Opening note
This week felt like everything I was working on was circling the same question from different angles.
What does it actually take to perform when the pressure is real?
Whether that meant reviewing AIDUCATION transcripts, recording a solo episode about inspiration, or rebuilding a product from the user's perspective, I kept arriving back at the same place: the human conditions that make performance possible matter more than we tend to admit.
What I published
Three blogs went out this week from my AIDUCATION26 interviews in Bucharest. Each one draws on a conversation with a practitioner working at the sharp end of AI in education.
The first asks what happens to trust when students can already tell a lesson was planned with AI. The second explores why AI policies often fail on contact with the classroom. The third looks at students turning to AI for emotional support, often outside any adult awareness.
What I'm reading
Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman. The System 1 and System 2 distinction keeps surfacing in my work.
It explains why AI policies do not change teacher behaviour, why inspiration feels hard to manufacture, and why students reaching for AI in moments of emotional distress makes complete sense from a cognitive standpoint, even if the outcomes are not always safe.
What I'm building
I went back into Duxa and started a significant revamp of the mobile app.
The core product was solid. What needed rethinking was the mobile experience, so I am rebuilding from the user's perspective rather than the builder's perspective.
There is a school version of that lesson too. Policies, frameworks, and training programmes can all make sense feature by feature while still failing as lived experiences.
What I'm thinking
Can you learn to be inspirational? My answer is yes, because inspiration is not a fixed attribute. It is an output of conditions.
Those conditions include clarity of purpose, genuine curiosity, and the willingness to be honest about what you do not know. None of those are things you either have or do not have. They are things you can build.
One thing worth your time
The map is not the territory. A policy is a map. The classroom is the territory. A lesson plan is a map. The learning that happens is the territory.
Where in your work are you treating the map as though it were the territory?
Closing thought
Curious where your school actually stands on AI readiness? The DEEP AI Literacy Audit is a good next step.