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…

Anatomy Galaxy — epistemic environment

An invited response to a one-day installation event – Anatomy Galaxy, by Connie Svabo.University of Southern Denmark Odense June 24 2026. [Link]Link to Connie Svabo’s dissertation on the project – [Link] Epistemic environments Connie Svabo’s Anatomy Galaxy began with a found situation: a decommissioned anatomy learning environment at the University of Southern Denmark — a wet specimen…

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…

Newsletter — Stanford Archaeology Center

Prospective reflections on 2025-26 Acting with nature — prehistory My new book Archaeologies of Nature: Activating the Archive, written with Gabriella Giannachi, University of Exeter and Turin, is now complete and in production. Open Access — it will be available as PDF in June 2026. We use an archaeology of artworks to probe human relationships…

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…

Christina Unwin — Design and Archaeology

Christina Unwin’s new book Design and Archaeology [Link] has just arrived. A remarkable path-breaking work, this is the synthesis of archaeology, design studies, material culture studies that we have been waiting for – delivered in elegant case studies of textiles, gold-alloy torcs, shale vessels, and a copper-alloy armband from the world of iron-age and early…