I was there to represent our recent launch of Pressing Prompts at the 4th Annual Teaching and Learning with AI Conference in Orlando, hosted by the University of Central Florida. The conference brought together more than 1,200 educators to share and connect over AI in education. The audience spanned teaching faculty, instructional designers and technologists, K-12 media specialists, librarians, and academic staff working across many areas of teaching and learning.

The conference kicked off with a keynote by C. Edward Watson, Vice President for Digital Innovation at the American Association of Colleges and Universities (AAC&U) and author of, Teaching and Learning with AI: a Practical Guide to a New Era of Human Learning. Watson ran through some striking stats: employers expect new workers to have AI skills, and they see higher education as the place where those skills will be developed. Yet students report feeling unprepared: 70% of recent graduates say AI should have been integrated into their college courses.

A persistent theme across many of the presentations I attended was helping students exercise discernment about how AI works and when and how to use it. A number of presenters touched on reframing the question from “Should AI be allowed” to “What does responsible AI use look like here?” At a talk on system card analysis, Hao Do argued that AI is not universally making us “dumber,” but that it does pose significant cognitive risks when used passively and uncritically. These ideas felt very much in the spirit of Pressing Prompts.

On Friday, I took the stage to present Pressing Prompts as a TAI Talk (think TED Talk, but for teaching and AI). I opened with a quick game of Connections, asking the audience what linked a set of six groups with whom I’d recently been invited to speak. The answer: all of them are asking questions about AI and all are concerned about AI’s impacts on the communities they serve.

That concern about AI’s ethical and human impacts is at the heart of what Pressing Prompts is trying to address. During the Q&A, someone asked whether we had plans to adapt the content for K-12 audiences. While this is not immediately on the horizon, we are looking forward to engaging with K-12 public school teachers at an upcoming workshop on Duke’s campus.

Throughout the conference, I distributed our mini-zine and had rich conversations about the challenges educators face as they try to keep up with AI and integrate it thoughtfully (and critically) into their courses. I came home with a running list of topics to explore and potential additions to Pressing Prompts.

If you’re wrestling with any of these same questions in your own classroom or institution, we hope Pressing Prompts offers a useful starting point. We’d love to hear what you’re thinking about.

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To reach our team, please contact Hannah, Aria, or Remi.

Coming soon: Remi will facilitate "Pressing Prompts: Questions and Activities" during MYFest26 on Thursday, July 2 at 12p ET.

Press on, critically, together.

We’re so glad you are here! We built Pressing Prompts for educators who want to bring critical, pressing questions about AI and ethics into their classrooms, and who want to do so with the human elements of empathy, inquiry, and curiosity. Because we believe that the most urgent questions about AI aren't technical ones; they're human ones.

Pressing Prompts is an openly accessible collection of activities, resources, and pedagogical guidance organized around the questions we think are genuinely worth pressing on: Can we trust AI? Is AI theft? Does AI harm critical thinking? Is AI a spy? These are just some of the questions we hope you will explore with students, colleagues, and anyone else who thinks current cultural conversations need more nuanced and critical approaches to understanding AI.

And the questions we raise aren’t rhetorical. Each Pressing Prompts topic opens with evidence-based inquiry exploring issues such as labor exploitation, environmental impacts, surveillance, bias, and what it means to think and learn in an age of algorithmic prominence. We've designed Pressing Prompts to help educators scaffold thoughtful debate and hands-on learning: use conversation starters that need no prep; access structured, student-centered activities featuring step-by-step instructional plans; and access “Learning Notes” with in-depth pedagogical guidance and assignment modifications.

A Note about Design

We want you to know that we worked alongside Claude (specifically Claude Code/Opus 4.7) to build Pressing Prompts, particularly in the development of our codebase, user interface, and the site’s aesthetic elements. Productively wrestling with questions like Do we need AI? requires that we actually reckon with AI ourselves. We used AI where it was genuinely useful; we didn't use it where it wasn't. That discernment, we think, is exactly what we're asking educators and students to practice both within and outside of the classroom.

And, to be clear, we created Pressing Prompts with Claude’s help because we wanted to experiment with and model new approaches to AI-enabled academic innovation. Our team knows a lot about learning, design, and sensemaking. We brought our expertise, skills, and skepticism into collaboration with Claude–and then we facilitated the iterative creation of Pressing Prompts. In doing so, we thought deeply about how knowledge was created and shared, how learning should be joyful and transformative, and how critical consciousness about technology and other systems of power shapes how we experience and impact the world. Agentic AI, like Claude Clode, makes it easier for us, as both educators and learners ourselves, to experiment with the form, function, and content of learning processes and products. Such critical and creative tinkering wasn’t as accessible even six months ago; and now, we’re committed to further iterating Pressing Prompts in light of future AI-enabled opportunities and your feedback.

A Note about Privacy

As you get to know Pressing Prompts, it’s important that we share our commitment to privacy: This site does not require you to login; it has no account creation function; and it does not collect your data. You can browse all topics, build a playlist of activities, and export your playlist as a PDF or Markdown file for your LMS. And when you're done, we haven’t tracked analytics or passed along any data. We built Pressing Prompts that way because our values about privacy aren't separate from our pedagogy; they're part of it.

Here’s What Comes Next

As a complement to our public launch, we’re excited to share Pressing Prompts during presentations at two upcoming conferences:

• Our team will be at the AI in Education at Duke Summit (May 28); Remi will share the lightning talk “Sensemaking the Loop: How we’re making sense of AI-enabled academic innovation” featuring Pressing Prompts, and both Hannah and Remi will discuss the project during the Summit Showcase.
• Hannah will represent our team at the University of Central Florida’s Teaching and Learning with AI conference (June 11-13), sharing the talk “Building a Teaching Toolkit for AI Ethics” about the origin and growth of our project.

And we’re also organizing a faculty experimentation community for Duke faculty that will convene at the start of next academic year–stay tuned for updates.

Pressing Prompts is not a finished product. It's a pedagogical experiment, and we expect it to evolve from the feedback, adaptations, and critiques provided by educators and students who use it. We're glad you're here.

Press on, critically, together.