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.

Most of us in higher education are now familiar with generative AI bots, where you formulate a prompt and get a reply. Yet, we are now beginning the advancement to agentic AI, the autonomous 24-7 project manager.

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

The emergence of Generative AI (GenAI) in higher education has prompted considerable discussion within the research community. Despite their centrality, students’ perspectives remain underexplored....

"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.

Students – and all manner of professionals – are tempted to outsource their thinking to AI, which threatens to undermine learning and credibility. A philosophy professor offers a solution.

In January 2024, I asked an auditorium full of community college instructors to tell me which stage of grief resonated most when they thought about their relationship with AI. Here's what they said: 7%: Denial - AI is overrated. I'll just wait it out. 15%: Anger - AI is running amok and undermines critical thinking. 38%: Bargaining - I'd learn more about AI if I wasn't so darn busy. 3%: Depression - What I love about teaching is slipping away. 38%: Acceptance - I'm ready! Where's my AI teaching assistant? How do you think the results would shift if you posed this question to faculty today? Do you think your colleagues are feeling significantly *more* or *less* optimistic about AI than they were a year or two ago? If so, why? #facultydevelopment #ai #edtech

Researchers identified tendencies for the chatbot to respond to prompts from fictitious teens by promoting harmful behaviors, as long as users told it the information was for a friend or project.

Editor’s Note: Please join us in welcoming Eleanor Ball, Information Literacy & Liaison Librarian and Assistant Professor of Instruction at the University of Northern Iowa, as a new First Year Academic Librarian Experience blogger for the 2025-26 year here at ACRLog. I’m about as anti-AI as they come. I’ve never used it, and I’m ethically

At this point I'm really just confused. Do people not realize how many college courses are being taught fully online, and of those, how many are fully asynchronous? "While comprehensive restructuring in higher ed will take time, triage must be administered right now. Institutions must apply a tourniquet to stem the hemorrhaging of college credibility. They must prohibit traditional take-home essays until effective, verifiable safeguards are in place. To fail to do so is no longer pedagogically outdated; it’s ethically indefensible." More than 50% of college students take at least one course online. This trends higher at community colleges (no shocker there), because those students need the most flexibility to complete their degrees while working and caring for families. Online asynchronous courses run on a much higher level of student autonomy and self-motivation and have for decades. We don't need clueless generalizations. We do need help. #Faculty are deeply struggling. I have been teaching online for twenty years. This has been the hardest term of my teaching career. We do need help. We need help in redesigning our courses. We need to be paid to do those redesigns. We need consistent support with obvious and flagrant academic integrity violations that harm students, faculty, and institutions. We need help. What is also "ethically indefensible" is the utter lack of understanding of how the majority of non-traditional students are able to complete their coursework. I need folks to realize that losing online learning would rip college access away from millions of non-traditional (what I call new-traditional) college students. I agree with this article that higher ed's very foundations are at risk. But we can't save it by sacrificing access. #HigherEd https://lnkd.in/eAG4rudV

Does ChatGPT’s “study mode” mean students will spend less time talking with their peers?

AI-text-detectors can be evaded using simple tricks in academic writing, as repeatedly shown by folks like Dr Mike Perkins and Dr Mark A. Bassett. Advice for how to do this is abundant on YouTube, in videos aimed at students, viewed millions of times. Some videos are about how to ‘cheat’, but others have more positive titles like ‘how to study with AI’. Is there any point trying to stop students using AI to write essays? Or even any value to using asynchronous written essays as summative assessments?   New paper from the great Tomas Foltynek and some bloke called Phil Newton   https://rdcu.be/eKCko

Some things you can't be polite about.

Learning is a complex process — and so is measuring it. Though research shows we have cause to be concerned about what happens when students use AI, the devil is in the details.

Greetings from early September, when fall classes have begun.  Today I’d like to share information about one of my seminars as part of my long-running practice of being open about my teaching…

Key findings from Inside Higher Ed’s student survey on generative AI show that using the evolving technology hasn’t diminished the value of college in their view, but it could affect their critical thinking skills.

The International Journal for Educational Integrity has published a new significant article analyzing the intersection of academic integrity and artificial intelligence in higher education. Conduct…

What bots are really doing in the classroom.

Developments in how higher education is responding to AI.

Do I even have to ask?

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

“Everyone is using it”—almost everyone.

The downsides of generative AI are growing like wildfire

The demise of the English paper will end a long intellectual tradition, but it’s also an opportunity to reëxamine the purpose of higher education.

Universities across the country are scrambling to understand the implications of generative A.I.’s transformation of technology.