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

Tag: reading/writing

    • Education Next
    • 04/03/24
    “Stories gain even more power when they are brought to life by reading aloud. In fact, this may be the book’s primary chance of salvation. If the book is going to survive its death struggle with the isolating and disconnecting technology of the smartphone, its best bet, I argue, will be if we can encourage […]
    • New York Times
    • 02/18/24
    “For more than two decades, I’ve taught versions of this fiction-writing exercise. I’ve used it in universities, middle schools and private workshops, with 7-year-olds and 70-year-olds. But in recent years openness to this exercise and to the imaginative leap it’s designed to teach has shrunk to a pinprick. As our country’s public conversation has gotten […]
    • Teachers College
    • 12/15/23
    “Four eighth-grade English language arts teachers, initially most concerned about their students’ disinterest in reading, stopped assigning any particular book and instead gave students wide access to books written for young adults, let them choose what to read (or not), and gave them time to read and openly discuss the books. We studied these classrooms […]
    • Research Gate
    • 10/01/23
    “In this meta-analysis, we examined if teaching writing improved the writing and reading of students in Grades 6 to 12, and what specific writing treatments enhanced students’ writing. Our review included writing treatments tested using an experimental or quasi-experimental design (with pretests) and published and unpublished studies, and computed effect sizes for all writing and […]
    • TextFX
    • 09/07/23
    “TextFX is an AI experiment designed to help rappers, writers, and wordsmiths expand their process. It was created in collaboration with Lupe Fiasco, drawing inspiration from the lyrical and linguistic techniques he has developed throughout his career. TextFX consists of 10 tools, each is designed to explore creative possibilities with text and language.”
    • 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 […]
    • TextFX
    • 09/07/23
    “TextFX is an AI experiment designed to help rappers, writers, and wordsmiths expand their process. It was created in collaboration with Lupe Fiasco, drawing inspiration from the lyrical and linguistic techniques he has developed throughout his career. TextFX consists of 10 tools, each is designed to explore creative possibilities with text and language.”
    • 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 […]
    • Cult of Pedagogy
    • 02/19/23
    “Our goal was to help students learn the underlying principles of kinetic and potential energy. We used ChatGPT to generate a range of different examples of kinetic and potential energy. Kids could sort these examples into categories and then explain their choices. In the screenshots below, the text next to the yellow icon is our […]
    • Inside Higher Ed
    • 01/31/23
    “In fact, OpenAI expects a collaborative disclaimer, one in which the published content is “attributed” to a human author (or company) at the same time that the “role of AI in formulating the content is clearly disclosed in a way that no reader could possibly miss.” …The company insists that we should not view the […]
    • The Spectator
    • 01/10/23
    “It’s at this point that the usual essay on ChatGPT points towards something consoling. Something like ‘Ah, but do not despair, humans will always yada yada’. I’m afraid I am not here to offer any such solace. I’ve done writing of all kinds for several decades, from travel journalism to art journalism to political journalism, […]
    • New York Times
    • 12/26/22
    “Most of us have never seen anything like it outside of science fiction. To better understand what ChatGPT can do, we decided to see if people could tell the difference between the bot’s writing and a child’s. We used real essay prompts from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the standardized test from the Department […]

ADMISSIONS

ASSESSMENT

CHARACTER

CREATIVITY

    • Broadway News
    • 06/11/24
    “Because the “family drama” feels deeply American, Jacobs-Jenkins wanted to write his own. But he was stuck. So he reread every play he could think of that fit the genre — those by Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Horton Foote, Lorraine Hansberry, August Wilson, Sam Shepard — and decided to “steal one thing from […]
    • Broadway News
    • 05/24/24
    “Adjmi writes on instinct. So much so that he didn’t initially write “Stereophonic”’s dialogue on a page; he dictated it to an assistant. “I would just start talking, and then I would have her transcribe everything I said, and then she would read it back to me and I’d say, ‘Cut that.’ ‘Put that line […]
    • Leon Furze
    • 02/19/24
    • New York Times
    • 09/09/23
    “When Groff starts something new, she writes it out longhand in large spiral notebooks. After she completes a first draft, she puts it in a bankers box — and never reads it again. Then she’ll start the book over, still in longhand, working from memory. The idea is that this way, only the best, most […]
    • Slate
    • 02/14/20
    “Whenever I got into a new band or played a new game or watched a new movie, I still looked it up on TV Tropes. I had to understand it—and seeing the same tropes appearing over and over again made me realize that I was holding myself to an impossible standard. Nothing is original. Every […]

CURRICULUM

DIVERSITY/INCLUSION

EARLY CHILDHOOD

HUMANITIES

LANGUAGE

    • Literary Hub
    • 10/20/24
    “A translator uses the resources of the language they’re writing in to produce a text that will be read and received within the context of that language. A translation into English is going to find its place in a literary universe—and a literary marketplace—of other English texts, so a translator of, say, Chinese poetry has […]
    • Culture Study
    • 01/07/24
    “Like many writers, I went through an extreme em-dash phase (if you think I use a lot of em-dashes now, you have no idea). Then I moved on to the colon, and at some point, the semi-colon. This was in my late teens and 20s. I was reading a lot of Henry James…..and then a […]
    • Behavioral Scientist
    • 03/13/23
    “While concrete language is great for increasing understanding, or for making complex topics easier to comprehend, when it comes to things like such as describing a company’s growth potential, abstract language is better, because while concrete language focuses on the tangible here and now, abstract language gets into the bigger picture.”
    • World Literature Today
    • 06/06/17
    • Quartz
    • 07/31/15

LEADERSHIP

LEARNING SCIENCE

PD

PEDAGOGY

READING/WRITING

SOCIAL MEDIA

STEM

TECH

WORKPLACE

    • Fast Company
    • 10/09/14
    “Misinterpretation tends to comes in two forms: neutral or negative. So we dull positive notes (largely because the lack of emotional cues makes us less engaged with the message), and we assume the worst in questionable ones… Face-to-face interaction took more reported effort… but also resulted in more positive ratings of the partner’s character, and […]

Z-OTHER

GENERAL

    • TextFX
    • 09/07/23
    “TextFX is an AI experiment designed to help rappers, writers, and wordsmiths expand their process. It was created in collaboration with Lupe Fiasco, drawing inspiration from the lyrical and linguistic techniques he has developed throughout his career. TextFX consists of 10 tools, each is designed to explore creative possibilities with text and language.”
    • 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 […]
    • Cult of Pedagogy
    • 02/19/23
    “Our goal was to help students learn the underlying principles of kinetic and potential energy. We used ChatGPT to generate a range of different examples of kinetic and potential energy. Kids could sort these examples into categories and then explain their choices. In the screenshots below, the text next to the yellow icon is our […]
    • Inside Higher Ed
    • 01/31/23
    “In fact, OpenAI expects a collaborative disclaimer, one in which the published content is “attributed” to a human author (or company) at the same time that the “role of AI in formulating the content is clearly disclosed in a way that no reader could possibly miss.” …The company insists that we should not view the […]
    • The Spectator
    • 01/10/23
    “It’s at this point that the usual essay on ChatGPT points towards something consoling. Something like ‘Ah, but do not despair, humans will always yada yada’. I’m afraid I am not here to offer any such solace. I’ve done writing of all kinds for several decades, from travel journalism to art journalism to political journalism, […]
    • New York Times
    • 12/26/22
    “Most of us have never seen anything like it outside of science fiction. To better understand what ChatGPT can do, we decided to see if people could tell the difference between the bot’s writing and a child’s. We used real essay prompts from the National Assessment of Educational Progress (the standardized test from the Department […]

A.I. Updates

    • AI for Education
    • 11/26/24
    “At the elementary level, GenAI tools should be used primarily by teachers for lesson planning, preparation, and selective modeling… Until there is compelling evidence of positive impacts on learning through direct student interaction with GenAI tools at the elementary level, as well as adequate safeguards in place to completely eliminate the risk of exposure to […]
    • Wired
    • 04/28/24
    “The USCO’s notice granting Shupe copyright registration of her book does not recognize her as author of the whole text as is conventional for written works. Instead she is considered the author of the “selection, coordination, and arrangement of text generated by artificial intelligence.” This means no one can copy the book without permission, but […]
    • The Learning Agency
    • 04/08/24
    “ChatGPT can perform comparably to a human in assigning a final holistic score for a student essay, but it struggles to identify and evaluate the structural pieces of argumentative writing in our experimental setup.”
    • IJETHE
    • 10/27/23
    “We found about half the students preferred receiving feedback from a human tutor, and half preferred AI-generated feedback. Those that preferred sitting down and discussing their feedback with a tutor cited the face-to-face interaction as having affective benefits, such as increasing engagement, as well as benefits for developing their speaking abilities. Those that preferred AI-generated […]

TECH/AI

TECH/AI: EDUCATION

    • No More Marking
    • 01/26/25
    “Suppose you are learning to drive, and during a lesson, your instructor says very little. At the end, he hands you a lengthy and specific written comment… This is all true, but it is not very helpful. And, crucially, even if you doubled it in length or added even more detail, it would still not […]
    • Chronicle of Higher Ed
    • 12/12/24
    “This time, she fed PowerPoint slides, self-produced YouTube videos, and course notes from previous iterations of the class into an AI platform called Kudu, which consolidated them into one text that she reviewed. Nothing in the book is actually written by AI. “It’s my words, my writing,” she said. The images in the book, like […]
    • AI for Education
    • 11/26/24
    “At the elementary level, GenAI tools should be used primarily by teachers for lesson planning, preparation, and selective modeling… Until there is compelling evidence of positive impacts on learning through direct student interaction with GenAI tools at the elementary level, as well as adequate safeguards in place to completely eliminate the risk of exposure to […]
    • EdWeek
    • 10/08/24
    “About half of the 130 teachers who said they used AI to help with their recommendation letters did so to take the stress out of the task, according to foundry10’s survey. And about a third of the 130 said they believed AI tools improved the quality of their letters. Far more teachers, 267 in all, […]
    • The 74 Million
    • 09/15/24
    “Rebind, a new, AI-assisted digital publisher, is betting that interactive, personal guidance and expert commentary will revive a love for reading.”
    • The Mind File
    • 08/24/24
    “This term, the highest and lowest marks I awarded were to AI-augmented submissions. The worst one was a depressing stack of LLM list outputs, complete with Title Case Subheadings. Although there was no declaration of AI use, it wasn’t a stretch to imagine how the student might have prompted a bot with key words from […]

TECH/AI: ETHICS AND RISK

    • New York Times
    • 08/20/24
    “We decided to hold a contest between ChatGPT and me, to see who could write — or “write” — a better beach read. I thought going head-to-head with the machine would give us real answers about what A.I. is and isn’t currently capable of and, of course, how big a threat it is to human […]

TECH/AI: GOVERNMENT AND LAW

    • Wired
    • 04/28/24
    “The USCO’s notice granting Shupe copyright registration of her book does not recognize her as author of the whole text as is conventional for written works. Instead she is considered the author of the “selection, coordination, and arrangement of text generated by artificial intelligence.” This means no one can copy the book without permission, but […]

TECH/AI: USES AND APPLICATIONS

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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