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Speculative Fiction & Learning Futures: The Sequel
Sometimes you do a project and think it’s done. You archive it, link to it from your blog, and move on. And then, years later, it finds a second life you never anticipated. A few years ago, during the pandemic, I was part of one of the most enjoyable projects I’ve...
27 Windows on the Universe (02): The Artifacts in the Machine
This is the second in a series of posts about the human side of science, based on interviews with 27 leading cosmologists. The first post told the story of how these transcripts came to exist. This one describes how they were analyzed. How the analysis was done I...
Of Three Minds
I was of three minds,Like a treeIn which there are three blackbirds.—Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" I thought of Stevens's three minds earlier today when I looked at my calendar for the upcoming week. That’s what I usually do on Sundays,...
SITE 2026: There in Spirit
SITE is my conference. It has been for years now, and not being able to attend this year’s meeting in Philadelphia was bittersweet, to say the least. But even though I couldn’t be there in person, our team had a strong presence, and that’s what matters. A huge...
27 Windows on the Universe (01): The Fan Letter
This is the first in a series of posts about the human side of science, based on interviews with 27 leading cosmologists. The series explores what drew these scientists to the universe, how they think, what drives them, and what shaped their paths. 01: How this series...
AI in Education: Digital Education Dialogues Podcast
In this episode of Digital Education Dialogues, the discussion centers on the intersection of AI, teacher training, and the future of educational innovation. It was fun to be a guest on a show run by Chris Dede, since we are usually co-hosts on Silver Lining for...
The Autocomplete That Didn’t: Three More Reads on Dampuni
I recently wrote a post about my son Soham, aged two, replacing words in the Humpty Dumpty poem with a nonsense sound (“Dampuni”) and what that small act of linguistic mischief reveals about play, evolution, and how children learn. I thought I was done with it. I was...
Humpty Dumpty Sat on a Dampuni: Play, Evolution, and Futures Thinking
This is the first of two posts. You can find the second post here. When my son was about two, we used to play a complete-the-nursery-rhyme game. It was a simple game: I would recite the first few words of a poem and he would complete it. The point was that he knew the...
Large Language Models and Intelligent Tutoring Systems: Conflicting Paradigms and Possible Solutions
I have a new chapter out, co-authored with Danielle McNamara, Gregory Goodwin, and Diego Zapata-Rivera, in the latest volume of Design Recommendations for Intelligent Tutoring Systems (Volume 12: Generative Artificial Intelligence), edited by Anne Sinatra, Vasile Rus,...
Six Years, 266 Episodes, and One Persistent Question
On March 11, 2020, my friend Yong Zhao sent me an email. “I am interested in a thought experiment about education,” he wrote. “What if the Coronavirus forces schools to close for more than a year? I think this is a great opportunity to do some imagination and...
Dissertation in a day
For the past six years, I have been a co-host on Silver Lining for Learning, a weekly webinar series that began on March 20, 2020, the very week the world shut down due to the pandemic. What started as an urgent conversation among colleagues about how to keep learning...
Danielle McNamara on Magic Tutors, Learning Engineering & AI’s Role in Education
Over the years, our column series in TechTrends has explored the intersections of creativity, education, and emerging technologies. Recent articles have examined how GenAI shapes curiosity, how it complicates writing instruction, and what it means to personalize...
Introducing Hyperlinked.us
Around a year ago (January 27, 2025) I got an email out of the blue from Raaghav Pandya, introducing himself as a scholar working at intersections of STEM, creativity, makerspaces, South Asian pedagogical traditions, and youth wellbeing, and seeking to connect. I was...
What Are Your AI Blind Spots? New AIR | GPT Episode
What if I'm wrong? What are my blind spots? Those two questions frame our latest AIR | GPT episode, and they're worth sitting with. The catalyst was Matt Schumer's viral claim that AI is on the verge of mass-deleting jobs, possibly imminently. It racked up 85 million...
The Overconfident Intern in the Classroom: Reflections on AI, TPACK, and Education
I recently joined Justin Hardman on the Education Vanguard podcast for a conversation that ranged from the evolution of TPACK (now over 20 years old) to what AI actually means for teachers and learners. Justin and I go back a long way: he hosted me for a keynote at...
Using AI to address The Alignment Problem in doctoral dissertations
This semester I am leading a group of students through their Education Doctorate program, and right now they are deep in the work of crafting their dissertation proposals. A proposal is essentially a coherent argument built across three chapters: identify a problem of...
From HTML to GenAI: Re-visiting Three Early-Web Projects
I've been on a bit of a vibe-coding spree lately, building interactive simulations, educational tools, cultural experiments, all through conversation with AI rather than traditional programming. At some point I looked up and thought: what about the stuff I made back...
Creativity & AI: On the Perkins Platform Podcast
I recently joined Dr. Brian K. Perkins on the Perkins Platform Podcast for a conversation that gets at a question I think about a lot: when AI is part of the process, what actually qualifies as your work? In our conversation we pushed back on the tired extremes and...
Social-Emotional Learning & AI at LERN2026
Social-Emotional Learning & AI at LERN2026 Our team presented two papers at the 2nd Annual Learning Engineering Research Network (LERN) Convening, held February 3–4, 2026, at ASU's Tempe campus. The convening, themed "From Insights to Implementation: Learning...
Honest Non-Signals: Why AI Fools Us Without Lying
I have a test I give AI systems: a modified Ebbinghaus illusion where one circle is deliberately larger than the other (as in the image below). Older models failed it outright, confidently declaring the circles equal because the image had surface similarity to the...
Agentic AI: New Tools, New Questions (New AIR | GPT Episode)
At our most recent AIR|GPT podcast meetup (our regular monthly "airport" gathering), Caroline Kurban jump-started the discussion with a startling experiment. She had tested Perplexity's Comet, an agentic AI tool, on a 60-hour Coursera course. The result? The AI...
EdPrepLab World Café: Transforming Teacher Education for a Changing World
In early December 2025, I had the honor of joining an extraordinary panel for EdPrepLab's fifth World Café, a global virtual convening focused on how teacher education must evolve in response to rapid technological, political, and social change. The session brought...
What a Guide to AI in Schools Reveals (and What It Can’t)
We had Justin Reich and Jesse Dukes as guests on the Silver Lining for Learning webinar/podcast to discuss their new guidebook, A Guide to AI in Schools: Perspectives for the Perplexed. The resource, based on over 120 interviews with teachers and students, offers a...
AI, Education, & the Unregulated Global Experiment: Keynote at Education International’s First Global AI Conference
I recently had the privilege of speaking at Education International's inaugural Global Conference on Artificial Intelligence: Shaping our Future: Education Unions Leading for a Human-Centred AI, held in Brussels on December 4–5, 2025. More than 200 union leaders,...
How do people think AI works? (Some surprising findings)
Those of us who work in and around artificial intelligence often exist in something of a bubble. We talk about vibe coding and hallucination rates as if these concepts are common knowledge. I have often wondered about how much the broader public understands about how...
An AI Premortem: A New Direction for Students in an AI World
When social media first entered our world, educators—myself included—focused narrowly on strategies for incorporating these tools into classroom contexts. We were so busy figuring out the "how" of implementation that we paid far less attention to the "what if" of...
The Curiosity Paradox: How Sycophantic GenAI May Undermine Learning
Over the years, our column series in TechTrends has explored the intersections of creativity, education, and emerging technologies. Over the past year, we've examined GenAI's impact through interviews with leading thinkers, practitioner studies, and conceptual pieces...
The Nostalgia Machine: Why Ed Tech Research Keeps Missing the Point
A colleague recently shared a new study with me that, on the surface, seemed to confirm what many people suspect: that AI is making us dumber. The research, (Experimental Evidence of the Effects of Large Language Models versus Web Search on Depth of Learning) by Shiri...
Remembering John Langdon
John Langdon (website | wikipedia) passed away a few days ago, on January 1, 2026. He was one of the pioneers of ambigrams: words designed to be read from multiple orientations, most commonly upside down. We never met. There were opportunities but somehow it never...
The Parrot’s Tale, Updated
I'm in Bangalore this week for Quest Alliance's Quest to Learn 2025 conference. Looking back through my blog, I found that my first encounter with Quest was in 2008, and again in 2018. In that 2008 post, I had written about a talk by Geetha Narayanan where she read...