Tools, and honest assessment of their track record.
9 topics · 10 curated works
No prior grounding assumed.
Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Teaching and Learning: Insights and Recommendations
US Department of Education, Office of Educational Technology · 2023
Argues AI should be adopted in schools for narrow, teacher-supervised uses that address specific gaps in feedback and differentiation, and warns…
Assumes you know the vocabulary.
Mindstorms
Seymour Papert · 1980
Children should program the computer rather than be programmed by it — the argument behind every constructionist tool since.
+5 more at this level
Primary sources and full treatments.
Evaluation of Evidence-Based Practices in Online Learning: A Meta-Analysis and Review of Online Learning Studies
Means et al. · 2010
A federally commissioned meta-analysis finds blended instruction that combines online and face-to-face elements outperforms either pure online or…
+2 more at this level
10 works
US Department of Education, Office of Educational Technology
Argues AI should be adopted in schools for narrow, teacher-supervised uses that address specific gaps in feedback and differentiation, and warns against outsourcing pedagogical judgement to systems nobody in the building can inspect.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Seymour Papert
Children should program the computer rather than be programmed by it — the argument behind every constructionist tool since.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Terry Anderson & Jon Dron
Argues online learning did not evolve as one thing but through three successive pedagogies — cognitive-behaviourist, social-constructivist, connectivist — each answering a different question about what a distant learner needs.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Faria Sana, Tina Weston & Nicholas J. Cepeda
Finds a student who multitasks on a laptop learns less, and so do the classmates who can merely see the screen, so the harm from one distracted student is not contained to that student.
Katy Jordan
Compiling completion data across hundreds of MOOCs finds average completion rates around 6.5%, and that offering a verified certificate is one of the few factors reliably associated with finishing.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026David Wiley & John Hilton III
Argues the real value of open licensing is not free textbooks but 'OER-enabled pedagogy', assignments where students revise and redistribute the materials themselves, which closed content cannot legally allow.
link failing as of 17 Sept 2026Kasneci et al.
Surveys what large language models can plausibly do for personalised tutoring against their tendency to produce confident, fluent wrong answers, and argues education needs new literacies to use them safely.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Means et al.
A federally commissioned meta-analysis finds blended instruction that combines online and face-to-face elements outperforms either pure online or pure face-to-face teaching on average, though few studies isolate why.
link checked 17 Sept 2026Kurt VanLehn
Finds well-designed intelligent tutoring systems close most of the achievement gap to human one-on-one tutoring, overturning the assumption that only a person can give step-level feedback that works.
George Siemens & Ryan S. J. d. Baker
Distinguishes learning analytics from educational data mining by audience and purpose, and argues the two communities need to share methods rather than duplicate them under different names.
link checked 17 Sept 2026