Via Dan Willingham, I discovered this new report by the American Psychological Association on children, adolescents, and educational technology. Dan was one of the authors. Much of what is in the report will not surprise regular readers of this blog. Take e.g. the finding that engagement is not the same as learning. This reminded me… Read More A new APA report on technology in education: learning and wellbeing
A year ago, I wrote a rant about Alpha schools. A few times a year, I let myself go. No, this will not be a new rant. Sorry. But in my post and the follow-up post, I argued that we couldn’t separate Alpha School’s spectacular claims from the extraordinarily selective population it serves. Now we… Read More Do We Know the Alpha and Omega of Alpha School?
This blog has an AI problem. No, not because it was written by AI (although I translated it with AI’s help). Or rather, I have an AI research problem. The problem is that I am increasingly unsure which new studies on AI and education are still worth discussing here. I have a monthly podcast in… Read More This blog has an AI problem
The Exploding Heads don’t need Colin from Portsmouth to be funny and poignant! Check here for more Funny on Sunday.
It has almost become an accepted truth, with social media bans becoming increasingly popular among politicians. Young people spend more and more time on social media. Mental health appears to be declining. So one must be causing the other. Over the past few years, numerous studies have reported an association between heavier social media use… Read More Does Time on Social Media Predict Later Mental Health? A Five-Year Study Suggests Not
A previous summer saved me from making a mistake on this blog. I came across a meta-analysis on AI in education and bookmarked it to write about later. By the time I returned to it, however, the study had started to fall apart. Although it had appeared in a top journal, many of the underlying… Read More Why This AI Meta-Analysis Tells Us Less Than It Seems
One of the most widely discussed educational innovations of the past fifteen years is undoubtedly the flipped classroom, helped in no small part by the attention generated by Khan Academy. Students engage with theoretical content before class, often through videos or other preparatory materials. Classroom time is then devoted to questions, applications, practice, and collaboration.… Read More When Does the Flipped Classroom Work in Higher Education?
I’m usually not someone who gravitates towards pessimism or endless talk about the decline of civilisation. And I’m not about to do that here either. This isn’t going to be another post about AI suddenly becoming sentient and wiping out humanity. But… Over the past few months, I’ve started noticing that AI is already damaging… Read More The Quiet Damage AI Is Already Doing
One of the things teachers often hope for when it comes to AI in education is that it might finally reduce the time they spend providing feedback on writing assignments. Good feedback is one of the most powerful ways to promote learning, yet it also remains one of the most time-consuming parts of a teacher’s… Read More What AI does better than teachers. And especially what it doesn’t.
A Substack post that suddenly seemed to appear everywhere in my feed led me to an interesting systematic review recently published in Review of Education. The authors did something that, surprisingly, had never been done before. They searched for experimental evidence supporting the Pedagogy of Multiliteracies, a framework that has become highly influential in some… Read More The Multimodal Learning Confusion