AI and Higher Ed, Job Moves, and the Bach Bros
This update is chock full of new items… because, yes, it’s the end of September and A LOT is happening.
Besides launching a podcast featuring the rapper and artist Common, there’s a bunch happening around my upcoming book Job Moves: 9 Steps for Making Progress in Your Career (out Nov 19th!)
First, I’m thrilled that Job Moves was named to the Next Big Idea Club’s November 2024 Must-Read Books! We’ll be creating a video soon for the Club that summarizes 5 key insights from the book—and then the Next Big Idea Club curators—Susan Cain, Malcolm Gladwell, Adam Grant, and Daniel Pink—will narrow the list down to a handful of finalists.
Second, Bruno Manno, a Senior Advisor and leader of the What Works Lab at the Progressive Policy Institute, offered a sneak peek at our book and its implications for K–12 schools in his latest Forbes column, “Hiring A Job And Navigating A Career Begins In K-12 Schools.” While our book focuses on individuals making their move and how organizations, managers, and mentors can better support them, as Bruno writes, this process of learning and navigating should begin in K–12 schools.
If you’re interested in how you can use the book to help individuals make progress in their lives and careers more broadly, drop me a line.
AI and Higher Ed
We’ve got two new Future U. podcasts out for you sponsored by College Vine that focus on AI.
1) First we had the incomparable and noted author on AI, Cal Newport (who is a professor of computer science at Georgetown University), on talking about “Searching for Fit: The Impacts of AI in Higher Ed.”
Cal shared how AI’s uses in and beyond the classroom could change how professors choose to teach and what students need to learn. Cal emphasized that there will be a trial-and-error phase before AI finds its most impactful applications. In his words, AI is still searching for product-market fit. Newport told us, for example, that if colleges build curriculum around “prompt engineering,” it will probably be outdated in a few years. “The university shouldn’t get out ahead and say, ‘We could imagine it would be useful in the future, in this type of job, to be good at ChatGPT, so we're going to teach you how to do it,” Newport told us. Colleges need “to actually see how this tool is being used in this job.” Once they do, then they need to “move fast…and actually teach about it,” he added. Jeff Selingo and I then drove this point home by drawing parallels with our own memories from the early days of the internet—and betrayed our age for our educational benefit.
From my perspective, Cal laid out a “third way for AI” that didn’t offer unbridled cheerleading, nor did he offer complete skepticism.
2) Then we released an episode titled AI Goes to College: In the Classroom and Beyond. As our producer
summarized, this episode took us out of the speculative and snapped us back to the present day with a look at how AI is already being used on college campuses. Lev Gonick, CIO at Arizona State University, shared about the tools coming out of ASU’s partnership with OpenAI. He offered thoughts on prioritizing AI projects, picking tech partners, and protecting student privacy. We also welcomed Ashley Budd, Senior Marketing Director at Cornell University, to discuss how AI will transform the top of the higher ed funnel. Jeff and I closed the series by considering AI’s transactional pitfalls alongside its transformational potential.Three More Before You Go
1) Helen and Dave Edwards, the co-founders of Artificiality, published a new research paper over with our friends
titled “Learning in the Intimacy Economy.” I’m quoted in the paper.2) I joined Michael Connor and the Voices for Excellence podcast to talk “Disruptive Innovation in the AC-Stage of Education.” What is the AC-Stage of Education, you may be asking? You’ll have to tune in to find out what Connor means by the term and how I framed the current moment and design choices for K12 schools and districts.
3) In the cutest segment of this newsletter, two children who started the “Bach Bros Studio” interviewed me for their YouTube channel (their dad is in my class at Harvard and runs the Bach Family Foundation). You can check out the interview below, in which they asked me, in plain language: What does "Transforming Education" mean? Why is it important to transform education? How do you transform education? How can we apply this idea in our lives? As technology advances, what will be the role of physical schools? For more, please visit www.BachBrosStudio.com and follow them on their social media channels @BachBrosStudio.
As always, thanks for reading, writing, and listening.