Tech and AI roundup recently

1. I'm going to suggest that districts insisting that children must use technology in schools when parents don't want them to--and when teachers and students are also objecting--is not going to go well for the districts.

2.  Rarely do I agree with Andy Smarick on anything, but when he's right, he's right, and he has nailed it on AI in the classroom in his piece for the National Review entitled "AI in the Classroom Is Our Most Senseless Education Experiment Yet"
   

   Learning is seldom about swiftly generating a final product. It’s about the slow, arduous work necessary for getting to a final product. From a great teacher’s perspective, what a student wrote in her final paper is less important than the weeks of researching relevant sources, assembling evidence, and outlining an argument. That great teacher doesn’t want a student to just write the correct answers on the exam; he wants the student to spend hours and hours reading texts closely, figuring out why that formula works, or trying different approaches until landing on the right method.

    Along similar lines is this opinion piece in The New York Times this week by  David Wallace-Wells (whose level-headedness on cell phones in schools I also appreciate).

3. The chorus of boos from graduates responding to A.I. boosters at their graduates has only grown this week (my count is up to five, if we include the graduation at which the A.I. announcement of graduates' names went haywire), and Marisa Kabas of The Handbasket starts there in her recent "Hating AI is good, actually."

4. And I'll be interested to see what Pope Leo has to say in his encyclical Magnifica humanitas ("Magnificent humanity") being released next week. Encyclicals, which is a letter of Catholic teaching, take their titles from their first few words, so we have a hint of his opening with that. Unusually, the Pope will be releasing the encyclical himself, speaking, it is thought, to how important it is to him.