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How AI is being used in Education is an ever-changing discussion. Some educators have dived right in, using it for their own work, while others are trying to figure out the best way to work with the students who are using it.
It’s an interesting topic, as you will see from our ongoing collection below.
A second approach involves teachers who acknowledge Deep Research models but move cautiously. They will ask themselves at each stage which “research” skills we teach are worth preserving (source evaluation!) and which may ultimately succumb to off-loading to AI (citation formatting?). This approach will involve risk taking, trial and error, and administrative support, especially in K-12 schools with rigid policies regarding student AI usage.
Forbes - The Rise And Rise Of Reinforcement Learning: AI’s Quiet Revolution
A quiet revolution is reshaping artificial intelligence, and it’s not the flashy one grabbing headlines. While chatbots and image generators dazzle, reinforcement learning, a method refined in academia over the past two decades, is powering the next generation of AI breakthroughs. Imagine a child learning to ride a bike: no manual, just trial, error, and the joy of balance. That’s reinforcement learning, which is an algorithm that explores, adjusts, and learns from feedback, akin to an Easter egg hunt guided by “warmer” or “colder” hints. This approach isn’t just changing how machines learn; it’s redefining what intelligence means.
Agentic tool orchestration for hands‑on learning. Because o3 can call Python, web search, file analysis, image generation, canvas and automations while it thinks, teachers can trigger one‑click micro‑labs: “simulate this projectile”, “plot the function the class just derived”, or “generate three contrasting political cartoons for tomorrow’s discussion.” Those tools are not bolted on; they are part of o3’s chain‑of‑thought, so the model decides when code, images, or external data will add clarity.
Rhetorica Substack - Publication Announcement-Thresholds in Education Special Issue on GenAI
Faculty have good reasons to be anxious—we have all been involved in a giant public experiment with generative AI that no one asked for. We read alarming headlines about AI; we know, with or without proof, that some of our students are surreptitiously using AI; we are swamped in our daily lives with AI commercials; we hear conflicting opinions and approaches from colleagues. We notice silence (or incomplete attention) from our institutional leaders. Our classroom environments are changing rapidly, and yet we do not control the agents of that change. Educators are understandably off-balance and uncertain about best practices for the present and future.
Forbes - Google Versus OpenAI: The AI Fight For Students
As finals season intensifies across campuses nationwide, students are receiving a timely boost from two tech giants, OpenAI and Google. Both have unveiled generous AI offerings to students for free. These initiatives aren’t just providing tools. They’re potentially fueling a redefined landscape in higher education. Positioning artificial intelligence as an essential part of student life.
The race to AGI may take a decade—or arrive before the next graduation speech. Either way, pre‑AGI AI already grants teenagers an unprecedented lever over society. Our job as educators, parents, and citizens is to make sure they wield that lever with wisdom, not just skill.
The future of computer science education isn’t about teaching less. It’s about teaching differently. We still need students who can understand how software works at a fundamental level. But we also need to train them to collaborate with AI—to become fluent in prompting, reviewing, debugging, and refining AI-generated outputs. Mastering this hybrid skillset will be critical not just for engineers, but for anyone hoping to thrive in a world where knowledge work is increasingly AI-augmented.
ai goes to college Substack - AI Supervision: A Meta-Skill for the Next Decade
AI agents are coming. I’ve written about this before and I remain convinced that the future of AI isn’t in chatbots (although they will remain important) but in networks of AI agents working together to accomplish complex tasks. It may be a few years away, but this future IS coming and higher education should be ready for it. I’ll admit, I’m out on the ledge (or the edge) here, but I’m confident I’m right.
This high-level cognitive outsourcing could mean students trust AI to enhance their critical thinking, but might also risk inadvertently neglecting these crucial skills themselves. It's a delicate balance faculty must help them navigate. And, the more data we have, the more prepared we can be to meet our students where they are in their usage.
The myth of the “digital native” is one of the most dangerous lies in modern education—a seductive illusion that today’s students, by virtue of growing up with screens, somehow understand technology, including AI (Dr. Sabba Quidwai). They don’t. Yes, they can scroll, swipe, and game—but that’s surface-level fluency, not deep comprehension. It’s certainly not going to prepare them for the AI World.
Teaching in the Age of AI Substack - What I Want Teachers to Know about AI
Learning about AI doesn't mean embracing or even supporting it as a pedagogical tool. It means understanding its capabilities, limitations, and where it might affect what’s happening in your classroom. It means being able to have informed conversations with students about responsible use and being able to articulate your position with knowledge and authority. Above all, it means that you establish yourself as someone students can trust when it comes to discussing what may be the most transformative technology to come along in decades.
Educating AI Substack - Process Tracking Is Not the Answer
In the ongoing scramble to respond to generative AI in education, the latest shiny solution now entering the scene is "process tracking"—a technique that monitors how a student writes, logging every keystroke, pause, paste, and revision. At first glance, it might seem like an elegant response to the growing challenge of AI-assisted academic dishonesty. After all, if you can see the writing process itself, surely you can tell if it's genuine. But if the last few years have taught us anything, it’s that chasing technological certainty through surveillance leads us deeper into a pedagogical cul-de-sac. Process tracking, like its predecessors, serves institutional anxieties more than it supports student learning
AI research tools can speed up information retrieval, but they cannot replace critical thinking, fact-checking, or deep analysis.
Create. Innovate. Educate Substack - How students can use generative AI
I find Joscha Falck's framework of the five dimensions of AI in education (learning about, with, through, despite, and without AI) particularly valuable. It provides an excellent way of framing the challenges educators face and offers a structured approach to integrating AI thoughtfully into educational contexts. This framework serves as the backbone for the guidance offered throughout this article.
In her screed against Generative AI, she put up slide after slide that played on the worst tropes about AI—how it was a Stochastic parrot, how it was just a cheating machine, how students would never learn writing because it suppressed their critical thinking. As she talked, knowing what I know about teaching writing with Generative AI, I knew that she knew very little about what she was talking about. First, she was at least a year behind (an age in the world of AI), and she was carefully cherry-picking her examples, her sources, and her information. But she was just getting started
ZDNet - The tasks college students are using Claude AI for most, according to Anthropic
Using Clio, the company's data analysis tool, to maintain user privacy, Anthropic analyzed 574,740 anonymized conversations between Claude and users at the Free and Pro tiers with higher education email addresses. All conversations appeared to relate to coursework.
In “Looking for the Next World”, Terry goes further—not only diagnosing the lazy brain syndrome that may come with habitual AI use, but offering a theory of how deep the consequences could be if educators and institutions continue to treat this moment as either a threat to resist or a trend to accommodate. Instead, he shows us what it looks like to actually engage with the problem—conceptually, socioculturally, pedagogically, and emotionally.
ai goes to college Substack - ALL Faculty Should Learn AI: Two Prompts to Get Started
But it's not enough to simply "resist" by ignoring AI or lamenting against it—effective resistance cannot come from a pace of ignorance. If you're in the "resist" camp, you really need to understand what you're resisting and the only way to do that with AI is to use it. Once you understand AI's capabilities and proclivities, you'll be much better positioned to create learning activities and assessments that are (mostly) AI proof. (I'm not sure any assignment is AI proof to a skilled student.)
AI + Education = Simplified Substack - Blending AI, OER, and UDL
First, they have complementary strengths. OER provides the framework for sharing and reproducing freely. GenAI opens up the possibilities to scale content creation and revising potential. Taken together, these turbo-charge how you can make UDL more possible throughout a course, a curriculum, and an institution.
The Important Work Substack - What Students Lose When They Read AI-Adapted Texts
First, AI-adapted materials may not be the best way to improve reading outcomes. Students need access to complex texts with varied sentence structures and sophisticated language to support reading comprehension development. AI-generated writing, by contrast, can be syntactically repetitive and stylistically flat. Will AI-adapted materials really boost students’ literacy skills?
The uncomfortable truth is that higher education now stands at a crossroads that will define its relevance for decades to come. One path leads to slow, deliberative integration of AI through endless committees and cautious policies. The other demands a bold, institutional commitment to transforming how we teach, research, and operate with AI as a core capability, not a peripheral concern.
Forbes - The Dawn Of The AI CEO? Why Education Needs To Watch Closely
The question isn’t, "Can AI run companies?" That answer is becoming clearer. The better question is, "Can we raise leaders who can think ethically in a world of machines that don’t?"
Fishbowl conversations—where students engage in spontaneous, improvised discussions while peers observe and critique—capitalize on these distinctions. This format requires students to demonstrate real-time critical thinking and adaptive reasoning, active, empathetic listening, responsive argumentation, collaborative meaning-making, reading of subtle social cues, appropriate interruption and elaboration, and navigation of unexpected conversational turns. These uniquely human capabilities in living color would make chronic AI dependence immediately apparent without embarrassing anyone.
Grading for Growth Substack - My AI-driven grading changes: A 3x3x3 reflection
Recently I read that any higher education person who claims to have figured out how to use generative artificial intelligence in their teaching to promote critical thinking and real learning, is lying. I tend to agree. I am generally pro-technology in teaching and learning, but when it comes to AI, I have been very cautious, and so far my stance has been reactive rather than proactive. I’ve mostly been trying to limit the negative effects of having this unprecedented technology around, rather than push its boundaries for how it can be helpful.
Educating AI Substack - The Practical Limits of AI Reasoning
I've never seen an AI model process for as long as ChatGPT did on some of these steps—and then always with results that completely ignored my meta-rules. In the generated schedules, some teachers had zero defenses assigned while others had ten. Some students weren't scheduled at all.
The Hill - Think our education system is bad now? Wait ’til AI takes over.
Artificial intelligence could now become the final nail in the coffin of educational excellence, by removing the “rote work” from learning and creating an educational environment in which critical thinking is replaced with automation.
Recent advances in "chain-of-thought reasoning" have dramatically improved AI capabilities by enabling models to replicate how humans think. Systems like ChatGPT o1, DeepSeek R1, and Claude 3.7 Sonnet show impressive capabilities in mathematics, logic, and creative reasoning, showcasing their step-by-step reasoning processes—a skill previously considered uniquely human. This rapid progress raises an important question: are these systems truly reasoning, or have we just created more convincing imitations of human thought?
The Important Work Substack - How This Teacher Feels About All This AI Stuff
Yes, this is a technology that can potentially impact almost every aspect of education, but that “potential impact” is for now a matter of experimentation and exploration; the guidance and resources around AI in many of our teaching contexts are much more limited; and the technology itself is fast-evolving, so that time invested to understand one tool or strategy may very well find itself outdated by the time it is implemented.
Rhetorica Substack - Showing Up for the Future: Why Educators Can’t Sit Out the AI Conversation
Anthropic recently announced a free version of their most advanced AI model for college students in the US. Within hours OpenAI responded by making their $20 per month ChatGPT Plus tier free for college students through the end of May with the promise: “ChatGPT Plus is here to help you through finals.” Giving away their professional tier for free may seem foolish. Trust me—it isn’t. College students are the super users of generative AI and OpenAI knows that this generation will ultimately decide the future of generative AI.
OpenAI’s approach differs markedly from Anthropic’s. While Claude for Education emphasizes critical thinking through its Learning Mode, OpenAI provides unrestricted access to its most powerful tools, betting that exposure to advanced capabilities will cement student loyalty.
CIO - New AI education initiatives show the way for knowledge retention in enterprises
Anthropic’s newly announced Claude for Education introduces a new “learning mode” to its AI assistant, designed to guide students through problem-solving rather than simply providing answers. By employing Socratic questioning techniques, the AI prompts users to think through problems independently.
Dr Phil's Newsletter Substack - Future of Learning or a Dystopian Distraction?
This rapid adoption of AI-avatars in education raises important questions about the pedagogical implications of synthetic instructors in learning environments. Yes, amidst all of this innovation and adoption, we rarely have time to stop to think about the pedagogical impact that lies (or, perhaps, doesn’t lie) beyond the more immediate and measurable practical benefits of AI-instructors.
Inside Higher Ed - Writing in the Age of AI Suspicion
The rise of AI in academic writing has sparked a profound crisis of trust within the academy. Faculty members now find themselves questioning whether a student’s work is genuinely their own or the product of a large language model. This places educators and learning in an adversarial position, which is good for no one.
The centerpiece of Claude for Education is “Learning Mode,” which fundamentally changes how students interact with AI. When students ask questions, Claude responds not with answers but with Socratic questioning: “How would you approach this problem?” or “What evidence supports your conclusion?”
Hybrid Horizons: Exploring Human-AI Collaboration Substack - Education's Algorithmic Reckoning
Preserving "Beautiful Inefficiencies": There is a danger that the relentless pursuit of AI-driven efficiency could inadvertently hollow out the educational experience. We must recognise and protect the "beautiful inefficiencies" inherent in deep learning: the shared confusion that builds solidarity, the productive frustration that fuels creativity, the meandering dialogue that sparks unexpected connections, the time needed for genuine reflection and integration.
Sean and Andrew delve into how AI challenges long-held ideas about why we teach and learn in the first place. If knowledge and intelligence become “free,” what is left for humans to cultivate? The conversation raises the specter that conventional classrooms, skill-based certifications, and even assessments might become obsolete or at least radically transformed.
Data Science Central - How do AI chatbots compare to human educators?
Neurobotics looks at how to program machines with social skills. Can the robot feel emotion or just mimic it? Already, scientists are studying how the brain works to show empathy, and caregiving and the higher mental functions required to achieve such emotions. The idea is to develop social robots to help with tasks such as child and elder care.
ai goes to college Substack - Prompting 201: Iterative Prompting and Gall’s Law
Many educators overcomplicate their AI interactions, but there's a better way - start simple and iterate. Here's why this approach works and how to use it effectively. The most effective users of AI aren’t prompt engineers following rigid formulas - they’re educators and professionals who start with simple goals and iteratively refine their approach until they achieve the desired results. Prompts often fail not because they’re bad, but because they’re over-engineered
Teaching in the Age of AI Substack - Deep Research in the Age of AI
It’s worth remembering that when Wikipedia was first introduced it was shunned for many of the same reasons as AI - it could not be relied on for accurate information. Over time, it turned out, that allowing for human editors to maintain and update its entries in real time resulted in better and more accurate results than many online or for-profit encyclopedias.
Marc Watkins Substack - The Chatbot Generation
One of the methods educators have used to engage students about AI and change the narrative around tools like ChatGPT as little more than a task completion machine is to give students opportunities to explore this technology under a guided-use framework. Here’s a tool, here’s what it can do for you, here’s what it cannot do, and here’s the danger of abusing it. While we've been implementing various approaches like this across disciplines, there remains a fundamental challenge—ChatGPT's user experience is designed to provide quick, easy answers—which often undermines genuine learning.
The tools aren’t designed to help them understand that many of the jobs that exist today, even marketing, some legal work, accounting, some teaching, and even a lot of medical diagnoses may very well not exist in a few years.
AI Log Substack - What is an LLM doing in my classroom? Part 4: What's Next
Students have been trained to summarize material objectively and to give encyclopedia-like overviews or reports. Of course, that’s something LLMs now do easily, if unreliably. Analyzing sources using a specific point of view is what I want from my writers, and it is challenging for many of them. Maybe an LLM tool, summarizing engine that it is, can help move students to the more difficult work of bringing their critical perspective on sources, helping them think about an artifact using the framework they are developing.
While many educators debate exactly how much of a student’s paper should be written with AI, the challenges our students face as we move into human-level intelligence are much more daunting.
Teaching in the Age of AI Substack - What I Want Students to Know About AI
You should also know that there is a raging debate within education itself about AI’s impact on student writing. Without getting into the weeds, two opposite camps have emerged - those who believe AI is the worst thing to ever happen to the writing process and have an almost visceral reaction to any suggestion that it might benefit students and those who see the writing on the wall (sorry!) that AI is the future and we better figure out how to teach students about it as soon as possible. And, of course, most educators fall somewhere in the middle.
In addition, Canva and Firefly both have student-safe environments and class management tools. They may be better suited for students to create their own work, while ChatGPT’s image generator is geared more towards teacher-created content.
For me, critical thinking isn't some special type of cognition isolated within educational taxonomies. It's a whole-brain assault on passive acceptance of cultural models, absurd assertions, unwarranted assumptions, and faulty inferences. It's intellectual dissection, idea autopsies, life and death sense-making, vigilant ethical reasoning, disciplined skepticism, and analytical excavation.
The Future of Being Human Substack - Can agentic AI build your entire online course?
If Manus is anything to go by, it will soon be possible to ask agentic AIs to whip up online courses in a matter of minutes that are as good as, if not better than, those that have taken teams of humans substantial time and money to create.
Zara's Newsletter Substack - Why GPT-4o's image generation is a game-changer for education
When I witnessed OpenAI's GPT-4o image generation capabilities yesterday, something clicked. Here, finally, was multi-modal technology ready to transform not just how we consume information, but how we learn. This breakthrough opens a door to something extraordinary: AI-generated learning materials tailored not just to what we need to learn, but to how we learn best.
Teachers and institutions are unsure how to ethically incorporate AI, reflecting the tension between innovation and academic integrity.
AI, academia, and the Future Substack - Higher education grapples with AI
We can start by catching up with what’s happening on campuses at the nexus of teaching and research: Bowdoin College just announced it was setting up a new AI effort, the Hastings Initiative for AI and Humanity. The “Hastings” in the name is from Reed, as in Netflix chair and co-founder, who donated $50 million to start it off.
Exploring methods like rhetorical prompting alongside AI-driven learning environments could amplify the benefits observed with Jill Watson, guiding students towards sophisticated critical engagement that supports writing and learning processes.
EducationWeek - The Future of Math Class: How AI Could Transform Instruction
“We know that children learn math from being able to problem-solve, being able to use reasoning skills, critical thinking, having opportunities to collaborate with each other and talk about what they’re doing,” said Latrenda Knighten, the president of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and a former math teacher. “AI will not change any of those things.”
Tom's Takes: AI Tools & Views Substack - Choosing the Right ChatGPT Model for Teaching Tasks
Beyond the base chat models, ChatGPT offers a suite of tools and features that can be useful in teaching. These include web browsing capabilities, research reporting, voice interactivity, custom GPTs, image generation, and experimental video creation.
Educating AI Substack - Possibility Literacy: Navigating AI's Productive Paradoxes in Education
Yet over time, a composition instructor might notice patterns emerging in the AI-generated work—similar rhetorical structures, familiar frameworks, and consistent stylistic elements across different students' writing. Despite surface variety, an underlying algorithmic signature becomes apparent.
The Multimodal AI Project Substack - If Academic Neutral Isn't Dead Yet, It Soon Will Be
This all gets back to voice. We aren’t naive. We know there are a miriad number of ways academics can use GenAI to write papers—some more ethical and responsible than others. We also understand that we can’t tell when they have or haven’t used GenAI. However, in our own classes and in our writing, we have decided that, even if a writer is using GenAI in the creation of their paper, they had better never SOUND like they used GenAI in the creation of their paper. The importance of voice, tone, and audience awareness cannot be underestimated. In the new age of AI, no one wants to read a paper that sounds like it was written with GenAI . . . and we definitely don’t want to write one.
AI & How we Teach Writing Substack - AI-Aware Teaching Examples
In this post, I drill down to some examples of AI-aware versions of common writing assignments: annotated bibliographies, reading responses, and reflections. By using pathways that acknowledge AI, we can achieve learning goals that support students’ writing, reading, and thinking development. And we can do it without resorting to unreliable AI detectors.
Nafez's Notes Substack - AI Can’t Fix Bad Learning
Corporate L&D is estimated at over $300 billion a year, yet I’d argue that 90% of it yields little real return from a learning perspective. I can’t think of another industry where that kind of inefficiency would be tolerated.
This obsession reveals our institutional anxiety more than anything else. We're clinging to systems of measurement and verification that were already problematic before ChatGPT arrived. The truth is, assessment has always been an imperfect proxy for learning, now it's simply becoming an untenable one.
The Algorithmic Bridge Substack - Don't Abuse ChatGPT, Kids
But here's why Jain’s post is worth digging into: average is not a perfect metric. The best students could be doing better than ever yet the worst doing so badly that they’d be driving the average down anyway. Wouldn't be surprised; for every student who documents her learning process in long-form Substack posts, ninety-nine indulge in TikTok binge-scrolling. The internet: distracting for the distractible. AI: catalyst of character.
Forbes - 8 Schools Innovating With Google AI – Here’s What They’re Doing
While fears of AI replacing educators swirl in the public consciousness, a cohort of pioneering institutions is demonstrating a far more nuanced reality. These eight universities and schools aren't just experimenting with AI, they're fundamentally reshaping their educational ecosystems. From personalized learning in K-12 to advanced research in higher education, these institutions are leveraging Google's AI to empower students, enhance teaching, and streamline operations.
Educating AI Substack - Beyond AI Cheating: Rethinking Learning for an AI-Integrated World
The goal of this piece is not to propose simple solutions or AI-proof assessments. Instead, it’s to explore a shift in pedagogy—one that moves away from static assessments of final products and toward a process-oriented approach that captures the evolution of student thinking.
Dr Phil's Newsletter Substack - Learning Design in the Era of Agentic AI
Our challenge and call to action to instructional designers and educators is not to create AI-proof courses, but to design learning that is so engaging and effective that humans don’t want to delegate it to AI in the first place.
The Multimodal AI Project Substack - Why We Don't Use "AI Detectors"
Completely fallible—in both directions. AI Detectors will tell you a student isn't using AI when they are, and they will tell you that a student is using AI when they aren't (See the comprehensive list of papers that prove this, below). Remember, even if there is only a 1% “failure rate,” that doesn’t mean that only 1% of your students will be falsely accused. It means that 1% of every assignment done in college will be flagged inappropriately. Even one misflag is one too many.
AI EduPathways Substack - Critical AI Literacy: What Is It and Why Do We Need It?
Let’s turn to an academic definition. Researchers at Georgia Tech (Long and Magerko, 2020) define AI literacy as “a set of competencies that enables individuals to critically evaluate AI technologies; communicate and collaborate effectively with AI; and use AI as a tool at home and in the workplace.”
The Future of Being Human Substack - AI in Higher Education: Students need playgrounds, not playpens
At the same time, we’re seeing a large gap in understanding between where the leading edge of AI capabilities are, and where educators think they are. As a result, there’s still a tendency to think of AI as a tool that can complete assignments or write essays, or create personalized learning environments, or simply act as a form of Google on steroids.
Critical Thinking and Problem-Solving – AI can generate content, analyze data, and automate processes, but students must learn to question outputs, verify sources, and think critically about AI-generated information. Encouraging projects that compare AI-generated content with human-created materials can enhance these skills.
Educating AI - Change Everything!!! And Then What???
Let's acknowledge the valid reasons for this sense of urgency. AI does present real shifts in the educational landscape. In a recent presentation on AI in Practice, I explored these very shifts. We face important questions for researchers, for businesses, for universities, and for high school teachers. Concerns about "cognitive bleed" – that subtle erosion of independent thinking, the rapidly increasing student usage of AI, the emerging data on AI's impact on critical thinking – these are not hypotheticals. The promise of AI-driven efficiency is tempting, but we also recognize the potential for over-reliance and skill atrophy. This creates a natural inclination to think in terms of radical change. When confronted with something so transformative, a sweeping response feels almost intuitively correct.
Debate is a powerful tool for developing historical understanding, critical thinking, and communication skills. This town hall debate challenges students to analyze key issues from the Progressive Era and connect them to modern economic and political debates. By engaging in structured argumentation, students will deepen their understanding of government intervention, business regulation, and the broader impacts of reform movements.
Forbes - DeepSeek - A Wake-Up Call For US Higher Education
Where will this meteoric rise of tech talent take China and AI? China’s goal to become the world leader in AI by 2030 could be realized, despite US export controls, as it seems to be rooted in a broader strategy to develop its own base of creative technology talent. The massive government investment in new universities is already producing nearly twice as many PhD’s in STEM fields than the US, with 77,000 STEM PhD graduates predicted for 2025 compared to 40,000 in the US. China’s focus on AI includes developing a $2.1 billion AI industrial park and creating multiple hubs for AI talent in the country
Dr Phil's Newsletter Substack - The Great Online Learning Reset?
If you work in L&D, you've likely seen the viral videos this week: Manus and other agentic AI tools completing asynchronous training courses in minutes. These AI agents don’t just assist learners, they autonomously complete courses by responding to questions, submitting assignments and even contributing meaningfully to online discussions.
Educating AI Substack - Transactional vs. Conversational Visions of Generative AI in Teaching
The challenge moving forward lies precisely in how we counteract the structural and technical designs of these tools. While some educators have invoked Nigel Daly's thesis about "cognitive bleed" to raise concerns, I tend to see this potential bleed as an opportunity rather than a deterministic fate. It's through intentional scaffolding, conscious instructional design, and robust AI literacy that we can shape the direction of this cognitive exchange.
In many cases, all students need to do is drop the assigment into the AI. The AI will then read the instructions, and then take multi-step action to complete it with little to know errors. In the end, it will get a better grade than 99% of students.
Nobody Wants This Substack - Resisting AI in Education - Part III
Instead of simply providing answers to their questions, Khan says, new AI bots like Khanmigo are trained to serve as “thoughtful” mentors, prodding students with questions, giving them encouragement, and delivering feedback on their mistakes as they work to develop their own understanding.
Just on an engagement level, it is very hard for the courses we use now to get constantly rejected, where the student is not calling. Well, an agent is not going to get tired, and may come up with four or five different ways to engage that student. So I think it's thinking of it in those ways, not as replacement issue, but as optimizing this technology to serve your change model or your service model to the highest possible degree.
The University hopes that Una will help to reduce advisor workload by about 25% and shorten class registration to under 20 seconds, 12 times faster than before, as well as free up university staff to offload routine admin and focus on strategic activities, such as as personalized outreach and program development.
ZDNet - 8 out of 10 college students and administrators welcome AI agents
Over one-third (35%) of school administrators find themselves unable to provide timely support to students due to the burden of administrative tasks. One-third are prevented from offering personalized support for the same reason.
Challenges - Privacy, Cost and Time, Pedagogical Shift, Student Brain-Drain - There are always going to be data privacy and sharing concerns with tools, AI or not, and this is no exception. Additionally, teachers require time and training, REAL TIME AND TRAINING not be mandatory meetings where someone talks about ChatGPT and throws up an example…
The PhD-level bots are at the other end of the spectrum, with some claiming that one needs a PhD to interact with this level of bot. At first, I agreed with this; I found that sometimes this level produced reports on debate topics I was working on where I didn’t fully understand some of the economics and/or science the reports discussed.
AI&How we Teach Writing Substack - How Can Your Courses be AI Aware?
With AI at our fingertips and in our faces, the choice of opting out of it while doing any form of digital composition is getting increasingly difficult. The default is AI, and settings to turn it off, if they even exist, are well hidden. AI’s incursion into our writing environments and the efficiency rhetoric that accompanies it is almost completely out of our control, and our students are struggling to make good decisions about their use of AI. The student who writes that “using AI is addictive” is, I think, asking for a respite from the relentlessness of AI in their life.
This initiative is revolutionary for universities, impacting how students learn, how researchers make discoveries, and how institutions manage vast amounts of information. OpenAI’s collaboration with universities is bridging gaps in knowledge access, healthcare innovation, and AI fluency for the future workforce.
AI EduPathways Substack - AI Literacy: How Comparative Transcript Analysis Changes Everything
The biggest mistake educators make when approaching AI literacy is assuming they need to “become an AI teacher.” Not only is that not what we signed up for, it’s an approach that shortchanges the depth of thinking that’s required for meaningful, effective, and ethical AI use.
It offers a compelling, concrete example of what thoughtful, student-centered AI integration can look like in higher education. It's not about hype or futuristic promises; it's about practical application and measurable results. This article explores LAPU's journey with AI, highlighting key initiatives, quantifiable outcomes, and future directions, drawing heavily from my conversation with Dr. Hanshaw and the university's published research.
The AI School Librarians Substack - Rethinking Research
Rather than seeing AI as a threat, educators can use this moment to redesign assignments that foster originality, curiosity, and deeper analysis. The key ethical challenge is ensuring that students don’t just rely on AI-generated text but instead use it as a tool to enhance their own thinking. By crafting assignments that demand higher-order skills—such as evaluating sources, synthesizing multiple perspectives, and constructing well-supported arguments—educators can maintain academic integrity while embracing the realities of AI in education.
Educating AI Substack - John Warner’s More Than Words and the Future of Writing in the Age of AI
Terry and I are also finding that when students take on much greater ownership in the evaluation and assessment process—designing their own outcomes for performance and administering them individually or in small groups—the idealized intuitions of writers become valued and shared resources inside a classroom’s complex power dynamics, thus outlining the very beginnings of what post-AI writing instruction might one day look like
The Future of Higher Education Substack - The Synthetic Knowledge Crisis
Of course, the problem is not that AI-generated content exists. It is that it increasingly looks like knowledge while bypassing the very mechanisms that give knowledge its legitimacy. Traditional safeguards such as peer review, scholarly debate, and methodological transparency are being diluted by an environment where credibility is shaped less by expertise than by linguistic persuasion. If a claim is well-worded, neatly structured, and delivered confidently, it is increasingly accepted as knowledge, or truth, regardless of whether it has any epistemic weight.
Forbes - AI Is Changing How We Learn: The New Role Of Human Teachers
AI generates impressive content but often lacks contextual grounding. Advanced language models rely on pattern recognition, predicting the most likely words to follow a prompt. This leads to hallucinations where AI fabricates facts or references when data is incomplete. The other risk resides with confabulations when AI confidently presents coherent but fictional narratives
In reality, very few educators or institutions fully embrace or reject AI. Instead, responses are layered, context-dependent, and shaped by pedagogical values, institutional goals, and broader societal concerns. The Microsoft Critical Thinking Study has further prompted many to clarify their positions, revealing a spectrum of approaches rather than a rigid divide.
Learning on Purpose Substack - AI Skills that Matter, Part 4: Ethical Decision-Making
Talking about using AI as a series of decisions rather than as “good” or “bad” behavior communicates to students that they have autonomy. As Lee shows above, autonomy is taking responsibility for making wise choices, not just deciding for the sake of deciding. That involves knowing when to reach out to others and seek advice.
Artisanal Intelligence Substack - No, Seriously: The Academic Research Paper is Really, Really Dead
“However, I have thoughts about research. I am also a Ph.D. student in English right now (and already have an Ed.D. in Organizational Leadership). I personally need to do the first read through on all articles I am using for research because if I outsource this to AI, I lose the opportunity to bring my own unique perspectives, experiences, and questions to the source. If I read the AI summary first, my experience of the source is already mediated, and I don't want that. However, using Notebook LM to collect and query sources AFTER I have read them is a game changer for research-supported writing.”
The Chronicle - My losing battle against AI cheating
But AI changes everything. I’m not a fan of tests, and my classes are heavy on writing assignments. Consulting AI for aid in understanding concepts is fine, but I ask students to do the class readings and write their papers in their own words. I cling to the hoary belief in the value of learning to read, think and make an argument on your own. You’ll use those human skills no matter whether you go into medicine, the law, finance, education, tech or the other classic Duke destinations.
In reality, very few educators or institutions fully embrace or reject AI. Instead, responses are layered, context-dependent, and shaped by pedagogical values, institutional goals, and broader societal concerns. The Microsoft Critical Thinking Study has further prompted many to clarify their positions, revealing a spectrum of approaches rather than a rigid divide.
the disagreement Substack - What role should AI play in K-12 education?
While they agreed on many things, there is a highly productive disagreement around whether or not we should be actively teaching AI literacy (or “readiness”) to students in grades K-12.
The Absent-Minded Professor Substack - We're Forgetting How To Fly
However, these advantages are paired with significant drawbacks. For one, reliance on autopilot systems has been shown to lead to atrophy in manual flying skills. Use it or lose it, as they say. It's not hard to imagine that this same phenomenon would also apply to the tasks we outsource to generative AI. If I'm using AI to write or code for me, it's not hard to imagine that after some time I will end up unable to code or write without it.
Educating AI Substack - Does AI Kill Critical Thinking? Maybe Not If We Use It Right.
If AI allows us to automate routine cognitive tasks—like information retrieval or summarization—this doesn’t mean we’re thinking less. It means our thinking is changing. And that shift can be an opportunity rather than a loss—if we learn how to use AI intentionally.
The AI School Librarians Substack - Harness the Power of Storm by Stanford
Storm is a cutting-edge research prototype developed by Stanford University, designed to revolutionize how we gather and organize information. By leveraging interactive knowledge curation, Storm enables users to generate structured, Wikipedia-like reports on their chosen topics, making it a powerful tool for educators, librarians, and students alike.
AI & How we Teach Writing Substack - What is Critical AI Literacy?
Yet it’s clear that students will need to know something about AI. Teaching students critical AI literacy in at least some of our writing classes—a place they’re already using it—can help them to be better equipped to responsibly encounter, use, and resist AI. The first step to teaching critical AI literacy, of course, is figuring out what it is.
Artisanal Intelligence Substack - Invent the Age! Invent the Metaphor!
So should I use AI in this class? I don’t know. But I do know my students are using it because I asked them, and they feel safe telling me about their use when they know they won’t be punished. I have decided to explore ways to incorporate AI in foundational writing, paying special attention and care to the critical foundational skills students need to develop their writing processes (with or without AI assistance).
Marc Watkins Substack - The Costs of AI in Education
What’s really going on with campus-wide AI adoption is a mix of virtue signaling and panic purchasing. Universities aren’t paying for AI—they’re paying for the illusion of control. Institutions are buying into the idea that if they adopt AI at scale, they can manage how students use it, integrate it seamlessly into teaching and learning, and somehow future-proof education. But the reality is much messier.
Artificial Corner Substack - Teaching in the Age of AI ... A Renaissance or the End of an Era?
Students are also turning to Gemini 2.0 to tackle various academic tasks. This multimodal AI recently introduced the ability to observe screens and respond in real time. In technical terms, "this system enables remote screen monitoring and cross-device content sharing," essentially allowing AI to act as a virtual lab assistant
TUM sees AI as both an opportunity and a challenge. Their strategy ensures that AI enhances education, research, and administration while maintaining ethical integrity, fairness, and transparency.
Artisanal Intelligence Substack - The Research Paper Is Dead. Now What?
Let’s be clear: research itself isn’t dead. Inquiry, analysis, and synthesis still matter. What’s obsolete is the performance of research—the idea that we can measure intellectual engagement by forcing students to produce a 10-page document that AI can generate in an instant.
Ask a Librarian Substack - The Digital Mirage
Even if they succeed in overcoming some limitations, AI and large language models (LLMs) are only accessing the smallest fraction of humanity's collective digital knowledge. A recent post “Advent of AI: “AI Knows Everything” speculates that AI tools are trained on “one one-hundred-billionth of the internet” – and that’s as good a guess as any out there right now.
Forbes - 6 Powerful AI Prompts That Will Help You Learn And Ace Exams (Without Cheating)
“Prompt: Please create a personalized study plan for me. First, ask me questions one at a time to understand my requirements. When you have enough information, generate a study plan for the relevant time period, with specific learning objectives, areas of study, practical or theoretical exercises and guidance toward learning resources for each study session. Include practice and review sessions to reinforce learning.”
While I understand the drive of some educators to create AI-free zones, continue leaning into AI detection devices, and shift toward a more protectionist mindset in the face of AI's disruption, I as a high school teacher recognize that these tools are already in my students' hands and are changing the way they think, read, write, and learn. Thus, pragmatically, much of my writing works towards a compromise state where we can filter in the best of AI capabilities into our instructional cycles, while minimizing or strategically redeploying the obstacles AI tools introduce into our instructional plans and practices.
Computerworld - GenAI can make us dumber — even while boosting efficiency
Raffo met with one student to discuss their A- grade on a paper. During the Zoom meeting, however, the student struggled to form grammatically correct sentences. Raffo began to question whether they had written the paper themselves, considering their communication skills didn’t match the quality of their work.
The Absent-Minded Professor Substack - AI's Agency Comes from Us
AI companies talk about their tools being able to reason, think, and write. There’s only one problem. They don't. All they do is emulate particular features of those behaviors. Reasoning is more than producing words that look like a reason. Thinking is more than processing and computation. Writing is more than extruding syntactically correct text. Both the product and process matter.
Well, if you’re curious, there should be fuss—if my findings are any indication. I compared 3 popular LLMs and 4 R-LLMs in an education use case: creating possible syllabi for a short-term EFL course for teens in Taiwan and then evaluating the syllabi to find the best one.
The AI School Librarian's Top 10 AI Tools: 2025 Edition
This updated list reflects the latest AI tools designed to inspire creativity, streamline workflows, and engage students like never before. Whether you’re managing a classroom, running a library program, or supporting student learning, these tools are game-changers for education in 2025.
Anna Mills' Substack - Why I'm using AI detection after all, alongside many other strategies
I argued against use of AI detection in college classrooms for two years, but my perspective has shifted. I ran into the limits of my current approaches last semester, when a first-year writing student persisted in submitting work that was clearly not his own, presenting document history that showed him typing the work (maybe he. typed it and maybe he used an autotyper).
Dr Phil's Newsletter Substack - Audio-Based Learning 4.0
What's super interesting is how the solid research backing audio's effectiveness is and how well this is converging with these new AI capabilities. Tools like ElevenLabs and Google MusicFX are helping to remove a lot of barriers that have made creating quality learning audio content challenging. It’s now easier than ever for anyone interested in innovating their pedagogical approaches to start experimenting with evidence-based audio content in their work.
AI EduPathways Substack - Revolutionizing Education with AI, Debate, and Meaningful Assessment
Yet, we no longer live in an age of industrial rigidity. The modern economy demands agency and entrepreneurship—individuals who navigate uncertainty, adapt to change and create value through innovation. Despite this shift, we continue feeding students the soured butter of an outdated model, preparing them for jobs that no longer exist instead of equipping them to shape the future.
Interconnects Substack - Deep Research, information vs. insight, and the nature of science
Deep Research’s limitations mostly feel like problems of search, where it is prone to returning SEO optimized slop, style, where it returns verbose, low information density writing, and modality, where it does not have the ability to read, process, and return plots and diagrams. All of these are surely solvable and expected features if we look at the rollouts of other AI models in the last few years.
This isn't merely about acquiring new technical skills, although those remain relevant. Rather, Possibility Literacy represents a fundamental shift in mindset, a framework for navigating the complexities of an AI-augmented world with both critical awareness and imaginative foresight. It's about understanding that we are not merely adapting to a new set of tools, but engaging with a force that is actively reshaping the boundaries of what is possible.
The Future of Being Human Substack - Can AI write your PhD dissertation for you?
By comparison, if you treat Deep Research’s dissertation an in-depth analysis rather than a piece of novel scholarship — the sort of thing a research consultancy or an organization like the National Academies would compile — my estimate is that it would take a minimum of 3 months for a single researcher to get anywhere close to producing something of this breadth, depth, and polish.
Inside Higher Ed - Professors Fear Impact of DeepSeek ‘Censorship’ on Students’ Work
Patel said that students need to have “access to factual information, rather than the politicized, censored propaganda information that may exist with DeepSeek versus other tools,” and said that the development heightens the need for universities to ensure AI literacy among their students.
AI Log Substack - The CSU system and OpenAI have an alignment problem
Instead, higher education institutions should put resources into understanding this new cultural technology in responsible ways and let savvy technology investors prop up Sam’s House of AGI Bubble Fun. This is true whether or not AI is as transformative as its boosters say it is. There are better ways to answer questions about the educational value of AI than spending money on an enterprise license for ChatGPT.
AI Log Substack - What exactly is an AI-Empowered University System?
The reality is that it is easier to write a press release and spin up a website than it is to take steps toward responsibly adopting AI tools on a college campus. Raising a big flag that says we’re AI-empowered invites questions from faculty and students about what is happening and when. It is not clear when or if there will be answers.
Forbes - Half A Million Students Given ChatGPT As CSU System Makes AI History
We’re still in the early stages of AI adoption in education, and it is critical that the entire ecosystem—education systems, technologists, educators, and governments—work together to ensure that all students globally have access to AI and develop the skills to use it responsibly
ai salon archive Substack - 027 - Education
However, AI tutoring systems are now enabling unprecedented levels of personalization. The participants imagined AI systems that can create student-specific metaphors to help drive home a particular lesson. For example, AI systems might teach algebra using soccer analogies if that makes the content more understandable or compelling to a student. This kind of contextual, personalized learning would represent a dramatic shift from the one-size-fits-all approach of traditional education.
Tampa Bay Times - AI is hitting Tampa classrooms. So far, teachers and students love it
Pepin 10th grader Marvin Baity said he always tries to do his work without relying on AI. But he liked that when he does turn to the bot, it offers suggestions and asks questions to boost his understanding rather than spewing out answers.
AI EduPathways Substack - How Educators Are Designing AI Assessments That Actually Work
One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is that students need to see themselves as the experts when working with AI—not the other way around. This received research-based support via a recent study that showed student learning increasing when students were positioned as the teacher and AI as the learner. In these cases, the student is the expert and the bot simply provides a playground on which to demonstrate expertise.
edutopia - Teachers Want Hard Questions Asked Before Adding Tech
1. What specific district problem does this solve? Can you explain it in three sentences or less?
It seems simple, but this exercise is often challenging for district leaders—especially because tech companies entice them with seemingly easy to implement products that promise academic success, greater efficiencies for teachers, and more. Districts can quickly find themselves adopting new tools before they’ve even figured out whether or not they need them.
eWeek - How to Jumpstart Your Career in AI
Embarking in careers in artificial intelligence molds you to be a part of a field that redefines our lives today. Keep in mind that establishing an AI career is just like launching any other career, you have to start from the ground up. This guide was built so you can prepare your AI career with confidence, no matter your background. By learning the core AI skills and gaining practical experience, you equip yourself with future-proof skills and open doors to innovative and impactful opportunities.
Dr Phil's Newsletter Substack - The AI Illusion in L&D
“According to the Jagged Frontier research published by Harvard Business School in 2023, while AI tools like ChatGPT improved performance on functional tasks requiring little domain knowledge (like content summarisation and email writing), they actually decreased performance quality by 19% for more complex, domain-specific tasks that were poorly represented in AI's training data.”
The AI Memo Substack - AI Literacy: Unlocking Measurable Value From AI with Cohort-Based Learning
“One stando”ut example of this approach is a telecommunications company that trained 5,000 employees on basic AI prompting skills through interactive "Promptathon" workshops. These sessions combined group activities and practical exercises, enabling participants to see immediate results. Employees reported saving an average of two hours per week as a direct result of the training—a powerful testament to the value of interactive, hands-on learning.”
Data Science Central - The role of AI in closing the skills gap in the business world
“Another key factor is the disconnect between education and industry needs. Many universities and vocational training centers still follow traditional curricula that fail to incorporate modern technological advancements. As a result, fresh graduates often enter the workforce unprepared for the real-world application of AI, automation, and digital skills. Many businesses have had to invest heavily in training their new hires, delaying productivity and increasing costs. Moreover, education systems in many countries remain theory-focused, with limited hands-on training in emerging technologies, exacerbating the challenge of preparing students for modern careers.”
Educating AI Substack - The Manifesto Moment: Examining Education's Response to AI
“Margarida Romero and colleagues' "Human-Centered Education" manifesto attempts to split the difference between principle and practice. It introduces the concept of "hybrid intelligence" and proposes a six-level model for AI engagement in education, from passive consumption to "expansive learning."
The AI School Librarians Substack - Grading with AI: Innovation Meets Ethical Challenges
“While AI grading tools like GetMarked AI offer incredible potential for streamlining workflows and providing timely feedback, they also bring ethical challenges that we must address. Fairness, transparency, and the preservation of the human element in education are paramount. By understanding these tools and their implications, we can use them responsibly and effectively.”
Nobody Wants This Substack - Resisting AI Mania in Schools - Part II
“But what pretty much all of us are being urged to do goes well beyond that. We are told we must teach our students how to use AI in preparation for a future we cannot predict. As Mullaney puts it, though, we are “teachers, not time travelers.”"
Forbes - Teens Are Losing Faith In Big Tech—And The Numbers Are Shocking
“According to the report, 60% of teens say they now question the accuracy of online information they encounter. This distrust extends to the companies deploying AI, as nearly 70% of teens want transparency about when and how AI is being used in the content they consume.”
Learning on Purpose Substack - AI Skills that Matter, Part 3: Playfulness
“The cultures of generative AI at most schools I visit are high-stakes and built on negative emotions like anxiety, anger, fear, or suspicion. When use cases of AI are discussed openly, those cases are most often abuses or unethical applications of the tool, not interesting or productive uses. When AI use is allowed, it is usually under extremely restricted circumstances and under threat of punishment if those boundaries are violated (disciplinary consequences, a reduction in a grade, etc.). “
Forbes - 5 Ways ChatGPT Is Making You Lazy And How To Stay Sharp
“Remember when finding information meant diving deep into sources and drawing your own conclusions? Now ChatGPT (and Perplexity) delivers pre-packaged answers and references with no effort required. Your critical thinking takes a back seat as you accept its responses without question.”
InfoWorld - Is ChatGPT making us stupid?
“In fact, one big risk right now is how dependent developers are becoming on LLMs to do their thinking for them. I’ve argued that LLMs help senior developers more than junior developers, precisely because more experienced developers know when an LLM-driven coding assistant is getting things wrong. They use the LLM to speed up development without abdicating responsibility for that development. Junior developers can be more prone to trusting LLM output too much and don’t know when they’re being given good code or bad.”
Forbes - AI For Data-Driven Tutoring Solutions: Is Socrates Here?
“When it comes to tutoring, obviously there are some major elements of how the technology works to the students’ benefit. There’s the time spent reviewing the material, and the access to learning methods. But there’s also something that the MIT article talks about as “cognitive scaffolding that unlocks the student’s own thinking.”
Marc Watkins Substack - Reading in the age of Social Media (and AI)
“His key takeaway—reading online is complicated. We can access far more words online than in traditional print, faster, more efficiently than at any other point in history. But reading with one method isn’t necessarily better than another. We might want to regularly rotate print, digital, and even explore new methods like AI reading assistants. In sum, we should all start exploring a little bit. “
AI Log Substack - What is an LLM doing in my classroom? Part 3: Learning
“My conclusion is that I should abandon my attempts to enliven asynchronous discussions and instead think about the discussion board as a way to support students in specific tasks. By harnessing the LLM’s feedback on topics we have discussed, its role is to reiterate class discussions and help students take steps on out-of-class activities. JeepyTA’s responses are visible to me, the teaching team, and the other students. If it gets something wrong, we can correct it. When it gets something right, which it mostly did, the output is available to the student at the moment they are working on the task.”
“Dr Phil's Newsletter Substack - The Impact of Gen AI on Human Learning: a research summary
“At the same time as the use of generic AI for learning proliferates, more and more researchers raise concerns about about the impact of AI on human learning. The TLDR is that more and more research suggests that generic AI models are not only suboptimal for for human learning — they may actually have an actively detrimental effect on the development of knowledge and skills. “