Learning Ecosystems

I underestimated this NotebookLM feature until it completely changed how I study [Sood]

On 07/15/2026, in Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, Google, productivity / tips and tricks, tools, by Daniel Christian

I underestimated this NotebookLM feature until it completely changed how I study — from digitaltrends.com by Shimul Sood

That’s exactly where Mind Maps changed things for me.

In a matter of seconds, NotebookLM analyzed everything I’d uploaded and turned it into a visual map of the topic. Instead of facing a wall of documents, I saw one main idea branching into the key themes, with each of those breaking down into smaller concepts. Before I’d properly read a single source, I already understood how everything connected. That completely changed the way I studied. Rather than asking, “Where do I even start?” I had a clear roadmap showing me what to tackle first, what could wait until later, and how each piece fit into the bigger picture.

Looking back, it’s funny that the feature I ignored for so long is now the one I use first. I still love NotebookLM’s summaries and Audio Overview — they’re great for quickly understanding what’s in your documents. But Mind Maps do something different. They help you understand how everything fits together before you even begin studying. That one change has made a bigger difference than I expected. Instead of diving into a stack of PDFs and hoping I eventually make sense of them, I start with the map. Within a minute, I know the main ideas, how they’re connected, and where I should begin. It makes the whole learning process feel less overwhelming and a lot more structured.

Also recently from Shimul Sood:

Claude diagnosed my washing machine problem in minutes, and it didn’t cost me a thing — from digitaltrends.com

The economy is shutting young adults out of career-entry jobs, analysis finds [Kalser]

On 07/15/2026, in Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, business, career development, corporate / business world, economics, student-related, United States, workplace, youth, by Daniel Christian

The economy is shutting young adults out of career-entry jobs, analysis finds — from hrdive.com by Laurel Kalser
Artificial intelligence matters, but in a “narrow, early and age-specific way,” researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis said.

Dive Brief:

The decline in overall job openings, exacerbated by a rising demand for artificial intelligence-related skills, is causing employment opportunities for young adults aged 18 to 24 to deteriorate, according to researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
Between April 2023 — when the U.S. labor market was at its strongest — and December 2025, the employment rate among 18- to 24-year-olds fell by more than 2 percentage points, researchers William Rodgers, III, and Alice Kassens reported in a June 30 post. The decrease appeared primarily as higher unemployment, rather than as labor force exits, “indicating that younger workers were still searching for jobs but with fewer opportunities available,” the authors noted.
By contrast, there was no comparable slide for workers aged 25-64, whose employment outcomes remained largely stable, the researchers said.

What Teaching Faculty Want From Professional Development (That’s Not Just Workshops) [Dodson]

On 07/15/2026, in adult learning, K-12 related, leadership, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, productivity / tips and tricks, professional development, strategy, teachers, United States, by Daniel Christian

What Teaching Faculty Want From Professional Development (That’s Not Just Workshops) — from rdene915.com by guest author Tessa Dodson

The journey toward a more meaningful, empowering, and effective model of professional development for teachers begins with dialogue. By asking educators what they need to grow and trusting their answers, school leaders can take the first crucial step toward building a culture where both teachers and students can thrive.

What Teachers Really Want From Professional Development
The most effective frameworks for teachers’ professional development are built on a foundation of empowerment. This involves a profound shift in mindset, from viewing teachers as recipients of training to recognizing them as professionals who can and should guide their own learning. When school structures are designed to foster teacher autonomy, the impact on professional growth is significant.

A 2023 study found that teachers’ autonomous behavior predicted professional development at work. The study identified key structural factors, such as “empowering teachers” and the “decentralization of responsibilities,” as crucial to creating an environment in which this autonomy could flourish. By trusting teachers to take ownership of their professional growth, leaders can unlock their intrinsic teacher motivation and capacity for innovation.

Artist Spotlight: Sara Suppan

On 07/15/2026, in art, creativity, by Daniel Christian

Artist Spotlight: Sara Suppan — from booooooom.com

Some Scripture for us

On 07/15/2026, in Daniel S. Christian, ethics, faith, global / globalization, hearts -- matters of the heart, morals/values, relationships, religion, society, youth, by Daniel Christian

Psalm 138:8

The Lord will vindicate me;
your love, Lord, endures forever—
do not abandon the works of your hands.

From DSC:
“…do not abandon the works of your hands.”
I need to ask that fairly often when praying to the LORD.

Proverbs 3:13-18

13 Blessed are those who find wisdom,
those who gain understanding,
14 for she is more profitable than silver
and yields better returns than gold.
15 She is more precious than rubies;
nothing you desire can compare with her.
16 Long life is in her right hand;
in her left hand are riches and honor.
17 Her ways are pleasant ways,
and all her paths are peace.
18 She is a tree of life to those who take hold of her;
those who hold her fast will be blessed.

Revelation 3:20

Here I am! I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in and eat with that person, and they with me.

Psalm 34:8

Taste and see that the Lord is good;
blessed is the one who takes refuge in him.

Two items on the downsides of AI from Shimul Sood at digitaltrends.com

On 07/14/2026, in Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, computer science, emerging technologies, graphics, programming, society, the downsides of how people use tech, by Daniel Christian

Researchers hid a prompt injection inside a PNG, and AI fell for it — from digitaltrends.com by Shimul Sood

A team of security researchers (professor Sudipta Chattopadhyay and researcher Murali Ediga) has demonstrated an unusual attack that doesn’t target the AI model directly. Instead, it targets what the AI doesn’t pay enough attention to during code reviews. Rather than hiding malicious instructions in lines of code, the researchers tucked them inside an image file. Since many AI review tools treat images as decorative assets rather than as something worth inspecting, the pull request can appear perfectly harmless and sail through the review.

They argue that AI review tools need to become “multimodal” in the truest sense — treating images, documentation, configuration files, and other non-code assets with the same level of scrutiny as source code. If an AI can read a picture, it also needs to understand that the picture could be trying to manipulate it. For developers, this is another reminder that AI coding tools still need supervision. They can dramatically speed up software development, but they also open entirely new attack surfaces that didn’t exist before. The next security risk might not be hidden in thousands of lines of code — it could be sitting inside an image that nobody thought was worth opening.

AI has already fallen into the wrong hands and they’re using it to make bombs — from digitaltrends.com by Shimul Sood

Artificial intelligence has quickly become the go-to tool for everything from writing emails and summarizing meetings to helping students study or developers debug code. But the same technology that saves people time can also be misused, and a new report suggests that terrorist organizations are finding ways to do exactly that.

According to a research paper shared with The New York Times ahead of its publication, researchers found evidence that members of Boko Haram have been using popular AI chatbots to support both day-to-day activities and combat-related tasks. Interviews with 27 former members conducted in Nigeria over the past two years suggest that tools such as ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, Grok, Meta AI, and DeepSeek were used to gather technical information, troubleshoot weapons, and even assist with planning attacks.

This wasn’t just a few bad actors messing around
What makes the findings especially concerning is that this wasn’t described as the work of a few individuals experimenting with AI. The report claims the group’s use of AI had become organized, with dedicated teams, internal training, and knowledge shared between members. Researchers also say some users managed to bypass built-in safety protections designed to prevent AI from responding to requests related to violence.

Reconnecting Professional Learning — Reflections from [Lucy Gray’s] ISTE Panel

On 07/14/2026, in adult learning, Apple, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, collaboration, communities of practice, education, education technology, ideas, instructional design, leadership, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, pathways, professional development, reinvent, relationships, teachers, by Daniel Christian

Reconnecting Professional Learning — from elemenous.substack.com by Lucy Gray
Reflections from My Wednesday ISTE Panel

At ISTE this year, I facilitated a Wednesday morning panel on professional learning. The session I organized was titled, The Future of Professional Learning: Connecting Educators Across Borders. I was joined by fellow Apple Distinguished Educators Tami Brewster, Bethany LaDue Nugent, Marcus Borders, Jason Krug and global educator Julie Meltzer. Our focus: How do we move professional development away from isolated, one-time experiences and toward something more connected, meaningful, and human?
…
The panel was grounded in a few simple but powerful ideas: professional learning should nurture, guide, and empower. It should be relevant, contextual, reflective, and sustained. It should recognize educators as capable professionals, not as people who are broken and need to be fixed. Too often, professional development is still designed around deficit thinking. Too often, teachers’ needs are not the starting point, and sessions become dry, one-directional experiences where information is delivered at them rather than built through conversation and collaboration, with little choice, little personalization, and little connection to the realities of their classrooms. Our panel served as a call to action to re-think professional learning.

We explored six different approaches to professional learning, and while each model was distinct, a clear through line emerged: relationships matter most.

Virtual Conferences at Scale — Lucy Gray — Actionable Innovations Events / GLOW
Micro-Mentorship — Tami Brewster
Networked, Values-Driven PD — Julie Meltzer — Institute for Humane Education
AI-Personalized PD Pathways — Marcus Borders
Share Stories with Voice — Bethany LaDue Nugent
Speak Your Crazy — Jason Krug

Our Padlet – Share resources and introduce yourself
Our Slides – Meet our panelists and learn about our work
Our Google NotebookLM – This notebook contains dozens of resources related to research and best practices in educator professional learning
The Connected PD App – This is an app I’m building in Base 44 to help people plan great professional learning experiences

Also from Lucy Gray, see the following for some nice tips and resources:

How I Spent My Time at #ISTElive26: Learning, Connecting, and Looking for What’s Next
A few reflections on AI, global learning, libraries, coaching, creativity, and the conversations that made ISTE meaningful.

Microsoft Discovery Platform Brings Agentic AI to Scientific Research [Paoli]

On 07/14/2026, in Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, colleges, community colleges, emerging technologies, faculty/staff, higher education, intelligent systems, Microsoft, platforms, research, science, STEAM-related, tools, United States, universities, vendors, by Daniel Christian

Microsoft Discovery Platform Brings Agentic AI to Scientific Research — from campustechnology.com by Chris Paoli

Key Takeaways

Microsoft Discovery reaches general availability, bringing agentic AI to scientific research and development workflows.
AI agents support hypothesis generation, experimentation, data analysis, and knowledge management at scale.
New Discovery app preview enables researchers to explore AI-driven scientific discovery with lower adoption barriers.

This is the Future of High School: The Tennessee School Rewriting the Rules of High School [xqsuperschool.org]

On 07/14/2026, in education, education reform, future, K-12 related, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, more voice more choice more control, robotics, skills, STEAM-related, student-related, teachers, by Daniel Christian

This is the Future of High School
The Tennessee School Rewriting the Rules of High School — from xqsuperschool.org
At Elizabethton High School, students wanted more from their education. So they helped rebuild it—class by class, project by project. Their idea: give students real, meaningful work, and they’ll rise to the challenge.

A cold case became a Prime Video series. A robotics club became an international competitor. And an ordinary high school became something else entirely. Elizabethton is reinventing high school—and showing what’s possible for the rest of the country.

Watch the Elizabethton+XQ story
Ten years, one school, and a redesign still unfolding. It took courage to break with tradition—and that risk is paying off for an entire community.

Why recruiters can’t find workers and new grads can’t find jobs (it’s not AI) — from washingtonpost.com by Jon Marcus
Experts say a major labor shortage looms because of population shifts and a mismatch between new graduates’ skills and employers’ needs.

Recent college graduates complain they can’t find entry-level jobs because artificial intelligence is taking over.

Yet, tech recruiter Matt Walsh and other experts say the growth of AI and the struggle to find entry-level work mask a bigger problem: The United States is facing what’s projected to become the largest labor shortage in its history.

In sectors such as semiconductor production, the problem isn’t AI or too few jobs, said Walsh, CEO of the Phoenix-based search firm Blue Signal.

“It’s ridiculous,” he said. “There just aren’t enough people.”

Economists warn that the worsening labor problem, due in part to a skills shortage and population shifts, will be vast and reach beyond tech.

Among the trends that have been leading to this moment: a mismatch between the careers college graduates are pursuing and the jobs employers are struggling to fill. Far fewer students are majoring in health care fields than are needed to meet demand, for instance.

“We have pumped so many young people into business and finance” when what’s really in demand are graduates in other fields, Hetrick said. “It’s like a factory producing these workers like widgets, even though society is saying, ‘We really don’t need them.’ And the factory just keeps pumping them out.”

“Teachers ban it. Employers demand it.”

Also relevant/see:

The Shifting Career Ladder — from nafez.substack.com by Nafez Dakkak
AI is changing how work works and quietly removing the pathways through which young people learn to become experts.

AI is reshaping how people build skills, enter professions, and move along the career ladder and through the labour market.

In this conversation, I sit down with Matt Sigelmen founder of LightCast and now the President of Burning Glass Institute. Matt has dedicated his career to understanding the labor market and helping society improve the connections within in it.

Matt and I explore why people and opportunities are often only “a few skills apart,” why entry-level work may be losing its traditional role as the first rung of expertise, and why schools, universities, and employers now need to rethink the pathways that turn potential into mastery.

Educators need to be deeply aligned with what these changes are, and they need to shift the AI discourse from “how” questions to “what” questions. What do we need to teach? What do we need to keep in the curriculum?

LEGAL FUTURISMS: Consumer Legal Tech and the Soul of US Democracy

The “Dollar Legal” Thought Experiment

What if the salvation of our democratic enthusiasm doesn’t come from a political revolution, but a technological one? Enter the thought experiment of Dollar Legal.

Imagine a ubiquitous, consumer-facing legal tech platform—accessible from any smartphone—that commoditizes basic legal defense and assertion of rights. It is AI-driven legal agency for the masses, costing no more than a cup of coffee, or perhaps literally a single dollar.

Dollar Legal wouldn’t exist to litigate complex corporate mergers; it would exist to handle the agonizing friction of everyday survival. It instantly analyzes a notice to quit, drafts a legally sound response asserting warranty of habitability defenses, and files it electronically. It forces the bureaucratic machine to pause. It translates the raw, terrifying human experience of a legal threat into the cold rules and procedures that the justice system understands.

And the price, $1.00, at sufficient scale, would support the operation and maintenance of the service.

By deploying Dollar Legal, we fundamentally shift the balance of power. The democratization of legal leverage changes the calculus for bad actors who rely on the silent default judgments of the unrepresented.

Those folks who like fish, birds, and rabbits will like this artist’s work!

On 07/14/2026, in art, creativity, by Daniel Christian

Veks Van Hillik Suspends Fish, Insects, and Other Objects in Surreal Murals — from thisiscolossal.com by Veks Van Hillik and Kate Mothes

The Law School Deans Driving AI Innovation in Legal Education — from natlawreview.com by Shivani Vedhere, AI & the Law Newsletter; via Colin S. Levy

Artificial intelligence is no longer a peripheral issue for legal education. It is quickly becoming one of the central questions facing law schools: how to prepare future lawyers for a profession in which AI will affect research, client counseling, litigation strategy, access to justice, and the business of law.

For decades, law schools treated legal technology as an elective or a niche interest for students already inclined toward innovation. That era is ending. Law firms are adopting AI tools at scale and even investing in developing their own tools. Clients are asking harder questions about efficiency, cost, and competence. Courts are sanctioning lawyers and litigants for AI-generated hallucinations, with the number of identified cases in the United States now exceeding 1,000. Students entering the profession will be expected to keep up with this rapidly changing landscape.

The most forward-looking law schools are responding accordingly. That transformation is being driven in large part by a group of innovative law school deans who are treating AI not as a passing trend, but as a structural change in legal education.

These initiatives signal a broader shift in legal academia where law schools are no longer merely debating whether AI belongs in the curriculum. The more pressing question is how deeply, how early, and how responsibly AI should be integrated into legal education.

A Comprehensive Report on Teens, Tweens, and AI — from commonsensemedia.org

To find out what that actually looks like day-to-day, we surveyed more than a thousand 9- to 17-year-olds across the country. We asked them how they use AI, how often, and for what.

The Common Sense Media Census: AI Use by Tweens and Teens (2026) is the first in a series we’ll repeat every year to learn how this generation’s relationship with AI evolves over time.

A few things stood out:

Kids are using AI for many things. It’s not just a homework helper anymore. For some kids, AI has become a confidant, even though our research is clear that AI companionship is not safe for anyone under 18.
Guardrails are thin to nonexistent. Schools are talking about rules more than safety. Three-quarters of kids say their school has discussed what they can and cannot use AI for, but just over half have been taught how to use AI safely.
Just like we saw with smartphones and social media, the conversation is once again lagging behind the technology. Nearly half of kids have never had a conversation with their parents about AI safety.

Learning Ecosystems

Artist Spotlight: Sara Suppan

Some Scripture for us

Those folks who like fish, birds, and rabbits will like this artist’s work!

Greetings!

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