New View EDU Episode 81: How AI Changes Everything and Nothing

Available November 11, 2025

Find New View EDU on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and many other podcast apps.

It may feel as though AI has changed everything about education. It has, says Peter Nilsson—but it has also changed nothing. That’s the paradox at the core of his forthcoming co-authored book, Irreplaceable: How AI Changes Everything and Nothing about Teaching and Learning. He joins host Morva McDonald to share what has changed, what hasn’t, and how his work using technology to bolster innovation in education led him to this place.

Starting with a discussion about Peter’s work with Athena Lab, a “Wikipedia meets Facebook” for teachers, the episode explores the intersections between enduring challenges in the field and the opportunity to solve them by using technology solutions that are grounded in humanity. Peter notes that early in his career, he realized that teachers lacked a “professional memory,” the kind of constantly evolving knowledge base that benefits doctors and lawyers. But since curriculum has to consistently grow and change as students and environments change, Peter argues that a strict collection of lesson plans or activities isn’t the kind of approach that will produce excellent teaching. Those realizations led him to create Athena Lab, where teachers can contribute to an ongoing collaborative database of pedagogy.

Connecting to a community and having access to new ideas and approaches, Peter says, is how all innovation spreads, and technology enables us to spread innovation more rapidly than ever before. He says school leaders must provide teachers with the support they need to access professional networks that will help spread ideas and innovative teaching and learning models, especially in independent schools, where quality teachers are part of the value proposition parents are seeking. AI, he says, is just the next in a string of technological advancements that have been changing schools for quite some time, and accessing it in appropriate ways to support different structures of school can be part of developing innovative practice.

The “everything,” he says, is in how AI has completely changed the way a human being can interact with a machine and gain access to information and feedback; but the “nothing” lies in the inability of machines to ever match the messiness of the actual human experience. While students can now do much more in terms of self-directed learning, they still need human beings to turn to for confidence-building, vetting ideas, exploring different applications for their learning, and making meaning. AI can supplant many things, but it cannot supplant the classroom experience, where students experience other perspectives, socialize, test things out, and come face to face with others along the learning journey.

The book lays out different contexts of teaching and learning: teachers alone, students alone, and teachers and students together. Peter shares how AI, from his perspective, can be used to support the different types of work done within those contexts, like planning, exploration, incubation, and revision. However, he maintains that despite the ways in which AI can be applied to all of those tasks, it will still not be able to replace human interaction as a one-size-fits-all solution. Peter points out that each student’s individual ability to access AI, their social-emotional readiness for different applications, and their willingness to follow through with the optimal utilization of every tool will vary. 

He concludes by reminding us that while he has written a book about AI and its place in education, the book is really about good pedagogy. He says there are long-term, tried-and-true principles behind good teaching that have always existed, and while the available tools to support those principles may continue to evolve, what constitutes excellent practice remains constant.

Key Questions

Some of the key questions Morva and Peter explore in this episode include:

• Athena Lab was created as a way to offer a professional memory to educators. What is the significance of professional memory, and how does it help elevate teaching and learning?
• What is the relationship between the creation of professional memory and innovation? How does something like Athena Lab allow for greater innovation in schools?
• What is the “everything” that AI changes about education? What is the “nothing?”
• What are some practical examples of ways in which AI can be applied to different contexts of teaching and learning, without changing the fundamental nature of the human connection that’s vital to education?

Episode Highlights

• “Unlike medicine and unlike law, education is diverse in the way that it is applied in different classrooms. There isn't only one way to teach The Great Gatsby. There isn't only one way to teach Beloved. In fact, every classroom should be different in the way that it engages it because every classroom has different students. So while knowledge on Wikipedia compiles everybody's contributions to the page on physics compiled to one page, curriculum does the opposite. Curriculum doesn't compile. It disaggregates. It diversifies.” (5:22)
• “It's impossible to expect every teacher, every school, even to be able to develop the wisest, most effective responses to every change. That's just not how innovation happens. What happens is people all across networks figure out small little things. And the more those small little things can share across the network, the more any individual node on the network can have the most comprehensive, high quality, effective response to that thing.” (16:52)
• “Students now can do more, so much more than they ever could do before. Every student having something like this vision of an AI tutor is a game-changer for so many reasons. But nonetheless, students will still need time. They will still need help. They will still need practice. They will still struggle to ask the right question. They will still come in confused about something. They will still need teachers to help them build confidence. Everything is changing in terms of how we do this on a human, individual level where we're interacting with a machine that is more and more like a human, but nothing is changing in that the messiness of our own human learning remains.” (22:31)

Resource List

• Keep up with Peter’s work at his website.
• Read Peter’s weekly newsletter, The Educator’s Notebook.
• Pre-order Peter’s book, Irreplaceable.
• Check out the “professional memory” in creation at Athena Lab.
• Learn about Peter’s work in the field of digital humanities.
• Get a glimpse of educators’ thoughts in action at Planning Process Illustrated.
• Take a peek at Peter’s “Hamilton-inspired” original musical about boarding school life.

Full Transcript

• Read the full transcript here.

Related Episodes

• Episode 71: Exploring Generative AI in K-12 Schools
• Episode 69: Building Collaborative Learning Cultures
• Episode 68: Technology Innovation in Independent Schools
• Episode 49: The View From the Classroom
• Episode 45: Designing Schools for Blended Learning
• Episode 31: AI and the Future of Education

About Our Guest

In Peter’s own words:

“I am an educator and musician. I love learning, I love teaching, and I love creating opportunities and structures for other people to learn and teach—in schools, in art, in writing, and all settings.  Everything we do has an element of education, regardless of our work. And it is at intersections between unlike things that we learn the most.

“I curate and edit a weekly newsletter called The Educator’s Notebook. It collects education-related news from around the web for the purpose of promoting innovation in education, and it is read around the world by teachers, school leaders, nonprofit directors, foundation leaders, charter chain managers, startup CEOs, conference organizers and more.

“I founded Athena, a Wikipedia-meets-Facebook for teachers. The field of education has no professional memory: while doctors and lawyers have hundreds of years of practice indexed and recorded, teachers reinvent the wheel every day. Athena provides a place for teachers to collaborate and share practices.

“I’ve presented separately on the topics of creativity and cognitive science at SXSWedu, NAIS, the College Board, the OECD, and elsewhere here in the U.S. and abroad.

“I serve on the advisory board for SXSWedu, the Center for Curriculum Redesign, and the Middle States Association Responsible AI in Learning.

“I consult on the topics of AI in schools, strategic planning, and more with Aptonym.

“I was head of school at King’s Academy, a coeducational, American-style boarding school in Jordan. Prior to my time at King’s Academy, I taught at Deerfield Academy for 15 years and held a variety of leadership positions.”