Tag Archives: learning

“Don’t Bring a Résumé. Bring Receipts.”

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In the article, ‘The Proof Economy’ Anand Sanwal says, “Don’t Bring a Résumé. Bring Receipts.” Anand starts with two definitions saying that we’ve moved from the Parchment Economy to a Proof Economy,

“We’ve entered the Proof Economy, a world where the most valuable signal isn’t where you went to school, what your GPA was, or which honors you collected, but what you’ve actually done and can do. In this new landscape, demonstrated ability trumps pedigree, and what you’ve built matters more than where you studied.

Meanwhile, the Parchment Economy, that centuries-old system where formal credentials and institutional validation serve as proxies for capability, is losing its monopoly on opportunity. The elaborate dance of transcripts, recommendation letters, diplomas and prestige markers is becoming increasingly irrelevant in field after field.”

This is something I’ve been describing for a while now, without properly defining the difference in the two ‘economies’. Beyond credentialed professionals like doctors, engineers, and lawyers, what now matters most is your portfolio, not your schooling certificates. ‘What is it that you can do better than others to earn you a spot in our organization?’ (Regardless of your credentials.)

Anand says,

“When anyone can access expertise through prompts and build a prototype video, software product or design via AI, the value shifts decisively from knowledge possession to knowledge application.”

But for me the most interesting section in his article is:

What Education Needs to Become

If we accept that we’re entering the Proof Economy, schools can’t just add a few electives or rethink assessment to focus on progress and not perfection..

They need to rewire what they reward.

We should expect:

  • Projects over problem sets: Real-world challenges that apply knowledge, not just recall it.
  • Portfolios over transcripts: A body of work that shows thinking, skill, and growth.
  • Public work over private grading: Output that lives in the world, not a Google Doc.
  • Coaching over compliance: Adults who challenge and support, not just evaluate.
  • Failure as fuel: A system that treats failed attempts as essential steps, not permanent marks.

At Inquiry Hub Secondary our students are still entrenched in the old public education system in that they complete required courses to meet provincial high school graduation requirements, and most of them still head off to university, college, or a technical institute to further their studies. However, along the way they are given the time, space, and credits (towards their graduation), to produce documentation of learning in areas of interest. They have an opportunity to design and build projects, (documented receipts), most other students could only get done on their own time, outside of traditional classrooms.

They also get to live in an environment where they have to cooperate with fellow students in scrum projects with tight timelines and defined roles (not just group projects with everyone having identical outcomes and expectations). They have to do frequent presentations, alone and in groups, with training to give and receive feedback with radical candour. They understand iteration, they pivot based on where their learning takes them, and they embrace failure as learning opportunities because sometimes obstacles become the way. And they are provided with greater and greater autonomy over their time as they progress from Grade 9 to 12.

Essentially, Inquiry Hub students still get their resume of courses, but they are also provided the opportunity to bring receipts too.

Students choose, AI delivers

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Thinking about AI use in schools, the vast majority of assignments are currently pretty easy to use AI to assist. Students can use this to extend their learning or to do the work for them/make the work significantly easier to do. And then teachers become police… not teachers, trying to figure out how a student is using AI to cheat.

Two big takeaways, one being a positive shift the other being a challenge:

  1. Process matters more than final products.
  2. Students will choose if they want AI to help them or do the work for them. Will they choose to have AI assist their thinking or do the thinking for them?

We have control over whether we focus on process or content. Students have the choice as to whether they use AI to help them think or to think for them. A focus on process can reduce how much a student relies on AI… but a student can always get AI to assist them with the next step.

I’m excited about how students will use AI to dig deeper and extend their learning. I’m equally concerned for students who are choosing to use AI to take the friction out of leaning… opting out of thinking for themselves. Whichever of these approaches students choose, AI will deliver.

Conference conversations

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A few years ago I wrote ‘the spaces in between’:

“I’ve never been to a session at a conference that has taught me more and been more engaging than the ‘spaces in between’ the sessions.

Connecting with distant friends and colleagues; Engaging conversations about teaching, learning, and leading; Topical discussions and meetings over coffee and meals; And getting to know bright people who have similar jobs but unique life and work experience that open my eyes to things beyond what I tend to learn and in my scheduled blocks of conference time… these are the moments that make a conference a rich leaning experience… it’s the spaces in between.”

Sometimes I’ve actually skipped sessions to connect with someone to have a learning conversation, like I did with David Jakes, Jeff Richardson, and Barbara Bray. Other times the conference is an opportunity to connect with people and find time outside of conference times, like I did with Shelly Sanchez Terrell, Kathleen McClaskey, and Remi Kalir… And these are just examples I took the time to record for podcasts, there are so many other conversations that were rich learning experiences, which were often better than the conference presentations themselves.

I’m not trying to say that conference presentations don’t have value, but rather that rich conversations in the spaces in between sessions can be even more interesting and valuable. Put these experiences together and a conference can be such an inspiring place to learn.

…And it’s keynote time… so much learning to be done today!

Close to the source

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Please visit Kelly Tenkely’s Substack and read, ‘Staying Close to the Source’. She starts with a wonderful metaphor,

“I was the kind of kid who loved to collect rocks. I was especially taken with any rock found in a stream or lake. Those rocks felt different. They seemed uniquely magical, luminous, and glittering just below the surface. Smooth, as if they’d been polished over time, their colors saturated and alive.”

… “Each time we visit a learner-centered school, I’m struck by that same kind of magic.”

I’ve had visitors to Inquiry Hub tell be they could feel this magic. They’ve described that this is a special place. They’ve been struck by the way our students share their learning experiences, and how open they are to articulate both their learning processes and their personal inquiries.

We still have percentage grades in grades 10-12, we are still a BC, Canada school providing our students with a regular diploma that they would get at any other school. But we offer opportunities that most students don’t get. We can’t compete with elective course offerings a big high school can provide, but we can have students design their own elective… but only after 1-2 years of doing shorter, less comprehensive, inquiries with continual reflection and sharing built into the process.

I’m not sure how this compares to the schools Kelly visited, but her post concludes with:

“May we stay closer to the source where learning happens. 

May we teach educators how to notice, how to listen, how to see the glitter. 

May we trust that teachers can sit beside learners and bear witness to their growth, without needing to pull it out of context to prove it exists.

Learning, when you’re close enough to see it, is unmistakable.”

This spoke to me, and reminded me of the special teachers and students I get to work with. I encourage everyone to read Kelly’s full post.

So easy to cheat

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We aren’t far away from contact lenses that can do the same. The article, ‘Smart Glasses for Exam Cheating: Best Models, Prices and Risks in 2026’, shares multiple options that can provide AI delivered test answers, in seconds, via a small ear piece or even projected text answers which can only be heard or seen by the user. Banned? Of course. Easily detected? Not all models, with more sleuth and hidden models being developed every day. And as mentioned, what happens when these are as invisible as contact lenses?

Make no mistake, cheating has been around as long as tests have. In some respects this is not new. But most methods of cheating demand guessing what questions will be on the test in advance. Methods like these are responsive to every question asked. And the speed of responses are natural. While you are still reading the question, a response is already headed your way. No need to shift your eyes from the screen or test paper. No hidden notes to conceal, and no wrong answers unless you are choosing to get less than a perfect score, to not seem suspiciously smart.

I remember a friend telling me about him and his friends getting hold of their ethics exam a couple days before they had to write it. The irony of cheating on an ethics exam is not lost on me. They memorized the questions and answers, and all chose different ones to get wrong, while still achieving high ‘A’s. Then on the day of the test my friend was horrified when his friend raised his hand 30 minutes into a 3-hour exam, and shared a typo on a question that no one should have gotten to in such a short time. Despite this poor choice, they all got their ‘A’s.

That’s going to be the new challenge in cheating, how to not do too well to bring attention to yourself. A good problem to have for a cheater.

So here we are in a new era of cheating. Prescription glasses, hidden cameras and microphones, and curated wrong answers. And in all honesty, less and less opportunity for detection. Ultimately, it’s the tests that will need to change.

Egoless learning

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I got to participate in a small Jujitsu class today with a buddy who is a black belt. The great thing about going to your first class with an expert is that there is no ego present. I knew before going in that I knew nothing, and that athletic ability and strength were not going to give me the slightest edge against someone who isn’t only a master in his art but also very athletic and stronger than me. So I went it with the mindsets of an apprentice.

With just 4 of us in the class the instructor catered the class to me, and made the lessons very introductory. Then my buddy gave me some one-on-one time. With every escape that either I was practicing on him, or that he was practicing on me, it quickly ended with me in a compromised position. “The last place you want your opponent to be is on your back,” he wisely shared with me. Then we’d be on the floor, him in a headlock, he’d show me an escape, I’d try to counter… and then he was on my back. Every. Time.

It would have been easy to be frustrated, but I expected it. I took it in stride. I would try again, take his advice, and then ultimately lose position a few seconds later. And I’m not being humble, it was always a few seconds later. I marvelled at how easy he made it seem. But that’s what years of practice does. It takes being put into compromising situations hundreds of times to understand how to escape those situations.

If I was a couple decades younger, I’d probably take the sport up, but these days I’d struggle too much with back and neck issues to do more than train for an hour with a black belt, who is fully aware of my challenges, and who is going light on me. I deal with enough injury recovery in my everyday life to add a contact sport to my life routines. Still, I had an absolute blast today. I forgot just how much fun it is to be completely new at something, and to have that ‘beginner mind’ where your ego is parked and real learning happens.

Who will get us there?

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Stephen Downes shared the following on LinkedIn:

“I was asked, “Please provide a brief abstract that summarises your views on the impact of AI on higher education.”

As far more than the language models that have captured the attention of the world over the last few years, artificial intelligence (AI) represents a significant increase in human capability, augmenting and sometimes exceeding our natural capacities to perceive, reason, create and remember. Ubiquitous access to these capabilities changes the definition of what it means to learn and to be educated. Skills once reserved to the domain of experts are now in the hands of everyday people, while most every discipline is devising new models, methods and pragmatics of work alongside, or teaming with, these new tools. This challenges educators along a number of fronts, impacting how they teach, what they teach, and even what it means to teach. Today’s educator in a world of AI is responsible for far more than passing along knowledge (indeed, the machine can do most of that). We will be responsible for challenging students both young and old to find new ways of seeing and creating, leading them through demonstration of dedication, resilience and passion, and modeling for them the best values of civil and social responsibility, contribution and care.

Thoughts?” ~ Stephen Downes

—

Although my thoughts align with K-12 education as well as higher education, these thoughts come to me in the form of a question:

Who is going to get us there?

Who is the ‘We’ that Stephen is talking about when he says, “We will be responsible for challenging students both young and old to find new ways of seeing and creating, leading them through demonstration of dedication, resilience and passion, and modeling for them the best values of civil and social responsibility, contribution and care”?

Because I love this vision of what teaching can become, I just don’t see a clear path to take us there.

‘We’ won’t get there following the guidance of financially lucrative edu-tech business, products, and tools… their locked-in subscriptions will tout measures of success that don’t align with this vision, even when they say that they will.

‘We’ won’t get there like we did with Web2.0 tools in the late 2000’s and early 2010’s, on the backs of tech savvy educators leading the charge.

‘We’ won’t get there because of some governmental vision pushing a new AI enhanced curriculum, or even new guidelines that somehow redefine for teachers, “how they teach, what they teach, and even what it means to teach”.

I hope I’m not coming off as a pessimist. I’m excited about what’s possible. I just fear that ‘we’ aren’t going to get ‘there’ any time soon unless ‘We’ align philosophy, policy, and economic support for the transformation of schools into something different.

Short of that, I fear that ‘We’ will be having the same ‘20th century schools in a 21st century world’ conversation in another 10 years… which I’ve heard since getting into education in the late 1900’s.

Reimagining Schools

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Since November I’ve been connecting, every few weeks, with Will Richardson and a group of educational leaders from around BC, Canada in a professional development session run by the BCPVPA (BC Principals and Vice Principals Association) called ‘Reimagining Schools: Confronting Education‘. Right off the bat, Will shared some framings:

• Everything is nature
• We’re not facing “problems” to be solved. We are in a predicament.
• Our predicament stems from the fact that we are out of relationship with each other and all living things on the planet. All of our challenges flow from this disconnect.
• Education is complicit in creating these challenges.
• Collapse is not new. What’s new is that systemic privilege is no longer a buffer.
• Our personal challenge is to face reality or “sit with the shit” and not run from complex, difficult questions.

There are a few deep thoughts that have brewed from these sessions, and yet oddly enough the two most impactful things came from outside the sessions.

First a conflict within me. Will shared a post on LinkedIn where he said,

“I think it’s telling that for all of the conferences and presentations and talks and essays and “achievements” that people post and discuss here, only about 2% of them seem to make any note of the fact that they are happening while:

~ecological limits are being breached
~social trust is eroding
~ AI is reshaping cognition
~ politics are destabilizing
~ inequality is deepening
~ biodiversity is declining at alarming rates

I mean, without using those contexts as a lens for our gatherings or our teaching or writing, what is the actual relevance that we can claim, not just around education, but around living life on the planet in general?

It’s either denial or ignorance. Or maybe it’s concern that if we ground our work in those lenses, no one will show up or read or listen…”

I commented:

“I’d push back a bit and ask what is the conference about?

There’s a cognitive dissonance that is invited when the mind has to weigh these things AND also take in information that people are going to a conference to learn about.

I’m seeing your question play out on social media where people are being called out for not being political and sharing their political stance… on a channel where politics is never discussed.

There needs to be a balance, we can’t stick our head in the sand, but we also can’t pretend (and I do intentionally mean pretend) that acknowledging major issues of global concern are equivalent to somehow authentically addressing them… and topically addressing them when our topic isn’t directly affected by them is to me worse than not mentioning them. It can be a distraction without gain to the intended message.”

Will responded:

“Dave Truss So, I’ll push back a bit on the push back. 🤣

I don’t think it’s a “calling out” as much as it is a reminder. And I don’t disagree that just naming them authentically “addresses” them, but it does provide a different lens for whatever question is in front of us at that moment. Every topic is affected by them. Every one.

Modernity wants to separate everything out into pieces and ignore the interconnectedness of the whole. This is the world we live in right now. It’s all entangled.”

The comment conversation continued, and is worth reading, but doesn’t add to my conflicted feelings about this. On the one hand I completely agree with Will, if we aren’t bringing a contextual lens to what we are sharing, we are somehow missing the interconnectedness of some of the things we should most value and care about. But on the other hand, I’m sitting in a place right now where just two days ago I wrote about being ‘Intentionally disconnected‘ because paying attention to the rather disturbing world events right now feels like too much. I ended the post saying, “for now I lack the capacity to engage. It seems like a futile activity that will anger and upset me, with no gain. It is rare for me to actively choose to be uninformed, but right now is one of those times.”

Therein lies the conflict. I agree with Will, yet I don’t think I’m the only one who isn’t ready to face the harsh realities of the predicaments we are in… especially when I’m trying to learn something new. I think for our students it’s the same. The last of the framings above is, ‘Our personal challenge is to face reality or “sit with the shit” and not run from complex, difficult questions.”

I get it, I really do. But when I’m at a conference or when a student sits in a class, do we really need to ‘sit in it’? Do we need to connect everything we do to the predicaments we live in? Do we need this lens to permeate what we are learning? If I channel my inner Will Richardson I think I’d ask myself, ‘But what value is the learning if it isn’t addressing the predicaments we are in?’ … Again, I’m left conflicted.

For example, can I teach students about using AI in an ethical way and not mention the cost of the energy drain? Is mentioning this once enough or should that be the bigger lesson? Do I need to bring the dire state of the world into every lesson, predicament after predicament? Is this even healthy? Maybe I’m just too stuck in the current educational context to see the bigger picture? I really don’t think that these sessions answered this for me, and yet I feel I have a deeper understanding of the need to confront hard truths… and ensure that what we choose to teach be taught with a lens of a world in environmental, political, and social challenges. Will shared the following quote in one of our sessions:

“If we fully accept the world as it is—in all its harsh realities— then we can develop the very qualities we need to be in that world and not succumb to that harshness. We find our courage, morality, and gentle, nonaggressive actions by clear seeing and acceptance. As we accept what is, we become people who stand in contrast to what is, freed from the aggression, grasping and confusion of this time. With that clarity, we can contribute things of eternal importance no matter what’s going on around us—how to live exercising our best human qualities, and how to support others to discover these qualities in themselves.”
~ Margaret Wheatley “So Far From Home”

The second insight I’d like to share came after our first session. Will invited any of us who could stay on to do so. During that after-session conversation I mentioned that I was retiring. The topic of my school, Inquiry Hub, came up and I mentioned that I was proud of what our team has been able to do, transforming the learning outside of the traditional high school box. And yet, I was disappointed that our little school has not had a greater impact on the rest of the district. Will responded saying something like, ‘Dave, if you were able to do that, you would be a unicorn because I haven’t seen that happen yet.’

That simple statement had an unburdening effect on me. It is sad, yet it comforted me. For the past 13 years my small team of teachers and I have created a very special place for self-directed learners to have some true agency over what they are learning, while still providing an opportunity for them to meet all the requirements they need for their post high school ambitions. It has been an amazing ride, and the fact that it didn’t really spread beyond our walls isn’t something that should weigh on me as I head into retirement. The test of my leadership will show if the school thrives after I’m gone.

Overall, I really enjoyed the sessions with Will, and with the other educational leaders from across BC. I appreciated the experience of sitting in the discomfort of knowing things must change in education and sitting in the predicament rather than cherrypicking shallow solutions and discussing them like we were solving all the world’s problems. I encourage educators to follow Will on his journey to confront education and reimagine schools and join one of his cohorts of educators on similar journeys of discovery.

Is Artificial Intelligence Reducing Our Intelligence?

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Joe Truss shared a great article with me, ‘The hidden cost of letting AI make your life easier‘, by Shai Tubali on Big Think. Towards the end of the article, Shai shares this:

“[Sven Nyholm’s] deeper worry is not that AI will outperform humans, but that it will appear to do so, especially to non-expert eyes. “Current forms of AI threaten meaningful activities,” he argues, “because they look far more intelligent than they are.” This appearance invites trust. People begin to treat AI as an oracle, mistaking an impressive engineering achievement for understanding. As misplaced confidence grows, judgment weakens. Skills develop less fully. Capacities are handed over too easily, and with them, forms of meaning that depend on effort.

Nyholm links this directly to the value of processes, including confusion, detours, and lingering with complexity. He punctures the idea that everything should be fast and efficient. Speed may feel pleasant, he concedes, yet it undermines patient thinking and reconsideration. He points to an Anthropic advertisement promising a paper completed in a single day: brainstorming in the morning, drafting by noon, polishing by afternoon. What disappears in this vision is the slow work of searching, getting lost, following the wrong thread, and returning with insight. “Many ideas,” Nyholm says, “come from looking for one thing and finding something else instead.” When AI delivers tidy, unified answers, it spares us that work. In doing so, it risks weakening our capacity to break complex problems into parts, examine assumptions, and think things through with precision.”

AI reduces the productive effort and struggle that makes both learning and understanding stick. Accessing information is profoundly different than understanding information, and directs the learner towards an answer instead of a learning process. This article reinforced some ideas I’ve already shared.

In ‘Keeping the friction‘ I said, “Decreasing the challenge doesn’t foster meaningful learning. Reducing the required effort doesn’t make the learning more memorable. Encouraging deeper thinking is the goal, not doing the thinking for you.”

And in ‘What’s the real AI risk in education?‘ I said, “Real learning has a charge to it, it needs to come with some challenge, and hardship. If the learning experience is too easy, it won’t be remembered. If there isn’t enough challenge, if the answers are provided rather than constructed, the learning will soon be forgotten. Remove being stuck, struggling, and failure, and you’ve removed the greatest part of a learning experience.”

I see this in my own learning. There are times I sit and read a full article, like the one shared above, but there are other times that I don’t bother and just throw a long article into an LLM and ask for a bulleted summary of the key ideas. However, I remember articles I read far better than articles where I only read the AI summaries.

How deep would my learning and understanding be if I only went as far as to read AI summaries? How much will my confidence and my belief in understanding grow, without the depth of knowledge to support my confidence and understanding? Would I be creating a kind of false fluency in topics where I lack true depth of understanding?

The convenience of using AI might not just be changing how we learn, it might be changing what we believe learning is… Perceiving learning as having access to information rather than having a deep understanding of a topic that needed to wrestle with to be truly understood. In this way, the convenience of using AI to think for us might just be reducing our intelligence.

What’s the real AI risk in education?

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I read a great article on LinkedIn by Ken Shelton. He looked at two articles:

“On one side:
AI as productivity infrastructure.
On the other:
AI as compliance enforcement.

But in both cases, the conversation centers on efficiency and policing, not on whether learning itself has been redesigned for an AI-rich world. Using historical context, one could reasonably make similar arguments around the implementation of technology as well. If students are learning to “sound human” to avoid detection…If institutions are investing in increasingly sophisticated surveillance tools…If teachers are primarily using AI to move faster within the same structures…Then we have to ask, as I have shared in previous posts:

Are we adapting learning?
Or are we simply optimizing and defending legacy systems?”

I found his article more interesting than the two he shared. I especially loved his final paragraph:

“The risk isn’t just that AI is moving too fast. The risk is that our response remains reactive, oscillating between efficiency and enforcement, without addressing purpose, power, and pedagogy. Therefore, the real inflection point isn’t technological, it’s analytical and philosophical.”

My thoughts: In education, go ahead and use AI to make teaching and lessons better, use it to help students learn, and also help them understand how to use AI to enrich their learning. But don’t use it to make learning easier. Real learning has a charge to it, it needs to come with some challenge, and hardship. If the learning experience is too easy, it won’t be remembered. If there isn’t enough challenge, if the answers are provided rather than constructed, the learning will soon be forgotten. Remove being stuck, struggling, and failure, and you’ve removed the greatest part of a learning experience.

So educators need to do two things: First, they need to use AI to make what they are doing even better. And secondly, they need to shift the learning experience to one where they no longer need to worry about policing and compliance. For example: The work isn’t finished with an essay, but with students defending their points in the essay against other students with slightly different points or different perspectives. The students who wrote the essay with AI and didn’t fully comprehend the topic can’t argue their perspective as well as the ones who were willing to do the work… and if they did use AI and can then argue the points better than their peers, that only proves that they understand how to use AI as a learning tool and not a tool to do the work for them. Because the real risk of AI in education is that the AI is doing the work, the struggle, and the learning for the student.

The problem we face is how learning can be circumvented by AI. And so the challenge for educators is to make it more challenging to use AI inappropriately, and to use AI to aid in making learning experiences more challenging. This is not an easy task, but it’s one we need to figure out and do well if we want our students to be learners who will have significance in a world where AI is all around us.

_________
Update: Just found this LinkedIn post by William (Bill) Ferriter, and it has two awesome images to fit with the above.

Update 2: I forgot about this post: Thinking Requires Effort

“Reducing busywork, and maximizing the problem-solving time, in a community of learners who find benefit from working together, is what schools should be in service of.“