On Wednesday, President Trump signed an executive order: "Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth." You should approach this as a Rorschach Test, of sorts: use it to evaluate what others – particularly those who are trying to sell a vision of education's AI future (with a
I'm not sure if we can call it an official launch – there's no actual product yet – but a new education company Matter and Space unveiled its website last week. The company, co-founded by former SNHU president Paul LeBlanc, MOOC pioneer George Siemens, and clinical psychologist Tanya
I've always been deeply uncomfortable with the casual observation that "schools are prisons," even if there are undoubtedly schools that do almost everything in their power to circumscribe the freedom and mobility of their students. This assertion – "schools are prisons" – flattens the many important
The 74 published an op-ed this week, penned by an AI industry consultant, invoking Sputnik and claiming that "AI education is the new space race." I'm going to set aside its problematic call for "AI literacy" for another day; and although it's
The dire wolf is not back. The New Yorker tried to convince us otherwise this week, with an article that surely makes one wonder what happened to its famed fact-checking department. Extinct, I guess, much like the Canis dirus which lived in the Americas until about 10,000 years ago.
In 2016 Microsoft made headlines when it debuted Tay, a chatbot modeled to speak like a teenage girl, which rather dramatically turned into a "Hitler-loving sex robot within 24 hours," as The Telegraph put it. The Twitter bot was designed to “learn” from the other Twitter users who
It's been another very dark week, hasn't it. Not even Cory Booker's act of elocutionary endurance could shake me out of the gloom. It's a personal gloom, no doubt – this week marked the five year anniversary of the last time I saw
According to some of the surveys that its evangelists are prone to cite, AI is now everywhere in education – or if not now, then soon, widely and excitedly adopted by the majority of teachers and students. To that, I utter the words of Marcia Brady, "Sure Jan." When
If you don't mind, I'd like to return to that other big story that appeared recently in The Atlantic. No, no, not the one where editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg describes how he was added to the Trump Administration's Signal group chat discussing plans to bomb
The Secretary of Education Linda McMahon will speak at the ASU+GSV Summit next month. The conference makes no mention in its blurb promoting the Secretary's appearance of what happened last week: President Trump's executive order to dismantle her department. There's no mention of
The Gates Foundation, we learned this week, is backing away from its environmental efforts, slashing staff and funding for projects that sought in part to address global climate change. Bill Gates is "retooling his empire for the Trump era," as The New York Times put it. No mention
I’d said in my last email that I didn’t plan on sending you anything today. I ran the NYC Half yesterday and presumed that I’d be too anxious on Saturday and too tired on Sunday to write anything. Think of this as either a bonus email or