Dear Educators,

What can we say about all this AI business? It sure feels like a whirlwind, doesn’t it?

Take ChatGPT. In its first five days after launching, ChatGPT reached a million users. Within two months, it reached a hundred million. And as of last February, they were up to four-hundred million. Yes, that’s weekly users.1

It’s hard to make sense of.

And how many of those ChatGPT users are our students, you might rightly ask.

Well, last October, during an OpenAI forum in New York City, an answer emerged from one of their senior leaders. And perhaps this won’t surprise you? But as reported by education writer Mark Watkins, it was revealed that “the majority of the active weekly users of ChatGPT are students.”

That’s a lot of students. Over 200 million?

And perhaps this holds true for other frontier models like Gemini and Claude: over half of generative AI users may be students? It’s sure hard to know.2

A Quick Poll

With all this in mind, let’s do a quick show-of-hands — or the online equivalent: a digital poll.

What percent of your students use AI?

On Teens & AI

With teens in particular, perhaps it’s impossible to get a clear sense of how many use AI - but it doesn’t keep us from trying.

As noted by a Pew Research Center 2024 study, the use of ChatGPT for schoolwork has doubled among teens age 13 to 17 — to 25%. And more specifically, as noted by K-12 Dive, 31% of juniors and seniors use ChatGPT, and 20% of seventh-graders and eighth-graders do as well.3

This figure may seem a bit high, especially when remembering what EdSurge reported about ChatGPT’s age requirements. According to ChatGPT’s rules, teens older than 13 but under 18 need a parent or guardian’s permission.4

But teens find a way, don’t they?

And if we look beyond just ChatGPT and its use for schoolwork, we find much greater AI use among teens. 70% of teens use some kind of generative AI bot — with 60% using AI for personal use, and 36% for schoolwork — as reflected in a study by the Center for Democracy & Technology,

This 70% figure is consistent with the 2024 Common Sense Media report. And what interests me most is not the percent. It’s what’s trending for teens with how they use AI. We should learn from them. Half of teens use AI for homework help. Two in five use it for translation help. Two in five use it for assignments. And here’s my favorite statistic: two-fifths use AI to “stave off boredom.”5

And do their parents know?

According to Common Sense, about two-thirds of parents of teens that use AI do not know. Furthermore, over half of the parents surveyed have never talked with their kids about AI. This rings true in Tucson. When I’ve done workshops here with K-12 parents, it’s always more than half the room who have not yet broached the subject.

No surprise.

But perhaps more importantly, 83% of parents in the Common Sense study reported that their K-12 schools have never communicated with them about AI.

But of course.

When six in 10 teens in that same study also report that their schools have never issued any AI guidance to them, we’ve got a real problem.

Either we don’t know how to approach K-12 AI policy — or we don’t know how to communicate it yet.

On AI in Colleges

So what about generative AI use in higher education — for better or worse?

Personally, I like to begin with the AI usage gaps between students and faculty. Looking back to the Fall of 2023, this usage gap came to my attention through the Time for Class study by Tyton Partners. As Inside Higher Education noted about their report, over twice as many college students were using AI as faculty. And though instructors’ and administrators’ AI use has since grown to 40%, as noted in their Fall 2024 report, we’ve also learned that student AI use has as well — to nearly 60%.6

Similar data has emerged in a national study of 337 college leaders through AAC&U and Elon University. In that study, most college leaders reported a parallel gap around perceived student and faculty AI use.7 Likewise, the 2025 EDUCAUSE AI Landscape Study suggests that students are either using AI more — or “a lot more” than faculty.8

So where do all these roads lead? What are all these reports telling us?

They tell us that college students continue to use AI more than faculty. And even if the gap differs at some schools, their use is growing. At one college I spoke with twice last year, faculty perceptions of students’ AI use leapt in just eight months from non-use to over half of students using generative AI.

Revisiting the numbers, some studies suggest that student AI use is much higher. A global study shared at Campus Technology reports that 86% of college students say they use AI in their studies.9

Yes, eighty six percent.

And how often do they use AI, you might ask?

Well, 54% use it weekly and 24% use it daily, according to this same poll by the Digital Education Council.

But as with teens, what interests me most is how college students are using AI to support their learning. Anthropic’s latest report on how college students use Claude AI gives us a window. And I should note that I first learned about this through one of Beth McMurtrie’s helpful letters to educators at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

As I read her letters, two things struck me. First, as McMurtrie noted, Anthropic decided to release their report alongside the launch of Claude for Education and its new “learning mode.”10

But second, she shared the survey data which noted that 39% of college students use AI to “create and improve educational content.” In other words, students are using AI to address what we … perhaps … aren’t addressing. They use AI to address those learning needs that we’ve either overlooked, or we’ve been unable to meet.

Across all of this data, the most persisting question for me is this: what does it mean when students are more familiar with AI than … those who make the rules about it?

On Surreptitious AI Use in Schools

To make this even spicier, let’s bring in another edgy question. What percent of your students would still use AI, even if it was banned by their teacher or their school?

Please take a moment to vote:

At the K-12 level, among students that use AI on assignments, 46% do so without their teachers’ permission — as noted in the Common Sense Media study.

And at the college level, it’s up from half to three-fourths, according the Tyton Partners’ studies.11

No matter if it’s K-12 or college, our students who use AI will continue to use AI — even if it’s banned.

And what does this mean for how we approach AI use in our classrooms?

Stepping Toward What’s Next

End of the day, we educators are incredibly adaptive and resilient.

Perhaps we are the most remarkably adaptive, most flexible, and most responsive people in the world? I am biased, I know.

But we make it happen for our students. We help each of our students prepare for their futures. We strive to make sure that they are informed and empowered — so that they can advocate for whatever comes next. In this way, I dare say we’re the world’s most important profession.

But considering the privileged responsibility that all of us carry, I want to leave you with two questions to chew on:

• What might it take for this generation of students to be practiced enough, and informed enough about what’s next with AI, that they will be able to guide our AI future forward — guardrails and all?

• How might you create more of a space in your classroom to help your students learn how to use AI — safely, ethically and transparently — so that they can be prepared for the AI that will be part of their college and career pathways?

I realize that these are very sticky questions — especially for those who don’t want to use AI.

Whomever you are, I hope these questions make one thing clear about our own personal use of AI: if we aim to make effective, informed decisions about students’ AI use, at the very least, we need to make time to play with generative AI — routinely and expansively.

If you aren’t already doing so, I hope you’ll give it a try. And I hope you will also hold onto your critiques and concerns about AI as you dive in. We need those too.

Last but not least, if this data share was helpful, please like (♥) my post or click “Leave a Comment,” and share what’s on your mind as you read this.

Leave a comment

Stay tuned and warm regards,

Reed

Read more Letters to Educators at Curious Tendril. Stay Curious! And if you want a deeper dive into the statistics, please see my footnotes below.

Dear Educators,

If you have not — and will not — use AI, you’re not alone.

Every time I give a talk on generative AI — whether to students, educators, or other professionals — the room is split. While two-thirds may be dabbling or even diving into AI on a daily basis, a third will be reluctant about AI, or even dead-set against it — and perhaps for good reason?

As I begin this blog, I want to take a moment to acknowledge some of the many concerns about AI.

And if you are the educator, who like me, cannot help but gush about AI — you are the kind of reader I most hope this reaches. More specifically, if you are that educator who simply cannot fathom why anyone might be cautious about an AI future, or about AI in the classroom — if you think, well, these positions are just unreasonably rigid or unresearched — please, take a moment to consider the persisting and emerging concerns about AI.

First and foremost, there’s the environment. AI appears to have real energy consumption1 issues that are growing each day — accompanied by a large water footprint.2 Next, we’ve got accuracy. Beyond AI’s penchant for brazenly inventing or omitting facts, only to apologize later, AI has this persisting accuracy problem3 that … Stephen Colbert might rightly refer to as digital truthiness.4 And perhaps most importantly, AI continues to echo many of the biases of the web and the world.5

Moral quandaries abound.

Clearly, digital innovation is not neutral in the age of AI. And when it comes to that list of concerns, we have only scratched the surface. As I see it, this is the stuff of ethical inquiry that our students should be taking on in our classrooms, so let’s keep it going. How about an old-fashioned, run-on sentence that tries to reflect the full scope of all that’s emerging?

Take a deep breath. Here we go …

Other AI concerns include labor augmentation and displacement6 amidst the use of AI agents as digital proxies,7 the hyper-growth of synthetic media filling the web,8 AI bots that are also overcrowding the web,9 cognitive offloading,10 and the persisting problem of how frontier models default toward authorship erasure11 and user-input scraping,12 and let’s not forget about copyright erosion,13 or the misuse of those image and voice and video generators that can create those astonishingly life-like deep fakes that then get used for cyber-bullying14 and electoral fraud,15 not to mention the threat of AI cyberattacks,16 nor the need for guardrails as we quickly advance toward semi-autonomous agentic interaction and collaboration,17 and what about the slew of AI-led wrongful arrests across America that seem to have gotten zero press18, or the quiet militarization of AI,19 and last but not least, let’s not forget the plausible specter of artificial super-intelligence (or “ASI”) in our lifetimes.20

Need we say more?

And we didn’t even touch on the prickly debates around AI in the classroom.

As I see it, these are concerns that we all should pay attention to — especially those well-meaning, AI-positive educators who might inadvertently push against educator choice by … pushing for mandatory AI adoption.

And to any readers who don’t want AI in the classroom, I hear you completely.

You deserve to be heard — and to have a safe space at your school to share your thoughts — and to have choices about AI in your classroom.

As you finish this post, regardless of where you stand, I want to hear from you. How do you lean when it comes to student use of AI in schools? Are you an advocate, or a critic, or undecided?

Whether you avoid AI, or you dive in — be it on your own, or with your students — I’m eager to learn more about your experiences. Whether you work in K-12 schools, higher education, or workplace learning and development (L&D), I hope you will leave a comment to extend the discussion.

Finally, and this may surprise you, in my letters to come, I will make the pedagogical case for why educators might nonetheless want to dive in, and start playing with AI today.

Stay tuned and warm regards,

Reed

p.s. For a deeper dive into the aforementioned AI critiques, please see my extended footnotes.21

I was especially glad to hear Kaepernick take up the question of how we can support educators in this new AI era:

“Over 70% of teachers have never received any kind of formal AI training. So if we actually want to get students up to speed, how do we support teachers in that process — where they don't feel like, I have to be an AI expert in everything, all at once, to be able to start using it.”

Check out this early highlight at ASU+GSV 2025’s AI Show on April 6, Kaepernick’s first appearance leading up to the ASU+GSV Summit. To learn more about his new EdTech app, visit Lumi:

Stay With Us.

This was Post #3 of Curious Tendril. Up next is To Those Who Don’t Want To Use AI. Stay Curious!

Thank you for indulging me. I have this penchant for analogous imaginings. If you give it enough time, for me, every landscape becomes a classroom. It’s as if all of life were the stuff of learning?

So what do we do with this dog-park-as-classroom scenario within the standard LMS? Is something rotten in the state of Denmark?1 Is all not well in the digital landscape of online spaces?

Truth be told … not all is well in the land of brick and mortar, either. Age-old problems persist, like divergent social learning needs. If only we could summon a digital AI persona of Lev Vygotsky2 to guide us through this.

But seriously though. Here’s the thing: this design question is unlikely to be taken up in the first place.

Is it not foolish to hope that any designer of online spaces might have the disposition — much less the luxury — to take up the challenge of social learning? After all, and bottom line, business is booming.3 It’s as though all demand within the education market is for more of the same — albeit, with some AI dressing on the side.

Could this be so?

And when demand is uninspired, perhaps our designers’ hands become tied? Are they not expected to give the customer whatever they want — even if it’s a simulation of stuff that never actually worked in the brick-and-mortar classroom.

So it goes.

But on the off-chance that any single, curious designer reading this piece might be aching to advance what Roberto Verganti calls an “innovation of meaning,” I’m offering up this story as a lens on the problem of social learning — not merely as a user-experience, or UX portrait, but as a story about our divergent pedagogical experiences - or PX4 if you will. This means students, and of course, their teachers.

PX for Designers

So then, what kinds of PX questions are worth asking? Here are three.

1. Rethinking Home. How might a sense of home be built into the course home page — as well as each school’s global home? Should designers leave the possibility of home up to schools, their instructors, or their LMS admins? Why not let our LMS designers reimagine various kinds of menus for a digital front-door? Should we really expect every educator to have the advanced instructional design skills that seem to be needed to make home possible? And returning to our analogous scenario, what design choices by instructors might make both Reed and Bee feel at home online? Or better yet, why not set it up so that each student could choose their own personalized design, and then rearrange the furniture as they see fit?

2. Rethinking Community. What might the ideal LMS look like that takes up the charge to help students connect? What if we could design this, dare I say, even better than our physical classrooms? What might an LMS feel like if it helped students connect in real time — or at least what we might call “near-synchronous” time? How much of a lift would it be to enable peer-tagging from any course page? What might it take to ensure that every student could jump straight into a live chat or video call — right from within the LMS? After all, even asynchronous students want synchronous time with peers and instructors. And when will our students be able to tag their instructor from any page in the LMS — just as easily as they might raise their hand in a physical classroom?

3. Toward the Sync in Asynchronous. How might tomorrow’s LMS shake that distancing feeling of what we call “distance learning”? What might the LMS of the future look like where students, upon entering, could actually see who’s online? What might the LMS sound like where students could hear the Cheers equivalent of “Norm!” filling the room? How might the LMS be better designed to bring isolated students together in real time (or the closest thing to it), without it feeling forced or obligatory?

Leaving the Dog Park

As the evening sets in, Bee and I exit the park to head home.

In the distance, there’s a frolic of freewheeling children romping around on the playground. I hear their swings: out and up, and back again, and I imagine myself swinging, kicking my feet into the air. And I wonder once again — just as I did as a child — what must it be like to have wings?

As we pass by the children, I see a living portrait of pure exuberance.

It is fantastic.

And then I think to myself, here’s a good question for another essay:

What might online learning spaces look like if they were … less like the walled gardens of vacant dog parks, and more like a playground? What more might we learn from our glorious children — or the design of our playgrounds — to help us reimagine what it means to feel connected, and at play, inside the LMS and beyond?

As I think this, Bee is tugging the other way with great urgency. I’m here, I’m here, he seems to be saying to another dog that has finally appeared.

Is it okay? asks the dog’s owner.

Of course, I say, and we smile as the dogs sniff each other.

I’m glad that we came and lost track of time. I needed this, and so did Bee.

The dog park’s design, of course, is far from ideal. But at just this time, it was just what we needed. And I wouldn’t have come here at all, were it not for my dog.

I reach into my pocket, find my phone, and end the recording.5

Share Your Thoughts

This was the closing part of On Dog Parks & Online Social Spaces at Curious Tendril. If anything was clarifying or troubling in a useful way, please leave a comment — and please share it forward with other designers.

Up next at Curious Tendril is Colin Kaepernick on Student Voice, AI in the Classroom, and Supporting Teachers.

Stay Curious!

5

In case you’re curious about my recording, the essay above was far from verbatim. The transcript gave me a great first draft. If you’d like to try using voice-to-text with Otter, here’s a quick visual on how it transcribed my audio journaling: an AI-generated conversation summary as bullet points, a full transcript with AI-generated keywords, and then a summary paragraph. While some folks love the summaries, I just ignore them and export the transcripts.

Alone again, eyes closed, I let myself drift.

I fully unwind — upward and outward — as if my mind is predisposed to reach and keep reaching till it latches onto something larger?

I am a tendril.

And for me, the nearest holdfast is almost always about our schools or our technologies — and how we design them. For whatever reason, they’ve become my lifetime obsession. So reach with me for a moment and let’s practice what the design firm IDEO refers to as “Analogous Inspiration.”1

The Dog Park as Analogous Inspiration

Imagine that on this glorious winter day, the space before us is not only an enormous dog park, but a kind of classroom. Bee and I, we are the students. And you are the teacher. And on this particular day, your students have vastly different needs.

Bee needs community. And I need a break from it.

We both need to be here — but we need this in very different ways.

In your head, you hear the phrase, “Different students, different needs.” But within the four walls of your classroom, how can you meet both?

And isn’t it something, how after all these years, it’s still such a struggle to address this age-old problem?

Let’s leap again.

Into the Flat-Screened World

Imagine now that we’ve somehow slipped into yet another educational realm: the flat-screened world of the digital classroom. You, me, and of course Bee.

The same questions persist in this scenario. Will your two students find what they most need within this learning management system (LMS)? Will they even be able to find each other?

Surveys says, no, and that’s unfortunate.

Will they at least be able to look themselves in the mirror somehow, or hear their own voice? Or will the roundness of their distinct personalities just be flattened into two dimensions?

When Home Means Alone

Imagine sweet Bee for a moment. He scans and he sniffs every edge and every corner of what’s called the “course home.” It’s a funny phrase, isn’t it? The course ‘home.’ You didn’t design it - but you do try to decorate it when time permits.

Perhaps this much is understood: that every landing page — be it a course home or a school’s global home — ought to reflect some idea of home?

So as for Bee, does he feel at home? Even if he’s alone? Even if there’s no other dogs to talk to on the other side of the digital fence?

Bee picks up a scent.

It’s a whole-class announcement replete with live links, so off Bee goes without looking back. You imagine, when Bee arrives, that he’ll find some glorious way to share his digital bark … or perhaps spray a canine version of “I was here, I was here!”

Bee isn’t gone long. But when he returns, he tilts his head to the side. He can’t find you, the educator, in real time. Nor me.

We’re nowhere in sight.

He shrugs his little dog shoulders. This place is a ghost town. Are there no real-time dogs? This place just is not made for students like Bee.

When Asynchronous Means Without

And then of course, there is Reed, sitting over there by himself on what appears to be some kind of digital bench. He is absorbed in his own little personal reading moment. Or perhaps he’s logged in, but completely checked out? For all you know, he could just be happily lost in some Spotify playlist.

Whatever he’s doing, you hope he’s at least found a creative way to connect with his peers through some kind of back channel? It’s just so hard to know. Most back-channel tools are informal — and even when they actually are integrated into your school’s learning management system (LMS), even if there’s an instructor dashboard, it’s too hard to know if your students are truly connecting. Perhaps the integrations are just too basic? If only you, the educator, could get inside Reed’s head in real-time — right within these spaces that they still want to call “asynchronous.”

It’s an interesting word, isn’t it? Asynchronous?

The origin seems pretty clear, but you can’t help yourself. You seek out the entry at the Online Etymology Dictionary and find the prefix A- followed by the word synchronous. The derivation seems clear. The prefix syn- and the root khronos would mean time together. So the word asynchronous means … without time together. It sure is pretty sobering when you look at it that way.

How strange, that we all could be in the same digital space at the very same time, yet no-one would know it? Why on earth would anyone want to preclude our ability to know who else is ‘present’ in real time?

But what can you do about product design? You’re only the teacher.

So you do what you can with what you’ve got. You focus on your students. You send out this survey with three open-ended questions: What’s been working for you, or not working? What should I know about you? And, what do you most need to succeed?

You wait and you wait.

Disparate Needs & AI Dogs

Most of the class does not respond. But Reed and Bee do, lucky you. And these little surveys tell you a lot about these students.

So what works for Reed?

As for today, he’s happily alone in the most isolated corner of this digital dog park. He’s glad this isn’t a brick-and-mortar classroom — or he would’ve had to drop this class by now. No offense to in-person teachers. But the commute itself … it’s time and money that he doesn’t have. He’s a parent and works full-time. What’s working most for him is simply this: the online aspect.

What isn’t working? Well, most of the other dog park patrons.

No offense, but he’d rather not speak to anyone at all — only if he must — and only if it felt authentic and real. He doesn’t have space for any go-through-the-motions, perfunctory kind of obligations. Reed spends most of his day in meetings, so end of the day, he needs to recede. The small talk is rough. To make matters worse, he’s had some health challenges. He’s had an eye surgery, and it didn’t go well. And there is one thing he really wants you to know: four of your PDFs just didn’t work with his text-to-speech tools.

But overall, he is relieved that he can now export most readings from the LMS directly as audio. That’s a game-changer.

He’s also glad that he finally figured out how to customize his phone’s triple-click feature to make it easier to read most websites with his ears. Incidentally, he’s also using voice-to-text to respond to this survey.

And what about the final question: what does Reed need? Does Reed need to be social?

Apparently not. He just needs a park bench, and an occasional, spontaneous chat with that one other student he already knows in the class named Bee.

And as for Bee’s responses, well … here’s what he says in the survey:

What good is a digital bark when no digital dogs will come running? It just isn’t fun. Isn’t learning supposed to be fun?

As you read this, you have to wonder. What if there were some kind of AI dog2 that could run around in this digital space — and always be there in real time? A dog to run with, but also a dog that wouldn’t intrude unless you called.

Wouldn’t a real-time AI dog resting there in your LMS be better than nothing?

Continue Reading Part 3 of 3

The Dog Park on Christmas Day

It is a rare thing in Tucson, Arizona, when you can sit alone in the sun and sense your skin drinking in the wetness of the air. It's Christmas day at the dog park, and my dog scampers from tree to tree, sniffing his fill, and peeing on everything.

I do live through him of course — this dog I didn’t really want in the first place — he keeps me going. His name is Bee.

And having been holed up for months after eye surgery, it is especially good to be here today at the dog park. Though my eyes are closed, at least for the moment, I am finally out in the world.

I press pause on my audio-recorder, and I sit with the stillness.

The wind through the mesquite is louder than the road behind me.

And this is also what I needed: nature filling my ears — louder than the road, louder than all the industrial noises that surely surround us.

Dare I say, it’s a perfect day.

As I open my eyes, I find that Bee is now over by the entrance to the dog park. He gazes longingly at a smaller dog beyond the fence. He runs back and forth, as if to say, “I’m here, I’m here.”

Bee is a love.

He is here to play, to run, to sniff the universe of possibility. He is the perennial optimist — always believing that another dog will arrive. But as for me, on this particular day, I’m the opposite.

I came here hoping for the gift of a ghost-town on Christmas Day. I came to this public dog park to simply sit and be a ghost. Just me and my dog.

And I know, this is a public space. It’s made to be shared. On a good day, I would celebrate how this dog park, like most public spaces, just comes to life when the public arrives, but, not today.

I just need the quiet, the wind through the trees, some good deep breaths — and yes, an occasional glance at my dog, before closing my eyes and being still.

I open my eyes again — the slightest bit — and somehow, Bee notices.

He runs across the park and he leans into me. Or, we lean into each other, you might say.

I pet him, and he decides to stay a little longer.

I soothe him, I tell myself, or perhaps he’s soothing me?

It is good, either way.

And I know it won’t last. He’s got other needs.

And right as I think this, off he goes to re-smell every inch of the park.

And I guess I have other needs too.

I press record and I speak to the stillness.

Continue reading Part 2 …

It’s a peculiar thing to launch a blog when I’ve never much liked blogs. They sit rock-bottom in my reading lists. But I am a peculiar cat and I revel in reversals. Whereas I once was a book-loathing boy who suddenly ached to be a writer, today, I am a blog-loathing man who suddenly needs to blog.

A Place to Stay Curious

So here I am, in the land of blogs, trying to take curiosity seriously.

Through Curious Tendril, first and foremost, I’m here to stay curious about daily life. But by extension, I am also here to stay curious about the whole constellation of practices that go by the names teaching and design — not to mention the big ideas that give our lives meaning — ideas like equity, innovation and sustainability. And let’s not forget that persistent little acronym, AI.

With Curious Tendril, I aim to bring pedagogy to designers, to bring ‘design thinking’ to the pedagogians, and to bring both to anyone who is curious. And I know, ‘pedagogian’ is not yet a word. But most educators know what I mean: it’s those of us who eat, drink, and sing pedagogy, unabashedly.

While Curious Tendril begins primarily with pieces for designers, educators and school leaders, my hope is that all visitors and subscribers will find posts and resources here that uniquely speak to their interests. In other words, something for everyone.

With the launch of Curious Tendril, I am including my first “Tendril” piece that bridges daily life with teaching and design:

• On Dog Parks & Online Social Spaces. This is a hybrid essay that begins at the dog park and spins out towards the question of how to meet divergent social learning needs within online learning spaces.

To all readers of Curious Tendril: expect an occasional piece like this that begins like a journal entry — like a long walk with Reed where our conversation slowly expands toward larger questions that cling and persist, or even bloom. Essays like tendrils.

A Space for AI

If you’ve attended my talks on AI, you have likely heard me speak about what I call the ‘Urgency of Play.’ You’ve heard me say that we cannot make effective decisions about any roadmaps — be they for our schools or our Ed Tech products — unless we are first immersed in playing with generative AI. We cannot imagine the worst or the best of what AI will bring, nor can we plan around both, unless we are immersed in the latest AI.

With this in mind, Curious Tendril aims to walk the talk. As such, expect regular how-to pieces that I’m calling Tendril Tips that will share AI or other EdTech practices that you can try on your own.

And while Curious Tendril will include AI as a regular focus, do not expect this to be a blog constrained by AI. This blog is willfully wide open, and reaching toward the new.

The Blog as a Commitment to Staying Curious

Personally, I’m launching Curious Tendril to keep myself accountable to a discipline of inquiry and creative expression. My goal here is to step out from the quiet indulgence of personal journaling toward a kind of public inquiry — one that invites broader conversations. Perhaps most importantly, Curious Tendril is my new nudge to share these ideas with you.

So, Why Tendril?

To be clear, the ‘tendril’ is no literary genre.

A tendril is simply an everyday miracle of nature that helps me, in particular, make sense of who I am. It helps me see how I make connections, and how my observations curl upward and outward till finding their anchors. Some of these “written tendrils” will clearly reflect that process.

Most of my initial pieces here began as audio journals recorded in the dark while recovering from eye surgery, or they began while I was walking the dog. For those pieces that begin with me walking the dog, I sincerely hope they feel like the kind of talks in which, no matter where we begin, we always arrive somewhere that matters.

The Tendril’s Reach

Being the perennial dreamer, I have ridiculous, fantastical visions for this blog.

I would, of course, love to someday see Curious Tendril as the most highly-subscribed blog on tech, teaching, design or AI. But, practically speaking, I’m just hoping that a handful of these posts might resonate with a few kindred spirits.

If they do resonate with you, maybe let me know?

Keep Reading

This was the inaugural post for Curious Tendril at Substack. If this sounds like it might speak to you, please tap your like button (♥), leave a comment, and share it forward with anyone you know who might be curious.

Up next is a field note for designers titled, On Dog Parks & Online Social Spaces. Stay curious!