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Category: Teaching & Learning

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

Skills for Sovereignty

Hi everyone. The blog is off this week, but given the release of the Defence Industrial Strategy, it seems worth flagging a few early observations – and providing an update on how this is shaping the agenda for our upcoming session of the National Defence Research Roundtable, which is focused on the role of post-secondary institutions in developing skills as part of a new approach to sovereignty and national security. So, the Defense Industrial Strategy (DIS) is finally out. I

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February 24, 2026 No Comments

Tenure and Promotion Criteria: You Get What You Ask For

Incentives matter. And all the major extrinsic incentives of university life can be found in documents known as “tenure and promotion criteria” (hereafter TPC). Every institution has a set of these (or indeed often multiple versions of them, since the criteria often vary from one faculty to another. Here’s McGill’s policy. Here is Waterloo’s. Here’s an extremely detailed one produced by the University of British Columbia. They are not exactly the same, but they rhyme. And what’s fascinating is what is not in any of them. Let’s start with research, or as

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February 4, 2026 3 Comments

Campus Total Defence

This blog doubles as an invitation to a very cool event in Ottawa on March 23rd. See the end of blog for details. If there is anything Canada should take from President Trump’s deeply disturbing rants about Greenland over the past couple of weeks, it is that our country is very definitely a target. The fascist government in power in the United States genuinely believes both that might makes right and that the entire hemisphere is rightfully theirs. The threat to national

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January 26, 2026 2 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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