Posts related to: Evolution
Generative AI: Will history repeat or (just) rhyme

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...

Media, Cognition & Society through History:  A Mapping

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...

Keynote Presentation: AI in Education Summit

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

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...

The Desk, the Test, the LMS: The 5 Spaces for (re)Design in Education

The Desk, the Test, the LMS: The 5 Spaces for (re)Design in Education

What do a teacher's desk, the PISA test and Learning Management Systems (LMS) have in common. Apart from being educational technologies, they are also the heart of a book chapter that Melissa Warr, Kevin Close and I just published in a book titled Formative Design in...

On designing aesthetic educational experiences in science

On designing aesthetic educational experiences in science

What is the role of beauty (and aesthetics) in science in science education? This is something that I have been interested in for a long time, going back to highschool. Over the years I have built a small body of scholarship around this topic. Sadly, this work does...

Bringing Design to Education: IDC Talks

Bringing Design to Education: IDC Talks

I was recently invited to speak at a series organized by alumni of the IDC School of Design, IIT Powai. As an alum of the same institution it was a great honor to be invited. You can see the entire series here (and I must say there are some awesome speakers there). My...

ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of the web

ChatGPT as a blurry jpeg of the web

Ted Chiang is one of the greatest, insightful writers working today. I had written previously about one his short stories in a post titled: Truth of fact and feeling: Unpacking McLuhan (2/3) about his short story The truth of fact and the truth of feeling. (If you...

Aesthetics and science education: Beauty at Work podcast

Aesthetics and science education: Beauty at Work podcast

Beauty at Work is a podcast that "explores how beauty shapes our lives and the work that we do" hosted by Brandon Vaidyanathan, Associate Professor of Sociology at The Catholic University of America. In its first season the focus is on beauty in science. As part of...

Modeling human behavior: The new dark art of silicon sampling

Modeling human behavior: The new dark art of silicon sampling

A couple of months ago I had written this post, On merging with our technologies – which was essentially quotes from a conversation Ezra Klein had with the novelist Mohsin Hamid. I finished the post with a quote speaking the dangers of predictive technologies on human...

Complicating the idea of Design Thinking (in Education)

Complicating the idea of Design Thinking (in Education)

“Design thinking” is one of the latest buzzwords in education. Proponents argue that design thinking is a tried and tested process for fostering innovation in education while critics suggest that it is the latest fad to sweep through, and will, like others before it,...

The utopian/dystopian futures of online learning: New book chapter

The utopian/dystopian futures of online learning: New book chapter

I was invited to wrote a chapter for an edited book titled "The future of online education," edited by Stephen Paul McKenzie, Lilani Arulkadacham, Jennifer Chung and Zahra Aziz. It was an opportunity for me and my co-authors Melissa Warr and Ben Scragg to engage in...

Educational Futures Thinking: New book chapter

Educational Futures Thinking: New book chapter

The philosopher George Santayana (1910) famously stated, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (p. 284). In other words, the “best” way to prepare for the future is to study the past and through that, identify patterns and trends, and then...

On merging with our technologies (Unpacking McLuhan 4/3)

On merging with our technologies (Unpacking McLuhan 4/3)

This is the fourth of what was supposed to be a three post-series about how media influence our thinking. The first post, uses the invention of writing and print to unpack the meaning of McLuhan’s statement, “The medium is the message.” The second post, focuses on a...

The Postman always rings twice: Unpacking McLuhan (3/3)

The Postman always rings twice: Unpacking McLuhan (3/3)

This is the third of three blog posts about how media influence our thinking. This is the second of three blog posts about how media influence our thinking. The first post, uses the invention of writing and print to unpack the meaning of McLuhan’s statement, “The...

The futures of higher ed with Phoebe Wagner

The futures of higher ed with Phoebe Wagner

The Center for Science and the Imagination at ASU runs a series of short stories and virtual gatherings that explore issues related to transformative change. Essentially they solicit and publish a (super-short) short story that explores “themes of community,...

Can a computer program be sentient? Insights from Rodolphe Topffer, the father of comic books

Can a computer program be sentient? Insights from Rodolphe Topffer, the father of comic books

Can a computer program be sentient? Or are machines just getting good at "behaving" in ways that make it seem that way? And what does the work of a 18th century caricature artist (and father of the modern comic book) help us understand what is going on when we...

My favorite(?) failure

My favorite(?) failure

I was recently asked to write a chapter for a book that my colleague Ron Beghetto was editing with Laura McBain, called My Favorite Failure. Failure is never fun - and to pick one that was your favorite, is like deciding what your favorite form or torture is....

Designing the futures of STEM education

Designing the futures of STEM education

“What knowledge is of most worth?” is a question asked over a 100 years ago by the English philosopher, Herbert Spencer. His unequivocal answer was—science. This question (and his answer) resonates even today, though the context within which it is asked, and how we...

From being to becoming: Keynote by Shawn Loescher

From being to becoming: Keynote by Shawn Loescher

It is rarely that I hear a talk that blows me away. We have all seen the TED talks, and their mutant offspring. The over-hyped music and catchy taglines; the speaker in front of a rapt audience; the crafted delivery with its carefully punctuated pauses and reveals,...

COVID19 & Education

COVID19 & Education

The COVID19 crisis has disrupted education globally at an unprecedented scale. In some ways, we are living through the largest educational social experiment in history! Over the past year I have been involved in a range of initiatives, discussions, interviews, and...