How to turn an AI into your personal cognitive coach. Most people use AI as a "Ghostwriter"—they ask it to write an essay or solve a problem so they don’t have to. The problem? The AI gets smarter, and the human stays the same. This course changes that. This is a scaffold for your brain. We aren't using AI to "do" the work; we are using it to guide the struggle. Real learning happens when your brain has to work, connect, and retrieve. This Prompt Journal uses proven, research-backed techniques to make sure that what you study today actually stays in your head tomorrow. Using AI to Support REAL Learning - AI Powered Learning Journal Prompt Pack · Learning with AI &

Could AI be a major education disruptor? Too early to tell, but that allows me to speculate without the drag of data! Not simple disruptions like all tests have to be in school supervised so AI is not used, lectures given by AI, etc. Maybe the whole emphasis switches to how to develope students with curiosity. Mastering skills, material, is out. The one attribute we must grow is motivation to attack problems. Thinking out of the box. A whole new education system that no longer pushes mastery of French but bad ass curiosity. Of course one has to master matieral, learn what is in the box, before one can think outside of it. A najor change in emphsis. First we reward mastery, then, opps, sorry, now instead of understanding all that has gone before, we need you to think about why A is important, What if B were the true guiding principle. What would one put in this new cirricumum? Visual Illusions, you know those pictures that you look at, see two women, look longer, see a compote. One line looks longer, no, they are the same length. The mystery has one ending. No, here is another ending that fits the facts also. Luckily I only have to outline the ideas, not cmoe up with the out-of-the-box cirriculum. Thoughts?

I am always on the lookout for ways to use AI. This comes out of a general theme of mine: Local Knowledge. If you have local knowledge, apply AI to helping you work with that knowledge. I run Historical societies. I am in a book club. Those are places I use AI. Wife gave me a new one today. She is visiting end of Long Island in April, has a NYT article about what to do there and wants to know which of the locations are open. She was able to go to normal Google search, choose AI mode, type in the prompt of " Please read the following material about locations to visit around the Eastern end of Long Island and research which might be open in April 2026" Append a couple paragraphs from the article and it gave her exactly what she wanted. I urged her to not put in the entire 700+ word article but instead chunk it up and extract results. Frank's focus is often on learning. Transferring what is in a book to your brain. I think my interest is a little more focused on mastering techniques to extract relevant information and methodologies. Putting stuff in my brain seems a little more oriented to school and school seems a little more oriented to teaching one how to master material. I might argue that schools/learning are about to change. The main skill is not knowing the causes of the fall of Rome but how to find out what people think about the topic and how to integrate that with related topics.

AI will force education to move from Problem Solving to Problem Finding. In this rant I am going to fail measurable by trying to do 2 things. The first is the above idea. It comes from Youtube Nate B Janes. I usually suggest that only technical people listen to him but I am breaking the rule. Now we move to the second "thing". I have used Notebooklm to parce the Nate piece. IF you have a gmail account, send it to me at tpears@aol.com and I will send you an invitation to view this Nate piece in a notebook. It is all free. Back to thing 1, Nate. Nate points out that the education system has historically optimized for problem solving, but the AI era will increasingly reward "problem finding" and the ability to frame the right questions. Furthermore, as technical skills like programming become commoditized, human value will shift toward taste, judgment, and the ability to curate high-quality outputs from a sea of AI-generated options. The above was written for me by notebooklm. Come see what I am talking about.

Happy Friday everyone! We are getting closer to the upcoming course that runs in February on our Learning and AI Community - I'm looking forward to seeing the results you achieve. Please let me know if you plan to attend the course (it's free for the first intake - you can't beat that price!). Even if you cannot attend all sessions, they will be recorded and shared with those that are taking the course. To enroll, please respond to this post letting me know. I will then be closing the course to everyone except the people that respond so that I can close the recordings to only participants. I'll be doing this early next week - so don't delay. As a reminder - here is the course outline: