Public Inspection: Extension of Compliance Dates for Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability; Accessibility of Web Information and Services of State and Local Government Entities Extension of Compliance Dates for Nondiscrimination on the Basis of Disability; Accessibility of Web Information and Services of State and Local Government Entities

The federal government just extended the deadline for enforcement for a full year. No one thought this through. www.federalregister.gov/public-inspe...

I was happy to contribute to this AI literacy framework for teens developed in partnership with the WAO and BBC. downloads.bbc.co.uk/rd/responsib...

What Happens When Students Stop Believing Their Work Matters A maxim I’ve oft repeated for our AI era is that if a task can be automated, then it will.

When a machine can now mimic the work of a human being, many of us, especially students, must be asking what the point is anymore. That’s a much more dangerous and slippery problem than students submitting AI-generated work. open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

Pope Leo XIV has urged priests to not to use artificial intelligence to write their homilies or to seek "likes" on social media platforms like TikTok. In a question-and-answer session with clergy from the Diocese of Rome, the pope said priests should resist "the temptation to prepare homilies with artificial intelligence." "Like all the muscles in the body, if we do not use them, if we do not move them, they die. The brain needs to be used, so our intelligence must also be exercised a little so as not to lose this capacity," Leo said in the closed door meeting, according to a report by Vatican News on Feb. 20. "To give a true homily is to share faith," and artificial intelligence "will never be able to share faith," the pope added.

I'm deeply against using AI to grade. But y'all, the Pope has asked priests to stop using AI in homilies. Do you really think that if THE POPE has to tell priests to stop using AI for intrinsically personal and spiritual matters that telling a teacher "just don't use AI to grade" is going to work?

Instructors, as I have previously written, are also using plenty of AI. Canvas recently introduced a new AI teaching agent designed to save instructors time on “low educational value tasks” such as organizing online-course modules and adjusting assignment due dates. “Faculty are using AI tools both for instructional purposes, for building course materials, but they’re also starting to play around with generative AI to actually grade and assess the learning,” Marc Watkins, a researcher at the University of Mississippi who studies AI and education, told me. He gave a hypothetical: “I could set my agent up, open it up in my course, go out on campus to walk across campus to get a cup of coffee at Starbucks,” he said. By the time he returned, 15 minutes later, all of the essays would be graded, and “bespoke personal feedback” would be sent out to each student. AI can save teachers time—that same grading takes him 10 or 12 hours, Watkins estimated—but in the process, the technology threatens the relationship between students and teachers that is core to education. “That’s really scary,” he said.

We're entering a time where purpose and intentionality are going to be more important than "getting something done." I was happy to sit down with Lila Shroff from the Atlantic to talk about how teachers using AI to grade can erode trust in the name of efficiency www.theatlantic.com/technology/2...

We're probably going to see a GOP push to blunt the regulation and make it moot. There's simply too many lawsuits. lawler.house.gov/news/documen....

Who (Or What) Filled Out Your Course Evaluation? Canvas will introduce its first AI agent directly into the LMS later this year, arriving in a chaotic landscape where few institutions have considered how agentic AI will impact faculty teaching and s...

We've only begun to think about the risks AI agents pose to faculty labor. Grading is one area. Consider if a student uses an agent to fill out a teacher evaluation and the upstream consequences of bias impacting promotion, tenure, or renewal. open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

AI's efficiency trap may be harming education | Marc Watkins | TEDxUniversityofMississippi YouTube video by TEDx Talks

I don’t think faculty should use AI to grade student work. I think we should be wary of how quickly faculty are falling into AI’s efficiency trap. youtu.be/nSyipCaxruU?...

The Dangers of using AI to Grade Nobody Learns, Nobody Gains

Wonderful! Also please stop misrepresenting my positions for engagement bait and cheap clicks. I've written extensively about the dangers AI poses in education and its impact on student learning and faculty labor. open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

I never implied faculty should be spending 90 minutes of their free unpaid time learning about AI. I absolutely acknowledged this increases labor that no one asked for. We must demand institutional support to ensure any extra time spent dealing with AI is compensated. And it is Marc not Mark.

OpenAI's Education Pitch Has a Free Version Problem OpenAI wants universities to invest in educational AI at scale, but students already live inside a free AI ecosystem that universities cannot control.

OpenAI wants universities to invest in educational AI at scale, but students already live inside a free AI ecosystem that universities cannot control. That was the unresolved problem hanging over OpenAI’s 2026 Education Summit. open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

I'm working on a post about the 2026 Education Summit held at OpenAI's headquarters last week in San Fransisco. Probably the biggest take away was the work OpenAI's James Donovan is attempting to research how students learn (or don't learn) using ChatGPT. Lots to unpack.

At SXSW Edu and it’s a steady stream of micro credentials, workforce training, future ready gibberish. No event has acknowledged AI agents exist or how agentic tools call into question the validity of certifying anything digitally right now. People have ignored AI developments.

When DOGE Unleashed ChatGPT on the Humanities

“The prompt was simple: “Does the following relate at all to D.E.I.? Respond factually in less than 120 characters. Begin with ‘Yes’ or ‘No.’” The results were sweeping, and sometimes bizarre.” When DOGE Unleashed ChatGPT on the Humanities www.nytimes.com/2026/03/07/a...

They aren’t all dead and they aren’t mini-LLMs. It’s a persona. They tasked the AI to “respond like X” and it mimics the authorial style based on its training data. Anne Lamott was the living author it produced for me. I don’t think they bothered asking her.

The Chronicle asked me to offer my prediction for what 2026 has in store for higher education and what I hope Universities will focus on our AI era. www.chronicle.com/article/high...

I did. I’m not sure what grounds Canvas would have. The only C&D he’s posted about was related to the name. Everything about this screams scam.

Einstein & The Rise of Nuisance Tech AI may be one of the most transformative innovations of our lifetime, but not when it is treated as spam.

Einstein isn’t really a threat to academic integrity so much as it is another distracting piece of marketing hype. It isn’t clear if it was a hoax, a failed app launch, or piece of tech posing as performance theater. AI agents represent challenges to online learning open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

I'm working on a post about the Einstein AI agent that claimed it can do a whole course for you and log into canvas. It is likely a hoax or failed vibe-coded app. It has been taken down. Agentic AI like Perplexity's Comet browser CAN take a course for you. Knowing what is BS will always be valuable

Screenshot of an article header from a website. The title reads "Writing As Thinking—By Proxy" in bold serif font. Below it, the author's name "by Jon Ippolito" appears as a red hyperlink, followed by the date "Wednesday, February 18th 2026" in gray monospace font. The article preview shows a photo of a cream-colored t-shirt on a hanger printed with cartoon robots and the text "The Transformers: Writing Instructors in the Age of A.I." alongside an italic abstract that reads: "In this provocation, Jon Ippolito questions what human capabilities AI extends and what capabilities it removes. In doing so, he charts the evolution of human writing processes alongside technology while speculating on what future human writing practices will look like."

Will “writing as thinking” survive the AI age? A provocation from Jon Ippolito, followed by a conversation among the other "Transformers," Mark Marino, @anetv.bsky.social, @mahabali.bsky.social @marcwatkins.bsky.social Jeremy Douglass, and me.

preview.electronicbookreview.com/gatherings/t...

Before You Buy AI for Your Campus, Read This Does your institution need to buy AI?

There's much talk about universities buying expensive AI licenses, but will students even use them? Arguments about access, equity, and security are often part of the marketing used to sell AI, but these become meaningless if students don't stop using free AI open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

We left Oxford yesterday after five days without power from the ice storm. I think it may have been restored at our house, but over half the town is still without power. The outage map tells the tale.

What We Give Up When We Let AI Decide Automation Is Easy. Judgment Is Not.

Day 8/10 sharing provocative scenarios to spark conversation about AI grading. Faculty have hidden directions to catch students cheating with AI. What happens when students do the same and use prompt injection to fool AI grading tools into giving them a higher grade open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

What We Give Up When We Let AI Decide Automation Is Easy. Judgment Is Not.

Day 7/10 sharing provocative scenarios to spark conversation about AI grading. How will parents and students feel about AI being used to grade? Some might welcome the efficiency of it, while others might ask why they're paying for college for a machine to grade them open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

What We Give Up When We Let AI Decide Automation Is Easy. Judgment Is Not.

Day 6/10 sharing provocative scenarios to spark conversation about AI grading. Agentic AI automates workflows. When grading and feedback are viewed as just another workflow, how easy is it for faculty to cede agency to an algorithm? open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

Prep for the SAT with practice tests in Gemini Gemini now offers full-length, no-cost practice SATs, featuring content from The Princeton Review.

I can see so many high school students going to Gemini to take practice tests, repeatedly. Will it help? Maybe. It also might mean we're headed to a world where people become more interested in assessing knowledge in ways that are less transactional. blog.google/products-and...

What We Give Up When We Let AI Decide Automation Is Easy. Judgment Is Not.

Day 5/10 sharing provocative scenarios to spark conversation about AI grading. Some faculty are using AI to proctor oral exams, recording students, what responsibilities do faculty and institutions have if sensitive information is disclosed by a student to the AI? open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

What We Give Up When We Let AI Decide Automation Is Easy. Judgment Is Not.

Day 4/10 sharing provocative scenarios to spark conversation about AI grading. AI models offer different levels of access and capability. Students may have access to better models, use 'councils of LLMs' to grade, or argue human judgement is biased vs. AI. open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

What We Give Up When We Let AI Decide Automation Is Easy. Judgment Is Not.

Day 3/10 of sharing provocative scenarios to spark conversation. Students may soon arrive in college expecting faculty will use AI for feedback and grading because their teachers used AI in high school. How would this affect faculty decisions around using AI? open.substack.com/pub/marcwatk...

I went through age verification instead of switching to VPN to login to Bluesky. IMO, it is absurd some states (I'm in MS) implemented this for social media, but so it goes. Equity, access, and protecting teens pose lots of challenges for online spaces. I don't know how this will work with AI.