Michael Hanegan

21 years of marriage to the best human I know. She is brilliant, obscenely talented, so very kind, and has made my life better in too many ways to measure. Here’s to another 50! Love you 109.

I NEED YOUR HELP!

My proposal for the SXSW EDU 2025 conference has moved on to the next round and is now open for community voting and I need your support! This is an important step to bringing my work on and to a larger audience.

Here you can learn more about my proposed session: "Being Human-Centered in the AI-Powered Future of Learning": https://panelpicker.sxsw.com/vote/155049

Voting is open until August 12th (so sorry if you get sick of this on your feed this week!).

Here is my description of my proposed session:

There is little question that generative artificial intelligence is disrupting the work of human learning, and this particularly true in formal education. This session explores how we ensure that our work is fundamentally and unapologetically human-centered. This means that we must change our language, our underlying approach to how we leverage technology in the work of learning, and how we design and deploy our learning communities at all ages and stages. This human-centered approach helps us begin to answer some of the most difficult and complex questions facing us in the future of learning.

Please consider voting and sharing with your networks!

PanelPicker | SXSW Conference & Festivals PanelPicker® is the official SXSW user-generated session proposal platform. Enter ideas and vote to help shape Conference programming for SXSW and SXSW EDU.

In anticipation of my workshop this weekend at the Atla Annual Conference, my colleague Chris Rosser and I are excited to announce the release of version 2.0 of our whitepaper "Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Theological Education" including an audio version which utilizes a clone of my voice through ElevenLabs.

Get access to the full paper here: https://bit.ly/theological-education-and-ai

If you are in and around and want to play with here are some of my favorites for that space (leaving out most of the technical and experimental stuff). All of these have a free version and have real application in the classroom.

Check it out here:

AI + Education

One of the best single conversations I have seen on the future of learning and work. HUGE disruptions, but for those who are willing to dig in, to learn how to learn, it is an exciting time with enormous upside.

Check it out here:

Future-Proofing Your Organization: Adapting Skills for the AI Workplace | ASU+GSV Summit 2024 Julia Stiglitz (CEO and Co-Founder, Uplimit), Kian Katanforoosh (CEO & Founder, Workera), David Blake (CEO & Founder, Degreed), Karen Kocher (General Manager...

TLDR - I have a model for an AI Innovation Lab dropping soon. I think it is super dope. If you are interested in an advanced look to provide feedback let me know.

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For the last couple of months I have been working on something big for K-12 and Higher Ed to help them think and work strategically in the initial phases of engaging and integrating into their work.

Soon I will be publishing my AI Innovation Lab model.

Here are some highlights and important features that set this apart from what I am seeing elsewhere in this space:

1️⃣ It provides a robust way to measure and enact differentiated learning according to each participant's level of interest and readiness.

2️⃣ It maps out a detailed, modular approach to content modules that optimize the specific learning path of each participant.

3️⃣ It leverages the insights and power of the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (UTAUT2) model, one of the most well-documented models for technology adoption in education.

4️⃣ It proposes a detailed, staggered cohort model that capitalizes on the formative power of social influence and the particular strengths and areas for growth for every participant.

I am looking for people in this space (academics, practitioners, educators, administrators, librarians, etc.) who might be interested in spending an hour together walking through a brief presentation of the model and offering feedback before final publication. If interested, leave a comment below or drop me a DM.

I am very proud of this work. I believe that it meets a real and urgent need in an innovative and robust way, and I can't wait for it to make its way out into the world.

Welcome to the next stage of human learning. What a time to be alive!

How to think, how to understand problems, how to structure the progression of solutions, how to build strategy and synergy with incredibly powerful tools. This is the future.

I think that as these tools get more powerful and the interfaces become more user-friendly, requiring less technical expertise, that these other underlying skills will be exponentially more important.

I would rather teach someone about mental models, creativity, and knowledge management (all learning how to learn) than a prompt engineering class. Period.

Check out the article here:

Why Engineers Should Study Philosophy The ability to develop crisp mental models around the problems you want to solve and understanding the why before you start working on the how is an increasingly critical skill, especially in the age of AI. Coding is one of the things AI does best and its capabilities are quickly improving. However,...

Another one for the people who say that Generative AI is just for cat pictures and better emails…

Generative A.I. Arrives in the Gene Editing World of CRISPR Much as ChatGPT generates poetry, a new A.I. system devises blueprints for microscopic mechanisms that can edit your DNA.

I've been seeing an uptick in school leaders and administrators that look at the pace of change and disruption coming with for education who have stated that they will therefore take a "wait and see" approach. Here's three reasons why I think this is wrong both strategically and ethically:

1️⃣ The world and your students won't wait.
The level of access to powerful AI tools is already huge at no cost. Between open-source tools, free versions, and increasing integrations there is literally no longer a real barrier to entry. Not to mention that most of our students who have a phone will likely have an entirely local LLM available to them before school starts next year (thanks, Apple).

2️⃣ Schools (K-12 and universities) that take a "wait and see" approach in the 2024-2025 school year will measurably disadvantage *at least* two classes of students (24/25 and 25/26) both in their subsequent education and the marketplace. If you care about equity then "wait and see" is not an option.

3️⃣ If you claim to care about the work of learning and human formation (after all, what is learning if not the shaping of people), then why would you opt out of the future of human learning and work in this way? If you have concerns (and there are real concerns), the only meaningful way to shape future design and use is to engage, not to watch from the sidelines.

What do you think? Is it wrong to take a "wait and see" approach in this once-in-a-lifetime moment?

In November, my colleague Chris Rosser and I published a whitepaper on Theological Education and AI. We wrote it from blank page to published in less than three weeks and had to rewrite two sections because they had already been rendered obsolete.

I am really proud of how durable this paper has been, and how there is really nothing that I would change (so far).

It has opened up some incredible conversations and collaborations that I can't wait to share more about very soon.

In the meantime you can read the paper here:

Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Theological Education | Notion By Michael Hanegan and Chris Rosser

The Gap is coming.

In productivity, in skill, in employability, in income, and in education.

For now the gap between those who leverage and those who "wait and see" is (relatively) small. But very soon, this gap will become exponentially larger.

The gap between people who do nothing or very little with AI + those who are building an introductory level of proficiency is growing, but can currently be "closed" in a relatively short time (think less than 100 hours). But what people don't realize is how small this window is.

This is a gap that will be unlike any other innovation before it. The next year is an unprecedented opportunity for early adopters and quick learners to have an exponential advantage, potentially for the rest of their lives.

The cost of not moving will be higher than ever.

As these tools become more powerful, as their implementation becomes more pervasive, and their impact on life and work expands there are those who will wait because they don't see the ultimate impact of what is coming, and how this disruption is like nothing before it.

If you are 63+ or are already financially set for life, you don't have a choice to lean in or not. You only have the ability to choose how helpful or harmful to your vocational and economic life these tools will be for your future.

Upskilling needs to start TODAY.

But this isn't upskilling like before. You don't need a 2-year MBA, to read 100 books, or hire an expensive coach. You need to rapidly cultivate what I call the "work behind the work". These are those skills and capacities that, when present, are largely invisible.

You need to learn how to think critically and strategically, you need to build communication skills in writing to articulate approaches to solving problems, you need to understand how to incorporate technologies into your work before your peers.

The learning curve might feel steep now, but understand this...

However steep it feels now will pale in comparison to the speed and scale that will be required to catch up, and eventually (sooner than later) it will be really hard to catch up at all.

I think (at least for the next few years) that people will not be exclusively replaced by these technologies but that instead they will be skipped over for jobs and promotions for people who can leverage these technologies.

So don't take a wait-and-see approach. The only thing you will see is the people on the horizon in front of you getting smaller and smaller as they leave you further and further behind.