tools

Tips on how to use Claude’s “Reading & Learning Mode” [Saidul Islam]

On 11/06/2026, in adjunct faculty, adult learning, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, colleges, community colleges, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, digital learning, education, education technology, emerging technologies, experimentation, faculty/staff, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, intelligent tutoring, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, liberal arts, library / librarians, personalized/customized learning, productivity / tips and tricks, professional development, skills, tools, vendors, by Daniel Christian

LEGAL FUTURISMS: Why Don’t Nonprofits Have Legal Innovation Experts? — from linkedin.com by Sateesh Nori

According to the New York Times, the “hot new job” in legal is in legal innovation. Elite corporate law firms and tech giants are aggressively bidding up to $300,000 for “legal engineers” and “innovation attorneys” to optimize corporate workflows and deploy generative AI.

Meanwhile, America’s civil legal aid and nonprofit sector faces a starkly different reality.

In public interest law, attorneys are drowning in a compounding crisis. A single legal aid lawyer often juggles hundreds of active cases at once—ranging from illegal evictions to life-altering immigration hearings—while relying on legacy software, manual document assembly, and underfunded back-offices.

Why is it that the sector that serves the people with the most urgent legal needs has the least amount of structural technology infrastructure to support it?

If the nonprofit sector continues to treat technology as an afterthought—a secondary luxury funded by leftover scraps—the justice gap will become an unbridgeable chasm. By embracing the BigLaw model and formalizing the role of the legal innovation expert, public interest organizations can transition from a state of perpetual triage to a system of scalable, tech-empowered justice.

The tools to fix the system exist. What the nonprofit sector needs now is the structural mandate—and the funding courage—to hire the architects who can build it.

EdTech’s Cybersecurity Reckoning [Hill]

On 11/05/2026, in change, colleges, communities of practice, community colleges, computer science, corporate / business world, education technology, higher education, ideas, programming, tools, United States, universities, vendors, by Daniel Christian

EdTech’s Cybersecurity Reckoning — from onedtech.philhillaa.com by Phil Hill
The Canvas breach was an early marker of a new reality. PHP2Shell shows why EdTech’s move toward managed services will accelerate.

Higher education has a particularly large exposure because so much of its technology grew through local initiative: someone built a useful tool, installed an open-source application, or kept a departmental website running. That approach delivered considerable value and fit the education ethos, but it also distributed responsibility for maintaining and defending software across multiple teams and individuals with very different capabilities.

I believe we are entering a period that will significantly accelerate the move toward managed services, shared infrastructure, and restrictions on locally operated applications exposed to the public internet, particularly for under-resourced institutions. This reaches into budgets, institutional autonomy, and the ways educational technology gets built and delivered—well beyond the immediate work of a CIO responding to a security alert.

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.

The fourth annual AI in L&D report [Taylor & Vinauskaite]

On 10/19/2026, in adult learning, analytics, Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, career development, communications, communities of practice, content development, aggregation, repositories, corporate / business world, corporate universities / corporate training, data related items, emerging technologies, experimentation, Google, human-computer interaction (HCI), ideas, innovation, instructional design, intelligent systems, interactivity, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, multimedia, Open AI, personalized/customized learning, platforms, productivity / tips and tricks, skills, tools, training / L&D, UK, United States, vendors, workplace, by Daniel Christian

In case it’s helpful, here is Donald’s posting on LinkedIn

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.

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

New: Essential Resources for Special Education [edutopia.org]

On 10/13/2026, in assistive technologies, Bias | Diversity Equity & Inclusion (DE&I), education, engagement / engaging students, instructional design, K-12 related, learning, learning ecosystem, Learning Experience Design, parents/guardians, productivity / tips and tricks, professional development, student-related, teachers, tools, United States, vendors, youth, by Daniel Christian

New: Essential Resources for Special Education — from edutopia.org

We’ve gathered advice for teachers on managing student accommodations, navigating IEPs, and much more, as well as ideas for administrators on how to support teachers in this work.

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5 Writing Tools to Get Unstuck [Caplan]

On 10/13/2026, in Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, education technology, experimentation, Google, ideas, journalism, tools, United States, vendors, vision/possibilities, writing, by Daniel Christian

5 Writing Tools to Get Unstuck — from wondertools.substack.com by Jeremy Caplan
Dictation, writing sprints, mind maps, AI interviews, and folded paper

The hardest part of writing is the first 10 minutes. Get past that, and momentum kicks in.

Having gotten stuck and unstuck a lot over the past 325 weeks of writing this newsletter, I’ve found a few tricks that help. Pick one to try, and leave a comment to share what you do to get unstuck.

As a little experiment, I’ve made an Unstuck Studio page to accompany this post and to help you get unstuck playfully.

As Daniel Pink explains, starting comes first.

“Action precedes motivation, not the other way around.”

The Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps — 7th Edition [Olivia Moore and Andressen Horowitz]

On 10/08/2026, in Artificial Intelligence/Agents/LLMs/and Related, business, corporate / business world, data related items, marketplaces, platforms, society, tools, trends, United States, vendors, by Daniel Christian

The Top 100 Gen AI Consumer Apps — 7th Edition — from a16z.com by Olivia Moore and Andressen Horowitz

The biggest takeaway from this new data? Consumer AI usage is wide, but not very deep…for almost everyone. While nearly half of U.S. consumers now report using AI, only 25% are engaged with it daily. And as of August, just 4.5% of U.S. consumers had an active paid personal subscription to ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude. You can get more data on broad AI adoption in our State of Markets presentation we shared last week.

However, AI’s consumer power users are extremely engaged — and highly monetizable. The top 10% of spenders account for roughly half of all observed spending. These high spenders disproportionately buy coding, productivity, and creative tools.

In these users, consumer AI has found its first real market: people who pay — often a lot — for tools that help them build, create, and get work done. Reaching everyone else will likely take different products. We’re seeing glimmers of this now with the launch of personal assistants that, unlike their ancestor OpenClaw, are usable by non-developers — and free.

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.

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.

Learning Ecosystems

LEGAL FUTURISMS: Why Don’t Nonprofits Have Legal Innovation Experts? [Nori]

EdTech’s Cybersecurity Reckoning [Hill]

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