Chit: an official note, sometimes a voucher or an IOU; a slip of paper that grants permission Chat: an informal conversation; a friendly talk Chit-chat: "A reduplication with vowel variation of chat...

"The best way to honor Charlie’s memory," California Governor Gavin Newsom said, "is to continue his work." And so we've seen in the last week: the targeted harassment of those who've spoken out about...

I'm truly at a loss of what to say today. (Last week. It lingers, doesn't it.) So (I guess) let me just repeat a point I've made repeatedly: one of the saddest rationales for using "AI" is for "brain...

In a children's literature class at Texas A&M University this summer, a student interrupted the professor as she began to recap some of the previously covered material, "remarks on gender and sexualit...

A couple of weeks ago, Ed Zitron published one of his epic rants -- the kind that, as he warned newsletter readers, is probably better read on the web than via email: it’s 16,000 words long; so long t...

Humans have always invested great meaning in birds. No surprise, what with the feathers, the flight. Each week, when I look at all the stories that've been told about education and technology and try ...

Last week, Max Read asked "Is the 'AI' 'bubble' 'bursting'?" – those scare-quotes strategically deployed to encourage readers to question what we mean when we talk about "AI" or "bubbles," when we pre...

If you were to tell the story of the end of public education in the US, you wouldn't begin with the Trump Administration's bluster about closing the Department of Education. You wouldn't begin with Tr...

[Depending on your geographic location] It's almost/already back-to-school season, which always means a flurry of aspirational, inspirational stories (and their opposite) about ed-tech gadgetry, along...

In their bestseller AI Snake Oil, Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor open their chapter on "How Predictive AI Goes Wrong" with a story from Mount St. Mary's University: how, in 2015, the school had co...

No one likes to be wrong. But perhaps what bothers people even more than making a mistake is being made a fool, being tricked or duped. It's no surprise then that many folks bristle at the assertion ...

Math teacher Michael Pershan wrote an excellent newsletter this week, and I'd like to start there rather than with the ubiquitous stories about the underwhelming roll-out of OpenAI's latest GPT. Mich...

Raymond Callahan's 1962 book Education and the Cult of Efficiency remains a classic study of public education in the US, chronicling how in the early twentieth century schools' goals became business g...

Simon Ramo published his essay "A New Technique in Education" in 1957 in Engineering and Science, a journal published by Caltech to showcase the institution's research. "A noted scientist proposes som...

Ed-Tech Criticism. AI Refusal.

Sometimes you have to repeat yourself. Sometimes you didn't say things clearly the first time. Sometimes your intended audience didn't hear you or they didn't listen. Sometimes there were louder voice...

Although I linked to it in Friday's newsletter and even embedded the Instagram clip, I have not been able to stop thinking about Ocean Vuong's remarks on how social media has shaping students' thought...

Over a decade ago, at the height of the MOOC madness, many people crowed excitedly about "the end of college" – not because the various technologies they believed would enable this were any good (by "...

Abetted by technological and military might, finance capital has achieved its hegemony over the Earth by annexing the core of human desires – Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics Last week, METR released th...

"Could AI slow science?" Sayash Kapoor and Arvind Narayanan ask, and proceed to poke a sizable hole in one of the major claims about "AI" – about its application in healthcare, in education, and beyon...

For decades, Johnson & Johnson was one of the most trusted brands in the world. The maker of bandaids and baby shampoo, its name was associated with care for our health and our bodies and, more import...

There's been plenty of ink spilled in the last week in response to The New York Times's story on NYC mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani and his college application to Columbia University, in which he ti...

One of the popular uses of "AI" that I truly do not understand involves "brainstorming" – and okay, I admit, I truly do not understanding using "AI" at all with what we know about its politically, psy...

You know how last week I had some good news? Yeah, well... that was nice, wasn't it. Because this week – Happy Fourth of July! LOLSOB – everything isn't just bad, it's dire. Trump's "Big Beautiful Bi...

Greetings from Maine where Kin, Poppy, and I are visiting family for a few days. As such – as summer – today's missive is a little shorter than usual. And, quite unlike recent emails, today's newslet...

Several weeks ago, a commenter suggested the word "howlround" to describe the dangerous tendency of LLMs to "glaze" their users – to provide responses that are self-reinforcing in both substance and s...

While I was pleased to see millions of Americans turn out for last weekend's protests, I have to say I've spent this week more depressed and more worried than ever about the road ahead. Perhaps it was...

I recently finished reading Geraldine Brooks's memoir Memorial Days, about the sudden death of her husband, author and journalist Tony Horwitz. It was fine, I thought; others have given the book much ...

"This is not right. This is not right." @justsayuhatebasketball I know this is a basketball page but I can’t think about hoops 🏀 right now. 🚨PUBLIC SERVICE ANNOUNCEMENT🚨 PROTECT YOURSELVES AND YOUR ...

There was a time when Elon Musk was positioned as some sort of tech genius, appearing in the second Iron Man movie with a cameo that implied that he was some sort of a real-world Tony Stark. There wer...

"'Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning a...

How shall we ever conceive However express a new idea If we are bound by the categorization That delivered our problem to us In the first place ? -- Stafford Beer How do you measure intelligence? Yo...

Back in 2012 ("the year of the MOOC"), when Sebastian Thrun told Wired that, in fifty years time there would only be ten universities left in the world and his startup Udacity had a chance to be one o...

(I'm interested in questions of agency, and how automation and artificial intelligence serve to undermine this – agents versus agency, I've previously argued. It's particularly striking that "agents" ...

Political reporters love a Midwest diner. Even though most Americans live in urban areas, even though a third of Americans live in California, Texas, Florida, or New York, even though around 40% live ...

Yesterday marked my fifth Mother's Day without him. Tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of his passing. My beautiful boy, for whom I still grieve and will grieve every day forever; and despite his death...

There's a tendency to write about technological change as an "all of a sudden" occurrence – even if you try to offer some background, some precursors, some concurrent events, or a longer, broader pers...

What do folks mean when they talk about AI in education? Most of the time – and I'm certainly at fault here too – no definition or description of AI is even offered. You’re supposed to just known what...

On Sunday, Ben Smith published a lengthy investigation into what he describes as "The group chats that changed America" – the private, digital banter of venture capitalists, tech executives, and influ...

Tressie McMillan Cottom recently offered a neat little summary of how universities have responded to generative AI: "Academics initially lost our minds over the obvious threats to academic integrity. ...

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 w...

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 ...

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...

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 l...

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, ...

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 Telegrap...

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 ann...

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 stud...

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...

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: Pre...