Last Friday, I was in Paris for what was, without exaggeration, one of the best lectures I have seen in recent years. Barbara Oakley was on stage, doing what she does better than almost anyone else: making complex insights from cognitive science and neuroscience clear, without flattening them. She touched on the importance of knowledge… Read More Why Knowledge Matters More in the Age of AI
As we move towards the end of 2025, the pattern has become hard to ignore. Over the past twelve months, the same sequence has played out again and again. Concerns rise about young people’s mental health. Attention quickly turns to social media. And before long, a policy proposal appears that promises clarity and decisiveness: an… Read More The (Overly) Simple Story About Youth Mental Health
Anyone who has ever sat in an online meeting with an email open on the side, a document that needed to be checked “quickly”, and perhaps a chat message popping up, will recognise the feeling. You are busy, but at the end of the meeting, you mainly feel tired. A new study by Frontzkowski and… Read More Why Multitasking During Video Meetings Leads to Fatigue and Worse Performance
Anyone using ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude today relies, indirectly, on an idea from 2017. Barbara Oakley reminded me of this today. That idea appears in a paper with a strikingly confident title: Attention Is All You Need. In hindsight, the title was not bravado but an accurate summary of what followed. Oakley also noted that… Read More How a Relatively Small Paper Laid the Foundation for ChatGPT and Gemini
Over seventy billion dollars. That is what Zuckerberg and Meta poured into the metaverse. Not gradually, but at full speed, Meta chased an idea that sounded convincing. Mainly because no one could explain what it was meant to become. Zuckerberg doubled down so hard he even renamed his company after it. And now Meta is… Read More Maybe We Should Talk About Wasted Money?
Anyone following recent discussions about AI in education will recognise a familiar pattern, the same one I highlighted last week in my blog on a meta review about this topic. Much AI research focuses on technological possibilities and pays far less attention to the underlying didactics. We experiment enthusiastically, but often without a clear view… Read More ChatGPT feels easier, but taking notes works better
Anyone diving into research on AI in education today will find plenty of promise. They will also find quite a few studies that do not fully deliver. There are intelligent systems that provide feedback, robots that support collaboration, and adaptive platforms that personalise learning. Yet the moment you look beneath the pedagogical and learning-psychological surface,… Read More AI in Education: Plenty of Technology, Not Much Learning Theory
We increasingly receive “tailored” information online. From videos to news to products, algorithms try to predict what we will likely want to see. Convenient, because it saves time. Less convenient, because you end up less often surprised by things you do not yet know. You may also drift into a kind of filter bubble. A… Read More What Happens When Personalisation Narrows Learning
Every month, I record a Dutch podcast with Rinke. He has now sent me a preprint of a meta-analysis by Nathan Welker and colleagues on so-called Content Acquisition Podcasts (CAPs). These are short, multimodal instructional modules that mainly appear in research on (special) teacher education. Think compact micro-instruction, not the kind of podcasts you listen to… Read More Content Acquisition Podcasts: Strong Results, Limited Evidence
I’m a big fan of the Exploding Heads. This video is perfect for a Sunday laugh, mixing humor with insightful commentary on AI. And for the connoisseurs amongst the readers of this blog: love to the family! Check here for more Funny on Sunday. View this post on Instagram