Today, we are surrounded – indeed, immersed – in a world of digital devices quietly powered by artificial intelligence. Whether through Microsoft’s Copilot, Google’s predictive search, Grammarly’s real-time editing, or the invisible algorithms guiding us through traffic and daily decisions, we are engaged in a kind of ambient co-thinking with machines. Most of the time, we are unaware of the extent to which our thoughts are being shaped, streamlined or scaffolded by these tools. Use is no longer a matter of conscious choice; it is the architecture of our environment.
Monday, April 7, 2025
‘You can’t create 18-year-olds’: What can colleges do amid demographic upheaval? - Ben Unglesbee, Higher Ed Dive
This is a moment for higher education 18 years in the making. By the latest estimates, 2025 will be the year that the number of high school graduates peak. The long-dreaded demographic cliff — caused by declining birth rates starting in 2007 — is coming. But the coming decline in traditional-aged college students might not be a “cliff,” exactly, and it doesn’t necessarily spell a disaster for the nation’s colleges. In its latest forecasts of future high school graduate numbers, the Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education described a more gradual drop over the next 15 years than the cliff metaphor suggests, though it also project
How online learning platforms are revolutionising upskilling - Arunima Jha, India Today
Online learning platforms have emerged as a key driver for upskilling, providing flexibility, affordability, and industry-relevant courses. These platforms enable professionals and students, particularly career switchers and those from non-traditional backgrounds, to enter high-demand fields such as AI, fintech, and cybersecurity. Experts from UniAthena and Intellipaat highlight how these platforms facilitate quality learning aligned with industry needs.
Tracing the thoughts of a large language model - Anthropic
Language models like Claude aren't programmed directly by humans—instead, they‘re trained on large amounts of data. During that training process, they learn their own strategies to solve problems. These strategies are encoded in the billions of computations a model performs for every word it writes. They arrive inscrutable to us, the model’s developers. This means that we don’t understand how models do most of the things they do. Knowing how models like Claude think would allow us to have a better understanding of their abilities, as well as help us ensure that they’re doing what we intend them to.
Sunday, April 6, 2025
AI-Driven Education Poised for Breakthrough as StudyPal Launches Next-Generation Learning Platform - Yahoo!
StudyPal, an innovative AI-powered education platform, today announced the launch of its latest suite of AI-driven learning tools, designed to revolutionize student engagement and personalized learning. As the debate over AI in education continues, StudyPal aims to demonstrate how artificial intelligence can enhance comprehension, retention, and accessibility for learners worldwide. AI has rapidly integrated into nearly every sector, and education is no exception. However, its adoption has sparked controversy. In January 2023, the New York City Department of Education restricted AI use due to concerns over academic integrity and misinformation. Despite these reservations, StudyPal is taking a proactive approach, proving that AI, when applied responsibly, can support individualized learning experiences rather than hinder them.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ai-driven-education-poised-breakthrough-183700438.html
'This has been a game changer' | Educators embrace AI at Texas State University symposium - Jessica Cha, KVUE
Around 375 higher education teachers gathered at Texas State University this week for their first symposium on artificial intelligence in education as educators strive to keep pace with rapidly evolving technology. The two-day "AI in Teaching and Learning Symposium," which concluded Thursday, was designed to showcase ways to enhance teaching practices by integrating AI into higher education settings and offering a collaborative space to do it.
Online microcredentials: a response to meet the market's demand for soft skills - Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC)
The demand for professionals with soft skills, such as effective communication, critical thinking and time management, is high in today's job market. "Soft skills are the personal and social skills that enable professionals to work effectively, both on their own or in teams. They're associated with personal behaviour patterns and attitudes such as decision-making, time management and resilience. These skills are crucial in any professional environment, and particularly important in a managerial role," explained Iñaki Bustinduy, a course instructor with the Faculty of Economics and Business at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). A recent study in this field undertaken by the UOC, led by Carles Bruguera, a member of the Labour Market Research and Analysis Unit(UPAL) and a researcher in the Management and Learning (MeL) group, examines how online microcredentials can help meet this need through flexible training adapted to meet the demands of business.
Saturday, April 5, 2025
Investing in the Future: Preparing Students for the AI Revolution - Teaching and Learning Services, Carleton
In a world where technology is rapidly evolving, artificial intelligence (AI) is seemingly everywhere, transforming many aspects of our daily lives. From using smart thermostats or robot vacuums in our homes, to offering virtual reality simulations in university courses, to automating tasks in the workplace, AI is changing the way we live, learn and work. To help prepare students for this new wave of technology, Teaching and Learning Services has launched online learning experiences that foster knowledge, skills and confidence in AI and digital literacy. These new modules are part of FUSION, an initiative that aims to bridge academic and employability skills. They will teach students how to identify accurate information online, manage their digital footprint and use AI effectively and ethically.
Virtual Classes and AI Help Students With Some College, No Credential - Abby Sourwine, Government Technology
Southern New Hampshire University's online offerings and artificial intelligence-powered support tools are re-engaging learners who left college without a degree. More than 40 million Americans have earned some college credit but never finished a degree, according to a report last year from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center (NSCRC). It’s a population that continues to grow — up 1.4 million from 2021 to 2022 — and, according to a recent policy brief from the Center for Higher Education Policy and Practice (CHEPP), represents both a failure of traditional higher education and an opportunity for institutions to meet these learners where they are. At CHEPP's parent institution, Southern New Hampshire University, flexible online courses and insights from artificial intelligence are now helping to make up for those failures.
Key Considerations for AI and Accessibility in Higher Education - Emily Cook, Every Learner Everywhere
Every Learner Everywhere and Teach Access have partnered to publish a new resource titled Where AI Meets Accessibility: Considerations for Higher Education, to support educators and administrators in higher education in exploring the intersection of artificial intelligence (AI) and accessibility, with a particular focus on the needs of people with disabilities (PWD). Created through collaboration with experts from academia, industry, and the disability community, this resource aims to help educators and institutional administrators discover innovative ways to foster access and opportunity in higher education for PWD. As AI becomes increasingly embedded into educational settings and practices, it offers both opportunities and challenges. This comprehensive resource will help navigate both aspects— demonstrating how AI can help overcome technology barriers and highlighting areas where it may inadvertently create new obstacles for PWD. It is also a practical toolkit for incorporating accessible AI in higher education, complete with example activities, discussion questions, and reading lists.
Friday, April 4, 2025
Which LLM Should You Use for Your Business? [Pros and Cons] - Nathan Lands and Matt Wolfe, Hubspot
Choosing the right large language model can feel overwhelming with so many options out there, especially if you’re not exactly living and breathing AI. But as we’ve worked through each one, we’ve gotten a real sense of what they’re good at (and where they fall short). So, let’s talk about what to use, when.
Gemini 2.5: Our most intelligent AI model - Koray Kavukcuoglu, Google
Gemini 2.5 is a thinking model, designed to tackle increasingly complex problems. Our first 2.5 model, Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental, leads common benchmarks by meaningful margins and showcases strong reasoning and code capabilities. Gemini 2.5 models are thinking models, capable of reasoning through their thoughts before responding, resulting in enhanced performance and improved accuracy. In the field of AI, a system’s capacity for “reasoning” refers to more than just classification and prediction. It refers to its ability to analyze information, draw logical conclusions, incorporate context and nuance, and make informed decisions. For a long time, we’ve explored ways of making AI smarter and more capable of reasoning through techniques like reinforcement learning and chain-of-thought prompting. Building on this, we recently introduced our first thinking model, Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking.
Creative Futures Academy (CFA) helping businesses equip their employees with the skills needed to thrive - Creative Futures Academy
Creative Futures Academy was delighted to feature in 'Business This Week' within The Irish Times as part of a special report on Attracting Excellence in Ireland. Our Director, Louise Allen, and our courses featured across multiple articles focusing on prioritising career development to attract talent, sustainability and EDI considerations and also exploring career stagnation with microcreds. With the growth in demand for creativity in all areas of work, the courses CFA offers benefit a wide range of sectors. “Creative and design-led approaches are essential in today’s workplace, driving innovation and growth. As experience economies rise, businesses must craft immersive, meaningful experiences that resonate with consumers”.
Thursday, April 3, 2025
Amplified Humanity: How AI Can Expand Our Capacity to Do Good and Be Good - Tawnya Means, University of Illinois Assistant Dean for Educational Innovation, via LinkedIn
In an era where headlines about artificial intelligence swing between utopian promises and dystopian warnings, we're missing perhaps the most profound opportunity of all: using AI to help us become better humans. This isn't about outsourcing our humanity. It's about leveraging technology to amplify our uniquely human capacities for care, support, learning, engagement, and love. As AI systems grow more capable, our ability to be deeply, authentically human becomes not just valuable; it becomes imperative.
SUPERAGENCY: What Could Possibly Go Right with Our AI Future" - Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato, Superagency
Superagency, by Reid Hoffman and Greg Beato, presents an optimistic view of AI's future, focusing on its potential to amplify human capabilities and improve society. Rather than dwelling on dystopian scenarios, the book explores how AI can enhance individual agency, enabling people to achieve more in areas like education, healthcare, and problem-solving. It advocates for an inclusive and adaptive approach to AI, emphasizing its role as a tool for positive change and encouraging readers to actively participate in shaping a future where human ingenuity and AI work in synergy. (summary by Gemini 2.0 Flash)
The rise of the AI manager - Tigran Sloyan, Fast Company
There’s a growing fear that artificial intelligence will soon replace human talent. While it’s undeniable that AI will impact the labor market, as with any disruptive technology, a closer look reveals a different—and far more empowering—future. Rather than displacing highly skilled professionals, AI is setting the stage for knowledge workers to transition from individual contributors into high-leverage managers, directing teams of AI agents that can execute tasks with breathtaking efficiency. Rather than consign the expertise and creativity of humans into irrelevance, AI will make it all the more essential, as humans direct and guide AI agents toward the ideal outcome.
Wednesday, April 2, 2025
Innovation and Collaboration in Higher Education During Challenging Times - Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed
The field of higher education is notoriously slow to change. Yet, when faced with the extraordinary challenges of today, our associations are quick to foster support, collaboration and unity. I just returned from the UPCEA annual conference held in Denver. A record attendance of some 1,300 administrators, faculty and staff from member institutions gathered to share policies, practices, innovations and knowledge in advancing the mission of higher education in 2025. It was a thriving and exciting environment of energy and enthusiasm in seeking solutions to challenges that confront us today and into the future. A number of the sessions addressed innovations with cost savings, efficiencies and effectiveness gains that can be realized by thoughtfully introducing artificial intelligence into supporting many aspects of the higher education mission.
Anthropic just gave Claude a superpower: real-time web search. Here’s why it changes everything - Michael Nuñez, Venture Beat
Anthropic announced today that its AI assistant Claude can now search and process information from the internet in real-time, addressing one of users’ most requested features and closing a critical competitive gap with OpenAI’s ChatGPT. The new web search capability, available immediately for paid Claude users in the United States, transforms the AI assistant from a tool limited by its training data cutoff to one that can access and synthesize the latest information across the web. “With web search, Claude has access to the latest events and information, boosting its accuracy on tasks that benefit from the most recent data,” Anthropic said in its announcement. The company emphasized that Claude will provide direct citations to sources, allowing users to fact-check information— a direct response to growing concerns about AI hallucinations and misinformation.
New ways to collaborate and get creative with Gemini - the Keyword, Google
Explore Gemini's latest features: Canvas, a new interactive space for refining your documents and code and Audio Overview, which transform your files into engaging podcast-style discussions. Gemini can already help you brainstorm ideas, do deep research and generate content for whatever project you’re working on. And starting today, Gemini can offer even more help, whether it’s editing a document with you in real time or taking your idea and coding a real prototype. Canvas is a new interactive space within Gemini designed to make creating, refining and sharing your work easy. Simply select ‘Canvas’ in your prompt bar and you can write and edit documents or code, with changes appearing in real-time.
Tuesday, April 1, 2025
Human Augmentation: The Core Promise of AI - Lee Ott,Tech Crunch
At the heart of AI is the goal of elevating human potential. When technology manages mundane or repetitive tasks, we are free to focus on creativity, collaboration, and decision-making. By offloading routine tasks to AI, workflows that once took days can be completed in hours, enabling people to think bigger and move faster. This shift from purely transactional tools to truly human-centric experiences underscores a core truth: One of technology’s most powerful purposes is to empower individuals, and by extension enterprises, while ensuring ethical, secure, and responsible innovation. AI’s real value lies in its ability to unlock new levels of productivity, spark innovation and drive responsible, human-centered progress.
More than 7 in 10 College Students and Administrators Seek AI Agents to Close Support Gaps, Ease Burnout - Salesforce
“AI agents offer an incredible opportunity for institutions to scale student support and engagement in a way that will enable them to increase enrollment and retention. Deeply knowledgeable, contextually aware AI agents that are grounded in an institution’s unique data are able to provide students with 24/7 personalized support from the moment they first engage with an institution. AI agents will also assist faculty and staff, helping to take on administrative burdens, so they can focus on what matters most – creating meaningful student experiences and driving lasting impact.” – Margo Martinez, VP & GM of Education, Salesforce.
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