Doug Holton
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edtechdev.bsky.social
Doug Holton
@edtechdev.bsky.social
860 followers 1.3K following 85 posts
faculty development, educational technology, open source, learning sciences... Mostly posting on mastodon: https://mastodon.social/@dougholton
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Faculty Development and GenAI Playbook: Evidence-based Best Practices www.everylearnereverywhere.org/resources/fa...
#EdDev #AIEd
"Increasingly, AI chatbots are unwilling to acknowledge that they do not know the answer to a question. Instead, they make stuff up. A September report from NewsGuard, which monitors online misinformation, found that “non-response rates fell from 31% in August 2024 to 0% in August 2025.”"
An alarming amount of the news information AI chatbots provide to users is false.

The study found that 20% of the AI chatbots’ answers “contained major accuracy issues, including hallucinated details and outdated information.”
What happens when you trust AI for news
AI chatbots are surging in popularity.
popular.info
Cool demo by @todepond.com of a classroom agent in @tldraw.com
youtu.be/L-fKtZXDb-s?...
Jump to the 10 minute mark to see an example of AI giving guidance to a student working on a math problem on the tldraw digital canvas. Uses the agent starter kit tldraw.dev/starter-kits...
#AIEd #EdTech
tldraw's classroom agent
YouTube video by tldraw
youtu.be
Coincidentally ran across a couple of videos about this: youtu.be/FKDcQJKg9rU?... & youtu.be/1U32hZYxfcY?...
Would be interested trying Gemini CLI and maybe some option that would work from my phone, where I'm usually adding notes
You Asked How I Built My AI Knowledge Management Agents — Here’s the Full Walkthrough
YouTube video by Jason Cyr
youtu.be
Reposted by Doug Holton
Noah D. Finkelstein: A principled way to think about AI in education: guidance for action based on goals, models of human learning, and use of technologies https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01467 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.01467 https://arxiv.org/html/2510.01467
Reposted by Doug Holton
Notes and system instructions and deep research reports on creating a custom GPT or Gemini Gem to tutor calculus: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p2aeeVmstAASRUsgH52NLDmhghrhhsab2pvmyevnuYI/edit?usp=sharing
Hawkulus: AI Calculus Tutor (Custom GPT) […]
Original post on mastodon.social
mastodon.social
Reposted by Doug Holton
It should be obvious a priori that it's absurd to judge colleges by the number of applicants they manage to avoid admitting. Quality ≠ selectivity! Now there's evidence demonstrating the absence of an empirical relationship between intellectual engagement and a school's selectivity: is.gd/itHRhu
Reposted by Doug Holton
🚨 New preprint 🚨

Across 3 experiments (n = 3,285), we found that interacting with sycophantic (or overly agreeable) AI chatbots entrenched attitudes and led to inflated self-perceptions.

Yet, people preferred sycophantic chatbots and viewed them as unbiased!

osf.io/preprints/ps...

Thread 🧵
Teaching Tips: The First Major Exam or Assignment
edtechdev.wordpress.com/2025/09/26/f...
Some research-based practices you may find useful for before, during, and after your first major assessment to improve student success and help struggling students turn things around afterward.
#EdDev #Teaching
Teaching Tips: The First Major Exam or Assignment
I’ve earlier shared evidence-based teaching tips and resources for the critical first week of a course, including these resources: Establishing Expectations: A Growth Mindset Approach –…
edtechdev.wordpress.com
The homework help button is gone, but starting today, there is an omnipresent Gemini button on the top right of Chrome, and it can do the same stuff. Additionally, it supports Gemini Live mode (voice mode). I tested it and it answered questions in a Canvas quiz for me: blog.google/products/chr...
Go behind the browser with Chrome’s new AI features
Google Chrome is getting upgraded with the latest AI to make it safer, smarter and more useful
blog.google
Looks like the Homework help button doesn't appear anymore. That's what the last comment at the above canvaslms discussion says, too. Unfortunately though, this kind of stuff is only pushing folks to use Honorlock and similar tools even more.
If any LLM devs want to skip ahead of the class, check out How People Learn nap.nationalacademies.org/read/9853/ch... or Teach Students How to Learn youtu.be/yGBfd7LeGMM?...
Another Metacognitive AI strategy: confidence self-assessments arxiv.org/abs/2508.152... #LearningSciences
Teach an LLM to master a body of knowledge? by @jessylin.bsky.social

They propose Active Reading 📙: where for each training doc, they have the model itself propose study strategies, "actively reading" to synthesize its own augmented training corpus.
Reposted by Doug Holton
Teaching students how to learn changes more than effort—it changes the pattern of their learning. A brief SRL intervention made study habits more regular & organized all semester, boosting grades. bera-journals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... #PsychSciSky #AcademicSky #EduSky
Reposted by Doug Holton
I've been trying to articulate why the fawning, complimentary responses from AI chatbots feel so insidious to me. I've finally figured out how to explain it.

Wrote a long piece on how current model training and design choices threaten our critical thinking skills: maggieappleton.com/ai-enlighten...
A Treatise on AI Chatbots Undermining the Enlightenment
On chatbot sycophancy, passivity, and the case for more intellectually challenging companions
maggieappleton.com
Advancements in astronomy education research: Two decades of progress with undergraduate and adult learners journals.aps.org/prper/abstra...
#Astronomy #PhysicsEd #STEMeducation #DBER #EdDev #ActiveLearning #Teaching