Education Futures

A podcast about the future of education in the age of AI. We bring together interdisciplinary voices to explore how we can shape more desirable futures for learning.

Education Futures is a education podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 0 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80. PitchCentric scores this show on Booking Probability, Listen Score, and live audience signals refreshed every 24 hours.

Unknown Host hosts Education Futures, a education show with 0 episodes published.

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  Episode #72

  Can AI build human connection instead of replacing it?

  Sep 9, 202642 minS1

  Julia Freeland Fisher is Director of Education Research at the Clayton Christensen Institute, the nonpartisan think tank built on Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation, where she has spent 13 years making the case that who students know matters as much as what they know. She holds a BA from Princeton and a JD from Yale Law School — a credential she cheerfully calls "a very expensive detour," having decided along the way that she did not want to be a lawyer. She began her career in 2007 at NewSchools Venture Fund, at the height of the No Child Left Behind era, when American education reform was measured almost entirely in test scores and graduation rates. Looking at the world of work, she noticed that networks quietly determined who got jobs, internships and promotions — and that this was completely absent from the reform conversation. She joined the Christensen Institute in 2013 to incubate the idea nobody was funding: social capital as a measurable, buildable education outcome. She is the author of Who You Know: Unlocking Innovations That Expand Students' Networks (Wiley), co-written with her husband Daniel Fisher, with a foreword by Clayton Christensen. Today her work sits at the intersection of social capital and AI. She writes Connection Error on Substack, on how AI is changing our relationships and how our relationships are changing AI. Her latest report, Prosocial Possibilities: Building Tech That Builds Students' Connections (with Anna Arsenault, published August 2026), documents a project with 10 ed tech platforms testing prosocial features and functionalities in the college and career guidance space. She is also running an early-stage Jobs to Be Done study with Bob Moesta on what actually drives demand for AI companionship among 18–24 year olds. In this episode, Julia talks with Svenia Busson about: Why relationships are the thing everyone in education agrees about and no one is accountable for — no budget line, no outcome metric, nobody's job AI companions as a textbook case of disruptive innovation — the risk comes less from the technology than from how flagrantly we've neglected human connection What prosocial AI looks like in practice — Protopia, Road Trip Nation, Climb Together and Uprooted Academy The four "jobs to be done" behind AI companionship in her study with Bob Moesta — and why not one young person used the word "loneliness" Fear of burdening others as the most potent force pushing teens toward chatbots, both pushing and pulling Why measurement alone won't save human connection — "what gets valued gets measured gets done" — and where the Search Institute's Developmental Relationships Framework and Harvard's relationship mapping fit in The 75+ US state bills regulating AI companionship, warning labels that miss the point, and federal cuts to outdoor education as two sides of the same coin Help-seeking and networking as the most neglected "skill of the future" — the Connected Scholars curriculum tripled graduation rates, and no employer ever asks for it The AI conversation education is missing: relationships are the real disruption. Links mentioned in this episode Julia Freeland Fisher at the Clayton Christensen Institute: https://www.christenseninstitute.org/people/julia-freeland-fisher/ Prosocial Possibilities (Julia Freeland Fisher & Anna Arsenault, Aug 2026): https://www.christenseninstitute.org/publication/prosocial-possibilities/ Connection Error , Julia's Substack: https://juliafreelandfisher.substack.com/ Who You Know: Unlocking Innovations That Expand Students' Networks : https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/37862640 Navigation & Guidance in the Age of AI: 5 Trends to Watch : https://www.christenseninstitute.org/publication/navigation-guidance-ai/ NewSchools Venture Fund: https://www.newschools.org/ Protopia: https://protopia.co/ Road Trip Nation: https://roadtripnation.com/ Climb Together: https://www.climbtogether.org/ Uprooted Academy: https://www.uprootedacademy.org/ Search Institute — Developmental Relationships Framework: https://searchinstitute.org/resources-hub/developmental-relationships-framework Making Caring Common (Harvard GSE) — Relationship Mapping Strategy: https://mcc.gse.harvard.edu/resources-for-educators/relationship-mapping-strategy Connected Scholars (Jean Rhodes, UMass Boston): https://mentoringcentral.net/mentoring-training/connectedscholars/ The Rithm Project — Youth, AI, and the Relationships That Shape Them : https://www.therithmproject.org/ Common Sense Media research on teens and AI: https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research Foundation for Social Connection (Julianne Holt-Lunstad): https://www.social-connection.org/ Jobs to Be Done theory (Bob Moesta's framework): https://www.christenseninstitute.org/theory/jobs-to-be-done/

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  Episode #71

  Teens, AI, and the conversations we are not having

  Sep 7, 202643 minS1

  Laura Zimmermann, Ph.D., is the Director of Youth AI Research at Common Sense Media, where she leads research within the newly launched Youth AI Safety Institute — the first independent safety lab dedicated to testing how AI products affect children. She earned her Ph.D. in Psychology at Georgetown University with a concentration in Human Development and Public Policy, and was an Institute of Education Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the School of Education. For over a decade, Laura has studied how children learn from screens — starting in infancy and early childhood and working her way up to tweens and teens. Her graduate research at Georgetown, in collaboration with Binghamton University, tested whether the well-documented "transfer deficit" (young children learn less from a 2D screen than from a live person) also applied to the then-brand-new iPad. It did. Her landmark paper, The Ghost in the Touchscreen: Social Scaffolds Promote Learning by Toddlers ( Child Development , 2017), showed what closes that gap: a responsive human sitting next to the child. She is also a co-author of Developer Meets Developmentalist: Improving Industry–Research Partnerships in Children's Technology ( Journal of Children and Media , 2018). Across her career she has led research for PBS KIDS, Sesame Workshop, New America, the Aspen Institute, the Bay Area Discovery Museum, Google, and MIND Education. She credits two mentors in particular: Lisa Guernsey at New America, and Donna Mitroff — the educational consultant behind Mister Rogers' Neighborhood . At Common Sense Media she is a lead author of Teens in the AI Era: Schoolwork and Skills That Matter , a nationally representative survey of over 1,000 US teens aged 13–17, fielded with NORC at the University of Chicago. In this episode, Laura talks with Svenia Busson about: The transfer deficit — why toddlers learn less from a touchscreen than from a person, and the one thing that closes the gap Why 70% of teens now use AI for schoolwork, but only a minority have ever discussed with a teacher what AI actually is The 63% who get answers from AI — and the 77% of that same group using it for brainstorming, feedback and checking work instead The nearly 90% of US teachers who have received no AI professional development, and what that vacuum produces Why 44% of teens have had an AI tool blocked at school — and 59% of them simply switched to a personal device The 38% who say AI makes them generate fewer of their own ideas, and keep using it anyway — grind culture as a hypothesis AI companions: 72% of teens have used one, and why Common Sense Media's position is that under-18s shouldn't use them at all The sycophancy problem — why "practising" social skills with a character that always agrees with you isn't practice The equity question nobody has data on yet: does AI narrow or widen the gap between well-resourced and under-resourced students The developer/developmentalist gap — what it would take for child development evidence to shape a product before launch rather than after the scandal The most powerful intervention isn't a policy or a filter — it's a conversation without judgment. Resources mentioned in this episode: Teens in the AI Era: Schoolwork and Skills That Matter — Common Sense Media Talk, Trust, and Trade-Offs: How and Why Teens Use AI Companions — Common Sense Media Youth AI Safety Institute and its free AI Risk Assessments of tools kids actually use Digital Literacy & Well-Being Curriculum, Grades 9–12 — free AI literacy lessons for teachers The Ghost in the Touchscreen: Social Scaffolds Promote Learning by Toddlers — Child Development , 2017 Laura Zimmermann's research The Disengaged Teen — Jenny Anderson's episode, referenced on teen shame around AI use Mentioned in this episode: For those who wish to know more about the Education Futures fellowship: https://educationfutures.ai/fellowship

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  Episode #70

  Inside England's digitized curriculum, built for AI

  Sep 3, 20261h 2mS1

  John Roberts is the Chief Executive of Oak National Academy , an NGO publicly funded by England's Department for Education to build a free, fully digitised national curriculum for England's schools. A former secondary school teacher and senior leader in the North West of England, he built his first reputation outside the classroom by founding Edapt in 2011, an independent edu-legal support service for teachers and school staff, where he remains chair. In April 2020, as COVID closed schools overnight, Roberts helped launch Oak as an emergency remote-learning platform — going from a WhatsApp conversation to a live site in 12 days, delivering over 130 million lessons between April 2020 and July 2021. He joined initially as Director of Product and Engineering before becoming CEO. Under his leadership, Oak evolved into what he calls the world's first fully digitised, machine-readable national curriculum: 13,000 lessons and roughly 100,000 resources across all 17 National Curriculum subjects, now used by one in three teachers in England. In September 2024, Oak launched Aila , England's first publicly available generative AI tool, now used by more than 60,000 teachers to plan lessons grounded in Oak's own openly licensed curriculum data. In this episode, John talks with Svenia Busson about: Why Oak scaled from a pandemic emergency platform into England's official digitised curriculum The case for openly licensing school content under the UNESCO 2019 Recommendation on OER Building Aila — and the safety and quality failures (Americanisms, guessable multiple-choice distractors, chatbot risk around sensitive texts like Romeo and Juliet ) that shaped its design Why grounding AI in a rich curriculum corpus, including full lesson transcripts, beats one-shot lesson generation Cognitive outsourcing vs. cognitive offloading — keeping teachers in the loop on lesson planning What Oak's open misconception datasets and curriculum knowledge graph (published on GitHub) enable for other builders, and how they compare to efforts like Eedi's misconceptions research with Google DeepMind Why public digital infrastructure, not just AI models, is the missing layer in ed-tech — from the US's philanthropically funded Learning Commons to Anthropic's MCP standard Open questions ahead: faster evaluation methods, the pending NFER/EEF evaluation of Aila , and England's 2028 curriculum change Mentioned in this episode: Education Futures Fellowship A six-week programme starting on September 22nd, where seven world-leading experts in developmental psychology, neuroscience, and AI child safety will share everything they know with you: educationfutures.ai/fellowship.

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  Episode #69

  What the AI debate misses about the Global South

  Aug 30, 202648 minS1

  Dr. Maria Mercedes "Didith" T. Rodrigo is a Professor in the Department of Information Systems and Computer Science at the Ateneo de Manila University in the Philippines, where she directs the Ateneo Laboratory for the Learning Sciences (ALLS) and co-heads the Ateneo Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality Laboratory. For over two decades she has studied what students actually do and feel while learning with technology — detecting boredom, confusion, frustration and engaged concentration from interaction data inside intelligent tutoring systems, educational games and programming environments. She is a former President of the Asia-Pacific Society for Computers in Education (APSCE) and a recipient of its Distinguished Researcher Award, and sits on the Executive Committee of the International Artificial Intelligence in Education Society. Her opinion piece "Is the AIED Conundrum a First-World Problem?" (International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education) argued that the classrooms most likely to benefit from AI are the ones structurally least able to deploy it. In July 2025 she delivered the keynote "The Technopolitics of AIED: A Developing Country's Perspective" at the AIED conference in Palermo, and later that year argued for culturally-responsive AI at the K-EDU EXPO in Korea . In this episode, Didith talks with Svenia Busson about: Why AI in education is built on Western psychological constructs — and whether boredom in Manila is the same as boredom in Michigan The Scooter experiment: US students deliberately provoking a scolding animated dog, Filipino students insisting "Scooter cares about me" "Gaming the system" — why students in the Philippines pretend to work rather than walk out, and what generative AI does to that instinct Findings from WHIMC , the University of Illinois Minecraft science environment, where lower-performing Filipino students made almost no observations — the cost of saving face Testing LLM grading bias on Filipino English, after earlier work showing essays written in African American English scored lower AI Ed Unplugged — Seiji Isotani and Ig Ibert Bittencourt's Brazilian movement to design AI for classrooms with one device, one connection, and paper exams Why she'd give the scarce resources to the teacher first — including the maths teacher assigned to teach relaxation massage Epistemic vigilance as the successor to critical thinking, and why friction, confusion and struggle have to be designed back in The trade-offs a Global South education minister actually faces — including feeding programmes, because hungry children cannot learn Mentioned in this episode: For those who wish to know more about the Education Futures fellowship: https://educationfutures.ai/fellowship

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  Episode #68

  Building schools where 25 Million have none

  Aug 26, 202646 minS1

  Zia Akhter Abbas is President & CEO of The Citizens Foundation (TCF), one of the world's largest privately-run networks of formal schools for low-income children and the largest private employer of women in Pakistan. He came to education sideways: an IB diploma at Lester B. Pearson United World College in Canada, an MBA from LUMS , then seventeen years in senior business and risk roles at Citi and Standard Chartered, plus a board seat at 1Link, Pakistan's leading payments switch. He left banking for TCF in 2014. For a decade he led TCF's global resource mobilisation, working with a volunteer movement across 14 countries, building the organisation's global governance framework, stewarding its Government Partnership Schools network (400+ public schools now run by TCF), and driving TCF's Strategy 2030. He became President & CEO in June 2025. The organisation he now runs began in 1995 with six friends in Karachi who met every Wednesday, decided education was the closest thing to a root cause, and built five schools with their own money. Today TCF operates 2,261 school units across 60+ districts, educates roughly 300,000 students, employs ~24,000 people including 15,000+ female faculty, runs its own construction company that completes two to three schools a week, and moves teachers 75,000 kilometres a day in a fleet of nearly 1,000 vans. Its results: 55% of TCF students complete intermediate (vs 27% nationally) and 26% enter university (vs 12% nationally). Zia is a Schwab Foundation / World Economic Forum social entrepreneur and a board member of the Global Schools Forum . In this episode, Zia talks with Svenia Busson about: Leaving banking for education after seventeen years — and why the nonprofit job turned out to be harder How TCF scaled from five schools to 2,261 units using the "unit concept," a cookie-cutter template for an entire school system — and what a sacred template costs you Pakistan's 25 million out-of-school children — a population the size of Australia — and why the state stopped building schools decades ago Funding 300,000 students with no government money: $60M a year raised through diaspora volunteers, chapters in 14 countries, and zakat as a global community endowment The all-female faculty decision, made intuitively rather than from research — and the finding that girls' enrolment drops 15% for every 500 metres of walking distance What broke when EdTech built for paying markets met dust, theft-prone tablet racks and 24-hour power cuts — and why TCF may have to build its own tools The Khan Academy Pakistan / Khanmigo pilot for Grades 6–8 maths and science, why it went teacher-facing rather than student-facing, and what principals said when asked if they'd ever use AI Why AI literacy training was rolled out before any AI tools — and why you educate 24,000 people rather than police them The Global South inversion: why the biggest unlock may be language, not tutoring, in a country where everything meaningful requires English Why the acute Western harms — mental health, isolation — look different when eight people share a room and the phone belongs to your father Mentioned in this episode: For those who wish to know more about the Education Futures fellowship: https://educationfutures.ai/fellowship

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