Jeffrey R. Young
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Journalist | Host, Learning Curve podcast on AI in education | Author, Jagged Intelligence newsletter | Articles and talks at jeffyoung.net
Articles by Jeffrey R. Young
Epic to launch app connector for AI agents
Connectors will let developers link other apps to Epic, allowing AI agents to find information and complete tasks.
What is open‑source AI? A software engineering researcher explains Original
You’ve probably heard artificial intelligence models described as “open” or “closed.” These are not descriptions of the model’s personality. Large language model AIs like the one under the hood of ChatGPT don’t have actual personalities, despite appearances. The labels refer to whether all of the information about how an AI model works is publicly available and the model can be modified, or whether the model’s developer keeps its inner workings secret and the model itself private property.
A New ‘AI-First’ College Aims to Offer Cheaper, Employer-Friendly Degrees
1 hour ago Want to buy a discounted MacBook in the Apple Education Store? Apple is going to check that you're actually a student or teacher now. We hope you took advantage of that $499 MacBook Neo deal in the Apple Education Store, because if you're not actually a student or teacher, that discount is now closed …
Trump Administration Immigration Policies Are Pushing International Students Away from the United States, Experts Say
9 hours ago Sam Altman’s World unveils a mobile verification device Tools for Humanity, the startup behind the World human verification project co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, unveiled Wednesday a mobile device designed to help people determine the difference between a human and an AI agent.
Most Popular EdSurge Podcast Episodes of 2024
Judge shows mercy on driver fined for running a red light after learning why he did it The judge dismissed the case and took time from his schedule to empathize with the driver. When it comes to road rules, people sometimes fail to stick …
Most Popular EdSurge Podcast Episodes of 2024 - EdSurge News
Most Popular EdSurge Podcast Episodes of 2024 By Jeffrey R. Young Jan 17, 2025 Can I have your attention? The challenge of getting and keeping the attention of students in schools and colleges was the topic of several of our most popular episodes of the EdSurge Podcast over the past year. Part of that involved the question of whether schools should ban smartphones — one of the biggest policy debates of the year in K-12 education.
How a Vacant School Building Became a Symbol of Loss and a Source of Hope for a Small Town - EdSurge News
Donora, Pennsylvania, once housed a thriving steel mill that stretched for about two miles, though that factory closed more than 50 years ago. Today, the town of about 5,000 people has no gas station, no bank and no grocery store. And just a few years ago its only school closed. The shuttering of that school was particularly tough for a community that has been in decline for decades. “Everyone loved that school.
These Higher Ed Stories Resonated Most in 2024 - EdSurge News
We’ve been crunching the numbers, and your votes are in. Here’s the countdown of the top EdSurge stories about the college world in 2024, based on readership. Nearly half of the stories in our top 10 involve the impact that AI tools like ChatGPT are having on campuses. No surprise there, considering that just about every week brings new AI products, and students rushing to social media to share how they’re using them on assignments.
AI Has Changed Student Cheating. But Strategies to Stop It Remain Consistent. - EdSurge News
Teachers and professors can make adjustments in how they teach that will greatly reduce incidents of student cheating with AI. It turns out, those changes aren’t much different than what worked to deter previous cheating methods. That’s the argument of Tricia Bertram Gallant, a longtime expert in academic integrity who is director of the Academic Integrity Office at the University of California San Diego.
Should Instructors Ask Students to Show Document Histories to Guard Against AI Cheating? - EdSurge News
‘Show your work’ has taken on a new meaning — and importance — in the age of ChatGPT. As teachers and professors look for ways to guard against the use of AI to cheat on homework, many have started asking students to share the history of their online documents to check for signs that a bot did the writing.
How Are New AI Tools Changing ‘Learning Analytics’? - EdSurge News
For years educators have been trying to glean lessons about learners and the learning process from the data traces that students leave with every click in a digital textbook, learning management system or other online learning tool. It’s an approach known as “learning analytics.” These days, proponents of learning analytics are exploring how the advent of ChatGPT and other generative AI tools bring new possibilities — and raise new ethical questions — for the practice.
What We Learned About Teaching and Creativity by Commissioning a New Podcast Theme Song - EdSurge News
The theme song of a podcast may only play for a few seconds at the beginning and ending of an episode, but the short clip sets the tone for the show. In searching for a theme song that fit, I spent hours clicking around on online music libraries including the Free Music Archive for songs with just the right mix of seriousness and playfulness to encapsulate our weekly interview show about the future of learning.
Researchers Try Using AI Chatbots to Conduct Interviews for Social Science Studies - EdSurge News
As the legislative election in France approached this summer, a research team decided to reach out to hundreds of citizens to interview them about their views on key issues. But the interviewer asking the questions wasn’t a human researcher — it was an AI chatbot. To prepare ChatGPT to take on this role, the researchers started by prompting the AI bot to behave as it has observed professors communicating in its training data.
Want to Find Highly Engaged Students at 4-Year Colleges? Look at Transfer Students - EdSurge News
Tim Lum is one of millions of students who returned to college as an adult, getting a two-year degree at his local community college. And this year, at the age of 36, he's one of who transferred institutions in fall of 2023. He describes the shift from a two-year college to the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, which has about 20,000 students, as one of culture shock. “It feels like Disneyland, in a sense — large buildings, lots of people, crowds, lines,” he says.
Should Students Chat With AI Versions of Historical Figures? - EdSurge News
Veteran multimedia producer and professor Lynn Rogoff has long experimented with ways to bring history alive for young people. So as she saw the rise of AI tools, she was quick to try them. In her latest film, “Bird Woman: Sacagawea,” viewers not only watch the story of Sacagawea — the young woman from the Soshone tribe who helped guide the Lewis and Clark Expedition back in 1804 — they can chat with her and ask questions about her life.
These new AI tools are promoted as study aids, but they may be doing more harm than good
3 hours ago “Having a little knowledge of music theory can open many doors”: The quick guide to reading music The written word is pretty vital - it's useful for everything from lyrical emotion, comedy and drama, through to the instructions for your dishwasher! … 16 hours ago Tips for becoming a better public speaker Matt Abrahams a communication expert, joins TheStreet to share some tips on how to become a better public speaker. 4 hours ago What's A 'Skillcation'?
New AI Tools Are Promoted as Study Aids for Students. Are They Doing More Harm Than Good? - EdSurge News
New AI Tools Are Promoted as Study Aids for Students. Are They Doing... By Jeffrey R. Young Nov 8, 2024 Once upon a time, educators worried about the dangers of CliffsNotes — study guides that rendered great works of literature as a series of bullet points that many students used as a replacement for actually doing the reading. Today, that sure seems quaint.
Diving Deeper Into the Effects of Smartwatches on Kids, Schools and Families - EdSurge News
With all the talk of the downsides of smartphones for teenagers, parents have looked to smartwatches as a way to stay in contact with their young children while avoiding the full internet and social media access of a phone. At least that was the narrative a couple of years ago. But more recently, more companies have been marketing smartwatches to kids as young as 4 and 5 years old.
What Can AI Chatbots Teach Us About How Humans Learn? - EdSurge News
What Can AI Chatbots Teach Us About How Humans Learn? By Jeffrey R. Young Oct 29, 2024 This article is part of the collection: The EdSurge Podcast. Do new AI tools like ChatGPT actually understand language the same way that humans do?
College ‘Deserts’ Disproportionately Deter Black and Hispanic Students from Higher Ed - EdSurge News
In recent years, a growing body of research has looked at the impact of college ‘deserts’ — sometimes defined as an area where people live more than a 30-minute drive to a campus — and found that those residing close to a college are more likely to attend. But a new study shows that these higher education deserts affect some groups of students much differently than others.
How Are School Smartphone Bans Going? - EdSurge News
Angela Fleck says this was the typical scene last year in the sixth grade social studies classes she teaches at Glover Middle School in Spokane, Washington: Nearly every student had a smartphone, and many of them would regularly sneak glances at the devices, which they kept tucked behind a book or just under their desks. “They're pretty sneaky, so you wouldn't always know that that was the reason,” says Fleck.
As the Job Market Changes, Is a College Degree Less of a ‘Meal Ticket’ Than in the Past? - EdSurge News
As the Job Market Changes, Is a College Degree Less of a ‘Meal Ticket’... By Jeffrey R. Young Oct 15, 2024 This article is part of the collection: The EdSurge Podcast. When Gina Petersen graduated with her associate degree from Kirkwood Community College two years ago, she described it as “the biggest accomplishment I have ever done.” As a returning adult college student, she had struggled to fit her studies in part time, online, while working as a trainer for a tech company.
If Smart Glasses Are Coming, What Will That Mean for Classrooms? - EdSurge News
When Meta held its annual conference at the end of September, the tech giant announced it is betting that the next wave of computing will come in the form of smart eyeglasses. Mark Zuckberberg, Meta’s founder and CEO, held up what he described as the first working prototype of Orion, which lets wearers see both the physical world and a computer display hovering in the field of vision.
Looking Back on the Long, Bumpy Rise of Online College Courses - EdSurge News
When Robert Ubell first applied for a job at a university's online program back in the late ’90s, he had no experience with online education. But then again, hardly anyone else did either. First of all, the web was still relatively new back then (something like the way AI chatbots are new today), and only a few colleges and universities were even trying to deliver courses on it.
Inside an Effort to Build an AI Assistant for Designing Course Materials - EdSurge News
There’s a push among AI developers to create an AI tutor, and some see that as a key use case for tools like ChatGPT. But one longtime edtech expert sees an even better fit for new AI chatbots in education: helping educators design course materials for their students. So all year Michael Feldstein has been leading a project to build an AI assistant that’s focused on learning design.
Should AI Bots Do Scholarly Research? - EdSurge News
Cong Lu has long been fascinated by how to use technology to make his job as a research scientist more efficient. But his latest project takes the idea to an extreme. Lu, who is a postdoctoral research and teaching fellow at the University of British Columbia, is part of a team building an “AI Scientist” with the ambitious goal of creating an AI-powered system that can autonomously do every step of the scientific method.
To Address the ‘Homework Gap,’ Is It Time to Revamp Federal Connectivity Programs? - EdSurge News
One of the lessons of the COVID-19 pandemic was that many families didn’t have reliable internet access at home. As schools closed and classes moved online, educators rushed to improvise solutions for families without robust connections, setting up mobile Wi-Fi access points in school buses, sending home portable hot spots to those who needed it and more.
How Rising Higher Ed Costs Change Student Attitudes About College - EdSurge News
How Rising Higher Ed Costs Change Student Attitudes About College By Jeffrey R. Young Sep 17, 2024 This article is part of the collection: Doubting College: A Podcast Series. ST. PAUL, Minn. — At the end of each school year at Central High School, seniors grab a paint pen and write their post-graduation plans on a glass wall outside the counseling office. For many, that means announcing what college they’ve enrolled in.
How Is Axim Collaborative Spending $800 Million From the Sale of EdX? - EdSurge News
One of the country’s richest nonprofits focused on online education has been giving out grants for more than a year. But so far, the group, known as Axim Collaborative, has done so slowly — and pretty quietly. “There has been little buzz about them in digital learning circles,” says Russ Poulin, executive director of WCET, a nonprofit focused on digital learning in higher education.
How a Returning College Student Advocated to Improve a Fledgling Online Program - EdSurge News
How a Returning College Student Advocated to Improve a Fledgling Online... By Jeffrey R. Young Sep 10, 2024 This article is part of the collection: The EdSurge Podcast. Paul Carr was just one semester shy of finishing his degree at Morehouse College when he found out his girlfriend was pregnant. So he decided to stop out, to get a job to support his budding family. He told himself he’d go back soon to finish. That was more than 25 years ago. Carr always intended to return.
AI Chatbots Reflect Cultural Biases. Can They Become Tools to Alleviate Them? - EdSurge News
Jeremy Price was curious to see whether new AI chatbots including ChatGPT are biased around issues of race and class. So he devised an unusual experiment to find out.
Will AI Make Standardized Tests Obsolete? - EdSurge News
The SAT is to standardized testing what the floppy disk is to data storage. Providers of some of the most popular standardized tests are rethinking their offerings as new AI tools are challenging traditional techniques for finding out what students know — and allowing new ways to give and score tests.
When the Teaching Assistant Is an AI ‘Twin’ of the Professor - EdSurge News
Two instructors at Vilnius University in Lithuania brought in some unusual teaching assistants earlier this year: AI chatbot versions of themselves. The instructors — Paul Jurcys and Goda Strikaitė-Latušinskaja — created AI chatbots trained only on academic publications, PowerPoint slides and other teaching materials that they had created over the years. And they called these chatbots “AI Knowledge Twins,” dubbing one Paul AI and the other Goda AI.
Not All ‘Free College’ Programs Spark Increased Enrollments or More Degrees - EdSurge News
The premise of “free college” programs popping up around the country in recent years is that bringing the price of higher education down to nearly nothing will spur more students to enroll and earn degrees. But is that what actually happens? David Monaghan, an associate professor of sociology at Shippensburg University of Pennsylvania, has been digging into that question in a series of recent research studies.
Should Educators Put Disclosures on Teaching Materials When They Use AI?
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Should Educators Put Disclosures on Teaching Materials When They Use AI? - EdSurge News
Many teachers and professors are spending time this summer experimenting with AI tools to help them prepare slide presentations, craft tests and homework questions, and more. That’s in part because of a huge batch of new tools and updated features that incorporate ChatGPT, which companies have released in recent weeks. As more instructors experiment with using generative AI to make teaching materials, an important question bubbles up. Should they disclose that to students?
An Education Chatbot Company Collapsed. Where Did the Student Data Go?
European Football 1 day ago AI predicts Euro 2024 final score and just how England can beat Spain dailystar.co.uk - Harry Thompson • 1d Got big plans to watch England in the Euros final tonight? Cancel them, because The Daily Star already knows the result.
An Education Chatbot Company Collapsed. Where Did the Student Data Go? - EdSurge News
When Los Angeles Unified School District launched a districtwide AI chatbot nicknamed “Ed” in March, officials boasted that it represented a revolutionary new tool that was only possible thanks to generative AI — a personal assistant that could point each student to tailored resources and assignments and playfully nudge and encourage them to keep going.
As More AI Tools Emerge in Education, so Does Concern Among Teachers About Being Replaced - EdSurge News
When ChatGPT and other new generative AI tools emerged in late 2022, the major concern for educators was cheating. After all, students quickly spread the word on TikTok and other social media platforms that with a few simple prompts, a chatbot could write an essay or answer a homework assignment in ways that would be hard for teachers to detect.
What If Banning Smartphones in Schools Is Just the Beginning? - EdSurge News
What If Banning Smartphones in Schools Is Just the Beginning? By Jeffrey R. Young Jun 25, 2024 This article is part of the upcoming collection: How Social Media Influences Teaching, Learning and the Student Experience. The movement to keep smartphones out of schools is gaining momentum. Just last week, the nation’s second-largest public school system, Los Angeles Unified School District, voted to ban smartphones starting in January, citing adverse health risks of social media for kids.
Should College Become Part of High School? - EdSurge News
Should College Become Part of High School? By Jeffrey R. Young Jun 11, 2024 This article is part of the collection: Doubting College: A Podcast Series. Last year, when Jayla Arensberg was a sophomore at Burnsville High School near St. Paul, Minnesota, a teacher showed her a flier saying that a program at the school could save her $25,000 on college. “I said, ‘I really need that,’” the student remembers.
Latest AI Announcements Mean Another Big Adjustment for Educators - EdSurge News
Tech giants Google, Microsoft and OpenAI have unintentionally assigned educators around the world major homework for the summer: Adjusting their assignments and teaching methods to adapt to a fresh batch of AI features that students will enter classrooms with in the fall.
Should Chatbots Tutor? Dissecting That Viral AI Demo With Sal Khan and His Son - EdSurge News
9 hours ago MoneyTalksNews notes that attending a public university that charges in-state tuition is likely to be a good investment for anyone who goes on to earn at least $50,000 before taxes for the first 10 years after graduation.
Should Chatbots Tutor? Dissecting That Viral AI Demo With Sal Khan and His Son - EdSurge News
Should AI chatbots be used as tutors? That question has been in the air since ChatGPT was released in late 2022, and since then many developers have experimented with using the latest generative AI technology as a tutor. But not everyone thinks this is a good idea, since the tech is prone to “hallucinations,” where chatbots make up facts, and there’s the bigger issue of whether any machine can fill in for a human in something as deeply personal as one-on-one tutoring.
How two professors harnessed generative AI to teach students to be better writers
5 hours ago Samsung has rolled out its latest significant update, One UI 6.1, for specific Galaxy devices. Below is the comprehensive roster of phones and tablets receiving the update. One UI 6.1 represents Samsung's second update developed on the foundation of Android 14. While there may not be significant …
Professors Try ‘Restrained AI’ Approach to Help Teach Writing - EdSurge News
When ChatGPT emerged a year and half ago, many professors immediately worried that their students would use it as a substitute for doing their own written assignments — that they’d click a button on a chatbot instead of doing the thinking involved in responding to an essay prompt themselves. But two English professors at Carnegie Mellon University had a different first reaction: They saw in this new technology a way to show students how to improve their writing skills.
What Brain Science Says About How to Better Teach Teenagers - EdSurge News
Ellen Galinsky has been on a seven-year quest to understand what brain science says about how to better teach and parent adolescent children. The past few years have seen advancements in our understanding of this time — where the brain is going through almost as much change as during the earliest years of a child’s life.
‘College for What?' High School Students Want Answers Before Heading to Campus - EdSurge News
ST. PAUL, Minn. — What do you want to be when you grow up? That’s a question long faced by high school students. But these days, students have access to far more information than in the past about what, specifically, they could do as a job after they graduate. And that is changing the way students are thinking about whether or not they want to go to college — or when they want to go.
Can ‘Linguistic Fingerprinting’ Guard Against AI Cheating? - EdSurge News
Since the sudden rise of ChatGPT and other AI chatbots, many teachers and professors have started using AI detectors to check their students’ work. The idea is that the detectors will catch if a student has had a robot do their work for them. The approach is controversial, though, since these AI detectors have been shown to return false positives — asserting in some cases that text is AI-generated even when the student did all the work themselves without any chatbot assistance.
Los Angeles School District Launched a Splashy AI Chatbot. What Exactly Does It Do? - EdSurge News
Balloon archways surrounded the stage as the superintendent of the Los Angeles Unified School District, Alberto Carvalho, last month announced what he hailed as a pioneering use of artificial intelligence in education.
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