In this episode of Life With Machines, we explore the widespread issue of students using AI to cheat in school, and ask the hard question: Is this just lazin...
There’s a lot out there from folks trying and suggesting and selling ways for teachers to put their fingers in the dike holding back the allegedly inevitable AI tide.
How artificial intelligence is reshaping college for students and professors
This year’s senior class is the first to have spent nearly its entire college career in the age of generative AI, a type of artificial intelligence that can ...
Commentary on Introducing Nano Banana Pro by Stephen Downes. Online learning, e-learning, new media, connectivism, MOOCs, personal learning environments, new literacy, and more
These remarks were delivered this evening at the Creatively Critical Tech Speaker Series at Illinois State University.
"There is no good way to say this."
These are the opening words of Yiyun Li’s latest book Things in Nature Only Grow about life after the death by suicide of both
The unending tide of AI used for stupid things just keeps on coming, and as widely predicted, the major accomplices are managers and employers, sucked in with promises that AI will make their work faster and easier and less have-to-deal-with-humans-y.
This week has emphasized that now is the time for reimagining what critical AI education might look like in the coming months and years, an education that eschews industry-captured AI literacy lessons for an expansive, interdisciplinary civics education with an emphasis on digital degrowth and data center resistance.
“What Are We Really Assessing?” Rethinking Evidence of Learning in the Age of AI
This piece builds on earlier reflections I’ve shared about responsible, transparent and learning-focused use of AI in SACE assessments, extending that thinking into the wider question of how we gather trustworthy evidence of learning. A few weeks ago, in a curriculum meeting, a HASS (Humanities and
Time, emotions and moral judgements: how university students position GenAI within their study
The emergence of Generative AI (GenAI) in higher education has prompted considerable discussion within the research community. Despite their centrality, students’ perspectives remain underexplored....
When it comes to the future of assessment, I think it's all right for faculty to create buckets.
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Bucket 1: Short-term changes that get us thorugh the day, the week, or the month.
We can revise assessments by grounding them in other modules or in-class activities, using multimedia, or including a synchronous component.
Maybe these end up being band-aids.
That's all right.
Band-aids are useful.
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Bucket #2: Long-term changes
These are things like shifting to process-focused assignments, creating a culture of transparency, or shifting to alternative assessment.
I think they'll have longer shelflives.
But they take a while to set up.
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We can't do everthing all at once.
I think it's perfectly all right to do small changes that get us through the semester, and recognize that we'll need bigger, more systemic changes down the road.
That's what I talked about during my keynote at San Diego Community College District.
We talked about how to manage those buckets.
It's a key part of the conversation, because on surefire way to create change paralysis is to say "change everything about what you teach, right now."
One of the best things I took away from Karen Costa and Niya Bond's webinar on asynchronous online learning in the AI era yesterday was that we cannot "fix" the AI problem. What a breath of fresh… | Catherine Denial
One of the best things I took away from Karen Costa and Niya Bond's webinar on asynchronous online learning in the AI era yesterday was that we cannot "fix" the AI problem.
Welcome! Take a moment to settle in. Slides: https://bit.ly/oneheasynch Please say hello in the chat and keep chatting! Slides: https://bit.ly/oneheasynch This session will be recorded. External AI note-takers like OtterPilot are not permitted. Please don’t connect them. Slides are provided and t...
"I had one friend who told a colleague that he was going across campus to an Al workshop, and the other professors said, 'Don't, we're leading a boycott against the workshop.' Okay. I mean, I don't… | Mike Caulfield
"I had one friend who told a colleague that he was going across campus to an Al workshop, and the other professors said, 'Don't, we're leading a boycott against the workshop.' Okay. I mean, I don't remember that kind of thing happening with Wikipedia or other tools for online learning..."
For me at least, it's pretty simple. People are using these tools, and they are using them poorly. We are educators and if we can teach them to use them more effectively we should. If we refuse to do that, where we end up as a society is at least a little bit on us.
But I disagree with Bryan a bit. We went through this before in miniature. In 2010 I was trying to convince people in civic education conferences we should teach people to use social media more effectively, including checking things online. The most common response "We shouldn't be teaching social media, we should be telling students to subscribe to physical newspapers instead." Those students we could have taught that year are thirty-five now. We could have had 15 cohorts of college students knowing how to check the truth of what they see online. Our entire history might be different, and maybe we wouldn't be seeing this rampant conspiracism.
The thing is those professors who said we should just give students physical papers will never realize their role in getting us here. I wish others would consider that history before they treat boycotts of AI workshops like a noble act. When you engage in politics you are judged by results, not intentions. And the results of this approach are not risk free.
Tech Billionaire Mocks Pope Leo’s AI Warning — and Reveals Silicon Valley’s Original Sin
A billionaire tech guru openly mocked Leo's call for moral AI — and quickly backtracked after backlash. It’s a telling collision of Silicon Valley hubris with a pope they cannot buy, bully, or ignore.
Higher Education Needs Frameworks for How Faculty Use AI
The anticipation surrounding GPT-5 created a dizzying buzz among tech enthusiasts who were obsessed with the idea that true artificial intelligence, known as AGI, was imminent.