Orientation – some recent personal anecdotes and thoughts about AI In May our reunion of H-Star academic collaboration between Stanford and Denmark prompted me to reflect upon AI in research collaboration [Link]. A new white paper from Stanford’s Accelerator for Learning — Responsible Assessment in the AI Era — prompted me to comment that we…
the academy
Creative Pragmatics for active learning — implications of AI in assessment
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…
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…