I recently was a guest on Bob Greenberg’s Brainwaves Video Anthology, a remarkable project that since 2014 has grown into an archive of over 2,500 conversations with some of the most interesting thinkers of our time. Bob’s mission of making the “best and brightest” minds freely accessible is admirable and I was happy to contribute two short videos to this growing collection.

Video 1: John Dewey Meets AI. In the first conversation, I lay out two lenses for thinking about generative AI in education. The first is the here and now — where most of the discourse has fixated on AI as a Socratic tutor, a dream that stretches back to the intelligent tutoring systems of the 1950s. But I think we’ve largely missed the more interesting tradition, the one Seymour Papert pointed to: the computer as a children’s machine, a tool for inquiry, construction, communication, and expression — Dewey’s four primary impulses for learning. The second lens is longer and more sobering: AI as a cultural technology, in the sense that film and radio were cultural technologies. They didn’t transform the classroom directly, but they reshaped the world around it. AI will do the same, and I suspect with stakes higher than social media. You can see the video embedded below.

Video 2: Teachers Make a Difference — Mrs. Sehgal and R.K. Joshi. In the second, Bob asked about teachers who shaped me, and I tell two stories. One is about Mrs. Sehgal, my third- or fourth-grade teacher in New Delhi, who saw something in me before I saw it in myself, and who could hold a room of small children spellbound with a single story. The other is about R.K. Joshi, my typography professor, who carried a blade wrapped in paper in his wallet — and who one morning used it to silently teach an entire class what it means to be a designer. My former doctoral student Danah Henriksen titled her dissertation on award-winning teachers We Teach Who We Are. Mrs. Sehgal and R.K. Joshi are why that phrase rings true for me. You can see the video embedded below.

I’d encourage you to go to the Brainwaves Video Anthology channel and lose an afternoon in the archive. Huge thanks to Bob Greenberg for inviting me.