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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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:...
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...
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...
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 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...
“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...
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...
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...
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...
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)....
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...
A little less than a year ago, my friends and colleagues, Marie Heath and Stephanie Smith Budhai reached out to me asking me if I would be willing to write a foreword to their book Critical AI in K-12 Classrooms: A Practical Guide for Cultivating Justice and Joy. I...
Earlier today I had a Zoom call with a doctoral student interested in having me on her comprehensive examination committee. During our conversation, she expressed interest in understanding the idea and process of design, particularly as it applies to educational...
Note: I wrote the following a day or so after I heard of David Berliner's passing. I have links to some other resources at the end, along with some other reminisences from some of my colleagues at ASU, collected here (with their permission). I first encountered David...
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about how AI systems trained on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) data risk creating a flattened, culturally homogenized version of human psychology. In my post (titled, S’more problems: Generative Ai,...
What is the role of technology in learning? I have devoted a large part of my professional life to this question, though I have increasingly started to wonder whether we, personally, and as a field, have been asking the wrong question. We have focused our attention on...
I've had the pleasure of co-hosting the AIR|GPT podcast, where I've gotten to know Errol St. Clair Smith as one of the most thoughtful curators of education-related news and information I've encountered. Errol has this uncanny knack for bringing diverse voices...
It's been 1000 days since ChatGPT launched. Not that anybody was clamoring for a hallucinating ChatBot but here we are. A friend once told me about a Gujarati business principle: give any new venture 1000 days, roughly three years, before deciding whether to continue...
Note to readers: This is the story of how I came to write an essay called "Why Gödel and Escher But Not Bach" for a book about the future of orchestras. I should add that I know almost nothing about orchestras and feel deeply uncomfortable in public classical music...
I recently had the pleasure of returning to the Modem Futura podcast for a second conversation with hosts Andrew Maynard and Sean Leahy, and guess what, it was even more fun than the first time around. What started as a discussion about the latest AI developments in...
Four copper pots. A fountain pen on a bus. A bull with a crow. A peacock in a bucket. What cities do these represent? And here's a bonus round: a swimming pool with a tiny lawn island floating in it—what fruit is this? Finally, glass of tea, a banana, and someone...
Scott Carlson's recent article (On the Dangers of 'Simplification') in The Chronicle of Higher Education explores James C. Scott's influential book Seeing Like a State. Reading it, something clicked into place—a recognition of why I've spent decades swimming against...
It is rare that one comes across an original journal article title that one HAS to click on and read. For instance, my favorite title of all time has been Alison Gopnik's article titled "Explanation as Orgasm." Not only is this a catchy title, it also make a profound...
In which I examine OpenAI's much-hyped "Study Mode" and contrast it with a couple of real research-based approaches. The differences are telling. Read on… OpenAI recently announced “Study Mode” for ChatGPT with considerable fanfare, claiming it was built “in...
Everyone seems to be clamoring for AI literacy these days—how to prompt effectively, how to spot AI-generated content, how to integrate these tools into workflows. I have been critical of this phenomena, see my post on pencil literacy and a new definition of literacy...