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...
Summary: In which I explore why tinkering—messy, creative, often undervalued and overlooked—is not only a valid way to approach teaching, but perhaps one of the most honest. My friend Josh Brake recently wrote a Substack post (Don't tinker with AI in the classroom)...
Summary: In which I explore three sticky metaphors—digital plastic, curriculum-shaped objects, and the endlessness of edge cases—and how they illuminate the risks of AI-powered education tools that look like learning but fail to teach. In a previous blog post (The...
One of blogging's greatest pleasures, often unspoken, are the truly serendipitous connections one makes. Not networking in the conventional sense, but unexpected encounters with people who find something on my website that connects with them and they reach out. These...
I am a huge fan of Arthur Brooks' regular columns in The Atlantic where he writes about meaning, love, and happiness, with twin goals, "to understand these parts of life more deeply, and impart to others whatever understanding I can glean." I appreciate his insights...
Bill Atkinson was someone I had never met. But he changed my life. I learned of Bill's passing a couple of days ago. It was not that I had thought about Bill a lot but the news of his death brought back memories and a recognition of the critical role he had played in...
Keeping up with GenAI can be difficult. Every few months, another language model arrives trumpeting crisper logic, improved outputs and more. The upgrades land so quickly that yesterday’s marvel becomes today’s baseline, enticing us to believe each new release is the...
Camera crews search for clues amid the detritusAnd entertainment shapes the landThe way the hammer shapes the hand. Jackson Browne, in Casino Nation In this post, I examine how AI systems have evolved from capturing attention to manipulating intentions, creating an...
Note: This post was co-authored with Melissa Warr and cross-posted on the Civics of Technology website as Artificial Intimacy: How AI is Engineered to Hijack Human Connection (published: April 27, 2025). Authors’ note: We had almost finished writing this post,...
On April 22, 2025, The Washington Post reported on a draft executive order from the Trump administration that outlines a sweeping plan to embed artificial intelligence into K-12 education. The order calls for AI to be integrated into teaching practices, teacher...
A recent study published in the Harvard Business Review (How People Are Really Using Gen AI in 2025) provides compelling insights into the evolving landscape of generative AI use. The research involved analyzing posts from Reddit, Quora and other articles over the...
The prose below is from a manuscript that was recently discovered in the archives of the Indian National History Museum. It was found among papers donated in 1923 by the estate of Colonel Jackson Vivian Quill III of the Royal Fusiliers, who served in British India...
In a previous blog post (Supernormal Stimuli: From Birds to Bots) I had written about the idea of super normal stimuli – a term was first introduced by the Nobel prize winning ethologist Nico Tinbergen. His research showed that animals often responded more strongly to...
Picture this: a small bird desperately trying to balance atop an egg so enormous it keeps sliding off, while its own perfectly good eggs lie abandoned nearby. This absurd image has stayed with me since childhood, when I first encountered it in a popular science book...
A while back, I wrote about an email that made my heart stop—an auto-generated message declaring that an employee had been "terminated." That impersonal, poorly designed communication spoke volumes about the organization's attitude towards its people. And the fact...
In my previous blog post on the Microsoft Research study about GenAI and expertise I ended with a troubling realization that GenAI may not be the best options for learners. As I wrote "This analysis raises particularly thorny issues about AI use in education. If...
As part of my class on Human Creativity x AI in Education, students were randomly assigned to Teams A through E. One of their first tasks? Create team names starting with their assigned letter. So we ended up with with teams AI, Brainstormers, Catalyst, Dreamers and...
A year or so ago, I came up with this metaphor that working with a chatbot is like having "a smart, biased, supremely confident, drunk intern." While the bias aspect is a crucial issue I've written about elsewhere, for this discussion we'll focus on the other...
Tesla recently quietly granted me temporary access to their Full Self Driving system (something I had written about in another context). It was interesting, to say the least, to give up control, in a relatively high-risk context and just let the machine navigate...
I've had many conversations recently with colleagues about what happens when we integrate GenAI into our daily work. What effects does it have on our cognition? What do we gain and what do we lose in this process? Does using Claude or ChatGPT to help with writing...
Note: For over 20 years I have been taking photographs of everyday objects that appear to have faces, a phenomenon known as pareidolia, for a series I call 'Faces in the Wild.” The above image was captured during a family trip to Mexico in 2012. I have “cleaned up”...