AI

Every four years at the Cybathlon, teams of researchers and technology “pilots” compete to see whose brain-computer interface holds the most promise.

With the other personalities, you’re choosing between flavors of bullshit. With Efficient, you’re choosing no bullshit.

"Assessment and feedback inspires and assures student learning""Formative, instant feedback, repeatable, and evaluative judgement - that's FIRE"In this 36th episode of The Opposite of Cheating Podcast, Pro Vice-Chancellor of Quality & Integrity at Western Sydney University Cath Ellis discusses the evolution of educational integrity in Australia, the role of regulatory frameworks like TEQSA, and how scandal and data paved the way for institutional change. She introduces Western Sydney's Inspire and Assure (IA) Approach to assessment, which is their refinement of the “two-lane” model talked about by Danny Liu in Episode 28, to center faculty on the importance of inspiring learning and assuring assessment validity. Cath shares practical strategies for identifying “enrolled persons” who may not be doing their own work, like oral assessments, and the need to build student capacity while holding institutions accountable for fairness and transparency. She also unpacks the matrix model for assessment reform and…

"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.

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.

We reason about a a study showing chocolate improves memory.

Guiding university staff in making informed decisions about using GenAI software.

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.

Designed for Education, Useful for Everyone

Welcome to EduGems! This is a growing collection of pre-made prompts ("Gems") for educators to use with Google Gemini. 💎 Click on any item below to get details on that Gem, with options to use or copy the Gem. 💎 When you click to use a Gem, it will open in Gemini. 💎 Before you begin interacting

Why higher ed needs to listen to the contrarians in setting policies on using tools like ChatGPT in faculty work.

What matters most is where you're going to spend the margin

Podcast Episode · Tea for Teaching · 10/01/2025 · 46m

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

The technology is reshaping every aspect of university life. Fifteen scholars weigh in on what happens next.

A Q&A with Marc Watkins, director of the AI Institute for Teachers.

Is consumer sentiment really near an all time low? And what does that mean? We get to use (at the very end) our definitional follow-up, which reveals an asto...

A while back I released my "get it in, track it down, follow up" framework for teaching students to use AI to assist with critical thinking. The framework is meant to address three major issues: * Help students mitigate confirmation bias and sycophancy, * Make sure that their answers are grounded in appropriate sources outside the LLM, * and turn LLM sessions into interactive critical thinking exercises that not only mitigate the harms of cognitive off-loading, but scaffold their critical thinking development. “Get it in” reflects two principles. First, just make the first step — as I say, the most important part of a gym routine is walking into the gym. You want to make it as fluid as possible to start. But the second part deals with sycophancy and confirmation bias. I’ve found in general that a practice of just putting the claim in, either bare or with a dry “analyze this claim” is a good way to avoid the pitfalls of inadvertently signal you want it to take your side. Track it down reflects my observation that when we use AI for information-seeking it is best conceptualized as a “portal, not a portrait”. LLMs don’t return answers, exactly. They return knowledge maps, representations of discourse. For anything with stakes, you are going to want to ground your knowledge outside the LLM. You need to follow the links, you need to check the summaries. I sometimes use the metaphor of those little mapping drones in science fiction that fly into a ship or set of caves and produce a detailed map before Sigourney Weaver (if you’re lucky) or Vin Diesel (if you’re not) goes in. Like that little drone (which I guess is science fact, now, isn’t it) a search-assisted LLM goes out and maps the discourse space, providing a representation of what people are saying (or would tend to say) about certain subjects. It’s a map of the discourse “out there”. But it’s still just a map. You’ve ultimately got to take it in hand and venture out, click the links, check the summaries, see if the map matches the reality. You’ve got to get to real sources, written by real people. Track it down! The final element, follow up, captures at the highest level that you have to steer the LLM as a tool or craft. Many people don’t like the idea of of LLMs as “partners”, being too anthropomorphic. Fine. This undersells it, but sometimes I think of them as “Excel for critical thinking”. What do I mean by that? Just as if you know the right formulas in Excel (and understand them) you can model out different scenarios and shape presentation outputs, with LLMs you can use follow-ups to try different approaches to the information environment. This can all seem very abstract, which is why I've created over 25 videos showing me walking through example information-seeking problems and showing how these "moves" are applied. Check out the link in the comments for links to the videos, and more explanation.

We keep hearing over and over that generative AI is causing massive problems in education, both in K-12 schools and at the college level. Lots of people are worried about students using ChatGPT to cheat on assignments, and that is a problem. But really, the issues go a lot deeper, to the very philosophy of education itself. We sat down and talked to a lot of teachers — you’ll hear many of their voices throughout this episode — and we kept hearing one cri du coeur again and again: What are we even doing here? What’s the point? Links: Majority of high school students use gen AI for schoolwork | College Board Quarter of teens have used ChatGPT for schoolwork | Pew Research Your brain on ChatGPT | MIT Media Lab My students think it’s fine to cheat with AI. Maybe they’re on to something. | Vox How children understand & learn from conversational AI | McGill University ‘File not Found’ | The Verge Subscribe to The Verge to access the ad-free version of Decoder! Credits: Decoder is a production of The Verge and part…

The social-media era is over. What’s coming will be much worse.

AI amputates information from its source, so internet users must continue to look for citations and click through to original sources.

AI amputates information from its source, so internet users must continue to look for citations and click through to original sources.

Commentary on Statement on Educational Technologies and AI Agents by Stephen Downes. Online learning, e-learning, new media, connectivism, MOOCs, personal learning environments, new literacy, and more

Mostly a cautionary tale about trusting AI Overview with any photo based investigation.

New research finds that AI companions can provide emotional support, intimacy, and personal growth, but they can also erode human relationships.