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.

"Can you tell me where we're headin'? Lincoln County Road or Armageddon?"

AI is warping our understanding of what public education is for

I've been thinking about Alpha School and yet another article - this time it's "Parents Fell in Love with Alpha School's Promise. Then They Wanted Out" by Todd Feathers published today in Wired at https://lnkd.in/gNCAx47s - detailing the school leaders' saviorism and their vision of education as a dystopian surveillance hellscape. What other visions of education should we pursue with teachers, students, and caregivers? A few years ago, I read, "Impossible Dreaming: On Speculative Education Fiction and Hopeful Learning Futures" by Shandell Houlden and George Veletsianos. They challenge speculative education researchers to shift focus away from apocalyptic futures and instead engage students in hope because "Imagining these hopeful education futures is necessary, to avoid reinforcing structures of injustice and inequality such as settler colonialism and to invite more radical imagination into our work as a means to seed the worlds we want to create and live in." You can read their excellent article at: https://lnkd.in/gKUGVjzc I took inspiration from Houlden and Veletsianos for one of my dissertation studies. I challenged a group of high school students to design a speculative educational technology for collective thriving at their school. We discussed how Mariame Kaba, Ruha Benjamin, Seamus Heaney, and others conceive of hope. We watched sava saheli singhs' short film on speculative ed-tech #tresdancing. (Watch and teach the film at: https://lnkd.in/gNiCNXHJ). We prototyped, provided feedback, and revised. What emerged were projects that align with previous research findings that students often reproduce existing hierarchies in their speculative technologies - and powerful possibilities for civic action in the here and now grounded in community and justice. Anyway, I reject Alpha School and its profiteering, dehumanizing education. Instead, I'll be working with teachers, students, and caregivers to imagine - and enact - otherwises "as a means to seed the worlds we want to create and live in."

Today, Hannah Rozear and I will share the AI Ethics Learning Toolkit with faculty at Duke University Nicholas School of the Environment. Our workshop will center the question "Is AI Sustainable?" and we'll explore a section of the toolkit with conversation starters, learning activities, and resources related to AI, sustainability, and environmental impacts. As we note in this section of the AI Ethics Learning Toolkit, "Instructors may encourage students to be mindful of the environmental impact of AI as they explore its applications and reflect on the balance between convenience and sustainability." One way to encourage student reflection is through conversation and, today, faculty in our workshop will engage with questions we suggest students should discuss: 🌱 In what ways do you think AI technologies impact the environment, both positively and negatively? 🗣️ Who should be responsible for making AI environmentally sustainable? Why? 🪴 Can AI be made more eco-friendly? How? 🌏 Have you seen/heard about examples of AI being used to help the environment? We'll also have our faculty partners review some of the resources and research currently included in the toolkit, such as: 🟠 "The Environmental Impacts of AI -- Primer" by Dr. Sasha Luccioni and colleagues: https://lnkd.in/gcngznNC 🔴 The Scientific American article "What Do Google’s AI Answers Cost the Environment?" by Allison Parshall: https://lnkd.in/gcuU4yww 🟡 The open library "Against AI and Its Environmental Harms" curated by Charles Logan: https://lnkd.in/gYjwMjT5 🟢 The "Cartography of generative AI" map created by the Estampa collective: https://lnkd.in/gQpNpvRU And we recently updated this section of our toolkit to include: 🔵 Hugging Face's EcoLogits Calculator, "a python library that tracks the energy consumption and environmental footprint of using generative AI models through APIs" available at: https://lnkd.in/gFFk_gtW 🟣 The recent technical paper "Measuring the environmental impact of delivering AI at Google Scale" by Cooper Elsworth and colleagues: https://lnkd.in/gUdmWuZM Since the semester began, Hannah and I have been sharing the AI Ethics Learning Toolkit with various departments, groups of faculty, and other constituencies at Duke, and we're very keen to connect with both our Duke colleagues and other academic communities. If you'd like to get involved or contact us, please visit: https://lnkd.in/gN4rEBeR Finally, a reminder that Duke's AI Ethics Learning Toolkit is publicly available here (link also in comments): https://lnkd.in/gkc4ansf Duke Learning Innovation & Lifetime Education Duke University Libraries Duke Climate Commitment #Sustainability #Environment #AIeducation #AI #HigherEd

It can take years to collect evidence that shows effective uses of new technologies in schools. Unfortunately, early guesses sometimes go seriously wrong.

The end of critical thinking in the classroom

Research on 74,000 educator conversations shows how faculty use Claude for teaching, research, and building interactive learning tools.

GPT-5 is now here and freely available to all.

Kids can't be expected to learn what adults haven't — or can't — learn

25 Colleges. One University.

Whether students and faculty are actively using AI or not, it is having significant interpersonal, emotional effects on learning and trust in the classroom.

The downsides of generative AI are growing like wildfire

Over the years I have disagreed with pretty much everything that Thomas Arnett and the Christensen Institute have had to say about education (you can use the search function for the main blog to see), but Arnett's recent piece has some points worth thinking about.

Students shared how they felt about AI usage—for students and adults alike

Are we tired of talking about this yet?

Centre for Research in Assessment and Digital Learning

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.

My students this term have been *passionate* in their rejection of generative AI. I think the wildfires have something to do with it – the environmental impact of data centers, the scarcity of water, the terrible losses they’re seeing. . . it makes the ‘abstract’ of the climate crisis very real.

Resistance is not futile, Melanie Dusseau writes.

If we thought smartphones were damaging to young brains, the risks posed by rampant artificial intelligence are far greater. Unchecked, it will rob children of the ability to solve problems and think for themselves

The mood around AI in education has taken a markedly darker tone of late.

I’ve written a lot, on and off, about the importance of developing critical AI literacy, but I realize now that it is not enough, and I’ve recently started thinking about all of this wi…

AI’s ability to empower students to tailor their learning experience is a promising development in the quest to transform education. But we need to keep an eye on concerns that are more significant than the possibility of students over-relying on the technology.