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...
What if I'm wrong? What are my blind spots? Those two questions frame our latest AIR | GPT episode, and they're worth sitting with. The catalyst was Matt Schumer's viral claim that AI is on the verge of mass-deleting jobs, possibly imminently. It racked up 85 million...
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've been on a bit of a vibe-coding spree lately, building interactive simulations, educational tools, cultural experiments, all through conversation with AI rather than traditional programming. At some point I looked up and thought: what about the stuff I made back...
I recently had the privilege of speaking at Education International's inaugural Global Conference on Artificial Intelligence: Shaping our Future: Education Unions Leading for a Human-Centred AI, held in Brussels on December 4–5, 2025. More than 200 union leaders,...
Is generative AI killing creativity or helping us find new ways to be creative? In our latest AIR|GPT episode, we take on Charlie Warzel's article: A tool that crushes creativity. He argues that generative AI is destroying creative work and polluting the digital world...
I was thrilled recently when my friend Josh Brake mentioned me in his Substack post about "The Forward Deployed Educator." He referenced the Unit Circle Demo I had created and wrote about how educators can now use AI tools to build custom learning experiences for...
I was recently invited to speak at the Universel Conference 2025: Empowering Humane Technology. You can find the abstract, and an embedded video of my talk below. The Promise and Paradox of creative AI What happens when an AI can write a mathematically perfect poem,...
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...
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...
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...
I was recently invited to the 17th annual International Conference on Education and New Learning Technologies (EDULEARN25) in Palma, Spain. Getting to visit beautiful Palma, Mallorca, speaking with 800+ educators from across the world... what could be more awesome? At...
In my presentations I sometimes talk about my four years in engineering school as being something of a disaster. The way I present this fact is through this image, and the math/science types get the pun - Four Year / Fourier Transformation! A slide I typically use in...
This past spring semester I taught (with Nicole Oster and Lindsey McCaleb) a masters/doctoral seminar on Human Creativity x AI in Education. I had wanted to write this post after our last class meeting over a month and a half ago—but travel and life kept getting in...
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...
I recently had the pleasure of joining Sean Leahy and Andrew Maynard on their podcast Modem Futura for what turned into a wonderfully sprawling conversation about AI and education—one that went far beyond the typical “robots in classrooms” narrative that dominates so...
Over the past 12 years we have been writing a regular column in TechTrends, broadly around "Rethinking Creativity and Technology in Education." More recently, we have been exploring the complex relationship between emerging technologies and educational practices, with...
A couple of weeks ago I was invited by Eamon Costello to present a talk at the Education after the algorithm: Co-designing critical and creative futures conference being held in Dublin. And no, I didn’t get to go to Dublin for my talk—had to do it from here in...
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...
One of the students in my Human Creativity x AI in Education class is an accomplished Kathak dancer and last week we got into a discussion of how she could bring this personal interest into projects we were exploring in the class. How could GenAI help? So yesterday,...
This semester I am teaching a course on Human Creativity X AI in Education. (More about our first week here.) A key focus of the class is on the idea of transdisciplinary creativity – that of bringing different lenses and senses to the process of learning and...
There was a recent article in the NYTimes about AI chatbots serving as virtual companion. Titled, She Is in Love With ChatGPT it was a story about a 28-year-old woman who spends hours on end talking to her A.I. boyfriend for advice and consolation. And yes, they do...
Tesla recently, unannounced gave me temporary access to its Full Self Driving system, and I decided to give it a whirl. It was somewhat unnerving to sit back and experience the car "do its thing." But over time you get to understand how the car is behaving, where it...
NOTE: This is a cross post with the Civics of Technology blog. I first read about the "ELIZA Effect" as a high-school student in India, in Douglas Hofstadter's classic rumination on art, music, humanity and AI—Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid.. The...
I recently sat down with Ryan Gray and Robin Bryce of Yavapai College for Win Coalition's What's Next Speaker Series. Regular readers of this blog will know exactly what I must have talked about - no surprises here! We dove into AI, education, and where all this is...
I'm excited to share that I'm part of a new monthly podcast focused on generative AI in education (AIR|GPT) alongside some great colleagues and friends: Helen Crompton, Caroline Fell-Kurban, Liz Kolb, and Ruben Puentedura. The podcast is structured as an informal yet...
I recently participated in a panel discussion organized by the Center for American Progress. Our conversation focused on the emerging impact of generative AI in classrooms. During the Q&A session, someone posted the following question: I am a designer / engineer...
I was recently invited to be a guest on the Superspeaks | Microsoft EDU podcast on the BAM Radio Network. the topic at hand were technology integration frameworks in the age of Generative AI. I was joined by a literal who's who of educational technology scholars, all...
Imagine a world where tape recorders fool beavers, triangles tell stories, and AI convinces us it's sentient. Welcome to reality—where our cognitive biases are colliding with technology in ways we're only beginning to understand. In this post, I focus on our tendency...
There is a great deal of buzz about how generative AI (GenAI) can transform education—something I have been thinking about a lot as well. That said, I not so sure we're asking the right questions. Let's back up a second. Back in the early 90's I was a grad student at...