21st century

With thanks to Thomas Fraher, the Co-founder & CTO of Novastart, I’d like to pass along some screenshots about one of Novastart’s products below.

Per Thomas:

It’s an infinite canvas whiteboard where your apps open as real windows. A whole team can share one canvas, each person with their own cursor, and everything stays where you left it. You can also work alongside AI agents on the canvas.

Experts say higher education is an industry in turmoil. The collateral damage is widespread [Marcus]

On 10/27/2026, in 21st century, business side of he, changing business models, colleges, community colleges, faculty/staff, game-changing environment, generational differences, higher education, legislatures / government / legal, new business models, policy, research, society, student-related, United States, universities, youth, by Daniel Christian

Experts say higher education is an industry in turmoil. The collateral damage is widespread — from hechingerreport.org by Jon Marcus
Colleges are closing at a pace equivalent to about one every three weeks, with more projected

AMHERST, Mass. — The parking lots are mostly vacant. Locked and dark, many of the buildings are lifeless but for dying plants in dusty pots. One of the few people visible is a white-bearded man on a riding mower, tending to an empty lawn as if by habit.

This is not a factory or office park abandoned by its tenants. It’s Hampshire College, a once-celebrated liberal arts school that will shut down in December. That makes it the latest in a steady stream of colleges that are closing or merging, at a rate that last year reached the equivalent of nearly one every three weeks.

“Everyone is shocked to hear that more than a quarter of our private colleges could be gone in the next decade,” said Peter Stokes, a managing director at Huron Consulting Group, which has projected that 442 of the nation’s 1,700 still-operating private, nonprofit universities and colleges are at risk of having to close or merge in the next 10 years. “We’re now talking about hundreds of other institutions being in a similar situation.”

Also see:

The State of Higher Ed 2026, in 4 Charts — from linked.com by Jeff Selingo

For nearly 60 years, higher ed had one answer to almost every strategic question: get bigger. Add programs, schools, enrollment, research labs, campuses, athletic teams, international students, online degrees.

That era is ending.

That’s the central argument running through this year’s State of Higher Education, my annual briefing for presidents, trustees, cabinets, and faculty leaders. Like last year’s inaugural deck, it borrows from Mary Meeker’s “Internet Trends”: heavy on charts, quick to scan, built for leadership teams to work through together.

The 2026 edition covers six areas: the business model, federal policy, research, AI, athletics, and governance. The question across all of them is what’s temporary and what’s structural. Each section ends with a page of opportunities for leaders.

Here are four charts from the briefing and what they tell us about what’s next…

32 Claude skills for every course an instructional designer builds [Obertyshev]

On 10/26/2026, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, instructional design, platforms, productivity / tips and tricks, professional development, skills, vendors, by Daniel Christian

[Gifted article] This used to be a cornerstone of every job application. Not anymore. [Carpenter]

On 10/16/2026, in 21st century, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, career development, change, skills, student-related, surviving, United States, workplace, youth, by Daniel Christian

This used to be a cornerstone of every job application. Not anymore. — from washingtonpost.com by Julia Carpenter; this is a gifted article
Has AI finally killed the cover letter?

“It’s not just easier to write a cover letter, it’s easier to write a phenomenal cover letter,” Kessler said. “That’s become more of a prerequisite and less of a differentiator.”

At the same time, the use of AI has contributed to an explosion of applications. For every open role in 2026 there are twice as many applicants as there would have been for similar roles in 2022, according to a recent study from LinkedIn Research.

That makes hiring managers and recruiters less likely to give cover letters even a perfunctory glance. They have too much else to handle during a busy job search, said Johnny C. Taylor, president and chief executive officer of the Society for Human Resource Management.

“The cover letter is literally dead, never to be resuscitated,” he said. “There’s too much volume for this beautiful piece of prose.”

“It’s tough when no one can give you a right answer,” Ogunlana said. “You have some recruiters saying ‘It’s worth it’ and others saying ‘No.’”

If there is any consensus, it’s that cover letters with a “human element” still can help an applicant stand out.

They need to sound different from all the ones written with AI, said Jason Baker, vice president of talent acquisition at Arctic Wolf, a security operations firm.

Baker recalled one applicant who didn’t land the job they originally applied for, but because their cover letter made such an impression, Baker invited them back when the company was hiring again for a similar position.

New tests show that AI can design like an expert Instructional Designer: so what next? [Hardman]

On 10/16/2026, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, adult learning, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, education, education technology, emerging technologies, faculty/staff, future, future of higher education, game-changing environment, generational differences, Google, higher education, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, IT in HE, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, Learning from the Living [Class] Room, Open AI, tools, United States, universities, vendors, vision/possibilities, workplace, by Daniel Christian

Here is Phillipa’s posting on LinkedIn.

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.

Making real work visible: Credentialing Community Justice Workers with Frontline Justice [eddesignlab.org]

On 09/29/2026, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, Access to Justice (A2J), change, communities of practice, credentialing, law schools, Legal operations, legal reform, legal technologies, legislatures / government / legal, skills, society, vision/possibilities, workplace, by Daniel Christian

Making real work visible: Credentialing Community Justice Workers with Frontline Justice — from eddesignlab.org (also educationdesignlab.org)

Frontline Justice is working toward a simple, ambitious vision: By 2035, anyone, no matter their background or location, can access the legal help they need for everyday civil issues. To move toward that future, the work is organized around two goals that run in parallel: (1) rapidly growing a new workforce of justice workers now, and (2) laying out long-term vocational paths so this role becomes a lasting and respected part of the justice ecosystem.

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.

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.

Per Anthropic’s CEO: “We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so.”

On 09/14/2026, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, change, communities of practice, dangers of the status quo, future, game-changing environment, generational differences, global, legislatures / government / legal, pace of change, society, technology (general), the downsides of how people use tech, trends, vendors, vision/possibilities, by Daniel Christian

We Must Pace the Frontier: I’ve written a new essay on why the AI industry should slow down, with a three-part plan for doing so.

Anthropic is unilaterally committing to the first of these steps. We’ll provide third-party evaluators with permanent, employee-level access to our…

— Dario Amodei (@DarioAmodei) September 12, 2026

Dario Amodei’s article here:
We Must Pace the Frontier — from darioamodei.com

But like many technologies before it, AI brings risks, and because it is such a powerful technology, these risks are serious. I’ve written a lot about them too. They include the risk of losing control of AI systems, misuse of AI for cyberattacks and bioterrorism, and serious economic disruption. A race to the bottom, spurred by commercial incentives, can make these risks more acute.

Along with my co-founders and employees, I have grappled with this duality of risk and benefit since the beginning of Anthropic.

Also relevant/see:

I left Anthropic’s safety team two weeks ago. Now feels like a good moment to explain why.

AI companies are racing to build machines that are much smarter than any human, and we may not survive this. I want to work from the outside to ensure the public is informed about these…

— Joe Benton (@JoeJBenton) September 11, 2026

[GIFTED ARTICLE]
Anthropic CEO calls for the AI industry to slow down — from washingtonpost.com by Ted Hesson, Ian Duncan, and Gerrit De Vynck
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said he was worried about the ability to control self-improving AI models.

Three of the nation’s leading artificial intelligence executives endorsed slowing down the blistering pace of technological advancement, revealing the growing unease with its potential dangers at the industry’s very highest levels.

The call was first made in an essay Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei posted online Saturday. The idea has gained ground in recent weeks as AI companies have struggled in some cases to keep their creations under control, even as they usher in an age in which AI systems themselves can build the more powerful next generation of the technology.

[GIFTED ARTICLE]
For years, they warned AI could kill all humans. Now people are listening. — from washingtonpost.com by Nitasha Tiku
A doomsaying community once on the periphery of the tech industry has gained influence, as AI “agents” perform amazing and alarming feats.

But when Hubinger issued a similar warning this week in a post on X, his message was viewed tens of millions of times, prompting state and federal lawmakers to echo his concern. Now he spoke as a team lead at Anthropic, developer of the chatbot Claude and a company set to go public at a valuation of over $1 trillion.

“AI could kill all humans … I personally think it is >10% within the next decade,” Hubinger wrote, in response to the resignation of his colleague Jacob Coxon, who accused Anthropic of racing ahead despite the dangers.
.

Several items re: the changes needed within higher education

On 09/14/2026, in 21st century, adjunct faculty, business side of he, career development, change, changing business models, collaboration, colleges, communities of practice, community colleges, corporate / business world, cost of getting a degree, culture, dangers of the status quo, entrepreneurship, expectations, experimentation, faculty/staff, future of higher education, game-changing environment, generational differences, higher education, ideas, innovation, instructional design, leadership, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, liberal arts, lifelong learning, new business models, reinvent, skills, society, staying relevant, strategy, student-related, surviving, teaching & learning, traditional / tradition, United States, universities, youth, by Daniel Christian

Below are several items that were either mentioned by Matt Tower or I came across them via offshoots of items that he linked to:

Future Universities Alliance Names Inaugural Innovation Sandbox Cohort — from provost.duke.edu
Program incubated by Duke brings together higher education innovators from 23 countries for year-long peer exchange

The Future Universities Alliance has selected 49 institutions from 23 countries for the inaugural cohort of its Innovation Sandbox, a 12-month peer learning program for higher education leaders advancing ambitious, institution-level innovation.The cohort brings together founders of new universities, administrators and faculty leading high-stakes changes within established institutions, and leaders of proven models exploring how their innovations can travel to new contexts. Participants were chosen through a competitive process that drew applicants from around the world in its inaugural year.

A makeover for college: No gym, no meal plan and two years of work — from npr.org by Jon Marcus

An entirely new college is being planned here to change not only how higher education is delivered, but at what price. It also proposes to highlight ways the current business model no longer works, as evidenced by the 152 colleges and universities that have closed or merged since 2016, and the 442 others that a new projection says are at risk.

So deeply entrenched are the problems confronting higher education that a growing chorus of innovators says the easiest way to fix them is to begin again from scratch.

All undergraduates should get work-based learning, v-cs say — from timeshighereducation.com by Jack Grove. NOTE: this item is behind a paywall.
Bold plan to support graduate employment would require placements for 1.4 million students annually

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 [Constantin]

On 09/10/2026, in 21st century, 24x7x365 access, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, emerging technologies, experimentation, game-changing environment, generational differences, global, legislatures / government / legal, Open AI, platforms, policy, political science, the downsides of how people use tech, United States, by Daniel Christian

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?

Learning Ecosystems

Making real work visible: Credentialing Community Justice Workers with Frontline Justice [eddesignlab.org]

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