Links:
The U.S. debt tops a record-shattering $40 trillion. Yes, with a T. — from npr.org by Scott Horsley
The federal debt topped $40 trillion Wednesday, a new high-water mark for red ink that shows no sign of receding.
The news, reported by the Treasury Department in its daily financial update, comes just five months after the debt surpassed $39 trillion. The government continues to pile up debt at a rapid clip, as spending outstrips revenue by more than $2 trillion a year.
“Our current fiscal trajectory is plainly unsustainable, and that’s the best-case scenario,” said Margaret Spellings, president of the Bipartisan Policy Center. “Even in the rosiest scenarios, we’re speeding toward a cliff and refusing to turn the wheel.”
Also related, see:
Gross National Debt Reaches $40 Trillion — from crfb.org
And other warnings signs are flashing too, with debt held by the public recently exceeding the size of our economy, the deficit-to-GDP ratio running twice as high as where it should be, and interest costs exceeding our national defense budget.
We Keep Designing the Future from the Past — from LinkedIn.com by Monty Alger
Using AI to create the practice opportunities online students need— from timeshighereducation.com by Kathy Miller Perkins
For disciplines that depend on interpersonal skills such as communication, leadership, negotiation and mediation, AI can provide elusive experiential learning, particularly in asynchronous environments
What if AI’s greatest educational value lies not in generating answers but in generating experiences?
Here’s how to show students what responsible AI use looks like — from timeshighereducation.com by Andrew Firr and Alex Fenton
Well-designed assessments can highlight generative AI’s limitations, where it can provide support and what responsible practice looks like. Andrew Firr and Alex Fenton offer strategies
We have been exploring ways to offer this in our Level 7 module for MSc engineering management students, many of whom come from the Global South. Assessment is built around a practical design problem: students examine how a real campus process operates, where delays occur, evidence they observe and how a feasible redesign might improve the system – in a 3,000-word essay.
They can use AI for planning and providing clarity, but not for generating the evidence on which the analysis rests. Invented observations, measurements, screenshots or unverifiable citations are prohibited. The assessment design reinforces this through a case study, diagram, fact-checking exercise and a short AI use statement.
Requiring an AI use statement encourages students to reflect on their processes. We ask which tool they used, how they used it, how they checked the output and which parts of the work depended on their own evidence and judgement. It reminds them that evidence must be theirs and that citations must be manually verified.
Slow math: Kids may learn more when AI makes them review mistakes — from hechingerreport.org by Jill Barshay and Kristin Fasiang
A randomized experiment involved more than 6,000 Tennessee middle school students learning fractions
In an experiment involving more than 6,000 middle schoolers in Tennessee, students learned slightly more math when an AI tutor walked them through their mistakes and then required them to demonstrate the same skill correctly three times in a row before moving on.
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The winning combination wasn’t the addition of AI tutoring alone, but AI tutoring plus repetition, with the idea that students needed to stick with the skill to demonstrate some level of mastery. The students who practiced math with this AI-enhanced “mastery learning” approach scored about 3 percentage points higher than students receiving conventional computerized instruction. The advantage was small.
I Built a Team of AI Bots That Write Feedback Better than Me. Here’s How. — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr Philippa Hardman
Aka, how to make learners love AI-assisted feedback, rather than loathe it.
This wasn’t hidden from the cohort. For reasons I’ll come to below, I always tell my cohorts at the very start that an AI assistant will be helping me draft their feedback. The aim wasn’t to remove me from the process, but to find out whether AI could help me to deliver feedback at a volume and quality that I simply couldn’t maintain without AI.
Spoiler: the experiment worked — but not for the reason I expected. In this post, I’ll share exactly what I built, tell you how to build a version for your course and reveal the three conditions that decide whether learners trust AI-assisted feedback or quietly stop reading it.
TL;DR: the spec for my feedback assistant is long not because the model needs persuading, but because it’s where my judgement lives. Every rule in it is a decision AI would otherwise make by itself, with limited expertise. A spec doesn’t make the model smarter — it makes expertise and judgement legible enough for the model to follow.
Of the five stages of AI grief, some managers are stuck in denial— from timeshighereducation.com by Shadi Mohamed
Acceptance is not surrender. It is about getting beyond a policing obsession and rethinking what assessment aims to measure, says Shadi Mohamed
To understand the scale of this threat posed by AI, consider what the internet did to journalism. Newspapers thrived by bundling together classified advertising with quick news hits, sports scores and opinion columns, using that reliable revenue to fund the expensive social necessity of investigative reporting. The rise of internet advertising did not kill journalism outright but it shattered the bundle, leaving the expensive core product without its historical financial engine.
Universities operate on a similar logic, bundling content delivery, assessment, credentialling, research and professional formation. But generative AI is now commodifying the most visible parts of that package. When AI can deliver personalised explanations instantly and generate the essays and reports we use to measure student capability, the traditional degree loses its role in the labour market as a proxy for understanding. If the bundle breaks, the economic model that funds our deeper purposes is in peril.
From DSC:
The vision that I’ve been tracking for well over a decade begins with this graphic:
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Could LearnVector be this next-generation company/platform? Perhaps. Time will tell.
Per Matt Tower via The EdSheet Vol. 38 dated 7/31/26:
- Coursera bets $100M on its own co-founder: Andrew Ng’s new venture LearnVector lands one of the largest single checks in edtech this year — from Coursera, the company he founded 14 years ago.
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Staffing Agencies as Apprenticeship Accelerators — from apprenticeshipsforamerica.org by Harry Leech; via Ryan Craig
Could America’s staffing industry be a catalyst for growing apprenticeship?
Apprenticeships for America (AFA) sees the development of a mature intermediary system as crucial to scaling apprenticeships in America. There are many shapes and forms of intermediaries: spanning public sector and private, for profit and not-for-profit. One promising and relatively unexplored model is staffing agencies.
This Field Briefing reviews the landscape of opportunity for harnessing America’s $200 billion staffing industry to grow apprenticeship. It explores the fit between apprenticeship intermediary functions and capacities of staffing firms. And it offers examples of how staffing agencies todays are supporting apprenticeship activies of their customers. Ultimately, it will take policy simplification and stable funding to fully benefit from the integration of the staffing industry and apprenticeship. This report sets out how.
Download the full report here: Staffing Agencies and Apprenticeship Report
Digital Accessibility Lawsuits in 2026: Five Trends Companies Should Know — from blog.usablenet.com
Here are five findings companies should understand, along with practical steps for reducing risk.
1. Digital accessibility lawsuits are on pace to reach 6,000
2. Where a company sells matters more than where it is headquartered
3. E-commerce remains the primary target
…and more
From DSC:
Below is an item on futures thinking. Don’t blow this off. This topic — and skill/strategy — is important not only to traditional institutions of higher education, but also to businesses and organizations of all sizes. In fact, even students can practice developing a list of potential scenarios and implement their plans of action if one of those scenarios occurs.
What China’s Calligraphy Lessons Can Teach Us About AI — from linkedin.com by Rebecca Winthrop
He recalled visiting a primary school classroom in China several years ago where students were practicing calligraphy—the centuries-old art of writing Chinese characters with brush and ink. While the scene appeared entirely traditional, there was something innovative happening beneath the surface. Embedded in students’ desks was an AI system capable of providing immediate feedback on their brushwork, noting misplaced strokes and suggesting corrections.
The image is striking. Students were learning in much the same way generations before them had learned—brush in hand, immersed in a deeply human and cultural practice. Yet AI was quietly enhancing the experience by providing immediate, personalized feedback that would have been difficult for any teacher to provide to her whole class.
That example captures something important for me. The most promising uses of AI may not be the applications that place technology front and center, but those that support learners to do what they have always done: connect with educators, practice with concentration, and learn and grow.
AI Can Build Your Course, but Can it Design the Learning? — from drphilippahardman.substack.com by Dr. Philippa Hardman
Aka, the current state of AI’s instructional design ability & what it means for L&D
So these models have learned design artefacts in extraordinary volume and design method barely at all. They know what e-learning looks like. They have very little access to why any of it looks that way and whether it actually works or not.
That produces a completely consistent behaviour: ask an LLM for an e-learning module and it generates the statistical centre of every e-learning module it has ever seen. What AI produces isn’t the output of a design process. It’s the output of a sampling process — the statistical centre of every e-learning module it has ever seen.
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So the honest conclusion isn’t that AI can design learning; it’s that AI executes design well when someone who already knows what to ask for is doing the asking and the checking.
This finding gives us a clearer division of labour than we’ve had before and with it a clearer picture of what the AI-enhanced workflow might look like:
The Pedagogy of Trading Places: Lessons from an Unexpected Role Reversal with AI — from facultyfocus.com by Sherrie Myers Bartell, PhD
These disruptions matter. They remind us that teaching is not a static identity but a dynamic posture. They show us that our pedagogical selves are not fixed; they are responsive to context, energy, and attention. They reveal that the qualities we value most in our teaching—curiosity, metaphor, play, and expansiveness—are not automatic. They require care and cultivation.
The AI didn’t “teach” me in the traditional sense. But it did something pedagogically adjacent: it surprised me back into myself.
AI & Accessibility: 5 Practical Ways to Use LLMs to Support Inclusive Learning — from learningguild.com by Dr. Athena Joyce Stanley (B.A., M.A.E., Ph.D.)
The following strategies focus on how instructional designers can design for accessibility by embedding or enabling AI-supported tools within learning experiences. These approaches move beyond access to content and begin to support access to understanding, expression, and participation.
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Personalized Clarification Through AI Copilots
Learners often need additional explanation, but may hesitate to ask questions in live sessions or require more individualized support.
Instructional designers can integrate AI copilots, LLM-powered conversational interfaces, into learning environments to provide on-demand clarification. These tools can act as digital coaches, helping learners understand concepts through simplified explanations and relevant examples.
This approach supports learners who benefit from additional processing time and personalized guidance.
Sample Prompt (for IDs Configuring Copilot Behavior)
You are a workplace learning coach.
Explain the following concept in a clear, simple way:
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- Use plain language
- Provide one practical, job-relevant example
- Avoid jargon unless necessary (and define it if used)
Then ask one follow-up question to check for understanding.
Teaching AI Literacy with Susan Ray — from intentionalteaching.buzzsprout.com by Derek Bruff and Susan Ray
Per Derek Bruff:
In my conversation with Susan, we talk about that syllabus activity, as well as the AI transparency journals she asks her students to keep during her courses. We also talk about how her personal background prepared her to navigate the challenges and opportunities that AI has posed to her teaching, how she approaches assessing student learning in this age of AI—especially in her online asynchronous courses—and much more.
Building the AI-Native University: Student Success and Lifelong Learning — from coursera.org
In this episode, you’ll discover:
- Why building an AI-native campus requires a data-first foundation
- How to build an “achievement architecture” for lifelong success
- How faculty-built AI tutors cut one program’s course attrition from 40% to 10%
- What it means to be a lifelong learning companion
We’re Raising the First AI Generation. They’re Pushing Back. (Rebecca Winthrop, Brookings) — from humanistxyz.substack.com by Allison Dulin Salisbury
“Young people harbor real anger about AI because they’re already experiencing its consequences in their schools, relationships, job prospects, and feeds.”
As Rebecca told me:
“Kids harbor real anger. They’re pissed about climate impacts. They’re upset about job prospects. They’re outraged about AI being used to plagiarize writing and produce counterfeit artwork. Their relationships are being affected, and they’re seeing deepfakes in their feeds.”
Our conversation explores what follows from taking those concerns seriously. We discuss cognitive stunting, the case for small, purpose-built AI models over frontier models in education, why students should spend far more time in explorer mode, and how schools can cultivate agency, curiosity, and independent thinking in an age of AI.
The interview ends with one of Rebecca’s most practical recommendations: every school should have a student AI council, not as a symbolic gesture, but with real influence over the tools their schools adopt, the ways they’re used, and the data students are asked to hand over.
Every generation of technology seems to relearn the same lesson: build with people, not for them. AI should be no exception.
Amazon, gig companies see spike in workers on SNAP and Medicaid, study shows — from washingtonpost.com by Lauren Kaori Gurley and Rachel Lerman
Amazon workers on federal aid nearly tripled between 2020 and 2025, while ride-hailing and food delivery drivers shot up on lists compiled by the U.S. Government Accountability Office.
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?
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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.
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.
Flipped Classrooms and Academic Achievement — from learningscientists.org by Megan Sumeracki
There are actually many, many ways to design a flipped classroom, and it has been fascinating to learn about the ways my colleague typically structures her hybrid, flipped-classroom courses. As a result, we’ve been able to engage in really interesting conversations about the best approach for this particular course, and why. As a result of some of these discussions, I came across a few recent meta-analyses related to the effects of flipped classrooms, the results of which I thought were worth sharing here (1, 2, 3).
From DSC:
I used to be able to bring up Firefly on the web and use it “free” of charge — I didn’t have to go purchase tokens or credits. (I was actually paying for the Adobe Creative Cloud Pro suite of tools…so it wasn’t really free.)
But the other day I was trying to figure out what the latest pricing is at Adobe with that suite of tools and the use of credits for AI-based features. They say Adobe Creative Cloud Pro users get 4000 credits a month. Well, I have that suite and I’m still getting prompted to purchase credits. Firefly for individuals runs from $9.99 (2,000 credits/month) to $139.91 per month (50,000 credits per month). Not inexpensive, right? Below are other items along these lines.
The Era of Affordable AI Is Over. What Comes Next? — from builtin.com by Ameya Kanitkar
AI providers are shifting to usage-based billing for their services. AI fluency is more important now than ever to make the most of your tools to avoid unnecessary spending.
Summary: The era of cheap, flat-rate AI is ending as providers shift to usage-based billing. Every prompt now carries a direct cost, turning casual use into major budget risks, as seen when Uber depleted its 2026 AI budget in four months. Leaders must now track real-time value and token efficiency.
For a brief window, companies had access to the most transformative technology in a generation at the cost of a streaming subscription. Tools like ChatGPT put AI within reach of anyone with a browser and time for experimentation, while GitHub Copilot came in at just $10 a month, with token costs remaining relatively low. In the beginning, experimentation felt cost-effective, easy and relatively low-risk.
But that era is ending, and the bill is coming due faster than a lot of enterprise leaders anticipated.
The Fable of AI in Education — from downes.ca by Stephen Downes
Marc Watkins, Rhetorica, Jun 17, 2026
Tokenomics will be a hot topic of discussion on university campuses because, as Marc Watkins notes in this article, there is no realistic path forward to providing all students with access to advanced AI.
From this posting on LinkedIn.com from Dr. Nick Jackson:
And now there is a third layer emerging. Institutions are waking up to a systems-level question they are likely not remotely prepared for. Who pays for AI? How are budgets managed when there are unclear token consumption pricing models? How is AI procured? Who decides what tools get used and by whom and who gets access and at what level?
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