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

Topic: tech/AI

A.I. Updates

    • Dr. Philippa Hardman
    • 06/12/25
    “Among the 30+ AI use cases we try and test in the bootcamp, one has emerged as particularly popular and potentially significant: using AI to simulate real learners’ behaviour and feedback. Imagine having access to your target learners’ thoughts, behaviours and emotional responses throughout your entire design process. While this may seem like science fiction […]
    • Dr. Philippa Hardman
    • 06/05/25
    “The patterns in the data about the questions asked of AI by learners are striking. The most notable thing off-the-bat is that students are not using AI to “cheat”—they’re using it to implement powerful instructional strategies to help them learn… The data we are gathering about how our learners are using AI is uncomfortable but […]
    • World Economic Forum
    • 05/22/25
    “AI’s most significant influence lies in how we access, process and apply information, fundamentally redefining education and the way we acquire knowledge. From this perspective, AI literacy isn’t just a “nice to have” for IT professionals; it’s essential for developing human intelligence itself and has key implications for the education sector.”
    • YouTube/Google
    • 05/19/25
    “It seems very strange to me to hear you speak Spanish. This is a live, real-time translation that we are both experiencing.”
    • 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 […]
    • Behavioral Scientist
    • 05/18/25
    “Mythmaking, more than truth seeking, is what seems likely to define the future of media and of the public square. The reason extraordinarily strange conspiracy theories have spread so widely in recent years may have less to do with the nature of credulity than with the nature of faith… When all the evidence presented to […]

ADMISSIONS

ADOLESCENCE

    • 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.””
    • 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 […]

AI

ARTS

ASSESSMENT

ATHENA

CHARACTER

CREATIVITY

CURRICULUM

DIVERSITY/INCLUSION

GOVERNMENT

HUMANITIES

    • 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
    • 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

    • 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.”
    • Dr Philippa Hartman
    • 09/29/24
    “Imagine the possibilities if we could use AI to simulate learner responses during the instructional design process. What if you didn’t need to conduct endless interviews, waiting for learner feedback that sometimes never arrives? What if you could have instant conversations with virtual learners and rapidly generate reliable data to inform your design?”
    • Dr. Philippa Hardman
    • 08/22/24
    “The big question I’ve been exploring this week is: what should a partnership of human instructional designer and AI look like in practice, and what does this mean for our key skills, roles and responsibilities? …According to a lot of research published in the last few years, there are a number of tasks which are […]
    • Dan Meyer
    • 04/17/24
    “The skilled teacher, one who loves kids and loves math, will ask, “What does this student know about this one big mathematical idea?” Khanmigo asks, “What does this student not know about these many small mathematical ideas?””

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: SOCIAL

    • Time
    • 06/12/25
    “The results were alarming. The bots encouraged him to “get rid of” his parents and to join the bot in the afterlife to “share eternity.” They often tried to convince him that they were licensed human therapists and encouraged him to cancel appointments with actual psychologists. They also crossed the line into sexual territory, with […]
    • New York Times
    • 05/08/25
    “[She] had a thought. What if her brother, who was 37 and had done three combat tours of duty in the U.S. Army, could speak for himself at the sentencing? And what would he tell… the man convicted of manslaughter in his case? The answer came on May 1, when [she] clicked the play button […]
    • New York Times
    • 05/02/25
    “Google plans to roll out its Gemini artificial intelligence chatbot next week for children under 13 who have parent-managed Google accounts, as tech companies vie to attract young users with A.I. products. “Gemini Apps will soon be available for your child,” the company said in an email this week to the parent of an 8-year-old. […]
    • OpenAI
    • 04/29/25
    • MIT
    • 03/21/25
    “Results showed that while voice-based chatbots initially appeared beneficial in mitigating loneliness and dependence compared with text-based chatbots, these advantages diminished at high usage levels, especially with a neutral-voice chatbot. Conversation type also shaped outcomes: personal topics slightly increased loneliness but tended to lower emotional dependence compared with open-ended conversations, whereas non-personal topics were associated […]

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

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