Assessment in the AI era: a moment we have been preparing for since the 1980s A comment on the Stanford Accelerator for Learning white paper “Responsible Assessment in the AI Era” (2026) Quick summary — AI is revealing the flaws of traditional pedagogy based on standardized testing of final course deliverables. I am not alone…
the academy
Trans-Nation Co-Creation
Studio Michael Shanks Stanford This week I am off to join Sabine (Remdisch) and colleagues as part of our collaboration — Trans-nation Co-creation. Here’s a kind of prospectus. TNCC Tour and Dialogues: A Week of Innovation, Leadership, and Foresight From June 13 to 19, 2026, the Institute for Performance Management at Leuphana University Lüneburg holds a…
AI and collaboration — lessons from Stanford
Here is the keynote I presented at our reunion last week in Odense, of Danish alumni of the Stanford H-Star fellowship program (2010 to 2015). Keith Devlin (H-Star director emeritus) and Connie Svabo of the STEM Education Research Center – FNUG at University of Southern Denmark [Link], were our hosts. The program enabled about 50…
Digital Humanities — a zombie concept
This is part of my long-running commentary on the current state and future of the humanities, including what gets called digital humanities. Nudged by a symposium at Stanford There was a symposium at Stanford last week (November 14-15) called “The Futures of Antiquity in an Age of Digital Data and AI”. Credit goes to faculty…
Science Learning – a future
I am in Copenhagen at the annual meeting of the European Science Education Research Association ESERA [Link]. Here is my summary statement for our plenary session that introduces Creative Pragmatics as a framework for reshaping science education [Link]. The world our students face today is not stable, predictable, nor neatly divided into disciplines. It is…
Mike Rowlands 1944 – 2025
Another loss to anthropology and archaeology. Mike Rowlands died on July 19. He was there at the funeral and at the tribute to Chris Tilley last November [Link] and I recalled first meeting him in 1979. It was at a conference about social theory that I helped organize with Keith Ray and Mark Gregson at…