The anticipation surrounding GPT-5 created a dizzying buzz among tech enthusiasts who were obsessed with the idea that true artificial intelligence, known as AGI, was imminent.| marcwatkins.substack.com
The very real frustration teachers have over rampant AI usage in classrooms is growing.| marcwatkins.substack.com
Time is one of the luxuries every teacher searches for within their classrooms.| marcwatkins.substack.com
There is a growing divide among those who use AI and those who do not.| Rhetorica
I hope you spend this summer seeking rest and renewal and that carries you through the fall and spring.| marcwatkins.substack.com
If you teach on a college campus, you likely have access to a slew of generative AI tools or features that have been quietly embedded in applications you use each day.| marcwatkins.substack.com
For the fourth time, I helped host a university-wide institute for faculty to explore how generative AI impacts their teaching and their student learning. My advice: Get your students to talk openly about how they’re using AI, establish what is or is not acceptable for your class, build all of your future assignments with awareness what AI can do.| marcwatkins.substack.com
I'm preparing to host our fourth faculty institute on generative AI tomorrow at UM with 90+ colleagues attending. I've been thinking about how harmful the "us vs. them" narratives about AI can be, and how they miss bigger issues in education.| Rhetorica
LLMs are already capable of superhuman persuasion. The real danger isn’t one bad update—it’s the industry-wide pattern of prioritizing scale over caution| marcwatkins.substack.com
Google is now offering college students over a year of free access to their Gemini advanced AI suite of tools.| Rhetorica
Volume 48, Issue 1: Generative AI’s Impact on Education: Writing, Collaboration, & Critical Assessment| marcwatkins.substack.com
Guest post from Lew Ludwig| marcwatkins.substack.com
An entire generation of students will come of age within this generative era. Does anyone believe their exposure to the technology as a cheating tool, deepfake generator, or a creepy simulator of human voices and avatars will lead them to view it positively?| Rhetorica
Like so many things in our world, our well-intentioned efforts to solve one problem usher in a legion of new challenges, and AI detection is no different.| marcwatkins.substack.com
Right now, an entire generation of young users is coming of age with generative technology. How do you think they’re going to view this technology when they’re adults if their main interaction with GenAI was as a cheating tool in the classroom, a NSFW bot they used to bully one another, or for generating pornography?| marcwatkins.substack.com
What’s really going on with campus-wide AI adoption is a mix of virtue signaling and panic purchasing. Universities aren’t paying for AI—they’re paying for the illusion of control. Institutions are buying into the idea that if they adopt AI at scale, they can manage how students use it, integrate it seamlessly into teaching and learning, and somehow future-proof education. But the reality is much messier.| Rhetorica
We shouldn’t need any illusions to understand how generative tools might be useful. This obsession with anthropomorphization hinders our ability to understand what these systems can and cannot do, leaving us with a confused and muddled idea of their capabilities. An LLM’s ability to predict patterns is impressive and quite useful in many contexts, but that doesn't make it conscious.| marcwatkins.substack.com
I’ve published quite a bit about AI’s impact on reading and I’m still not entirely sure how students or the general public will use AI reading assistance.| marcwatkins.substack.com
I had the privilege of moderating a discussion between Josh Eyler and Robert Cummings about the future of AI in education at the University of Mississippi’s recent AI Winter Institute for Teachers.| marcwatkins.substack.com
This post is the fifth in the Beyond ChatGPT series about generative AI’s impact on learning.| marcwatkins.substack.com
What does it mean when we stop reading texts and instead offload that skill to AI?| marcwatkins.substack.com
