We had Justin Reich and Jesse Dukes as guests on the Silver Lining for Learning webinar/podcast to discuss their new guidebook, A Guide to AI in Schools: Perspectives for the Perplexed. The resource, based on over 120 interviews with teachers and students, offers a...
AI, Education, & the Unregulated Global Experiment: Keynote at Education International’s First Global AI Conference
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,...
How do people think AI works? (Some surprising findings)
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...
An AI Premortem: A New Direction for Students in an AI World
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...
The Curiosity Paradox: How Sycophantic GenAI May Undermine Learning
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...
The Nostalgia Machine: Why Ed Tech Research Keeps Missing the Point
A colleague recently shared a new study with me that, on the surface, seemed to confirm what many people suspect: that AI is making us dumber. The research, (Experimental Evidence of the Effects of Large Language Models versus Web Search on Depth of Learning) by Shiri...
Beyond AI Slop: Pride, Joy & Creativity in a World Created by AI
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...
The Freedom to Design: Repurposing Technology for Creative Teaching
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:...
TPACK Handbook 3rd Edition (Plus: Covers that didn’t make it)
Twenty years. That's how long it's been since Matt Koehler and I published the 2006 article that gave the TPACK framework its name. The core ideas have aged reasonably well, even as the technologies around us have shape-shifted in ways we never anticipated. What we...
Jim D. Schools Punya on AI Research Tools
I'll be honest—I've been working with AI for a while now, but when it comes to the new tools for conducting literature reviews, I was behind the curve. I don't even use Zotero! So when my PhD students started asking about these AI-powered search tools, I realized I...
GenAI & Trans-disciplinary Creativity: New Book Chapter
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...
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 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...
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 Balancing the Digital Scales: Screen Time Management in Early Childhood Education (Molina, 2025). The report lays out how excessive screen exposure in young...
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. In their paper ""Check My Work?": Measuring Sycophancy in a Simulated Educational Context" researchers tested five different LLMs in a simulated educational...
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 vague pictures of Bessel functions from Jahnke and Ernde’s book, with light-tan j’s, slightly violet-bluish n’s, and dark brown x’s flying around. And I wonder what the hell...
Beyond Skills: A conversation on Futures & Learning
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...
Beyond Tools and Training: Building Sustainable Learning Environments that Evolve with AI
Our TechTrends series on technology, learning and creativity, has focused recently on generative AI's impact on education through expert interviews, practitioner experiences, and historical analyses. This article addresses a critical challenge: How do we create...
Pedagogical Debt: What We Owe Our Students in an AI World (New AIR | GPT Episode)
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)....
Subversion as Literacy: Foreword in “Critical AI in K-12 Classrooms”
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...
From the Archives: My First Paper on Design
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...
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 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...
Beyond Classroom Walls: The New Psycho-Social Ecology of GenAI
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...
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) data risk creating a flattened, culturally homogenized version of human psychology. In my post (titled, S’more problems: Generative Ai,...
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 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...
Three Years of Gen AI: Back to School Edition of AIR|GPT
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...
The perfectly wrong person for the job: My essay on the future of the orchestra
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...
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 a single quote, and reflect on how complexity gets flattened at multiple levels—from educational policy to media coverage. I recently wrote a post...
Against Simplification: On the value of small rebellions
Scott Carlson's recent article (On the Dangers of 'Simplification') in The Chronicle of Higher Education explores James C. Scott's influential book Seeing Like a State. Reading it, something clicked into place—a recognition of why I've spent decades swimming against...
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. 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...
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 are telling. Read on… OpenAI recently announced “Study Mode” for ChatGPT with considerable fanfare, claiming it was built “in...






























