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

Topic: tech/AI

A.I. Updates

    • QuestionWell
    • 12/28/25
    “Writing good multiple-choice questions (MCQs) is well studied and well known to be difficult, even for human beings. Decades of  research document common flaws: inadvertently giving students cues, implausible distractors, ambiguity, and questions that reward test taking strategies, and allow students to side-step understanding. Large language models (LLMs) make many of the same errors as […]
    • Notion
    • 12/22/25
    “My co-founder Simon was what we call a 10× programmer, but he rarely writes code these days. Walk by his desk and you’ll see him orchestrating three or four AI coding agents at once, and they don’t just type faster, they think, which together makes him a 30-40× engineer. He queues tasks before lunch or […]
    • Teaching in the Age of AI
    • 12/22/25
    “I suspect many high school students simply ask the first question when determining the calculus of AI use: Will I get caught? It’s heartening to know others are weighing the more critical question: Will I learn? Both are operating rationally within a decision making framework, but only one produces the outcome educators want. It’s clear […]
    • Microsoft
    • 12/10/25
    • Alex Kotran
    • 12/09/25
    “Here’s what I want you to take away: uncertainty isn’t the same as helplessness. You don’t need to predict the future to prepare for it. The people who thrive in moments like this aren’t the ones who guessed right about which industries would boom—they’re the ones who built the capacity to adapt, to learn, to […]
    • Anthropic
    • 12/04/25

ADMISSIONS

ADOLESCENCE

    • Stanford
    • 08/27/25
    • New York Times
    • 08/25/25
    “When A.I. chatbots are purposely trained as digital therapists, they show more promise. One example is Therabot, designed by Dartmouth College researchers. In a randomized controlled trial completed earlier this year, adult participants who used Therabot reported significant reductions in depression, anxiety and weight concerns. They also expressed a strong sense of connection to the […]
    • Jed Foundation
    • 08/20/25
    “For people under 18, AI companions are not currently safe. They can manipulate teens’ emotions, distort their sense of reality, and keep them from getting the real support they deserve at a time of significant brain growth and development. AI companion platforms are financially incentivized to build dependency, with your teen as the target audience. […]
    • EdSurge
    • 07/08/25
    “Students didn’t share these concerns with adults in their lives. Instead, they expressed these worries to an AI chat system, which schools and health care institutions are increasingly turning to in an attempt to better support youth… Balancing extracurricular activities and school was the largest concern among students, followed by sleep struggles and finding a […]
    • EdWeek
    • 05/19/25
    “The Take It Down Act is the first federal law to include criminal penalties for creating and posting AI-generated deepfakes, as well as for threatening to post intimate images without consent. Both the creators of such images, and those who “intentionally threaten” to create them, will face up to three years in jail if the […]
    • 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.””

AI

ARTS

ASSESSMENT

ATHENA

CHARACTER

    • New Yorker
    • 07/21/25
    “There’s a risk in becoming too attached to these fawning A.I.s. Imagine a teen-ager who never learns to read the social cues for boredom in others, because his companion is always captivated by his monologues, or an adult who loses the knack for apologizing, because her digital friend never pushes back… A.I. companions should be […]
    • Guardian
    • 02/27/25
    “Research pitting people against AI systems gives AI an edge by asking us to perform in machine-like ways.”

CREATIVITY

CURRICULUM

DIVERSITY/INCLUSION

GOVERNMENT

HUMANITIES

    • New Yorker
    • 04/26/25
    “She paused. “The A.I. is huge. A tsunami. But it’s not me. It can’t touch my me-ness. It doesn’t know what it is to be human, to be me.””
    • EdWeek
    • 04/28/24
    • 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 […]
    • 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.””
    • 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

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

    • Mike Caulfield
    • 12/09/25
    • Augmented Educator
    • 11/21/25
    • Harvard
    • 10/14/25
    “Critically, Tan does not grade her students’ AI-generated content. Instead, she assesses their reflections and their ability to use AI meaningfully. Over time, students get better at writing effective prompts and critiquing the AI’s output. They learn to identify hallucinations, jargon that masks weak logic, and content that sounds plausible but lacks substance. Tan’s broader […]
    • Medium
    • 04/21/25
    “They looked at 90 lesson plans from MagicSchool AI, SchoolAI, and straight OpenAI GPT-4. They didn’t set out to embarrass anyone — but the results speak for themselves… Here’s what the researchers found: MagicSchool leaned heavily on quiet, individual work — often defaulting to instructions like “assign a worksheet and ask students to work quietly.” […]
    • Dr Philippa Hartman
    • 11/08/24
    “Spoiler: my findings underscore that until we have specialised, fine-tuned AI copilots for instructional design, we should be cautious about relying on general-purpose models and ensure expert oversight in all ID tasks.”
    • Carmel Schettino
    • 11/03/24
    “We need to make it so that what students are being asked to learn is not how to factor, but why you might factor a polynomial. Instead of focusing on how to graph trigonometric functions, questions should focus on what affects the graph and why.”

READING/WRITING

    • Alex Kotran
    • 11/18/25
    “In this piece, I’ll start at the foundations of the question, exploring whether there is some intrinsic, essential metacognitive value in the literal act of writing that cannot be replaced by AI. After establishing a positive statement about the importance of writing, I’ll step back and address the normative dimension: should we encourage the use […]
    • Augmented Educator
    • 11/09/25
    • No More Marking
    • 10/25/25
    “We asked the LLMs to make Comparative Judgements instead. They have to read two pieces of writing and choose which is better, and we can then combine together all of these decisions to create a very sophisticated measurement scale for every piece of writing… This approach is much more effective, and results in very high […]
    • No More Marking
    • 10/19/25
    “So far, our teachers have told us that the report they find the most useful is the teacher report, consisting of personalised information on every student designed for teachers. There are three elements in the report: data, AI feedback and the student writing. They prefer this to the student report, which is similar but doesn’t […]
    • Chronicle of Higher Ed
    • 10/16/25
    “O — Ownership Through Reflection: Asking students to explain their writing decisions helps them develop their own voice and take responsibility for their writing choices, and serves to motivate them. Brief oral presentations can advance this sense of ownership as well as tie accountability to both their instructor and peers.”
    • Academic DJ
    • 08/18/25
    “Writing this piece required a careful dance—collaborating openly with AI tools while firmly protecting my own voice. I didn’t simply push “The Button.” Instead, I used the back-and-forth, the friction, the continual clarification of prompts and revisions to sharpen my thinking. This dialogue, though algorithmically mediated, deepened my sense of what I wanted to say. […]

STEM

SUSTAINABILITY

TECH

TECH/AI

TECH/AI: EDUCATION

TECH/AI: ETHICS AND RISK

TECH/AI: GOVERNMENT

TECH/AI: GOVERNMENT AND LAW

TECH/AI: INDUSTRY DEVELOPMENT

TECH/AI: SOCIAL

TECH/AI: USES AND APPLICATIONS

TECH/AI: Z-OTHER

WORKPLACE

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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