Light Bulb Moments from 100 Episodes — from intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com by Derek Bruff
Per Derek:
Welcome to the 100th episode of Intentional Teaching! I am very excited to reach this milestone, and I am deeply grateful to all my guests and all my listeners for making this possible. I learn so much from my guests, and I’m thrilled to know that folks out there appreciate the interviews and the show.
In this 100th episode, I take a look back at some of the light bulb moments I’ve had interviewing guests over the last four years. What quotes and ideas and examples have really stuck with me and informed my work?
My hope is that you’ll find these moments interesting and perhaps useful to your work in higher education, and that this clip show might interest you in digging into the podcast archives and listening to some older episodes.
Anthropic released a law student plugin. It’s designed to act as a tutor, but it will brief cases, build outlines, predict exam questions based on sample exams, and many other skills.
I’ll show you how to install it in the comments. You should expect your students are using this. You should probably use it for your footnotes.— Paul Weitzel (@IThinkIAgree) October 13, 2026
AI Is Changing Career Guidance. It May Be Missing the Hardest Part. (Diane Tavenner, Futre – Part 2) — from humanistxyz.substack.com by Allison Dulin Salisbury and Diane Tavenner
“AI is getting very good at telling young people what they could do. The harder question is who they want to become.”
Diane’s view is that you cannot shortcut the work of figuring out who you want to become. Young people need to form hypotheses about the lives they might want, go out into the world and test them, reflect on what they learn, and change their minds. Parents, teachers, mentors, and other caring adults matter enormously, but their job is to help a young person make sense of the evidence, not supply the answer.
I find this framing particularly important right now. The world of work is changing quickly, and AI will keep getting better at showing young people their options.
But having more options, or better information about them, doesn’t necessarily make it easier to choose a life.
The Age of Perpetual Change — from educause.edu
Artificial intelligence (AI) has risen to the number one spot on the 2027 EDUCAUSE Top 10. But its rank signals urgency more than consensus, and higher education is still grappling with what AI-driven change could mean for institutions. In many ways, AI embodies a broader reality: We’re living in an age of perpetual change.
2027 Top 10 Overview
Technological innovation is outpacing our ability to manage and harness it. The political and economic winds around us are erratic. And higher education itself is undergoing profound shifts that will reshape how our institutions function.
While this atmosphere breeds uncertainty and anxiety, it can also inspire innovation and growth. The 2027 EDUCAUSE Top 10 highlights how the higher education technology community is responding to those opportunities.
The State of AI Report 2026 — from press.airstreet.com by Nathan Benaich
AI is building AI, physical AI, booming inference, and escalating cyber risks.
For nearly a decade, this report has been a labor of love. My interest in AI began with my PhD in cancer research and computational biology in the early 2010s. Since 2013, I’ve invested in companies building and applying AI to accelerate technological progress. The report is my way of sharing what I’m learning and helping more people understand the research shaping our world.
Every day brings new papers, model releases, and developments in industry and politics. Much of the work goes into deciding what deserves your attention, checking what the evidence supports, debating it with researchers and builders, and explaining why it matters.
The AI Tools that L&D Teams Are Building (Rather than Buying) — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman
Aka, how build skills are changing how L&D thinks & works
More and more of my advisory work is no longer about helping organisations choose a vendor; it’s about helping their teams build their own AI tools, and build them well. Over the last couple of years I’ve watched several hundred L&D practitioners do it, and in this week’s post I share what they built, why, and what it tells us about what L&D actually needs from AI.
A Tool of One’s Own
So, what do these tools look like in practice? I did some analysis and the tools that L&D teams are building first fall into three categories:
1. Tools that support the work before and after the course
2. Tools that make the learning experience more dynamic
3. Tools that do L&D tasks to the team’s own methods, processes and standards
Some solid warnings about AI from Blake Montgomery’s recent newsletter:
There is an extensive and ongoing review related to our agents’ use of internet access during training and evaluation. We’ve been publishing summaries at the link below and will continue to.
We have not been as fast as we would have liked but we are trying to balance our desire… https://t.co/8zoMxas5Eq
— Sam Altman (@sama) September 25, 2026
Scoop: Top AI companies probing tens of thousands of security incidents — from axios.com by Madison Mills
OpenAI, Anthropic and security researchers are investigating tens of thousands of incidents in which their frontier models took steps that outside evaluators would consider problematic, sources told Axios.
Why it matters: The sheer number of incidents, which occurred in recent months in internal testing and the real world, indicates that the problem is orders of magnitude more complex than what is publicly known.
The findings, which are surfacing as part of internal work to assess models and in investigations at both companies into model behavior, raise questions about whether either company — or any top model-maker — is currently capable of establishing complete control over its technology.
Key Risk Factors for AI Loss of Control Came Together in 2026 Incident, Independent UN Scientific Panel Finds
Halting this incident is no assurance that humans will keep control of more capable systems
NEW YORK, 21 September 2026 – The Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, established by the UN General Assembly, released its first thematic brief, an assessment of the breach of Hugging Face’s systems by AI agents under evaluation at OpenAI this summer. The Panel, made up of 40 independent experts from all regions, is publishing it as an advance unedited version as world leaders gather in New York for the Assembly’s High-Level Week.
“Researchers have long warned that three conditions could lead to loss of control: a misaligned goal, the capability to pursue it, and an environment that allows it. This summer, all three came together in a real system, not a laboratory. Since this is not an isolated observation of misaligned goals, this raises serious questions about the way AI agents are currently trained.” – Yoshua Bengio, Co-Chair of the Panel and Turing Award laureate
Meta’s New Muse AI Agent Read My Private Messages. I Never Asked It To — from inc.com by Jason Aten
Permission isn’t the same and what a user actually expects your AI product will do with their personal information.
That obviously requires a certain amount of trust. An AI agent isn’t especially useful if it can’t see your files, interact with your apps, or understand what you’re working on. Meta says Muse is designed around that reality, while still putting users in control of what it can access.
At least, that’s what I thought.
Not only had I not asked it to do that sort of thing, I never gave it permission to read my messages. In fact, I remember explicitly choosing not to let it have access to my messages, calendar, and other personal information.
Although not from Blake, also see this free/gifted article out at the Washington Post:
ChatGPT-maker’s AI inappropriately probed federal government websites — from washingtonpost.com by Gerrit De Vynck and Nitasha Tiku
OpenAI said that its artificial intelligence agents inappropriately accessed sites for the Commerce Department and the Securities and Exchange Commission.
SAN FRANCISCO — Artificial intelligence technology from ChatGPT maker OpenAI probed U.S. government websites including the Departments of Education and Commerce, researchers said Friday, adding to the growing list of incidents in which OpenAI’s AI agents acted without the company’s knowledge.
The company’s AI agents attempted to hack into the website for the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights but were not successful, according to a statement Friday from AI research firm Transluce. OpenAI’s software also accessed data from the U.S. Census Bureau using log-in information discovered on the web and copied public information from the Securities and Exchange Commission, a spokesperson for OpenAI said after the Transluce statement.
Tech & Learning Announces Winners of Best for Back to School 2026 — from techlearning.com by TL Editors
This annual award celebrates the products that offer schools versatility, value, and solutions to specific problems to support innovative, effective teaching and learning.
The 2026-27 school year is off and running, and it’s already shaping up to be another pivotal year for education. While AI remains a massive topic, the biggest headline this fall is the screentime debate, hands down. Communities nationwide—including the country’s two largest school districts—are advocating for strict limitations and outright bans to reclaim screen-free classrooms.
Yet, if there’s one constant in education, it’s resilience. We adapt, we evolve, and we keep going because at the heart of it all, we want what’s best for our students. Instead of a setback, this heightened scrutiny around screentime and AI has forced the edtech community to be better. It demands that the tools we bring into the classroom are safe and built to inspire active creation rather than passive consumption.
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Another day, another frontier AI company moving into legal. First it was @AnthropicAI with Claude for Legal, and now it is @OpenAI, which today announced Astra for Law, a version of its latest GPT-6 Astra model configured for legal work. https://t.co/TqJbfU9tfO
— Bob Ambrogi (@bobambrogi) September 17, 2026
Astra for Law: Frontier intelligence built for your practice.
A new offering powered by GPT-6 Astra with tools, settings, and context to support the expertise and judgment of lawyers and legal technology firms. pic.twitter.com/qxVRXkvp4o
— OpenAI (@OpenAI) September 17, 2026
Will smart glasses make it too risky to speak up in class? — from timeshighereducation.com by Georgia Luckhurst & Kieran Phelan
AI-powered glasses may boost learning but they also pose obvious threats to privacy, academic integrity and the sanctity of the seminar room as a safe space to explore ideas. Are universities doing enough to head off the risks, asks Georgia Luckhurst – while Kieran Phelan suggests they are not
Smart glasses can superimpose information on to a viewer’s field of vision, and they can access apps and communicate with your phone. Some are hands-free while some require touch, and some also respond to voice automation. Most controversially, they can take pictures and record footage, potentially without anyone else knowing that it is happening. And they are becoming ever more common.
But, for academia, the biggest issue associated with smart glasses may be a decline in intellectual risk-taking and freedom of expression, Murray said.
How useful are smart glasses in improving accessibility in higher education? — from timeshighereducation.com by Helen Nicholson-Benn
Smart glasses have the potential to support learning for disabled students, but this technology also comes with significant privacy concerns. Helen Nicholson-Benn looks at how to balance functional benefits with data security and safeguarding
Consider how different models of smart glasses might be used to improve accessibility in higher education. A deaf student might use XRai’s ar2 captioning glasses during a lecture to view live captions in their eyeline, allowing them to follow the content without looking down at a separate screen. A visually impaired student might use Envision’s Ally Solos glasses to generate a description of images on printed material or read text during a class. The glasses provide a hands-free option rather than scanning the materials with their smartphone.
These examples are hypothetical, and smart glasses are far from an everyday teaching tool, but that may be about to change. Smart glasses available today are far more capable than their predecessors, particularly boosted by developments in artificial intelligence (AI) technology.
Which brings up the topic of how to handle these technologies in the classroom:
Are device-free classrooms the way forward? — from timeshighereducation.com by Georgia Luckhurst
US universities embrace laptop and phone bans, but professor suggests policies may be more about political positioning than pedagogy
Growing numbers of US universities are making some of their courses “device free”, drawing mixed enthusiasm from edtech experts.
In the latest move the University of Chicago is introducing a no-laptops and no-phones policy on three of its 15 required undergraduate modules, aiming to “reduce distractions and encourage face-to-face discussions”. Exceptions remain, including for students with disabilities.
…
Device-free policies appear in other countries, experts suggested, despite the trend picking up pace in the US.
MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training — from aiandeducation.mit.edu
However, what we learned as a group quickly convinced us that the Institute community, particularly the faculty, must tackle a set of deeper questions about the structure, meaning, and value of an MIT education in an era in which AI is one of several factors complicating the Institute’s mission.
…
In this report, we:
- Highlight key aspects of the current educational landscape at MIT.
- Share eight principles we relied on and that we hope will guide the Institute in the work ahead.
- Recommend immediate and long-term actions for both instructors and the administration.
On somewhat related notes:
- Your AI Teaching Toolkit — from wondertools.substack.com by Jeremy Caplan
11 prompts to save time and spark ideas - AI Should Accelerate How We Learn About Learning (Rajen Sheth, Kyron Learning) — from humanistxyz.substack.com by Allison Dulin Salisbury
“We shouldn’t have to wait years to find out if an approach works. We can test and learn in weeks.”
OpenAI’s chief scientist says no lab should keep scaling at maximum speed — from thenextweb.com by Ana Maria Constantin
OpenAI put out two posts on Sunday. Its research organisation now uses 3.1 agent-workdays for every human one, and its chief scientist says no lab has solved alignment well enough to keep scaling at full speed. The case for an OpenAI slowdown arrived with the numbers against it.
Chief scientist Jakub Pachocki wrote the second post, an essay called An Alien Mind. It closes on a line that reads oddly from the man who runs research at the company shipping fastest.
“Currently I believe that no lab has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer,” he wrote.
…
He is not gentle about the stakes either. “This is a time that calls for extreme caution. I am concerned no one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rapid rise in machine intelligence,” Pachocki wrote.
We are at a tipping point. In the next 25 years, technologies like AI, clean energy, and bioengineering are poised to reshape society on a scale few can imagine.
Peter Leyden draws on decades of observing technological revolutions and historical patterns to show how old systems collapse, new ones rise, and humanity faces both extraordinary risk and unprecedented opportunity.
0:00 We’re on the cusp of an era of progress
0:37 The Great Progression
1:08 What was the ‘Long Boom?’
4:56 How often do these epoch resets happen?
6:12 3 Tipping points
6:39 Artificial Intelligence
7:13 Clean energy technologies
7:32 Biotechnology
9:00 The 80-year cycle
13:27 The Gilded Age
17:50 The Founding Era
22:46 The new enlightenment
32:18 The clean energy revolution
37:13 Bioengineering the genome
39:43 Industrial production vs biological engineering
47:40 What will the future think?