Greetings Eddies!
Quick Eddy Awards update. We've received 233 nominations across five categories. Inspiring Student leads with 79, followed by Parent Educator (70), Innovator (55), Resource (20), and Communicator of the Year at just 9.
We extended the deadline through tomorrow because people kept telling us they meant to nominate someone but hadn't yet. So here's your window: nominations.opened.co.
In particular, we'd love to get more nominations for the resources (curricula, companies, products, etc.) and communicator of the year. Please go nominate the YouTuber, podcaster, or blogger who changed how you think about education.
And now back to your regularly scheduled programming.
– Charlie (the OpenEd newsletter guy)
NONE OF THE DREAMS ARE GOOD
Peter Gray asked adults: "do you ever dream about school?" Seventy-three percent said yes. And not a single one of the 128 people who answered said the dreams are pleasant. The most common themes are being lost, being late, being unprepared for a test, or being (wait for it) trapped and unable to leave.
Interestingly, good students reported worse dreams than the ones who didn't care. "The more seriously you took school," Gray speculates, "the more it got under your skin."
There's a version of this conversation where someone says "well, some stress is normal." Sure. But we don't dream about other stressful experiences this way. For whatever reason, school seems to occupy a special space in our subconscious.
AI FLUENCY IS NOW A GRADUATION REQUIREMENT
Parents who've been debating whether their kids should use AI can stop debating. The universities have decided for them.
Purdue announced that starting with the class of 2030, every student will need to demonstrate AI competency to graduate. Ohio State followed with the same requirement for the class of 2029. Nearly 90% of college students already use AI tools academically - the schools are catching up to what's already happening.
SKIP THE AI-DETECTION TOOLS
If you want a head start on that conversation at home, Julie Bogart at Brave Writer published a piece on what to do when you suspect your child is using AI for writing projects. Her advice: skip the detection software. Ask your kid to walk you through how their ideas developed. The process conversation reveals more than any algorithm, and it doesn't blow up trust.