I’ve been writing about artificial intelligence off and on since 2010. After the release of ChatGPT-3 in November 2022, I increased my pace of reading and writing substantially. During a recent Academic Affairs Board Committee meeting, one of the committee members asked me if I would send her a list of relevant AI publications and links. I told her that the number of articles is voluminous, and most AI-related books are out-of-date by the time they’re published.
While there are certainly far too many articles about AI in education for anyone (other than an AI) to review and organize, I attempted to focus my recommendations on specific readings or specific people who blog or post articles about education related AI articles. I’ve organized them by major category.
Recently Published Books About AI or the Use of AI
Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, by Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, published in April of 2024. The early chapters of Co-Intelligence provide an explanation of the evolution of the AI technology specifically related to LLM’s. His four principles that he recommends following when working with AI are worth remembering.
Click here for a link to my review.
Creative Applications of Artificial Intelligence in Education. – I reviewed this book using ChatGPT 4o to analyze each chapter. Organized as a collection of academic papers, it’s a bit too academic, in my opinion. During my review, I encountered an experience where ChatGPT 4o “hallucinated” and did not logically follow my prompt. I thought it worth sharing.
The Coming Wave: the Power of AI and the 21st Century’s Greatest. Mustafa Suleyman founded two AI startups, Deep Mind (purchased by Google) and Inflection AI. He left Inflection AI to become CEO of Microsoft AI. Suleyman is one of the AI leaders who signed an open letter recommending that the U.S. implement requirements to contain the development of AI. The book is deep in places, somewhat philosophical, and somewhat scary. For my review of his book, click here.
Building Artificial Intelligence for education. Written by six Latin American university professors, it’s an open-source book (free) that provides an assessment of their perspectives of using AI in another area of the world.
Infinite Education: The Four-Step Strategy for Leading Change in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, by Dan Fitzpatrick. This book was just published on January 7, 2025. It was highly recommended by a few educators I know. It’s on my reading list, but I’ve not yet read it.
There are two other books, that Dr. Paul LeBlanc, recently retired president of Southern New Hampshire University, recommended recently at a conference I attended.
Power and Prediction: The Disruptive Economics of Artificial Intelligence was coauthored by economists Ajay Agrawal, Avi Goldfarb, and Joshua Gans. The book explains how AI is improving in its predictive capabilities and how that shift from humans to machines will impact the economics of systems.
Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence was written by James Bridle. With the advent of AI, Bridle explores the co-existence of other intelligences on earth that are just being discovered.
AI Writing and Research Tools
STORM. Stanford University created an AI app called STORM, that attempts to write a Wikipedia-like research paper about any topic you choose. My blog review is at the link. While the sources are noteworthy for the most part, I questioned the currency of some of its sources during my utilization of the app.
NotebookLM. is a recently issued AI tool from Google (and it is free for now). I personally like this tool. I wish NotebookLM was available when I researched and wrote my doctoral dissertation and the other academic papers that I have published. It’s great for organizing your materials. Even better, if you have a link to a source or a pdf, you can upload it, and it will summarize it in about the time it takes to print the summary on your screen. It will also create an audio podcast from any article uploaded or linked to it. I’m using it to organize my research and writing for a book I hope to publish in 2026. I wrote a review here.
AI-related Reports
The 2024 EDUCAUSE and Horizon Report: The Impact of AI on Education was issued in May. I reviewed the report here. This report is more about technology and higher ed and is excellent if you want a 20,000-foot flyover, but less so if you’re looking for a more technical or detailed discussion.
Former Wall Street analyst Mary Meeker issued a report about the relationship between AI and universities over the summer. Ms. Meeker leads off her report with the statement, not a prediction, that AI will impact higher education significantly. She created a list of 10 questions that university leaders should ask if they want their institution to be competitive in an AI world. You can find my blog review here.
Situational Awareness. Google researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner’s June 2024 report predicts the major AI events of the next decade including the arrival of artificial general intelligence by 2027. Aschenbrenner claims that there are only a few hundred people in the world who understand AI well enough to be “situationally aware.” It’s a thought-provoking paper.
Andreessen Horowitz has a recently published report out about how AI agents will be used by SAAS (software as a service) companies to enhance their scale and market share. I happen to believe that the biggest power in AI is the utilization of AI agents to reduce repetitive tasks. The power of this application will likely reduce jobs as well. There are many reports about AI agents, but this (and the two following reports) provides great insight into the companies building and offering these agents and what the downstream implications might be.
Use of large language models as artificial intelligence tools in academic research and publishing among global clinical researchers. The researchers who wrote this open-source report surveyed 226 medical and paramedical researchers from 59 countries across 65 specialties. Nearly 90% of the researchers were aware of LLM uses in research and more than half agreed that comprehensive guidelines and an ethical framework should be developed to guide academic research and address current challenges posed by AI-utilization.
Analyzing the Impact of AI Tools on Student Study Habits and Academic Performance. This open-source research report was published by Cornell University. The four researchers’ questions and methodology are interesting. I question the relevance of their findings given the small number of students in the study.
What’s next for AI in 2025 is one of the latest from MIT’s Technology Review. Hint, it’s not about agents and small language models which were 2024’s next hot application. The five new trends in AI are:
- Generative virtual playgrounds
- Large language models that “reason”
- It will be boom time for AI in science
- AI companies will get cozier with national security
- Nvidia will see legitimate competition
Blogs and Newsletters
Wharton professor Ethan Mollick is one of my favorite commentators on AI. He writes about it on his Substack blog, One Useful Thing. From day one of ChatGPT’s announcement, he allowed his students to use AI in the classroom. At the same time, he flipped the way he teaches to challenge students’ abilities to use the AI productively and ethically. I recommended his book, Co-Intelligence.
AI x Education – another Substack blogger, their most recent issue discusses AI agents. Lily Lee and Aditya Syam are very focused on education.
AI, Academia and the Future is written by Georgetown University professor Bryan Alexander and published on Substack. Alexander’s research and consulting work as an education futurist is relevant to his blog posts.
Khanmigo, the AI tutoring tool developed by Khan Academy, is being adopted by many school districts across the country. Khan Academy had early access to OpenAI. A link to their blog is here.
George Couros is an experienced teacher with a substantial following. His most recent blog post, Decoding Digital Deception: A Journey into AI and Bias, is worth reading.
George Siemens is an expatriate Canadian who is a professor at the University of South Australia. He is well known for his papers on data analytics and connectivism. He is also an AI aficionado and posts almost weekly at his blog. His most recent post is at the following link and is worth reading for its links to other relevant AI sources.
LinkedIn AI Posters From the Higher Ed Sector
There are far too many people to list here. However, there are a few whose AI-related LinkedIn posts are frequent and notable. In this group, I recommend:
Recent AI Articles or Opinion pieces
- University of Chicago Maroon. Opinion from a freshman about use of Gen AI in a linguistics class.
- How will the rise of AI in the workplace impact liberal arts education? Higher Ed Dive
- SUNY to mandate civic discourse and AI education for students
- Arts and Sciences Meets AI Johns Hopkins
- How Will AI Change the Teaching Model in Business Schools? Columbia University
- AI’s Not a Genie in a Lamp: It’s a Space to Think – Inside Higher Ed opinion piece from a professor
- AI Could Actually Help Rebuild the Middle Class – Economist and Professor David Autor (MIT) argues that AI will increase demand for human expertise and expand the middle class.
- ‘The game has changed.’ AI triumphs at protein folding – Science Magazine article about Google’s Deep Mind AI’s success at predicting protein folding at a rate far in excess of experienced teams of scientists.
- We’re Asking the Wrong Questions About AI – Paul LeBlanc opinion piece about worrying less about students using AI to plagiarize and worry more about the future of the knowledge workforce.
University Guides
- Elon University – Student Guide to Artificial Intelligence
- Report of the AI at Stanford Advisory Committee
- Cornell University. Generative AI in Administration
- University of Texas. The Faculty Guide to Getting Started with Gen AI
Final Thoughts
I began this post as a simple exercise to provide a few relevant links to articles, papers, books, and people discussing AI and education. It wasn’t intended to become an all-encompassing source. At the same time, I’m glad to add a header or a few relevant sources that I did not include. Please send me a note and thank you in advance.
