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...
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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
“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...
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...
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,...
I had three conversations this week. One with a colleague, one with a furniture repairer, and one with a physicist who’s been dead for decades. They fit together somehow… and this blog post is the result. Story 1 Lydia Cao is a friend, and colleague (faculty at the...
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...
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...
In which I respond thoughtfully to a journalist's question about AI in schools, watch my nuanced argument get reduced to a single quote, and reflect on how complexity gets flattened at multiple levels—from educational policy to media coverage. I recently wrote a post...
Do I contradict myself?Very well then I contradict myself,(I am large, I contain multitudes.)~ Walt Whitman; Song of Myself, 51 Last week I published two blog posts on the same day, which is relatively rare – but it does happen. What is truly rare is that in these two...
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...
A recent study by Neil Selwyn, Marita Ljungqvist, and Anders Sonesson titled When the Prompting Stops begins with GenAI's beguiling offer to educators: "What can I do for you?" But what unfolds isn't a story of seamless automation—it's a story of repair. Drawing on...