A weekly newsletter where I share ideas from about nurturing learning and curiosity with technology.
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Focus on how you work with AI, not what it answers
90% of the value I derive from ChatGPT comes from thinking about my prompt. In forcing myself to think out loud and give instructions to a responsive system, it gives me clarity. The response from ChatGPT almost becomes irrelevant. This doesn’t work as effectively if I were to write into an empty notepad. That’s because…
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Navigating the Open Waters of an Early-Stage Product
I’ve been sharing videos and links to the tool we’re building called Flota. At the surface, it’s a new interface for instructors to create agendas. Yet our hope is to improve the experience of creating in-class sessions… So how do we know an agenda builder is the right place to start? This is the meta…
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In my class, you surf alone and get feedback together
Every year, I try to refine the intentions of the 6 month UX certificate I teach. This experience has been incredibly educational for me in understanding how people extract information from what is presented to them. My intentions as an instructor can be interpreted in a plethora of ways that are outside my control. To…
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23 things I learned in 2023 about how we communicate
Talking is exciting, infuriating, and wonderfully human. As an extrovert and a teacher, I think a lot about communication and how we can make it more enjoyable, intentional, and effective. Here’s a list of 23 observations I made during the tens of thousands of conversations I had in 2023. They have been curated down from…
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Intellectual Nutrition Labels for Generative AI Products
If a generative AI had a nutrition label that said “100 brain calories per ChatGPT response”, would that change how you use it? Nutrition could serve as a metaphor to understand why taking a tempered approach with generative AI might be important for our intellectual health. For starters, not all calories are created equal. 100…
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How we learn is changing. Why am I worried?
I’m deeply worried about the future of learning, but I can’t put my finger on why. For a while it was because of all the noise coming from the media and technology. It divided the population and created a sea of information that’s difficult to validate. Later, I started to become concerned with all the…
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Simplicity's Double-Edged Sword in the Information Age
We’re obsessed with simplicity. It’s alluring and inflammatory all at once. We want to simplify everything, and we want to draw the line on when something is too simple. “Everything should be as simple as possible, but not simpler.” Though there is no confirmed source, the quote is often attributed to Albert Einstein. It’s about…
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Embracing the AI Mindshift: From Google to ChatGPT
???? This post originally appeared on the Pragmatics Studio blog. Whether we like it or not, thinking will happen through AI, as it happens today through Google. We will ask language models how to deal with a broken heart the way we started doing that with the search giant. Generate recipes. Deal with grief. Diagnose…
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How AI highlights the flaws in grading
AI is going to make teachers work much harder. Not because ChatGPT is killing student’s thinking, but because the grading system killed thinking already. However, a quirk in how grades are assigned is the reason things are going to get worse if we don’t change. For subjects with a high degree of nuance like writing,…
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I have been thinking about education for 15 years
The other day I was digging through some notebooks in my drawer, and I realized how many of them had notes about education. Each page I flipped through warped my sense of time passing. Though some of them were 10 years old, the notes felt like they were written yesterday. Not because the ideas themselves…
