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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...
The Plays I Never Saw: A Tribute to Tom Stoppard
Tom Stoppard, the renowned playwright, has died. The funny thing is that I never saw any of his plays performed. And yet he played a critical role in making me who I am. The fact that I knew this playwright by reading his plays, rather than seeing them on stage, may...
Beyond AI Slop: Pride, Joy & Creativity in a World Created by AI
Is generative AI killing creativity or helping us find new ways to be creative? In our latest AIR|GPT episode, we take on Charlie Warzel's article: A tool that crushes creativity. He argues that generative AI is destroying creative work and polluting the digital world...
The Freedom to Design: Repurposing Technology for Creative Teaching
I recently had the pleasure of joining Dr. Cyndi Burnett and Dr. Matthew Worwood on the Fueling Creativity in Education podcast for a wide-ranging conversation about teachers, technology, and creative agency. We explored a question I've been thinking about for years:...
TPACK Handbook 3rd Edition (Plus: Covers that didn’t make it)
Twenty years. That's how long it's been since Matt Koehler and I published the 2006 article that gave the TPACK framework its name. The core ideas have aged reasonably well, even as the technologies around us have shape-shifted in ways we never anticipated. What we...
Jim D. Schools Punya on AI Research Tools
I'll be honest—I've been working with AI for a while now, but when it comes to the new tools for conducting literature reviews, I was behind the curve. I don't even use Zotero! So when my PhD students started asking about these AI-powered search tools, I realized I...
GenAI & Trans-disciplinary Creativity: New Book Chapter
What does the advent of AI mean for human creativity? That is the focus of a new book, Generative Artificial Intelligence and Creativity: Precautions, Perspectives, and Possibilities, edited by Matthew J. Worwood and James C. Kaufman. And as it happens, Danah...
Making Thinking Visible: Some Examples of No-Code (Vibe) Coding
I was thrilled recently when my friend Josh Brake mentioned me in his Substack post about "The Forward Deployed Educator." He referenced the Unit Circle Demo I had created and wrote about how educators can now use AI tools to build custom learning experiences for...
Beyond Learning Styles II: Your Students’ Minds ? Work Nothing Like Yours (and They Don’t Know it Either)
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post about cognitive diversity (and learning styles), essentially arguing that in the process of debunking the learning styles myth we may have lost sight of a bigger issue, that of cognitive diversity. That post, and the ideas...
Blaming the Parents, Not the Platforms: How a World Bank Screen-Time Report Lets the Attention Economy Off the Hook
Note: This is a cross post with the Civics of Technology blog. The World Bank recently released a report titled Balancing the Digital Scales: Screen Time Management in Early Childhood Education (Molina, 2025). The report lays out how excessive screen exposure in young...
The Real AI Challenge: Building Systems That Adapt, Not Just Adopt
“The environment is where we all meet, where we all have a mutual interest; it is the one thing all of us share. It is not only a mirror of ourselves, but a focusing lens...” ~ Lady Bird Johnson “A system is never the sum of its parts; it’s the product of their...
The Yes-Bot Problem: Why Agreeable AI Makes Learning Harder
I just came across a study that should make anyone thinking about AI in education sit up and take notice. In their paper ""Check My Work?": Measuring Sycophancy in a Simulated Educational Context" researchers tested five different LLMs in a simulated educational...
Einstein’s Beams and Feynman’s Colors: What We Lost When We Debunked Learning Styles
“When I see equations, I see the letters in colors — I don’t know why. As I’m talking, I see vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahnke and Ernde’s book, with light-tan j’s, slightly violet-bluish n’s, and dark brown x’s flying around. And I wonder what the hell...
From Classroom to Reality: Celebrating Media Mentor AI
This past spring semester, I taught (with Nicole Oster and Lindsey McCaleb) a masters/doctoral seminar on Human Creativity × AI in Education. When we set out to design the class, we knew we were venturing into relatively uncharted territory, committed to examining...
Beyond Skills: A conversation on Futures & Learning
A few months ago I sat down with my friend Bhawna Parmar as a guest on the Quest for Better Futures podcast. Readers of this blog will remember Bhawna from her insightful article in The Caravan that had inspired a previous blog post: While we weren't looking: The real...
The Promise and Paradox of Creative AI: Talk at U25 Conference
I was recently invited to speak at the Universel Conference 2025: Empowering Humane Technology. You can find the abstract, and an embedded video of my talk below. The Promise and Paradox of creative AI What happens when an AI can write a mathematically perfect poem,...
Beyond Tools and Training: Building Sustainable Learning Environments that Evolve with AI
Our TechTrends series on technology, learning and creativity, has focused recently on generative AI's impact on education through expert interviews, practitioner experiences, and historical analyses. This article addresses a critical challenge: How do we create...
Pedagogical Debt: What We Owe Our Students in an AI World (New AIR | GPT Episode)
At our most recent AIR|GPT podcast meetup (our regular monthly "airport" gathering), Ruben Puentedura introduced us to the concept of "pedagogical debt," inspired by comment by Ian Bogost (in a recent Atlantic article titled AI Has Broken High School and College)....
We Are All Living in Searle’s Chinese Room
I found out a couple of days ago that the philosopher John Searle passed away on September 17, just a couple of weeks ago. Searle was a philosopher known for his work in the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and social philosophy. That said, he most known...