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Category: Blogs

Some Notes on Artificial Intelligence in Higher Education, May 2026

Today is just a quick round-up of recent news and trends re: artificial intelligence in higher education – hopefully one which is a bit different from the everything-is-awesome/everything-is-terrible style of think pieces that you often see on this subject. Artificial intelligence is having significant impacts in fields like astronomy and molecular biology, and large language models quite unexpectedly seem to be capable of making significant contributions to mathematics. In other fields, AI does not eliminate any steps in the research

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May 27, 2026 No Comments

Overestimating in the Short Run

Nearly fifty years ago, California futurist Roy Amara coined a widely quoted adage on the subject of technological change. It says: “We tend to overestimate the effect of a technology in the short run and underestimate the effect in the long run.” This is a quote very much worth keeping in mind when it comes to thinking about how higher education should react to the growth of artificial intelligence and, in particular, how we grapple with educating students for an

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May 26, 2026 No Comments

China Update 2026

Hi all. Every couple of years I spend some time going through data on Chinese higher education and, in particular, the finances of the country’s top universities. It’s been two years since the last time I did this, so here goes: Figure 1 shows total expenditures at what I call China’s Big 8 universities (which is actually just the elite C9 League of universities minus the Harbin Institute of Technology, which does not make previous years’ financial data available), in

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May 25, 2026 No Comments

Focus Friday: May 22

Hi all! It’s the second last Focus Friday before a summer break. Joining me this afternoon is David Hornsby, Vice-Provost (Academic and Global Learning) at Carleton University, for a conversation on Carleton’s newly released institutional AI Framework and what it actually takes to move from “we should probably do something about AI” to a university-wide governance approach. We’ll spend some time talking about: As always, Focus Friday is meant to be highly conversational and discussion-driven, so bring your questions, experiences,

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May 22, 2026 No Comments

The Knowledge Coalition

The Netherlands has one of the most knowledge-intensive economies not just in Europe, but in the entire world. Despite its small size, it has many world-class universities, a remarkably collaborative research culture, deep ties between academia and industry — basically everything you’d want to stay at the forefront of the global economy. And yet, the Netherlands has not been immune to the factors that have hampered the drive for innovation in many other countries, most notably lack of funds and

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May 21, 2026 No Comments

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One Thought to Start Your Day is our founder and CEO Alex Usher’s popular daily blog, brimming with up-to-the-minute insights and informed opinions on today’s higher education industry.

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