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

Topic: tech/AI: uses and applications

A.I. Updates

    • One Useful Thing
    • 03/22/25
    “When working without AI, teams outperformed individuals by a significant amount, 0.24 standard deviations (providing a sigh of relief for every teacher and manager who has pushed the value of teamwork). But the surprise came when we looked at AI-enabled participants. Individuals working with AI performed just as well as teams without AI, showing a […]
    • Ars Technica
    • 03/19/25
    “The study comes with an important caveat. On average, fully AI-generated memes scored higher than those created by humans alone or humans collaborating with AI. But when researchers looked at the best individual memes, humans created the funniest examples, and human-AI collaborations produced the most creative and shareable memes. In other words, AI models consistently […]
    • Understanding AI
    • 02/24/25
    “Seven out of 19 respondents… said OpenAI’s response was at or near the level of an experienced professional in their fields. A majority of respondents estimated it would take at least 10 hours of human labor to produce a comparable report.”
    • Semafor
    • 02/17/25
    “In a series of training documents, editorial guidelines laid out possible use cases for journalists, including prompts such as: How many times was Al mentioned in these episodes of Hard Fork? Can you revise this paragraph to make it tighter? Pretend you are posting this Times article to Facebook. How would you promote it? Summarize […]
    • Anthropic
    • 02/10/25
    “Cognitive skills such as Critical Thinking, Reading Comprehension, Programming, and Writing had the highest prevalence. However, our analysis captures only whether a skill was exhibited in Claude’s responses, not whether that skill was central to the user’s purpose or was performed at an expert level. For instance, while Active Listening appears as the second most […]
    • 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 […]

ADOLESCENCE

    • 74 Million
    • 08/07/24
    “Snapchat last year said that after just two months of offering its chatbot My AI, about one-fifth of its 750 million users had sent it queries, totaling more than 10 billion messages. The Pew Research Center has noted that 59% of Americans ages 13 to 17 use Snapchat.”
    • Marc Watkins
    • 08/02/24
    “It is increasingly looking like generative AI won’t become intelligent to achieve true AGI, but human beings will still put their trust into these black box systems and may one day be willing to cede autonomy and critical decision-making to an algorithm. To those who scoff at this, and I imagine there are many, know […]
    • Medium
    • 06/28/24
    “I’ve created a resource to proactively envision how young people might relate to and utilize chatbots, with different impacts on human connection. The framework below maps four different possible futures, each representing the most common chatbot experience for young people.”

CREATIVITY

HUMANITIES

    • Ars Technica
    • 12/15/23
    “Starhaven recently wrote, “My new morning driving routine involves chatting with ChatGPT through my car speaker/Airplay, as if I were hanging on the phone with my mum.” He talked about working through ideas vocally. “Sometimes you just wanna share your unhinged thoughts with a friend—though, maybe not at 7 in the morning,” he wrote. “So […]

LEADERSHIP

READING/WRITING

STEM

TECH/AI

TECH/AI: EDUCATION

TECH/AI: ETHICS AND RISK

TECH/AI: GOVERNMENT AND LAW

TECH/AI: INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT

TECH/AI: USES AND APPLICATIONS

WORKPLACE

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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