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

Tag: AI

    • Georgia Tech Admissions
    • 08/09/23
    “I absolutely think you should experiment with AI as you write your recommendation letters this fall. The same advice applies to these letters as I provided for seniors writing essays. This is not a simple cut and paste, but instead a great tool for getting started, rephrasing, or discovering different ways to frame the content […]
    • Slow Boring
    • 07/18/23
    “ChatGPT has made cheating so simple — and for now, so hard to catch — that I expect many students will use it when writing essays. Currently about 60% of college students admit to cheating in some form, and last year 30% used ChatGPT for schoolwork. That was only in the first year of the […]
    • Middle Web
    • 07/17/23
    “In my three years of teaching this powerful text, this was the most rewarding. I had a mixture of creative sequels, vocabulary journals, research on thematic topics like censorship and control, and character analysis… Then, I asked it: Write a 500 word dystopian story taking place in Newark, New Jersey for 800 Lexile Level. I’ve […]
    • One Useful Thing
    • 07/15/23
    “I can’t claim that this is going to be a complete user guide, but it will serve as a bit of orientation to the current state of AI. I have been putting together a Getting Started Guide to AI for my students (and interested readers) every few months, and each time, it requires major modifications. […]
    • One Useful Thing
    • 07/01/23
    “Students will cheat with AI. But they also will begin to integrate AI into everything they do, raising new questions for educators. Students will want to understand why they are doing assignments that seem obsolete thanks to AI. They will want to use AI as a learning companion, a co-author, or a teammate. They will […]
    • The New Atlantis
    • 07/01/23
    “So what’s different now? What follows in this essay is an attempt to contrast some of the most notable features of the new transformer paradigm (the T in ChatGPT) with what came before. It is an attempt to articulate why the new AIs that have garnered so much attention over the past year seem to […]
    • Georgia Tech Admissions
    • 08/09/23
    “I absolutely think you should experiment with AI as you write your recommendation letters this fall. The same advice applies to these letters as I provided for seniors writing essays. This is not a simple cut and paste, but instead a great tool for getting started, rephrasing, or discovering different ways to frame the content […]
    • Slow Boring
    • 07/18/23
    “ChatGPT has made cheating so simple — and for now, so hard to catch — that I expect many students will use it when writing essays. Currently about 60% of college students admit to cheating in some form, and last year 30% used ChatGPT for schoolwork. That was only in the first year of the […]
    • Middle Web
    • 07/17/23
    “In my three years of teaching this powerful text, this was the most rewarding. I had a mixture of creative sequels, vocabulary journals, research on thematic topics like censorship and control, and character analysis… Then, I asked it: Write a 500 word dystopian story taking place in Newark, New Jersey for 800 Lexile Level. I’ve […]
    • One Useful Thing
    • 07/15/23
    “I can’t claim that this is going to be a complete user guide, but it will serve as a bit of orientation to the current state of AI. I have been putting together a Getting Started Guide to AI for my students (and interested readers) every few months, and each time, it requires major modifications. […]
    • One Useful Thing
    • 07/01/23
    “Students will cheat with AI. But they also will begin to integrate AI into everything they do, raising new questions for educators. Students will want to understand why they are doing assignments that seem obsolete thanks to AI. They will want to use AI as a learning companion, a co-author, or a teammate. They will […]
    • The New Atlantis
    • 07/01/23
    “So what’s different now? What follows in this essay is an attempt to contrast some of the most notable features of the new transformer paradigm (the T in ChatGPT) with what came before. It is an attempt to articulate why the new AIs that have garnered so much attention over the past year seem to […]

ADMISSIONS

ASSESSMENT

CURRICULUM

    • Myra Roldan
    • 07/23/23
    “AI systems are taking on repetitive, physically demanding, or hazardous roles, allowing human workers to engage in more intricate tasks — this is where the term “blue-collar AI” comes in, these are roles that do not require the individual to have deep data science skills, be a researcher, or to build complex algorithms. “Blue-collar AI” […]
    • New York Times
    • 06/02/23
    ““Programming will be obsolete,” Matt Welsh, a former engineer at Google and Apple, predicted recently… Welsh’s argument, which ran earlier this year in the house organ of the Association for Computing Machinery, carried the headline, “The End of Programming,” but there’s also a way in which A.I. could mark the beginning of a new kind […]

HISTORY OF EDUCATION

    • Larry Cuban
    • 06/16/23
    “Similar claims about new technologies have been made before. Recall that, earlier generations of technophiles claimed that students using graphing calculators in class would transform math instruction (and raise test scores). Calculators surely helped students and teachers but did not alter dominant ways of teaching math.”

HUMANITIES

    • Res Obscura
    • 09/12/23
    “In the second half of this post, I go into detail about what exactly I mean by “simulating history.” I am under no illusions that these simulations are accurate: they are littered with confidently-stated falsehoods and hallucinations. Sometimes, though, hallucinations can be a feature, not a bug.”
    • New York Times
    • 07/25/23
    “We have now arrived at a similar crossroads in the science of computing, a crossroads that connects engineering and ethics, where we will again have to choose whether to proceed with the development of a technology whose power and potential we do not yet fully apprehend… It was the raw power and strategic potential of […]
    • New York Times
    • 06/30/23
    “But human intelligence is as much a product of policies and institutions as it is of genes and individual aptitudes. It’s easier to be smart on a fellowship in the Library of Congress than while working several jobs in a place without a bookstore or even decent Wi-Fi. It doesn’t seem all that controversial to […]

LEADERSHIP

    • McKinsey
    • 07/07/23
    “How will generative AI affect our industry and company in the short and longer term? …Are we balancing value creation with adequate risk management? …How should we organize for generative AI? …Do we have the necessary capabilities? …They will also want to direct a preliminary, fundamental question to themselves: Are we equipped to provide that […]
    • Harvard Business Review
    • 02/07/23

PEDAGOGY

READING/WRITING

SOCIAL MEDIA

STEM

TECH

WORKPLACE

Z-OTHER

GENERAL

    • Georgia Tech Admissions
    • 08/09/23
    “I absolutely think you should experiment with AI as you write your recommendation letters this fall. The same advice applies to these letters as I provided for seniors writing essays. This is not a simple cut and paste, but instead a great tool for getting started, rephrasing, or discovering different ways to frame the content […]
    • Slow Boring
    • 07/18/23
    “ChatGPT has made cheating so simple — and for now, so hard to catch — that I expect many students will use it when writing essays. Currently about 60% of college students admit to cheating in some form, and last year 30% used ChatGPT for schoolwork. That was only in the first year of the […]
    • Middle Web
    • 07/17/23
    “In my three years of teaching this powerful text, this was the most rewarding. I had a mixture of creative sequels, vocabulary journals, research on thematic topics like censorship and control, and character analysis… Then, I asked it: Write a 500 word dystopian story taking place in Newark, New Jersey for 800 Lexile Level. I’ve […]
    • One Useful Thing
    • 07/15/23
    “I can’t claim that this is going to be a complete user guide, but it will serve as a bit of orientation to the current state of AI. I have been putting together a Getting Started Guide to AI for my students (and interested readers) every few months, and each time, it requires major modifications. […]
    • One Useful Thing
    • 07/01/23
    “Students will cheat with AI. But they also will begin to integrate AI into everything they do, raising new questions for educators. Students will want to understand why they are doing assignments that seem obsolete thanks to AI. They will want to use AI as a learning companion, a co-author, or a teammate. They will […]
    • The New Atlantis
    • 07/01/23
    “So what’s different now? What follows in this essay is an attempt to contrast some of the most notable features of the new transformer paradigm (the T in ChatGPT) with what came before. It is an attempt to articulate why the new AIs that have garnered so much attention over the past year seem to […]

A.I. Updates

    • CRPE
    • 09/01/23
    “Districts are responding in divergent ways to artificial intelligence’s potential to reshape teaching and learning, and most have refrained from defining a districtwide stance for schools to navigate AI… it’s clear that this technology will evolve faster than districts can develop formal training and guidance for staff. Leaders need to respond by thinking through how they train […]

TECH/AI

TECH/AI: GENERAL

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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