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Essay
Content type: Essay
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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.…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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Remembering David Berliner (1938 – 2025)
Note: I wrote the following a day or so after I heard of David Berliner’s passing. I have links to…
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LLMs are WEIRD Stochastic Parrots
Almost exactly a year ago, I wrote about how AI systems trained on WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic)…
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Flawed Jade
I had three conversations this week. One with a colleague, one with a furniture repairer, and one with a physicist…
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While We Weren’t Looking: The Real Digital Revolution Beyond School Walls
What is the role of technology in learning? I have devoted a large part of my professional life to this…
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Whose Voice? Whose Accent? Navigating Authenticity & Impact in AI-Generated Content
I’ve had the pleasure of co-hosting the AIR|GPT podcast, where I’ve gotten to know Errol St. Clair Smith as one…
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On Becoming: Insights from the Modem Futura Podcast
I recently had the pleasure of returning to the Modem Futura podcast for a second conversation with hosts Andrew Maynard…
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The Loss of Nuance in discussions of AI in Education
In which I respond thoughtfully to a journalist’s question about AI in schools, watch my nuanced argument get reduced to…
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The art of having it both ways!
Do I contradict myself?Very well then I contradict myself,(I am large, I contain multitudes.)~ Walt Whitman; Song of Myself, 51…
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F*** Nuance: A reflection on TPACK and theorizing
It is rare that one comes across an original journal article title that one HAS to click on and read.…
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Prompts vs. Principles: Contrasting OpenAI’s Study Mode to Real Educational AI
In which I examine OpenAI’s much-hyped “Study Mode” and contrast it with a couple of real research-based approaches. The differences…
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The Hidden Cost of AI in Schools: As Expert Teachers Work Harder, Can Novice Teachers Keep Up?
A recent study by Neil Selwyn, Marita Ljungqvist, and Anders Sonesson titled When the Prompting Stops begins with GenAI’s beguiling…
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In defense of tinkering
Summary: In which I explore why tinkering—messy, creative, often undervalued and overlooked—is not only a valid way to approach teaching,…
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The Edge Cases Are Endless: Google’s Digital Plastic and other Curriculum-Shaped Objects
Summary: In which I explore three sticky metaphors—digital plastic, curriculum-shaped objects, and the endlessness of edge cases—and how they illuminate…
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Small pieces, meaningful connections: Why I love the open web
One of blogging’s greatest pleasures, often unspoken, are the truly serendipitous connections one makes. Not networking in the conventional sense,…
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Large Language Models: A Postmodern Nightmare (built by Silicon Valley)
I am a huge fan of Arthur Brooks’ regular columns in The Atlantic where he writes about meaning, love, and…
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The Stranger Who Changed My Life: A tribute to Bill Atkinson
Bill Atkinson was someone I had never met. But he changed my life. I learned of Bill’s passing a couple…
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The jagged frontier of reasoning models: Revisiting eclipses & illusions
Keeping up with GenAI can be difficult. Every few months, another language model arrives trumpeting crisper logic, improved outputs and…
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The Hammer Shapes the Mind: GenAI and the Rise of the Intention Economy
Camera crews search for clues amid the detritusAnd entertainment shapes the landThe way the hammer shapes the hand. Jackson Browne,…
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Engineered for Attachment: The Hidden Psychology of AI Companions
Note: This post was co-authored with Melissa Warr and cross-posted on the Civics of Technology website as Artificial Intimacy: How…
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Who Ordered That? On AI, Education, and the Illusion of Necessity
On April 22, 2025, The Washington Post reported on a draft executive order from the Trump administration that outlines a…
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Artificial Intimacy: How AI Exploits Our Social Brains
A recent study published in the Harvard Business Review (How People Are Really Using Gen AI in 2025) provides compelling…
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On the Ethical Perils of Mass-Produced Books: A Concerned Scholar’s View
The prose below is from a manuscript that was recently discovered in the archives of the Indian National History Museum.…
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Irresistible by Design: AI Companions as Psychological Supernormal Stimuli
In a previous blog post (Supernormal Stimuli: From Birds to Bots) I had written about the idea of super normal…