We shouldn't destroy ourselves in arguments about AI. campuses need to focus on conversations that allow faculty to form shared values and shape what role, if any, AI should have in education. open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

In today's Tea for Teaching podcast, @anetv.bsky.social , @marcwatkins.bsky.social , and @derekbruff.bsky.social join us to discuss their forthcoming book, The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching. teaforteaching.podbean.com/e/ai-aware-t... @cyberthread.bsky.social

It was wonderful spending time with @anetv.bsky.social & @derekbruff.bsky.social talking about AI-Aware teaching on The Tea for Teaching Podcast. We need to start having serious and sustained conversations across campuses about what role AI should have in classrooms and teaching

Having critical and thoughtful discussions with students about their AI use and AI’s impact on their community creates the type of creative and curious responses for students to learn about this technology without asking them to use a chatbot. open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

A foundation model like Claude or ChatGPT IS NOT trained as a text classifier (aka an AI detector). PLEASE STOP DOING THIS! These are two entirely different AI systems (generative vs. classifier). This is why AI literacy matters. People need to understand how these tools work.

The Granta AI scandal grows. Several other stories may have been AI generated. A single paragraph at the end of the award announcement says Commonwealth is investigating. No response from Granta. Even the writing within the award announcement reads like it is AI generated. What are we doing here?

I'm very exited to share that you can now pre-order The Norton Guide to AI-Aware Teaching, written by @anetv.bsky.social, @marcwatkins.bsky.social, and me! Follow this link for your current pre-ordering and bulk ordering options: derekbruff.org/books/

So Instructure paid the ransom to unlock Canvas. The precedent this sets . . . www.insidehighered.com/news/tech-in...

My campus uses an ancient form of course management immune to hacking because it is so old the programmers who wrote the code did so upon slate tablets, lost to the ages. It cannot be killed, refuses updates, and predates time itself. Dear users of Canvas, I beckon you to return to Blackboard.

The Dept. of Labor's answer to help train the workforce in AI skills is a course delivered entirely via text message! Emojis and memes galore! The MAGA themed Make America AI-Ready course promises to only take "7 days. 10 minutes a day . . ." I wish this was fiction.

How inaccurate is Pangram’s Chrome Extension is for their AI detector? here is a human written post that was flagged as “AI-assisted” in my Substack feed from a quote. When I clicked on the post, the label flipped from “AI-assisted” to “Human!” This is not okay to sell a product that does this!

I tested Pangram's detector on my social media feed and found it made me trust accounts less. When we allow a company to place labels on our social media interactions, we cede some agency to opaque systems, ultimately giving them a great deal of power over our lives open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

I was interviewed by Dana Goldstein for the NYTs about how writing instruction is responding to AI. It’s true many are returning to analog techniques to curb AI misuse. Some are also trying to incorporate AI to help students develop discernment about AI use: www.nytimes.com/2026/04/30/u...

Teaching centers do their best to present nuanced takes on the latest educational research. Most of all, teaching centers exist not as places where learning is homogenized or loaded with academic jargon, but as communities. open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

Harvard did good. Requiring students to learn ABOUT AI, be critical of its impact on education, and society is where we should focus our efforts. Not asking students to uncritically adopt a chatbot. Placing agency at the heart of this discourse is what matters www.thecrimson.com/article/2026...

I was happy to contribute to this AI literacy framework for teens developed in partnership with the WAO and BBC. downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/responsib...

When a machine can now mimic the work of a human being, many of us, especially students, must be asking what the point is anymore. That’s a much more dangerous and slippery problem than students submitting AI-generated work. open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

I'm deeply against using AI to grade. But y'all, the Pope has asked priests to stop using AI in homilies. Do you really think that if THE POPE has to tell priests to stop using AI for intrinsically personal and spiritual matters that telling a teacher "just don't use AI to grade" is going to work?

We're entering a time where purpose and intentionality are going to be more important than "getting something done." I was happy to sit down with Lila Shroff from the Atlantic to talk about how teachers using AI to grade can erode trust in the name of efficiency www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

We've only begun to think about the risks AI agents pose to faculty labor. Grading is one area. Consider if a student uses an agent to fill out a teacher evaluation and the upstream consequences of bias impacting promotion, tenure, or renewal. open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

I don’t think faculty should use AI to grade student work. I think we should be wary of how quickly faculty are falling into AI’s efficiency trap. youtu.be/nSyipCaxruU?...

I never implied faculty should be spending 90 minutes of their free unpaid time learning about AI. I absolutely acknowledged this increases labor that no one asked for. We must demand institutional support to ensure any extra time spent dealing with AI is compensated. And it is Marc not Mark.

OpenAI wants universities to invest in educational AI at scale, but students already live inside a free AI ecosystem that universities cannot control. That was the unresolved problem hanging over OpenAI’s 2026 Education Summit. open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

I'm working on a post about the 2026 Education Summit held at OpenAI's headquarters last week in San Fransisco. Probably the biggest take away was the work OpenAI's James Donovan is attempting to research how students learn (or don't learn) using ChatGPT. Lots to unpack.

At SXSW Edu and it’s a steady stream of micro credentials, workforce training, future ready gibberish. No event has acknowledged AI agents exist or how agentic tools call into question the validity of certifying anything digitally right now. People have ignored AI developments.

“The prompt was simple: “Does the following relate at all to D.E.I.? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’” The results were sweeping, and sometimes bizarre.” When DOGE Unleashed ChatGPT on the Humanities www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/a...

The Chronicle asked me to offer my prediction for what 2026 has in store for higher education and what I hope Universities will focus on our AI era. www.chronicle.com/article/high...

Einstein isn’t really a threat to academic integrity so much as it is another distracting piece of marketing hype. It isn’t clear if it was a hoax, a failed app launch, or piece of tech posing as performance theater. AI agents represent challenges to online learning open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

I'm working on a post about the Einstein AI agent that claimed it can do a whole course for you and log into canvas. It is likely a hoax or failed vibe-coded app. It has been taken down. Agentic AI like Perplexity's Comet browser CAN take a course for you. Knowing what is BS will always be valuable

Will “writing as thinking” survive the AI age? A provocation from Jon Ippolito, followed by a conversation among the other "Transformers," Mark Marino, @anetv.bsky.social, @mahabali.bsky.social @marcwatkins.bsky.social Jeremy Douglass, and me. preview.electronicbookreview.com/gatherings/t...

There's much talk about universities buying expensive AI licenses, but will students even use them? Arguments about access, equity, and security are often part of the marketing used to sell AI, but these become meaningless if students don't stop using free AI open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

We left Oxford yesterday after five days without power from the ice storm. I think it may have been restored at our house, but over half the town is still without power. The outage map tells the tale.

Day 8/10 sharing provocative scenarios to spark conversation about AI grading. Faculty have hidden directions to catch students cheating with AI. What happens when students do the same and use prompt injection to fool AI grading tools into giving them a higher grade open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

Day 7/10 sharing provocative scenarios to spark conversation about AI grading. How will parents and students feel about AI being used to grade? Some might welcome the efficiency of it, while others might ask why they're paying for college for a machine to grade them open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

Day 6/10 sharing provocative scenarios to spark conversation about AI grading. Agentic AI automates workflows. When grading and feedback are viewed as just another workflow, how easy is it for faculty to cede agency to an algorithm? open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

I can see so many high school students going to Gemini to take practice tests, repeatedly. Will it help? Maybe. It also might mean we're headed to a world where people become more interested in assessing knowledge in ways that are less transactional. blog.google/products-and...

Day 5/10 sharing provocative scenarios to spark conversation about AI grading. Some faculty are using AI to proctor oral exams, recording students, what responsibilities do faculty and institutions have if sensitive information is disclosed by a student to the AI? open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

Day 4/10 sharing provocative scenarios to spark conversation about AI grading. AI models offer different levels of access and capability. Students may have access to better models, use 'councils of LLMs' to grade, or argue human judgement is biased vs. AI. open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

Day 3/10 of sharing provocative scenarios to spark conversation. Students may soon arrive in college expecting faculty will use AI for feedback and grading because their teachers used AI in high school. How would this affect faculty decisions around using AI? open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

I went through age verification instead of switching to VPN to login to Bluesky. IMO, it is absurd some states (I'm in MS) implemented this for social media, but so it goes. Equity, access, and protecting teens pose lots of challenges for online spaces. I don't know how this will work with AI.

Day 2/10 of sharing provocative scenarios to spark conversation. Using AI to create a virtual 'twin' is already being done by some faculty. The scenario below is for a fully online, asynchronous course. What guidelines and guardrails should be put in place? open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

Does your uni have guidelines or policy about using AI to grade student work? I think they should. Over the coming days, I'm sharing 10 provocative scenarios to spark conversation and hopefully convince folks in education that we need to start taking this seriously. open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

I hope those in education consider what AI grading represents beyond narratives of efficiency. Assessing how a student learns is an act of critical judgement. I’d hate to see that outsourced to a machine. open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

Lot of wisdom here from @biblioracle.bsky.social . I think many of us, myself included, felt like our undergraduate experience was one of searching and failure. Education is finding yourself and we shouldn’t give up that in the name of efficiency www.insidehighered.com/opinion/colu...

Happening on X currently--each time a woman posts something the embedded AI allows other users to abuse them by putting them in a bikini or removing their clothing in response. And this is a feature use case Musk is promoting! www.reuters.com/legal/litiga...

My final post of 2025: stop chasing AI updates. The skills we need are human, not technical. Focus instead on exploring what agency means personally to you and students in this age of automation. open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

Many blame students for using AI to cheat, but we should direct our anger toward an AI industry that markets itself as being safe and responsible while refusing to implement guardrails that stop students from using these tools to impersonate learning and committing academic fraud.

Within Gemin's Pro plan ($20/month) a user can toggle on/off the watermark identifying AI-generated content. What's the purpose of watermarking media to show that it is AI generated, if paid access allows you to treat the feature like a light switch?

This is the 3rd time Google has offered a Gemini trial for college students since May. They're clearly tying trials around the academic calendar. It is no wonder college instructors are hostile toward AI companies pushing free premium AI for college students during finals.

My latest for the Chronicle. Online education has its many flaws and it's clear ChatGPT, and now agentic AI, broke assessments, but there's too much at stake to give up the equity and accessibility afforded by online learning. www-chronicle-com.umiss.idm.oclc.org/article/can-...