Vince Wall 💬 @vincewall - Bluesky Profile

From Levels to Learning: Rethinking AI Assessment in History Departments How do we meaningfully design assessment of and for learning when the presence of AI tools fundamentally changes the game? Earlier this term, I was invited to present to a group of school curriculum leaders who are preparing to reimagine assessment for the 2026 school year. The timing is both exciting and daunting. These leaders find themselves on the frontlines of a rapidly shifting educational landscape, grappling with the complex interplay of generative AI, cognitive development, academic integrity, digital equity, and evolving pedagogies.

I recently presented to curriculum leaders as they reimagine their school's assessment. In this blog post, I unpack how #teachers might use the AI Assessment Scale (#AIAS) as a design tool — one that supports #assessment of and for #learning in the age of #GenAI.

#schools #education #teaching

27.10.2025 13:12 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

On Bubbles and Burners: Teaching for Cognitive Friction in the Age of AI We’re entering a moment in education where the learning process itself is up for renegotiation. With generative AI now accessible to every student with a keypad, the temptation is real: skip the hard part, avoid the struggle, bypass the friction. Tools like Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude are fluent, persuasive, and increasingly responsive — so, the question we now face isn’t…

Teachers are increasingly needing to decide not WHETHER to us #AI in #schools but HOW to use it.

This paper employs some powerful metaphors of visualising how to teach with AI.

21.10.2025 11:35 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Healing History: A Student’s Phrase and the Purpose of Difficult Pasts A student's wisdom from within our class yarning circle “History isn’t just about what happened. It’s about what we do with it.” We talk a lot about AI in education right now - and yes, I use it in my planning, research, and even in drafting reflections like this one. But for all its convenience and power, it can’t do what happened in my classroom last week.

“We study history to help heal the hurt and harm of the past.”

A powerful phrase, gifted by an insightful student in a yarning circle. After a few week's break, the Disrupted History blog returns this week to reflect on teaching 'difficult histories' in an age of AI.

13.10.2025 09:48 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

The Strawman Problem: What the binaries of the EI vs Inquiry Debate Get Wrong There’s something brittle about education's recurrent discourse around Explicit Instruction (EI) and Inquiry. For all the energy it generates, the debate feels stale - locked in false binaries and riddled with misrepresentations. Lately, I’ve been returning to the work of Sweller, Dreyfus, and especially John Dewey, trying to find a more honest, rigorous way forward. What I’ve found is that the loudest voices in this debate - particularly some advocates of what I’ll call “extremist EI” - aren’t really arguing against historical inquiry at all…

Tired of the "explicit vs inquiry" nonsense? So am I.

Here’s my new post on the false binaries of the EI conversation. I look at Sweller's expertise reversal, guidance fading, Deweyan inquiry, and historical pedagogy. I respond to 3 strawmen messing with best practice.

Let’s end the nonsense.

09.09.2025 04:45 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

History ‘on the run’: How AI is Becoming a Study Companion in Surprising Ways Offering interactive Vietnam War mind maps through study guides to personalised audio and video summaries, Google’s NotebookLM is reshaping how my History students study - even on the move. In this post, I reflect on what happened when I introduced it to Year 12 Modern History, and how one Year 9 student showed me how far in front of others she was by listening to AI-generated overviews of historical topics while jogging.

I've been mainly focused on my research in recent weeks BUT I've just published a new blog post exploring how Google's NotebookLM is reshaping the way students learn in my History classroom - from AI-generated mind maps to audio overviews students are listening to while out running!

#schools #AI

31.08.2025 20:30 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Quick Post: Not Cheating – Learning How are students really using AI in the classroom? This thoughtful and candid episode from the AI in Education podcast flips the script - handing the mic to the learners themselves. Featuring a group of articulate and reflective students from my classroom, the episode dives into the grey zones of AI use in schooling - from study aids to moral dilemmas.

🎧"It's not cheating. It's learning."

Hear directly from students navigating the ethical use of AI in schools in this powerful episode of the AI in Education podcast. Thoughtful, honest, and future-focused.

#AI #AIinEducation #AI4ED #schools #teaching

07.08.2025 13:20 — 👍 0 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

Whose Nation? Whose Story? Using AI to Confront Narrow Narratives in Year 9 History If you grew up in Australia and studied history in the 1970s or 80s like I did, you likely encountered a story of nationhood that was neat, triumphant, and sanitised. It was a story of explorers, settlers, and infrastructure — a relentless march towards “progress”. For all its coherence, the cost of such a narrative was its silences: Indigenous resistance, the trauma of dispossession, and the violence of the Frontier Wars were largely absent.

Who gets remembered in national #history? And how? That’s the question my Year 9 History students tackled recently through the use of Google Gemini 13-18 EDU and NotebookLM. A provocatively playful - and deeply reflective - #AI activity about perspectives and power.

04.08.2025 13:07 — 👍 0 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

“Wisdom of the Heart in the Age of AI: Reading Antiqua et Nova” I recently spent time with the Vatican’s Antiqua et Nova: Note on the Relationship Between Artificial Intelligence and Human Intelligence, a document co-authored by the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Dicastery for Culture and Education. At over a hundred paragraphs, it’s as theologically weighty as it is ethically urgent - wide-ranging, bold, and, in parts, surprisingly hopeful.

In a world awash with generative tools, educators are urged not to fear AI - but to shape it with wisdom, and to use it in service of humanity.

💗 A “wisdom of the heart” must guide our use of AI in education, especially in history classrooms where justice, community, and truth-telling matter

15.07.2025 23:30 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Brain-to-LLM, Cognitive Debt, and Being Strategic: Going behind the headlines of ‘that MIT paper’. The recent MIT Media Lab study Your Brain on ChatGPT made headlines for all the wrong reasons. Accusatory articles and alarmist social media posts latched onto a simplistic narrative: that AI tools like ChatGPT are, in short, 'cognitively corrosive'. But the real story is far more interesting and far more relevant to those of us working in classrooms today. But let's start at the beginning.

What did 'that MIT study' really find?

💡In this post, I go behind the viral clickbait to explore what the MIT research led by Nataliya Kosmyna, Ph.D actually says about #AI, cognitive debt, and #learning - and why the “Brain-to-LLM” approach might be one of the most important ideas for educators

10.07.2025 04:49 — 👍 1 🔁 2 💬 0 📌 0

Can AI Help Our Students Learn and Thrive? A Resounding Yes – But Only If We Act Wisely At the 2025 EduTechAU conference in Sydney, I posed what might seem like a simple provocation: Can AI help our students learn and thrive? The answer I gave was emphatic: Yes. But - and this is a vital but - only if we as educators make thoughtful, urgent, and courageous decisions now. We are living in a moment as consequential as the cusp of the industrial revolution.

🚸 Can AI help our students learn and thrive?
✅ Yes - but only if we act wisely... now!

In my latest blog post, I identify 4 future paths for education in the AI age and argue that educators and educational leaders have an important challenge to rise to!

03.07.2025 06:32 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

So, what do we do? Reimagining Pedagogy – Four Numbers and a Call to Action "It’s not about the technology. The human in the loop matters." - A summary of my presentation to the 2025 QHTA State Conference. This June, I had the privilege of delivering a presentation titled Reimagining History: Refreshing Pedagogy for an AI-Disrupted Classroom. Set against a backdrop of rapid technological change and ever-growing teacher workload, the presentation wasn’t just a demonstration of tools; it was a provocation and a call to reimagine the very core of our pedagogy.

So, what do we do? Reimagining Pedagogy – Four Numbers and a Call to Action
At the QHTA State Conference, I shared how #AI is already reshaping #history classrooms – not in theory, but in practice. Four numbers. One provocation. A flipped, human-centred future for history teaching.
👉 Read the post

01.07.2025 04:07 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Wisdom Before Widgets: Profession Rose Luckin at EduTechAU Sydney 2025, AI, and the Urgency forVision in Education I had the privilege of hearing Professor Rose Luckin speak live twice at EduTECH Australia 2025, and while her reputation as a global authority on AI in education certainly preceded her, it was the clarity, urgency, and humanity of her message that resonated most powerfully. Her keynote was not a sales pitch for the latest tools or a technical showcase. Instead, it was a deeply philosophical and strategically grounded call to action for educators, school leaders, and system architects to engage with AI from a place of wisdom, not novelty.

I went to #EduTechAU 2025 and amstill thinking about Professor Rose Luckin’s call for visionary leadership in the age of AI. Her keynote wasn’t about tools – it was about people. About agency. About pausing, preparing, and partnering for deep, ethical change.

29.06.2025 23:00 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Dissonance

From the Halls of Montezuma
To the shores of Tripoli;
We fight our country's battles
In the air, on land, and sea;
First to fight for right and freedom
And to keep our honor clean;
We are proud to claim the title
Of United States Marine...

14.06.2025 02:05 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

Maybe it's rightly being dismissed as the BS crazy that it is... Maybe it's best not to give this nonsense oxygen.

13.06.2025 23:24 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Watching the deployment of National Guard and Marines on the streets of LA from Australia, it strikes me how afraid the troops look. The general vibe for me is that the Trump administration is frightened of the US population.

13.06.2025 23:21 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Switching to Autopilot: Are We There Yet? From Technical to Metaphorical? From Tool to Cospecies? Conversations describing teacher use of AI are changing (again). Initial educator conceptualisation of AI as 'just another edtech tool' have quickly crumbled - but the metaphor of seeing AI as a tool remains. That said, the tool as metaphor is also now fragmenting as early adopters and some first followers grapple with the conceptual nature of AI bots and agents.

Are We Mistaking Copilots for Autopilots? In a world awash with AI change, are we confusing advanced chatbots with truly agentic AI? DisruptedHistory's latest post on explores why getting our heads around 'agents' matters for educators, researchers, and future-ready schools.

07.06.2025 00:01 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Sleepwalking Through Disruption: Comfortable Delusions in a Revolutionary Age I sometimes think people say they are fine with disruption… until it actually disrupts them. We are not in an age of approaching disruption. We are living inside it. And yet, as educator and technologist Dr Nick Jackson warns, many are sleepwalking into an educational crisis. One where institutions claim to embrace innovation while shuffling forward with the same scripts, assessments, structures, and assumptions that predate the AI age.

We are not in an age of approaching disruption. We are living inside it. And yet, as educator and technologist Dr Nick Jackson warns, many are sleepwalking into an educational crisis.

31.05.2025 23:59 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

3 Essential Principles for AI in Education: Reflections on Publishing Our GAI in Education Article A teacher-led framework for using generative AI to deepen thinking, foster discernment, and support student agency. Last week, I experienced one of those quiet, surreal moments of pause: the kind you get when a milestone you've been working toward for months suddenly clicks into place. My first major peer-reviewed article of my PhD candidature, Generative Artificial Intelligence in Education: Initial Principles Developed from Practitioner Reflexive Research…

TLDR? No worries! My latest blog features a quick summary of (and a vote of thanks to all who assisted with the writing of) my recently published peer-reviewed article on using AI in schools.

29.05.2025 23:11 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Generative artificial intelligence in education: Initial principles developed from practitioner reflexive research This paper explores the use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (GAI) with chat-like functionality (CLF) in education, focusing on the secondary history classroom in an Australian context. It pre...

There's not a huge amount of peer reviewed research on how we might teach with #AI in #schools. As a full-time high school teacher, I'm pleased help address this deficit. I hope other #teachers find it of practical value. Please share widely.

www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

29.05.2025 07:18 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

#47 = f.o.s. smh

23.05.2025 09:10 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

So have we had a "the farmer doesn't want a wife reference" yet? #auspol

20.05.2025 06:44 — 👍 4 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

“Not Either/Or”: Getting to Explorer Mode from the Springboard of Explicit Instruction Why explicit instruction and inquiry aren't mutually exclusive Last week, I travelled to Canberra for the HALT Summit - a professional learning experience that felt more like a reinvigorating recalibration than the 'stock standard' conference. Amid the powerful conversations about impact, innovation, brain science, leadership, and pedagogy, it was Nathaniel Swain’s keynote that had me thinking most deeply long after the applause of at the conclusion of the final had ended.

This week I've been thinking a lot about the false dichotomy of explicit instruction v inquiry. The end result is this blog post: “Not Either/Or”. H/t to Cameron Paterson, Nathaniel Swain, Louka Parry, Jared Cooney Horvath, & Guy Claxton.

18.05.2025 08:32 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Frontiers | Shaping integrity: why generative artificial intelligence does not have to undermine education The integration of generative artificial intelligence (GAI) in education has been met with both excitement and concern. According to a 2023 survey by the Wor...

Hi Vince, my colleague and I wrote this article on why GenAI does not have to undermine education. Please help us share it by reposting to promote dialog.

www.frontiersin.org/journals/art...

09.05.2025 05:16 — 👍 0 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 0

The Slow Power of Objects: Expanding the Space for Wonder in My History Classroom In recent months, I’ve been reflecting on how to purposefully integrate Object-Based Learning (OBL) into my history classes. It strikes me that any fundamental shift in how we think about designing history pedagogy for the AI era should allow for increasing opportunities to engage with the physical world around them. I believe we should imagine AI, not as a replacement for human-centred learning but, as a space-maker.

AI can be a space maker for the things that matter most in history education. When used within a flipped learning approach, it helps to make space for teachers and students to focus on collaboration and connection-making. That's why, I've been recently reflecting on Object-Based Learning.

08.05.2025 23:59 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 1 📌 0

I Shall Bear Witness: The Diaries Of Victor Klemperer 1933-41 Victor Klemperer · Audiobook

A couple of weeks ago, I made the decision to engage with the work of Victor Klemperer. I cannot recommend it highly enough. I've taught the #Holocaust many times and done a lot of study / reading on the topic but Klemperer is special. #History #teaching #edusky
open.spotify.com/show/7Dd7nRq...

05.05.2025 12:17 — 👍 2 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Something of interest for #teachers via #Edusky? Some thoughts on field trips and #edtech- especially the wonderful @goosechase.com.

05.05.2025 12:10 — 👍 0 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

Beyond the Bus Ride: Some Reflections on Building Impactful in Field Trips and Excursions If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you know I don’t believe doing things - including excursions or field trips - just for the sake of ticking a curriculum box or burning up a bus budget. Teachers need to act with purpose. They must know their why. To me our purpose is clear. We are about learning. Therefore, class activities must be about learning - not about filling in time, not just about 'engagement', and not 'just fun'.

How can school excursions spark real historical thinking?

In my latest Disrupted History post, I explore how tools like GooseChase, Polycam, and Thinglink transform field trips into moments of civic inquiry, reparative justice, and deep reflection.

05.05.2025 02:42 — 👍 2 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 1

Thanks to everyone at @goosechase.com who have helped me in supporting my students' learning.

03.05.2025 07:44 — 👍 1 🔁 0 💬 0 📌 0

More Than a Game: Using the GooseChase Scavenger Hunt to Foster Presence, Connection and Agency in History Education In 2019, at the ISTE conference in Philadelphia, I was introduced to a mobile platform called GooseChase EDU. Marketed as an app for gamified learning, it promised student engagement through scavenger hunt-style missions. That kind of language can feel gimmicky, especially for a subject like History, where the goal is often deeper thinking and ethical reflection rather than fast-paced point-scoring.

This week I reflect on how I’ve been using edtech tools (in particular @Goosechase EDU) to shift history learning beyond the classroom - building student presence, connection, and agency through museum excursions and community-based homework. #edtech #historyteacher #education

03.05.2025 02:47 — 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 1

More Than a Game: Using the GooseChase Scavenger Hunt to Foster Presence, Connection and Agency in History Education In 2019, at the ISTE conference in Philadelphia, I was introduced to a mobile platform called GooseChase EDU. Marketed as an app for gamified learning, it promised student engagement through scavenger hunt-style missions. That kind of language can feel gimmicky, especially for a subject like History, where the goal is often deeper thinking and ethical reflection rather than fast-paced point-scoring.

This week I reflect on how I’ve been using edtech tools (in particular @Goosechase EDU) to shift history learning beyond the classroom - building student presence, connection, and agency through museum excursions and community-based homework. #edtech #historyteacher #education

03.05.2025 02:47 — 👍 1 🔁 1 💬 0 📌 1

Vince Wall 💬

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