AI Article and Resource Roundup
Addressing AI in asynchronous courses, rethinking reading expectations, bracing for AI-induced unemployment, free Gemini Pro access, and a raccoon eating jello
I’ve been spending more time on LinkedIn and YouTube lately. I’m not sure if that’s something to celebrate, but it feels slightly more productive than my usual morning/bedtime routine, which primarily consists of watching baby squirrels doing squirrel things and wombats climbing on children.
To document my more scholarly online pursuits, here’s a roundup of things I’ve been reading and reflecting on.
Free Access to Gemini Pro
In case you missed it, Google is offering a free one-year trial of Gemini Pro for students. The sign-up deadline is June 25th and access is limited to users in the US, UK, Brazil, Japan, and Indonesia.
Based on my experience, the only requirement to verify student status is a .edu email address. Here’s the process I followed when signing up.
Go to gemini.google/students and click “get offer.”
Sign in with a Gmail account.
Enter a .edu email address and then enter the confirmation code.
Provide a credit card. (PayPal is also an option.)
A few concerns about this:
The first .edu email I tried didn’t work. It said that account wasn’t eligible. I think this is because it was affiliated with an instituion that has a Google drive partnership, but I’m not sure.
You’ll be charged $19.99 a month automatically if you don’t cancel before the trial ends.
There are plenty of big questions here that I’d love to discuss, including:
How concerned should we be about student-focused offers like this? Will they exacerbate the gap between instructor and student exposure to the latest AI tools and models?
The credit card requirement could be an impediment for certain students. How can we address that with better plans and policies at the institutional level?
How should institutions secure access to pro-grade tools if they don’t have the budget for campus-wide licensing?
Addressing AI in Asynchronous Online Courses
Jason Gulya recently mentioned on LinkedIn that online asynchronous courses are left out of most conversations when we talk about how to address AI in education. In the comments, Amanda Tkaczyk shared the following teaching strategy that has helped address AI issues in her courses.
Instead of the traditional “respond to this post and comment on 2 others”, I had embedded team based Discussion Group Leaders and assigned Discussed Group Individual Responders in a matrix. Each week, rotating teams would have 3 days to create a VIDEO prompt for their peers - this was fun for them. Then they would post the video prompt with questions for their peers. Individuals who were assigned to respond to each prompt had 3 days to answer. This collaborative co-creation style to discussion forums was interesting as students seemed mutually engaged in the activity as opposed to passsive commenting just for the sake of commenting. I did this also to avoid students not getting feedback on their work from peers, to balance topics, and reduce the stress of responding.
You can view the full conversation here.
Rethinking Reading Expectations
Beth McMurtrie’s recent Chronicle article, “The Reading Struggle Meets AI,” is an interesting follow-up to her May 2024 piece, “Is This the End of Reading?”
There were several great insights from the faculty interviews, but this quote from Susan Blum, an anthropology professor at Notre Dame, really caught my eye:
There are old articles, old journal articles, that I’ve always used, and I look at them from 2025 eyes, and I think, Oh, I don’t want to read that…The layout seems boring and stiff. There are too many words on the page. The author takes too long to get to the point.
I love this frank reminder that the design and wordiness of academic texts aren’t just impacting students. They’re also impacting academics’ eagerness to engage with academic texts. I looked back at what Blum told the Chronicle in 2024, and there are some additional gems there worth highlighting.
Blum recently discussed the argument of Kotsko’s Slate article with her students, who objected to the idea that their generation has lost the ability to read critically. “We have narrowed the definition of reading to a certain kind of material,” she says — namely, textbooks and academic articles — “and then we have drawn the conclusion that they can’t read or they won’t read.”
You might argue, “It’s not just academic reading. We have data that shows students are reading less in general.” That’s a fair point, but I still think Blum pushes us to ask important questions about the “sanctity” of reading. There’s a common perception that reading dozens of pages of text in a single sitting or hundreds of pages per week is an academic badge of honor. It’s often treated as a sort of intellectual ultramarathon—an endurance test that builds core muscles essential for learning.
I recently shared a few thoughts about this on LinkedIn, and I had a lively exchange with Dr. Blum and other colleagues about whether we need to rethink our biases and expectations around reading.
A Dash of Doomscrolling
Feeling too at ease with the state of the world? Short on terrifying AI-related articles that will haunt your dreams? If so, I highly recommend, “Behind the Curtain: A White-Collar Bloodbath.”
If you’re short on time but still curious, here’s my 100% human-generated summary:
Claude tried to blackmail an engineer after it found evidence of an extramarital affair in his inbox.
Anthropic’s CEO, Dario Amodei, thinks AI might cure cancer and create 20% unemployment in the next few years.
The article concludes with a list of potential solutions that could ease economic disruption based on conversations with multiple leaders in the AI space. Amodei has suggested a “token tax,” which could generate significant revenue that governments could redistribute as AI use rises.
Most of the proposed solutions would require an international coalition of well-informed, forward-thinking governments to implement them effectively.
That’s all for today! If you’re in need of a palette cleanser, let me know. I have no shortage of adorable elderly chihuahua photos, videos of raccoons eating jello, and clips of quokkas watching people juggle.
