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

Topic: tech/AI

A.I. Updates

    • Andreessen Horowitz
    • 03/06/25
    “In just six months, the consumer AI landscape has been redrawn. Some products surged, others stalled, and a few unexpected players rewrote the leaderboard overnight. Deepseek rocketed from obscurity to a leading ChatGPT challenger. AI video models advanced from experimental to fairly dependable (at least for short clips!). And so-called “vibecoding” is changing who can […]
    • Alitu
    • 02/28/25
    “Vibe coding is an AI-assisted approach where you describe your software idea in plain language and the AI writes the code for you. It’s that simple, and this guide will show you how.”
    • 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.”
    • New York Times
    • 02/20/25
    “John Giorgi uses artificial intelligence to make artificial intelligence. The 29-year-old computer scientist creates software for a health care start-up that records and summarizes patient visits for doctors, freeing them from hours spent typing up clinical notes. To do so, Mr. Giorgi has his own timesaving helper: an A.I. coding assistant. He taps a few […]
    • 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 […]
    • OpenAI
    • 02/15/25
    “College-aged students aged 18-24 primarily use AI tools for starting papers and projects, summarizing texts, exploring topics, and brainstorming creative ideas, according to our recent survey. For ChatGPT users who belong to this age group, just over a quarter of all messages are education- or learning-related (which means those messages are tagged as tutoring- or […]

ADMISSIONS

ADOLESCENCE

    • New York Times
    • 10/23/24
    “One day, Sewell wrote in his journal: “I like staying in my room so much because I start to detach from this ‘reality,’ and I also feel more at peace, more connected with Dany and much more in love with her, and just happier.””
    • Center for Democracy & Technology
    • 09/26/24
    “Since 2020, CDT has conducted annual or semi-annual surveys with students, teachers, and/or parents. The surveys measure and track changes in perceptions, experiences, training, engagement, and concerns about student data privacy, student activity monitoring, content filtering and blocking software, generative AI, NCII, and deepfakes in schools.”
    • Axios
    • 09/18/24
    • 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.”

AI

ARTS

ASSESSMENT

ATHENA

CHARACTER

CREATIVITY

CURRICULUM

DIVERSITY/INCLUSION

HUMANITIES

    • EdWeek
    • 04/28/24
    • TechCrunch
    • 12/15/23
    ““With Open Empathic, our goal is to create an AI that goes beyond understanding just words,” Schuhmann added. “We aim for it to grasp the nuances in expressions and tone shifts, making human-AI interactions more authentic and empathetic.””
    • Stanford
    • 12/15/23
    “Values centered on individual experience, such as personal agency, enjoyment, and stimulation, are undeniably important and central requirements for any social media platform. It shouldn’t be surprising that reward hacking only on individual values will lead to challenging societal-level outcomes, because the algorithm has no way to reason about societies. But then, what would it […]
    • 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 […]
    • Rest of World
    • 09/20/23
    • Economist
    • 04/28/23
    “Forget about school essays. Think of the next American presidential race in 2024, and try to imagine the impact of ai tools that can be made to mass-produce political content, fake-news stories and scriptures for new cults… The catch is that it is utterly pointless for us to spend time trying to change the declared […]

LANGUAGE

LEADERSHIP

LEARNING SCIENCE

    • Center for Curriculum Redesign
    • 01/01/25
    “The goal of this paper is to: 1. Determine which types of cognitive processes and procedures (aka “modes of thinking”) are used in human reasoning. 2. Determine which forms of human reasoning can be mimicked/reproduced by Generative AI–specifically Large Language Models (LLMs). Hereinafter, it will be referred to as “GenAI” unless otherwise indicated (in the […]
    • Noema
    • 09/03/24
    “Hybridization of life with technology is scary when you can’t quite lose the unspoken belief that current humans are somehow an ideal, crafted, chosen form (including their lower back pain, susceptibility to infections and degenerative brain disease, astigmatism, limited life span and IQ, etc.).”

PD

PEDAGOGY

READING/WRITING

STEM

SUSTAINABILITY

TECH

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

Z-OTHER

    • Noema
    • 09/03/24
    “Hybridization of life with technology is scary when you can’t quite lose the unspoken belief that current humans are somehow an ideal, crafted, chosen form (including their lower back pain, susceptibility to infections and degenerative brain disease, astigmatism, limited life span and IQ, etc.).”

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

Subscribe

* indicates required