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Making AI a More Effective Teacher: Lessons from TPACK
David Wiley, improving learning, 2025/03/24

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The interesting part of this post isn't the TPACK model at all but the "TRaining AI to be a Teacher" (TRAIT) hypothesis introduced later in the post. It "is something like this: the effectiveness with which a generative AI model supports student learning will be proportional to the extent to which it has the skills and knowledge of an appropriately trained human teacher." Now it's a nice starting point, and we can see the relevance of Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) to this. But really, the skill sets are very different for AI and human teachers. The AI is teaching one-to-one, the human is teaching a cohort. The AI is following the student's lead, the human is teaching a specific curriculum. The AI doesn't care about behaviour, the human manages behaviour and a host of other social factors over and above learning. But Wiley's main point holds: an AI teacher will require specific competencies we might not expect an AI to have out of the box.

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The New Analytics-Industrial Complex in Higher Education: Data, Governance, and Power
Chris R. Glass, Gerardo Blanco, International Higher Education, 2025/03/24

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According to this article, "private data firms are quietly seizing control of global higher education, creating a power shift more profound than universities realize." I'm not sure how real these assertions are, but there's enough evidence out there to suggest that they might be. "The analytics-industrial complex has effectively achieved a form of regulatory capture over global higher education.... This represents a profound shift from public to private governance, where commercial entities increasingly determine educational standards and priorities without democratic accountability." I'd like to think that this isn't the case here in Canada, where universities are (mostly) public institutions, but in the U.S. and the U.K. these concerns may be more valid. I don't know.

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5 questions for Natali Helberger
Gabby Miller, Politico, 2025/03/24

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This article is an interview with Natali Helberger, a law and digital technology professor at the University of Amsterdam, and I really like the "one underrated big idea" that leads the post: "AI is as much about society as it is about technology. AI systems are integrated into complex social, cultural, economic, political and institutional contexts that shape the data the systems are trained on, the prompts that drive them, the values tech is evaluated against, the way the technology changes workflows and how its decisions affect the life of people." That is all.

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2025 EDUCAUSE Horizon Action Plan: Supporting Agency, Trust, Transparency, and Involvement
Jenay Robert, EDUCAUSE Library, 2025/03/24

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This report (11 page PDF) begins by describing "their preferred state of higher education 10 years from now" and then outlines actions to help educators prepare for it. It's hard to imagine such a world. Every trend in the U.S. is pointing in the opposite direction right now. That may seem harsh, but consider what they expect: increased enrollment, increased technology budgets, distributed and collaborative data governance, ethical and responsible AI use, federally supported identity system architecture, a national standard for cybersecurity and privacy, and more.

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Product Market Fit Collapse: Why Your Company Could Be Next
Brian Balfour, et al., Reforge, 2025/03/24

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Product Market Fit (PMF) is the idea that a given product serves an identifiable (and profitable) market. This market is defined by a window of consumer expectations and needs, and it varies over time as these increase and as external events - such as the introduction of new technology - change them. PMF collapse happens when this change is sudden and complete; the market moves in such a way that PMF is lost and unrecoverage. Arguably, AI has truggered PMF collapse in a number of cases, for example, which is seeing the value of its homework tutor service reduced to zero as AI takes over; or Stack Overflow, which is in decline for similar reasons (and also, Google basically dropping them in favour of Reddit didn't help). What will change in the future? This article hazards some guesses (auto-creation, custom products, task automation) but I don't think it will be so clear-cut. Anyhow, good article. Via Mark Oehlert.

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We publish six to eight or so short posts every weekday linking to the best, most interesting and most important pieces of content in the field. Read more about what we cover. We also list papers and articles by Stephen Downes and his presentations from around the world.

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