A large-scale study of 77,543 distance-learning students found that the AI learning assistant Syntea is widely integrated into study routines, with usage varying across demographic and academic contexts.
Student Success (in the Age of AI)
AI exposes the collapse of a school bargain built on compliance and credentials, making student agency the only remaining source of real learning and success.
https://www.stevehargadon.com/2026/05/student-success-in-age-of-ai.html…
The Time My Students Used AI in Their Final Reflections – and I Liked It!
A critical AI educator explains that, while deeply skeptical of AI’s harms and ideologies, they focus on building students’ critical AI literacy and transparency, and were pleasantly surprised by thoughtful student uses of AI in final reflections.
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In his first encyclical, Pope Leo XIV says AI must serve humanity, not the powerful few
The Pope’s first encyclical reportedly critiques AI’s concentration of power, lack of public oversight, privacy risks, manipulation, and tendency to reinforce hidden biases under the appearance of neutrality.
https://religionnews.com/2026/05/25/in-his-first-encyclical-pope-leo-xiv-says-ai-must-serve-humanity-not-the-powerful-few/…
Microsoft Wants to ‘Make People Addicted’ to its New AI Assistant, Internal Documents Reveal
Planning documents for “Scout” say the plan is to “make people addicted” to the tool before adding new features.
https://www.404media.co/microsoft-wants-to-make-people-addicted-to-scout-its-new-ai-assistant-internal-documents-reveal/…
How AI Is Changing Teaching Workflows
AI is saving teachers meaningful time. Whether that eases burnout depends on where the time goes.
https://edtechinsiders.substack.com/p/how-ai-is-changing-teaching-workflows…
This big university system is embracing AI. Students and faculty aren’t all on board
CSU’s large-scale ChatGPT Edu partnership with OpenAI aims to make it the first AI-powered university system of its kind, but many students and faculty remain skeptical about AI’s educational value and broader impacts.
https://www.kosu.org/news/2026-05-25/this-big-university-system-is-embracing-ai-students-and-faculty-arent-all-on-board…
The Pope on Defederation
The Pope’s Magnifica Humanitas encyclical is viewed as a treatise on AI, writes Laurens Hof, but the article also reads it as a diagnosis of why decentralised social networks keep struggling.
https://connectedplaces.online/reports/fr164-the-pope-on-defederation/…
How DuckDuckGo Can Be a Hero
Google’s shift from pure web search to AI assistant features creates an opening for DuckDuckGo to position itself as the default “pure web search” alternative while keeping its privacy advantage.
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A human centered model for discussing AI in assessment
AI should not be the centre of assessment renewal; instead, it should prompt us to redesign assessment around three human-centred questions: Did students do the work? Have they learned? Are we helping them learn more?
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AI is Forcing the Return of Writing by Hand in the Classroom
As AI makes take-home writing harder to police, many teachers are shifting toward in-class, handwritten, and more personal reflective assignments.
https://mindmatters.ai/2026/04/ai-is-forcing-the-return-of-writing-by-hand-in-the-classroom…
I tried the ‘expert educator’ prompt on ChatGPT that’s gone viral — and it’s incredible
The article tests viral “expert prompt” frameworks to see which genuinely improve AI responses and which mainly create overconfident hallucinations.
College students are noticing their AI-smoothed writing sounds strong—and not like them
Students are using generative AI widely for schoolwork, but beyond cheating concerns, it is raising deeper questions about authorship, academic identity, legitimacy, and whether AI-assisted work still feels truly their own.
https://phys.org/news/2026-05-college-students-aismoothed-strong.html…
Google’s Gemini Spark is the first AI agent built for people who don’t know what an AI agent is
Google has thrown down the gauntlet as the first major player to change that by announcing Gemini Spark at Google I/O 2026. It’s a 24/7 personal AI agent that prioritizes out-of-the-box user-friendliness, seamless app integrations, and entirely cloud-based processing. Gemini …
“Ask YouTube” brings AI-powered conversational search to video, adds Gemini Omni to Shorts
YouTube is adding AI-powered search with “Ask YouTube,” allowing users to ask complex and follow-up questions and receive generated responses based on both Shorts and long-form videos.