The Society for Information Technology in Teacher Education (SITE) conference has been an integral part of my professional journey for over two decades. My first presentation at SITE was back in 2001 with Matt Koehler and through the years, SITE has played a pivotal...
AI in Education: Potentials, Perils & Policies
NORRAG, based at the Geneva Graduate Institute, is a global network focused on international education policy and cooperation, known for its commitment to addressing under-researched topics related to education quality and equity and amplifying voices from the Global...
The (Neil) Postman Always Rings Twice: 5 Questions on AI and Education
Note: This post has also been cross-posted on the Civics of Technology blog. Marie Heath (with whom I recently co-wrote a blog post about GenAI in Teacher Education: A techno-skeptical perspective) and I were invited to write a chapter for an edited volume titled...
Creative dialogue with Generative AI: Exploring the Possible with Ron Beghetto
As part of our ongoing series for the journal TechTrends exploring the intersections of technology, education, and creativity, we have recently turned our focus to the potential impacts of generative AI (GenAI) on these domains. Our latest article features a...
Student Panel at FOLC Fest
On March 14-15, 2024, Arizona State University hosted its inaugural Future of Learning Community (FOLC) Fest at the Omni Hotel in Tempe. This conference brought together educators, technologists, and student success advocates to explore how ASU can fulfill its charter...
Generative AI in Education: Keynote at UofM-Flint
A couple of weeks ago I was invited to give a keynote at the Frances Willson Thompson Critical Issues Conference on Generative AI in Education. It was great to go back to Michigan even if for a super short trip. One of the pleasures of the visit was catching up with...
Generative AI: Will history repeat or (just) rhyme
As generative AI continues to reshape our world, we're faced with a crucial question: Will we repeat the mistakes we made with previous technologies or will this time be something different? George Santayana famously warned, "Those who cannot remember the past are...
Hype & Luck: Gratuitous Self-Promotion (2024 Edition)
It is natural, if you have been working in a field for a while, and have been somewhat successful, that some accolades will come your way, just by dint of being around long enough. As Bing Chat wrote, when asked to create a funny, self-deprecating profile of me in the...
GenAI in Teacher Education: A Technoskeptical Perspective
Image created using Adobe Firefly & Adobe Photoshop, composed in Keynote by Punya Mishra By Marie K. Heath and Punya Mishra Hello! This is a cross-blog post between Punya Mishra’s blog, where he plays with ideas of learning, technology, design and creativity...
“Tipping” the Scales: When Metaphors (Quite Literally) Blur Reality
Should we tip machines for the work they do for us? Does that question even make sense? What follows is a reflection on metaphors, technology, deceptive design, AI and more... Read on. Metaphors and more In her book God, Human, Animal, Machine, Meghan O’Gieblyn...
Generative AI, Teacher Knowledge and Educational Research: Bridging Short- and Long-Term Perspectives.
I am pleased to share our latest article in our ongoing column series for TechTrends on the topics of technology creativity and education. Over the past few months we have focused on generative AI, through conversations with thought leaders such as Chris Dede...
Media, Cognition & Society through History: A Mapping
If oral cultures prioritize memory and print cultures emphasize systematic organization, what types of knowledge will AI systems foster? Marie Heath and I wrote this line in a chapter that is currently in press. But the idea underlying this quote has been with me for...
The Absurd One-Sidedness of the Ethics of AI Debate: A rant
It seems no conversation about AI and education is complete without discussing the importance of the ethical use of the technology. There are numerous reports and academic articles about it (this and this and this ... I could go on and on). There is, however, one...
It HAS to hallucinate: The true nature of LLM’s
Though Generative AI is receiving a great deal of attention lately, I am not entirely sure that the discussions of these technologies and their impact on education and society at large genuinely engage with the true nature of these technologies. In fact I have argued...
Education & the Rise of AI Influencers
I have been thinking hard about the nature of generative AI, what sets it apart from other technologies that have come in the past. It seems to me there are two key factors. The first is its ability to engage in dialogue, in natural language and the second are its...
AI is WEIRD: Part II
Note: The image above is an original design - showing "AI" embedded in the word "WEIRD" Generative AI is weird... as I had written in my previous blog post, identifying some key characteristics I had described in a recent Keynote presentation. In the process of...
GenAI 2023: Year in Review
A week or so ago I was joined by friends Sean Leahy, Rachna Mathur and Kellie Kreiser on the Learning Futures Podcast. The topic: looking back on a crazy, dynamic, transformative year of generative AI. As is to be expected, we covered a lot of ground in the...
Generative AI is WEIRD!
Note: This blog post was almost entirely written by ChagGPT based on an analysis of a set of images I had uploaded onto it. The image above (Weird AI) is an original typographic design created by me. The background sky was created by Adobe Firefly. To give some...
Me & We in AI
What does generative AI mean to me? And to us? These key questions were part of a special exhibit curated by students in the DCI 691: Education by Design course I taught this fall. Education by Design is my favorite class to teach. It is a course about design—design...
Keynote Presentation: AI in Education Summit
Note: The image above is the result of a two-stage creative process—done in collaboration with AI. Dall-E was tasked, over multiple iterations, to craft a woodcut-style image, to abstractly capture the idea of AI and education, with dark and light motifs, aiming to...
Andrew Maynard on AI, Responsible Innovation & The Future of Humanity
Welcome once again to our ongoing column series where we delve into the intersection of technology, creativity, and education. Our conversations with authorities such as Chris Dede (Harvard), Ethan Mollick (Wharton), and Kyle Jensen (ASU) have centered around the...
AI writes book reviews
Here is the title and abstract for a book review that was just published in the Irish Journal of Technology Enhanced Learning Preparing Ourselves for Artificial Intelligence: A Review of The Alignment Problem and God, Human, Animal, Machine Abstract: In this article,...
OECD Global Forum on the Future of Education: Bucharest, Romania
I have been in Bucharest for the past few days participating in the OECD Global Forum on the Future of Education. It has been great fun, meeting lots of new people, developing frameworks around AI and education and more. A few resources and photographs from the...
Questioning Assumptions: Podcast episode
I was recently invited as a guest on the Better Learning Podcast. I had a great conversation with the host, Kevin Stoller (and boy does he have a voice designed for audio!). Turns out that we both went to Miami University, though our paths didn't overlap or intersect....
BAIS: Implicit Bias in AI systems
Update September 20, 2024): This article is now published and can be found here: Warr, M., Oster, N. J., & Isaac, R. (2024). Implicit bias in large language models: Experimental proof and implications for education. Journal of Research on Technology in Education,...
Design\Ethics\AI
Technologies like remote proctoring software and advanced language models are no longer futuristic concepts. They're here, and they're reshaping how we learn and how we teach. But with these advancements come critical ethical considerations. The deployment of these...
Can we please slow it all down? School leaders take on ChatGPT (new article)
We have, over the past months, explored a range of issues related to generative AI, education, and creativity in our column series, for TechTrends, with the goal of fostering dialogue among stakeholders—students, parents, educators, and policymakers—to ensure these...
Vikram OR Vetaal, A Halloween Story (co-authored with AI)
A few weeks back, Sean Leahy – friend, tech aficionado, futurist, and the co-host of the Learning Futures Podcast – reached out to me via email with an intriguing proposal. He was playing with the concept of harnessing generative AI to craft Halloween stories. The aim...
The new convergence
I recently received an email from dean recommending this post titled Thoughts on Now and Then by Andrew Hickey. In this extended essay Hickey provides his thoughts on the new Beatles remake, Now and Then. The essay is a thoughtful and loving analysis of human...
Total eclipse of the sun: An experiment with visual AI
In a previous post I explored some of the visual capabilities of ChatGPT. This is a continuation of those experiments, where ChatGPT helped me identify the date and time of a solar eclipse based on a photo I took decades ago, as a graduate student at the University of...