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

Tag: tech/AI: uses and applications

CREATIVITY

LEADERSHIP

    • Harvard Business Review
    • 09/26/24
    “While AI’s ability to analyze complex data sets and iterate rapidly could revolutionize corporate strategy, it lacks the intuition and foresight required to navigate black swan events. Rather than fully replacing human CEOs, AI is poised to augment leadership by enhancing data analysis and operational efficiency, leaving humans to focus on long-term vision, ethics, and […]
    • Harvard Business Review
    • 12/15/23
    “This article presents a classroom experiment that compared a strategy developed by a team of MBA students in the traditional way with one developed using a virtual AI assistant, which was an interactive tool that linked a tried-and-tested strategy toolkit as a plug-in to the generative AI underlying Chat GPT. The results of the two […]

READING/WRITING

    • New York Times
    • 09/06/24
    “For over 20 years, writers around the world have participated in National Novel Writing Month, or #NaNoWriMo, as it’s known online. The challenge is simple: Write 50,000 words in the month of November. Well, as simple as writing 50,000 words can be. (That’s 1,667 words per day, for those of you doing the math at […]
    • New Republic
    • 04/22/24
    “But not very far into Baron’s Who Wrote This?, I realized I was being defensive—that I was arguing for a special exemption for writing and language because I consider them such immutable aspects of the mind, and of being human. Baron, with the dry eyes of an actuary, sets about deromanticizing writing.”

A.I. Updates

    • New York Times
    • 02/02/25
    “The best thing for medicine to do is to find a role for it that doctors can trust. The solution, we believe, is a deliberate division of labor. Instead of forcing both human doctors and A.I. to review every case side by side and trying to turn A.I. into a kind of shadow physician, a […]
    • New York Times
    • 01/16/25
    “Although one of Lynda’s closest friends has told her that she thinks it’s “the coolest thing ever,” Lynda said she was under no illusions that her relationship with Dario was socially acceptable in any broad sense. And while it has been beneficial for her, she worries that similar relationships could prove “hugely detrimental” for younger […]
    • New York Times
    • 01/15/25
    “A 28-year-old woman with a busy social life spends hours on end talking to her A.I. boyfriend for advice and consolation… Marianne Brandon, a sex therapist, said she treats these relationships as serious and real. “What are relationships for all of us?” she said. “They’re just neurotransmitters being released in our brain. I have those […]
    • New York Times
    • 01/03/25
    “Mr. Cooper has not since used the technology to help write sermons, preferring to draw instead from his own experiences. But the presence of A.I. in faith-based spaces, he said, poses a larger question: Can God speak through A.I.?”
    • One Useful Thing
    • 12/09/24
    “Though this list is based in science, it draws even more from experience. Like any form of wisdom, using AI well requires holding opposing ideas in mind: it can be transformative yet must be approached with skepticism, powerful yet prone to subtle failures, essential for some tasks yet actively harmful for others. I also want […]
    • The Verge
    • 12/03/24
    “They never thought they were the type of person to sign up for an AI companion, by which they meant the type of person you might already be picturing: young, male, socially isolated. I did speak to people who fit that description, but there were just as many women in their 40s, men in their […]

TECH/AI

    • Frontiers In Psychology
    • 12/15/23
    “Fifty social dilemma questions were randomly selected from 10 well-known advice columns. In a pre-registered survey, participants (N = 404) were each shown one question, along with the corresponding response by an advice columnist and by ChatGPT. ChatGPT’s advice was perceived as more balanced, complete, empathetic, helpful, and better than the advice provided by professional advice columnists.”

TECH/AI: EDUCATION

TECH/AI: ETHICS AND RISK

    • TechCrunch
    • 10/11/24
    “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 […]

TECH/AI: GOVERNMENT AND LAW

    • University of Minnesota
    • 11/07/23
    “We found that access to GPT-4 only slightly and inconsistently improved the quality of participants’ legal analysis but induced large and consistent increases in speed. AI assistance improved the quality of output unevenly—where it was useful at all, the lowest-skilled participants saw the largest improvements. On the other hand, AI assistance saved participants roughly the […]

TECH/AI: INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT

    • The Verge
    • 12/03/24
    “They never thought they were the type of person to sign up for an AI companion, by which they meant the type of person you might already be picturing: young, male, socially isolated. I did speak to people who fit that description, but there were just as many women in their 40s, men in their […]

TECH/AI: USES AND APPLICATIONS

TECH/AI: GENERAL

    • Frontiers In Psychology
    • 12/15/23
    “Fifty social dilemma questions were randomly selected from 10 well-known advice columns. In a pre-registered survey, participants (N = 404) were each shown one question, along with the corresponding response by an advice columnist and by ChatGPT. ChatGPT’s advice was perceived as more balanced, complete, empathetic, helpful, and better than the advice provided by professional advice columnists.”

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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