Over the years, our column series in TechTrends has explored the intersections of creativity, education, and emerging technologies. Recent articles have examined how GenAI shapes curiosity, how it complicates writing instruction, and what it means to personalize...
Around a year ago (January 27, 2025) I got an email out of the blue from Raaghav Pandya, introducing himself as a scholar working at intersections of STEM, creativity, makerspaces, South Asian pedagogical traditions, and youth wellbeing, and seeking to connect. I was...
I recently joined Justin Hardman on the Education Vanguard podcast for a conversation that ranged from the evolution of TPACK (now over 20 years old) to what AI actually means for teachers and learners. Justin and I go back a long way: he hosted me for a keynote at...
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...
At our most recent AIR|GPT podcast meetup (our regular monthly "airport" gathering), Caroline Kurban jump-started the discussion with a startling experiment. She had tested Perplexity's Comet, an agentic AI tool, on a 60-hour Coursera course. The result? The AI...
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...
When social media first entered our world, educators—myself included—focused narrowly on strategies for incorporating these tools into classroom contexts. We were so busy figuring out the "how" of implementation that we paid far less attention to the "what if" of...
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...
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:...
What does the advent of AI mean for human creativity? That is the focus of a new book, Generative Artificial Intelligence and Creativity: Precautions, Perspectives, and Possibilities, edited by Matthew J. Worwood and James C. Kaufman. And as it happens, Danah...
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...
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...
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...
In our new paper published in AI-Enhanced Learning, my colleagues Nicole Oster, Lindsey McCaleb, and I argue that while educators debate classroom integration strategies, the most profound transformation is happening outside traditional learning environments. We...
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...
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...
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...
Nostalgia isn't what it used to be. I remember when “x” was just the “unknown” – the variable that we needed to compute. It could be anything, but also knowable. Now “x” is a toxic wasteland. I remember when Grok was a lovely word, created by Heinlein, back in the...