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Of Pride & Prejudice (and a Smart Drunk Intern)
How many students feel pride in the work they are made to do for school? My guess is very few. Pride if anything comes from the final grade not the work itself. The work too often is just meant to be seen by the teacher. I have been thinking about this idea of pride...
27 Windows on the Universe (09): Metaphors as Windows
I thought I was done with this series about the human side of science, drawn from interviews with 27 cosmologists. Earlier posts explored, how this project started, the method, the role of wonder and beauty, the craft, how scientists think, what keeps them going and...
27 Windows on the Universe (08): The Last Window
This is the last post in a series about the human side of science, drawn from interviews with 27 cosmologists. Earlier posts explored, how this project started, the method, the role of wonder and beauty, the craft, how scientists think, what keeps them going and how...
Paths Crossing at the Digital Maidan: Keynotes, Forewords, and Futures
This post is long overdue. I was in Bangalore, back in December 2025, for the Quest 2 Learn Summit organized by the Quest Alliance. Quest and I go back to 2008, when I first attended one of their conferences. Our paths have kept crossing since: the Quest to Learning...
The Mirror and the Black Box: AI Metaphors and What They Mean for Learning
The latest installment of the Rethinking Technology & Creativity column in TechTrends is published. This one, co-authored with Danah Henriksen, is called "The Mirror and the Black Box: AI Metaphors and What They Mean for Learning." (Full citation and link below.)...
The Classroom and Beyond: Teacher Education in a GenAI World
Danah Henriksen and I have a chapter in the Third International Handbook of Educational Change (2026), edited by A. Lin Goodwin, Andy Hargreaves, Victoria Showunmi, Corrie Stone-Johnson, and Jennie Weiner. In our chapter, "The Classroom and Beyond: Teacher Education...
27 Windows on the Universe (07): The Ecosystem
This is the seventh in a series about the human side of science, drawn from interviews with 27 cosmologists. T Earlier posts explored, how this project started, the method, the role of wonder and beauty, the craft, how scientists think, and what keeps them going and...
27 Windows on the Universe (06): The Drive
This is the sixth in a series about the human side of science, drawn from interviews with 27 cosmologists. Earlier posts explored, how this project started, the method, the role of wonder and beauty, the craft and how scientists think. This one is about what keeps...
Look What You Made Me Do: The Dawkins Saga, Part II
A week or so ago I wrote a letter to Richard Dawkins — part tribute, part diagnosis — about his now-famous two-day conversation with Claude (or rather, "Claudia"), in which one of our most celebrated skeptics concluded that the chatbot might well be conscious. The...
A Transatlantic Keynote (No Travel Required)
Earlier this year, the University of Glasgow held its first International Symposium on AI in Education, organized by the School of Education and the Centre for Teaching Excellence. I was invited to give the keynote. The catch: I was in Arizona. Mark Peart, Gabriella...
Three Questions on Questions: On Asking, Knowing and Noticing
Note: This post is a followup to a piece I had written earlier. You can find that post Why Sal Khan’t: On Learning by Making but Teaching by Telling. This post was also cross-posted on the Civics of Technology blog. "Students aren't great at asking questions well."...
From Spectator to Specimen: When Parasocial Media Becomes Parasocial AI
Facebook!!! How it has changed over the years. I remember the time when it was a space to connect with friends and family, get their updates and more. It was a bit performative, for sure, but it still felt like a space worth visiting once in a while, to check in. All...
This View of Life: A Letter to Richard Dawkins
Note: Richard Dawkins made the news recently with an essay describing his two-day conversation with Claude, the AI chatbot from Anthropic, ending in the conclusion that Claude must be conscious. There have been many responses; this is mine — partly about that...
Banning what won’t go away: A new AIR|GPT episode
Tech bans, and calls for more of them, are in the air. The Los Angeles Unified School District just banned screens. Australia banned social media for everybody under 16 years of age. Other districts and states are following, or weighing whether to do so or not. That...
27 Windows on the Universe (05): The Internal Landscape
This is the fifth in a series about the human side of science, drawn from interviews with 27 cosmologists. Earlier posts explored the origin of the project, the method, wonder and beauty, and craft. This one is about something that surprised me in the data: these...
John Dewey, Mrs. Sehgal & R.K. Joshi: Two Brainwaves videos on AI and Teaching
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"...
27 Windows on the Universe (04): The Craft of Work
This is the fourth in a series about the human side of science, drawn from interviews with 27 cosmologists. The first post told the origin story. The second described the method. The third explored wonder and beauty—the spark that draws people into science. This one...
From blog post to AERA paper: Kant, Borges & AI go to Bollywood
Last summer, digging around in an old Dropbox folder, I stumbled across a Kant quote I had used in a comprehensive exam back when I was a graduate student, almost three decades ago: “Concepts without percepts are empty; percepts without concepts are blind.” That...
27 Windows on the Universe (03): The Spark
This is the third in a series about the human side of science, drawn from interviews with 27 cosmologists. The first post told the story of the transcripts. The second described the method. This one is about where science begins: in wonder. And what happens when...
Why Sal Khan’t: On Learning by Making but Teaching by Telling
This piece was also cross-posted on the Civics of Technology blog. This piece also has a followup post that you can find at Three Questions on Questions: On Asking, Knowing and Noticing Two pieces crossed my feed recently, both about Sal Khan and the AI tutoring...
The Paragraph is the Interface: AI Metaphors Meet the Talmud
Danah Henriksen and I recently wrote a paper, currently in press, titled "The Mirror and the Black Box: AI Metaphors and What They Mean for Learning." It's about how the metaphors we choose for AI shape what we can and can't think about it. The paper traces a...
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,...