Educator’s Notebook #490 (June 22, 2025)
INTRODUCTION
Epistemology, adulting, learning science, and more
An excellent week.
Epistemology and its sibling media literacy are having their moment — one that I suspect will only continue to grow. As the isolating nature of social media and news filter bubbles have now for almost two decades created separate realities for citizens of the world, the broader cultural ecosystem has been forced to wrestle more openly with how to cross this growing epistemological divide. How do we move forward together when entire swaths of global citizens have entirely different understandings not just of politics, but of how fact is determined? I’ve been interested in this growing awareness since 2018, when danah boyd spelled it out in a keynote at SXSWedu. This week’s features offer perspectives through the lenses of both epidemiology and media literacy. (Related, in the AI update, find an excellent tool for sorting through information in the form of a GPT designed by Mike Caulfield to use the internet for fact checking. It’s very good.)
Also this week, find a rich section on learning science, two good posts on character that are particularly helpful for those in leadership, one school’s course on “adulting” and others.
These and more, enjoy!
Peter
Find this beautifully organized map of cognitive biases in the Learning Science section.
Browse and search over 15,000 curated articles from past issues online:
FEATURED
On Epistemology: “How Should We Respond To People “Doing Their Own Research”
“This dysfunctional dynamic misses the bigger picture of what’s happening. For many, this phrase represents a sincere effort to find answers they’re struggling to get elsewhere. And when that genuine search for information is met with an expert’s scorn, it can push people away from trustworthy sources.”
Kids Want News Literacy Instruction
“The News Literacy Project’s study shows that an overwhelming majority of teens (94%) want media literacy instruction, but most aren’t getting it.”
ADOLESCENCE
School Offers New Courses: Adulting 101 And 102
“The course outline for Adulting 101 includes going to college and other pathways; getting a job; banking; budgeting; doing taxes; housing; home maintenance and safety; health, nutrition, and cooking; insurance; voting and community involvement; digital citizenship; and personal relationships and conflict. Adulting 102 covers travel, doing laundry, personal and mental health, tech or digital health, personal budgeting, time management, and goal setting.”
ARTS
ASSESSMENT
ATHLETICS
CHARACTER
CURRICULUM
What Might A Civics Curriculum Look Like?
“It’s about helping students understand that rules and institutions protect all of us.”
DIVERSITY/INCLUSION
“A White Nationalist Wrote a Law School Paper Promoting Racist Views. It Won Him an Award.”
“Well beyond the classroom, bigoted and extremist views are on the rise and vying for mainstream acceptance, raising questions about whether principles of neutrality and free-speech rights are proper and adequate responses to the threats.”
GOVERNMENT
“Court Blocks Louisiana Law Requiring Schools To Post Ten Commandments”
How Executive Orders Have Changed Four Universities
HUMANITIES
How LLMs Are Changing The Study Of History
“Among the historians I spoke with, one of the more enthusiastic experimenters was Fred Turner, who teaches in the communication department at Stanford. I arrived at his office expecting to interview him about how A.I. fits into the long history of information technology, but we wound up spending much of our time discussing how ChatGPT has helped him with his latest book project, which revolves around the New York City art scene of the 1970s and 1980s.”
Is Literary Fiction In Cultural Decline?
LEADERSHIP
LEARNING SCIENCE
Three Ways To Strengthen Student Memory
Less Sleep = Less Learning. What Can Schools Do?
“Why Our Brains Need Knowledge In An Age Of AI”
Brilliant Visualization Of Cognitive Biases
READING/WRITING
TECH
Should Each Student Have A Portable Learning Model For EdTech?
“Imagine a Portable Learning Model… that is, a framework for how to understand a user as a learner that is contained outside of any single chat or learning tool. Let’s call this a learner’s PEARL: a Portable, Evidence-Based, Adaptive Representation of a Learner.”
“The Tool Trap: When Technology Becomes The Goal”
WORKPLACE
A.I. Update
A.I. UPDATE
An AI fact checking tool, AI companions, jobs
An excellent week.
Mike Caulfield’s AI fact-checking tool is a powerful, free resource for anyone. Have a claim that you’d like fact checked? Mike Caulfield has done the work of designing the AI assistant to help you get it done. These kinds of resources will be invaluable in our new world.
Also in the features, find the NYT’s exploration of therapy chatbots. A positive use of AI’s ability to engage on a social-emotional level, therapy chatbots and other pro-social AI tools will help solve some of the challenges we face as globally interconnected society. In a time when AI’s development seems a ceaseless march onwards — for better and for worse — we need more of these positive use cases.
Also this week, find several posts about the changing job market AI is ushering in, as well as a detailed report on the importance of learning without AI first and then using AI afterwards. The Tech/AI: Education post dives deep into the evidence of a recent study.
These and more, enjoy!
Peter
Surveys can’t agree on what percentage of the population is using AI at work — you can find anything from 25% to 75% — but they all agree that AI use in the workplace is on the rise. See the Gallup survey for more detail.
TECH/AI: FEATURED
What Are Therapy Chatbots Like For Kids? Here’s A Deep Dive.
““When you’re in a situation where you can’t really be open with everyone else, you at least have this app,” Cassandra continued. “And I think that’s kind of how it builds a connection. You go through these lessons, and it tells you, ‘Hey, good job, you’re doing great!’ Or one of the messages I really like that’ll come up when it notifies me to do a daily check-in, it’ll say: ‘I’m really proud of you, Cassie. This stuff is really hard to talk about.’””
A GPT For Deep Fact Checking
“Here it is — I just released a (largely) non-hallucinating rigorous AI-based fact-checker that anyone can use for free. And I don’t say that lightly: I literally co-wrote the book on using the internet to verify things. All you do is log into ChatGPT, click the link below, and put in a sentence or paragraph for it to fact check.”
TECH/AI: EDUCATION
Learn Without Technology First, Then Use Technology To Enhance Learning
“When students who'd never used AI were introduced to ChatGPT in session four, something interesting happened. Their brain activity increased rather than decreased. They showed "network-wide spikes in alpha, beta, theta, and delta bands" [10]. This suggests prior cognitive investment creates a foundation that enhances AI collaboration. Students who build thinking skills first can use AI as a genuine tool. Students who rely on AI from the start never develop those foundational skills. The timing matters enormously. Brain-to-AI users maintained cognitive ownership while gaining efficiency.”
TECH/AI: ETHICS AND RISK
Or Maybe Entry Level Jobs Aren’t Going Away?
“We had our research conference a week ago and almost every HR leader or head of recruiting told me that they are rebuilding their entry level development programs for young employees. Why? Driven by tightening the budgets and entry hire slowdowns, their talent pipeline was weakened.”
TECH/AI: INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT
Altman’s Singularity Essay Is Probably Just Fundraising
How Anthropic Structures Multi Agent Deep Research
Sam Altman Describes A “Gentle Singularity”
TECH/AI: SOCIAL
On AI, Loneliness, And What It Means To Feel Seen
“When I asked Peter, an engineer, what he thought humans still had to offer in this work, he said: ‘an audience that matters’. In his view, robots would someday do most everything humans could do – in education, for example, that would include grading papers and answering questions about the material. He still wasn’t sure, however, if one could ‘project enough humanness onto a robot that you want to make it proud of you’.”
Some Ways OpenAI Is Thinking About Human-AI Relationships
“Our goal is for ChatGPT’s default personality to be warm, thoughtful, and helpful without seeking to form emotional bonds with the user or pursue its own agenda… Model training techniques will continue to evolve, and it’s likely that future methods for shaping model behavior will be different from today's. But right now, model behavior reflects a combination of explicit design decisions and how those generalize into both intended and unintended behaviors.”
“Why Human-AI Relationships Need Socio-Affective Alignment”