It has been a busy summer. On the personal front, my son got married, and the wedding was everything such an occasion should be, everything it could be, and then a good deal more.
Things have been busy on the professional front as well though not much of it made it to the website. The biggest reason for that was that since the beginning of June I have been rebuilding this website (a process that deserves its own post) so the live site was frozen while I worked on it in the background. Of course none of that meant that I wasn’t giving talks and traveling. So in some sense, this post is housekeeping, an attempt to get things on the record before the fall semester swallows everything.
1. It has to be me: A conversation with Felipe Zamana
Felipe Zamana has started a new interview series called Time to Think, built on the idea that ideas are worth following as they change over time, and he was generous enough to make me the first conversation. We covered a lot of ground: design as the thing that holds my otherwise scattered interests together, why creativity and knowledge develop alongside each other rather than in sequence, and why so much of my thinking happens in the act of writing rather than before it. We also talked about my work on beauty and aesthetics in science education, which never found the audience my other writing did, and which I am, perhaps for that reason, more attached to than is reasonable.
The title of the piece (It has to be me) comes from something I said about writing with AI. However much I use these tools, and I use them a great deal, the final say has to stay with me, or the result stops being worth publishing under my name.
2. Asking better questions about AI in education with Darius Pocha
I was a guest on Primer, the podcast from Create/Change, a London consultancy that works with government and the public sector. That is presumably why Darius Pocha was interested in what institutions ought to be asking about AI. We discussed how the cheating frame has done real damage to discussion about AI, making it about policing and not about deeper questions, namely how we protect those parts of learning that need to be difficult. We also talked about what any of this looks like at the scale of a university with 180,000 students.
Listen on Spotify · Watch on YouTube · Episode page at Create/Change
3. In Madrid, with Education International
At the end of June I was in Madrid for the first in-person meeting of Education International’s AI and Technology Network, picking up a thread from the keynote I gave in Brussels last December. EI represents somewhere north of thirty-two million educators, which makes it one of the few bodies in this conversation with real leverage over how any of this actually lands in schools.
I gave a keynote in Madrid as well, but the more useful artifact is the report Education International published just before the meeting, Armand Doucet’s Teaching, AI, and the Human Core of Education: The Future Worth Defending, which I had a hand in shaping, and I truly value the opportunity to get my ideas out to a wider audience. A fair amount of my thinking made it in, including the argument that AI fluency has to cover the technology, the system it operates inside, and the self that is susceptible to it. The report also emphasizes the relational aspect of education, something that educators bring to the table by default. Its central claim is the one worth carrying away: AI is not disrupting the purpose of education, it is disrupting the conditions under which that purpose can be realized.
And, more briefly
- A new episode of AIR|GPT, the roundtable I record with Caroline Fell Kurban, Liz Kolb, Ruben Puentedura and Helen Crompton, (produced by Errol St. Clair) went up on July 4: What Can You Trust and Who Do You Trust With Educational AI? Five people who each built a framework for thinking about technology in education, spending thirty-seven minutes on what and whom you can actually trust once AI enters the world.
- On July 6 I was invited by Nurun Nahar to join Tina Austin and Chahna Gonsalves for a TIRIgogy fireside chat on generative AI, assessment integrity, and learning in higher education, pitched mostly at UK colleagues. The slides, the video, and the Padlet of questions we collected from participants are all available, and the whole series is worth a look if you work in higher education. TIRIgogy keeps an archive of past webinars.
- Also in late June I was in Pittsburgh for AI Upskilling: The Future of Work in the Age of AI, a two-day workshop run by the AI Adoption Initiative and Carnegie Mellon, where I sat on a panel about what AI means for higher education. Their organizing idea is the AI labor stack: the innovators who build the infrastructure, the facilitators who deploy and integrate it, and the users whose jobs change underneath them. It was fun to hang out with a bunch of policy makers and labor economists and see the world through their lens.
- Earlier in the year I sat down with Itamar Livne-Kricheli (a 13 year-old running his own youtube channel, how cool is that!) for The Rhetoric Room, a video interview on digital literacy, how these models actually work, and how schools and students might decide for themselves whether and how to use them.
- Finally, one more for the record. The EDSAFE AI Alliance and my own college have published Future-Proofing Human Flourishing: The Case for a Learning Sciences Benchmark for AI, which came out of a convening that I had participated in, back in February, and argues that AI tools ought to be measured against what the learning sciences know about cognition rather than against capability alone.