaining its reasoning. Doctors randomly assigned to use the chatbot got an average score of 76 percent. Those randomly assigned not to use it had an average score of 74 percent.”
“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, many in the development space dismiss these issues and file them under the umbrella of near-term harm.”
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