Week in Edtech 9/9/26: AI Cognitive Offloading, NYC School AI Restrictions, The Tech Backlash, The Paradox of Banning AI, and More! Feat. Shan Reddy & Vivek Vajipey of Aristotle and Dr. Ron Smith of Salesforce

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Wake up. Like, that's not what it's like in your schools. Your floor is incredibly low. You need to raise the floor. Your ceiling is incredibly low. You need to raise the ceiling. And there's no burning platform in blue states, period, full stop, to say we need to do something different about education. Meanwhile, parents are like, hey, these red states... I abhor their social views, but the kids actually learn to read and write pretty damn well, and they can actually get jobs. Maybe I should move to a Sunbelt state where they care about kids actually getting an education versus grinding a political axe.

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Insiders. Remember to subscribe to the pod, check out our newsletter, and also our event calendar. And to go deeper, check out EdTech Insiders Plus, where you can get premium content, access to our WhatsApp channel, early access to events, and back channel insights from Alex and Ben. Hope you enjoyed today's pod. Hello, Tech Insider listeners. It's me, Ben, alongside Alex. Oh my gosh, so much stuff to cover. You just were in Germany. How

was your trip? I just had like a life-defining experience over the last week. It was totally incredible. I was in Frankfurt. I was invited by Barb Oakley, who is... arguably the most influential learning teacher in the world. She's the Oakland University professor who teaches the learning how to learn course on Coursera and many other courses in that vein that has over six million students on Coursera. She's published like, I think, five books on education. And she invited me to basically be in these rooms of incredible researchers from all over the world doing neuroscience, cognitive science, developmental science, education in every context, incredible people. And I learned so much. And it was all about AI and cognitive offloading. So there was very deep conversations about how AI can support and limit learning outcomes. What a blast. We're putting a book together out of it. That's how this works. It's an Ernst Ströman forum, which is a particular model that they do for putting together research. It was totally incredible. And it's got me thinking very big thoughts about the future of AI and education. And then, of course, meanwhile, while I was there, these crazy things happened in New York and L.A., which we got to sort of announce live in the middle of these talks about exactly these issues. It was amazing. How have you been, Ben? Well, you've been doing all sorts of amazing things stateside, right?

Yeah, holding down the fort here. We do have an EdTech Insiders happy hour coming up next week on the 16th in Los