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Researcher with public evidence across AI business, AI research, Culture, work & education.
"Certainly, AI teaching will be cheaper than teaching assistants. But we know that the second it becomes possible for an institution to achieve an end cheaply – even if it’s far worse – there is immense pressure from above to do so." www.theguardian.com/books/ng-int...
“Writing builds our working memory, executive planning skills and metacognition — the ability to think about our thinking, weigh alternate viewpoints and revise for clarity and style. It takes decades to develop writing skills, from toddlerhood into adulthood.”
The Department for Education's AI tutoring initiative is getting pounded with criticism from both sides. Some critics have launched a call to pause this initiative docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1F...
One good thing to say about this is STS researchers are going to have a blast doing ethnographies of its enactment. "Claude Science brings ... fragmented tools into a single research environment where scientists can conduct all stages of their work." www.anthropic.com/news/cla…
This is the good stuff right here. www.insidehighered.com/opinion/care...
"LLMs not only alter the voice and tone of human writing but also consistently alter the intended meaning" - seems especially bad for academic work arxiv.org/abs/2603.18161
Many out there want to treat AI in education seriously. Then there's this from *Napster*. "Trained on a teacher’s material, courses, and papers, these digital twins will live online, becoming a 'copy of yourself that you can then use to scale your time.'” www.wired.com/story/n…
NYC and LA just restricted AI in classrooms, and in both cities the parents and teachers who pushed for it are celebrating. Tech Policy Press fellow Chris Mills Rodrigo reports on the grassroots movement resisting the rush to adopt AI in schools.
This is ridiculous. “Google’s A.I. changes illustrate a longstanding power dynamic between consumer tech giants and the U.S. public education system. Tech companies regularly turn on new education product features for students…” (1/3)
“Teaching educators about AI is a ‘moral imperative’, said Randi Weingarten, the AFT president.” “And without outside funding, it was a choice between taking big tech’s money or doing nothing, she said.”
Today’s gadget, with a nice dose of ordinalization. intheweights.com
The anatomy of an AI-supported academic article is becoming more apparent. I desk reviewed ~70 manuscripts this week for our journal. Reckon 20ish had significant AI assistance. On top of hundreds of others recently I'm starting to see patterns. Are other editors are seeing the same or similar? 1/
What's most upsetting me as a journal editor is that many papers we receive where AI use is disclosed for editing and language refinement actually appear to have been ruined rather than improved by AI. We get what seem like promising underpinning studies, but totally obscured by over-complex text.
AI-assisted text is deadly for academic journal editors and reviewers. I'm detecting a lot more of it recently as an editor. It's still there in the "Frankencitations" and those little linguistic "tells" like "AI is not the cause. It's the symptom of an underlying reality." But it's more, too. 1/
The evidence about AI in education remains terrible as a basis for policy or practice. As schools in some places come back from summer next week (oh Scotland it's too early), here's a wee roundup on just how truly woefully AIED research has stood up and why educators shouldn't call on it 1/
Good god the really tepid pauses on AI in primary schools in NY and LA have wound up the LinkedInerati so badly they're already dropping a million Claude-written complaints and counter-proposals. Small children do not have to be your tech test subjects, guys. Get. A. Grip.
Wee bit of advice for anyone writing up research about AI in education. Journals like the one I edit are drowning in it. Reviewers aren't accepting invitations. Most manuscripts offer *nothing* new. Yes it's a big current topic BUT it's not inevitably important as a research subject...
I do think access to LLMs has sent some academic writers a bit doolally. At our journal I desk rejected a paper recently because it was just *impossible* to read. There seemed to be an underpinning study hiding in it, but I reckoned the (disclosed) use of AI for "editing only" wrecked it...
AI is a huge problem for education policymakers. There's no good evidence to go by, all countries feel like they must act on it, and it's a source of huge uncertainty. From a research perspective, we're just getting a view of how different national policy centres are dealing with AI.
Maybe if they had actually read what my work says about education, data and the edtech industry, instead of relying on some kind of AI summary of it, they would recognize that I - as an academic "who lives in the literature" - am about the last person to want to convert it into autosummary podcasts
Super intriguing that my university's head of tech today asked AI users to use Qwen running on institutional infrastructure instead of commercial LLMs ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini that "incur token based charges" in order to "significantly save money." US big tech LLMs getting too pricy for HE now?
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