For disciplines that depend on interpersonal skills such as communication, leadership, negotiation and mediation, AI can provide elusive experiential learning, particularly in asynchronous environments. For years, I faced a challenge familiar to many instructors who teach asynchronously online. My students were learning the concepts, reflecting deeply and developing new perspectives, but they weren’t getting enough opportunities to practise the interpersonal skills they would need in their careers. As a psychologist by training who teaches leadership and conflict resolution in sustainability-focused programmes, much of my work centres on helping students navigate complex environmental challenges.
Monday, August 24, 2026
The AI Literacy Test Higher Education Must Not Fail” Op-Ed Featured in Washington Examiner - Cornerstone University
“To be literate in AI is not merely to know how to type a good prompt,” Dr. Moreno-Riaño said. “It is to know when to trust an output, when to verify it, and when to reject it . . . [and] to understand the moral ramifications of the choices we make with these systems and to act in harmony with what is genuinely good for us as human beings.” The op-ed follows President Moreno-Riaño’s recent Fox News interview, which featured Cornerstone’s commitment to preparing graduates with the knowledge, wisdom, judgment and character to remain irreplaceable in an AI-driven world. President Moreno-Riaño points to two recent national polls showing that Americans see AI as both a major opportunity and a technology that requires safeguards. At the same time, according to Pew Research Center, approximately 70% of U.S. adults are already using various AI tools. Students, workers, patients and voters are interacting with AI every day, yet few have been formally taught how to evaluate what it tells them.
Sunday, August 23, 2026
AI in Nebraska education: Higher ed looks to human-centric approach to integrate artificial intelligence - Jolie Peal, Nebraska Public Media News
“The University of Nebraska is vast,” Adrian Wisnicki, co-director of the AI institute and a professor in English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, said. “There are 50,000 students, 10,000 faculty and staff, and so, as much as possible, [the executive vice president and provost] wanted to, in the leadership of the institute, represent the diversity of that and create a leadership that could engage with and speak to and support that diversity.” About 90% of students in higher education use AI occasionally in class, according to a survey from Instructure, the company that launched the education platform Canvas, and about 60% of college educators say they use AI. With this rise of AI use in higher education, the NU system launched a task force to look at how the university should respond to the new technology. One part of that task force’s recommendations was to launch the AI Institute.
Here’s how to show students what responsible AI use looks like - Andrew Firr and Alex Fenton, Times Higher Education
To support, we ask students to paste part of the assignment brief into a GenAI tool and request a plain English explanation, then to compare it with the official brief. They must consider what the tool clarifies and which requirements need to be checked against the marking criteria. This approach positions AI use as part of assessment literacy while highlighting the authority of the official brief and marking criteria.
Spotlight guide: Critical thinking in teaching and research
Spotlight guide: AI and assessment in higher education
Can academics tell the difference between AI-generated and human-authored content?
Saturday, August 22, 2026
AI and Enrollment Pressures Are Reshaping Higher Education - Amy McIntosh, EdTech
Higher education is at an inflection point. The 2026 EDUCAUSE Horizon Report identifies the forces most likely to reshape teaching and learning over the next decade — and the picture is complex. As artificial intelligence continues to evolve, it’s changing relationships across campus. Institutions also continue to face mounting enrollment challenges. And emerging risks related to cybersecurity, policy reform and sustainability are compounding institutional strain. According to the report, AI is redefining instructional design and how faculty teach. As institutions continue to shape their policies around AI use, it’s impacting student-teacher relationships in the classroom. The report notes that AI is also changing how people decide what information to trust, leading some faculty to shift the way they monitor and assess student work.
AI fluency: The next foundation of US economic competitiveness - Alexis Krivkovich, Brooke Weddle, and Maurice Obeid; McKinsey
AI is advancing faster than organizations can adapt. Reaching the next productivity frontier will depend on workers across the economy acquiring the needed habits and skills. Today, AI fluency is rapidly becoming the common language of work and a prerequisite for the next chapter of competitiveness. Workers’ practical ability to use and manage AI in their day-to-day, integrate it into workflows, evaluate its outputs critically, and, increasingly, create with it is transforming how work gets done. Unlike many earlier technological capabilities (such as cloud computing) that were relevant mainly to specialists, the demand for AI fluency is spreading across all types of workers, industries, and wage groups. What began as a technical skill is becoming a must-have capability for knowledge workers, blue-collar workers, managers, students, and everyday citizens.
Friday, August 21, 2026
Would You Trust AI for Ethical Advice? - Christian Terwiesch, Gideon Nave, Lennart Meincke; Knowledge at Wharton
No disrespect to philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah, but Wharton professor Christian Terwiesch no longer reads his wildly popular advice column, “The Ethicist.” Terwiesch used to love the long-running column in The New York Times until 2023, when he and two Wharton colleagues conducted an experiment to see whether people could tell the difference between Appiah’s advice or advice spit out by ChatGPT. In a blind study, even experienced professionals — including ethics professors and clergy — could not tell whether the AI-generated advice was more or less useful than the advice provided by Appiah. In fact, random participants preferred the AI-generated advice 59.6% of the time. An additional study found that participants who were initially resistant to taking advice from the chatbot became more accepting as they were shown the high quality of the AI reasoning.
Rogue AI Agents Aren’t Evil. They’re Just Eager to Please - Will Knight, Wired
AI agents that break free and hack into other systems are only trying to make us happy. Artificial intelligence agents merrily breaking free and hacking other systems might seem like a sign of the impending machine uprising. In reality, it happens when we push remarkably clever, but also kind of boneheaded, algorithms to follow our every command.
Thursday, August 20, 2026
OpenAI is expanding its cybersecurity program and launching a new AI model for security researchers - Cris Tolomia, Quartz
OpenAI expanded its Daybreak cybersecurity program on Monday with two access tiers and a new AI model built for security researchers, as the company argues defenders face a narrowing window to prepare before attackers deploy AI at scale. The program now includes Daybreak Blue and Daybreak Red. Daybreak Blue gives approved users access to GPT-5.6 Sol with system-level cybersecurity guardrails removed, supporting defensive work such as vulnerability discovery, malware analysis, incident response, and patch validation, the company said. Daybreak Red goes further, giving participants access to models trained specifically for cybersecurity work, covering exploit validation, vulnerability research, and security testing, the company said. OpenAI also introduced GPT-5.6-Cyber, a new model available exclusively through Daybreak Red. Built on GPT-5.6 Sol, the model targets cybersecurity-specific use cases and is designed to respond to higher-risk requests that standard safeguards would otherwise block, the company said. In an internal evaluation, GPT-5.6-Cyber handled 95% of advanced cybersecurity prompts — covering scenarios such as exploit-chain development, authentication bypass, and privilege escalation — while GPT-5.6 Sol with its default protections answered just 1.5%, and the Daybreak Blue variant answered 2%.
Anthropic is embedding invisible watermarks in Claude text and images - Cris Tolomia, Quartz
Anthropic is adding machine-readable marks to text and images generated by its Claude models, a step toward complying with E.U. rules requiring AI companies to label AI-produced content. The markings are imperceptible to the human eye but enable people and platforms to identify when content has been produced by Claude. The company uses two methods. Text generated by supported Claude models carries an embedded watermark that Anthropic says travels with the content if users copy and paste it and may hold up through some degree of editing. For files such as .png, .jpg, and .svg images, Anthropic is applying signed provenance metadata using the C2PA open standard, which is also used by Adobe $ADBE -3.05%, OpenAI, and Google $GOOGL -0.54%, according to The Verge.
https://qz.com/anthropic-claude-watermarks-ai-generated-text-images-081126
Wednesday, August 19, 2026
Focus on the Quantum Future - Ray Schroeder, Inside Higher Ed
While artificial general intelligence and artificial super intelligence will mark significant improvements in AI algorithms, there is not a single clear definition of either of these terms. Therefore, some experts believe that we have already achieved AGI and that ASI is just a year or two away; others say it will be the middle of the century before either is achieved. So, without minimizing the impact of any of the steps toward general and super intelligence, I think we are better served by focusing on more solidly defined steps in AI advancement. That brings us to what may become a pivotal stage of development in AI, the use of stable quantum computing to accelerate and extend the potential of algorithms.
Tuskegee University Awarded Nearly $700,000 NSF Grant to Advance Trustworthy Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare - Brittney Dabney, Tuskegee University
Tuskegee University has been awarded a $699,999 research grant from the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) to advance the development of trustworthy artificial intelligence (AI) for healthcare through a three-year research initiative focused on improving the safety, transparency, and reliability of AI-assisted medical technologies. The project, titled "Excellence in Research: Trustworthy AI for Healthcare: Evidence-Grounded, Compliant, Human-in-the-Loop," is housed within the Department of Computer Science in the Andrew F. Brimmer College of Business and Information Science.
Tuesday, August 18, 2026
AI-Enabled Ghost Student Fraud: How IT Leaders Are Fighting Back - Adam Stone, EdTech
Generative artificial intelligence is fueling a surge in ghost student fraud. Learn how layered identity verification, behavioral analytics and AI-driven pattern detection help higher ed IT leaders stop fraud rings before disbursement. First, there was the zombie college scam. Now it’s “ghost students,” bad actors leveraging artificial intelligence to create fake identities and enroll imaginary students to scoop up grants and loans. AI tools now allow synthetic identities to mimic genuine student behavior long enough to collect financial aid disbursements, and traditional enrollment systems are falling short. The schemes are costing the U.S. taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars in siphoned-off federal financial aid packages
How AI Actually works - Cris Tolomia, Quartz
This piece is not about whether AI is good or bad. It's about what it actually is: how it learns, how it generates output, where its failures come from, and why the problems that afflict these systems are structural rather than incidental. Understanding these things won't make you a machine learning engineer. It will make you a sharper reader of AI coverage, a more careful user of AI tools, and a better judge of claims made by the companies building them. The 15 concepts here cover the full chain — from how models are trained to why they hallucinate, from what "parameters" actually means to why the alignment problem is harder than it looks. Some of these ideas are technical but not complicated. Others are philosophical but grounded in real engineering decisions. All of them matter if you want to engage honestly with the technology reshaping how work gets done, how content is made, and how decisions are reached in medicine, law, finance, and government.
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