A few months ago, I found myself standing in the vinyl record section of a bookstore with my children.
“What even is a record?” one of them asked.
After a quick explanation, another question followed.
“Why would anyone buy one when you can stream everything?”
I laughed. Then I realized, I wasn’t entirely sure how to answer that question.
After all, they weren’t wrong. Streaming gives us access to nearly every song ever recorded. It’s cheaper, faster, more portable, and infinitely more convenient than vinyl. By almost every measure, it is better technology. Which makes the resurgence of vinyl so unexpected.
What struck me wasn’t that my children didn’t know what a record was. It was that they couldn’t imagine why someone would want one.
To them, music is immediate. Infinite. Effortless. The idea of listening to an album from beginning to end seemed almost irrational. This friction between convenience and engagement is exactly what I’ve been wrestling with as AI has become more prevalent in the classroom.
Vinyl records and AI are actually similar technologies. Both seem to provoke a human response to technology: the easier something becomes via technology, the more we begin questioning what was valuable about the underlying use in the first place.
In my own experience with AI, I can’t remember another issue that has prompted so many conversations about what learning is actually for. But as I listen to educators wrestle with these questions, I increasingly hear another one emerging beneath them.
It’s not a question about technology. Rather, it’s a question about learning: What should students still need to do themselves?
I found myself thinking about that question recently while sitting in on rehearsals for our ninth grade capstone presentations.
This capstone project brings together English, science, and global studies and asks students to partner with local nonprofits, investigate real-world challenges, and develop ideas for meaningful action. Their final task is to synthesize everything they’ve learned into a TED-style presentation.
As Director of Innovation at an all-boys middle school outside of Boston, I spend a lot of time thinking about what learning should look like in the age of AI. I work closely with teachers as they design projects, assessments, and learning experiences that ask students to do meaningful work.
As I listened to students rehearse their talks, I was struck by something: Students had access to research, interview notes, statistics, and AI tools capable of generating polished drafts in seconds. Their challenge was deciding what mattered. Which story should they tell? Which evidence was most compelling? Which ideas deserved an audience’s attention?
Watching those students, I found myself feeling unexpectedly hopeful.
The tools sitting on their laptops could summarize articles, generate outlines, and draft paragraphs in seconds. But none of those tools could decide which story deserved to be told. That work still belonged to the students.
As someone whose role in education is focused on the intersection of innovation, learning, and emerging technologies, I expected to leave those rehearsals thinking about technology. Instead, I left thinking about judgment.
I didn’=;t see technology replacing thinking. I saw technology making a different kind of thinking more important.
For all the anxiety surrounding AI, that moment reminded me that some of the most important work of learning still resists automation.
In Imaginable, futurist Jane McGonigal argues that one of the best ways to prepare for the future is to distinguish between trends and signals. Trends are the large, visible forces reshaping society. Signals are the smaller observations that reveal how people are responding to those forces.
Artificial intelligence is clearly the trend. But the resurgence of vinyl felt like a signal.
The more I thought about it, the less interested I became in whether vinyl sounds better than streaming services.
What interested me was why people were choosing vinyl at all.
Streaming solved the problem of access. It put nearly every song ever recorded in our pockets. By almost every measure, it is the more efficient technology.
And yet, people continue buying records.
Maybe it is because a record asks something of the listener.
You choose an album.
You place the needle.
You stay with it.
The music becomes the activity, not the backdrop to something else.
As technology becomes increasingly good at solving problems for us, I wonder whether we will begin to value experiences that ask something of us in return.
I found myself wondering whether schools were wrestling with a similar tension.
This search for participation over efficiency is the same tension surfacing in our schools. I’ve heard the phrase “cognitive offloading” more in the past year than I have in my entire life.
Not just at conferences or in articles.
I’ve heard it while sitting around tables with teachers trying to make sense of what AI means for learning.
Those conversations have led us to rethink assignments, assessments, and even where some learning takes place. We’ve debated when students should brainstorm with AI, when reflection should happen without it, and which assessments require students to show their thinking in real time.
Not because we’re opposed to AI. Because we’re trying to better understand what learning requires.
At first glance, these decisions seem contradictory. But, in reality, they are not.
When educators ask students to write by hand, discuss an idea face-to-face, wrestle with a difficult text, or work through a problem without immediate assistance, they are often protecting something more than academic integrity.
They are protecting opportunities for students to think.
Learning requires students to do some of the cognitive heavy lifting.
And I can’t help wondering if that’s the signal hidden beneath many of today’s educational debates.
As AI becomes more capable, what humans contribute may matter even more.
The ability to discern.
To judge.
To create.
To remain present long enough to make meaning.
If Jane McGonigal is right that signals reveal how people respond to larger forces, then the resurgence of vinyl may be telling us something about the future of learning.
It’s not about what AI technology can do. Rather, it’s what humans may continue to value alongside it.
None of this is an argument against AI. Quite the opposite.
At my school, we’ve spent the past couple of years exploring AI literacy, assessment, academic integrity, and responsible use. Those conversations matter deeply.
But the conversations that have stayed with me most weren’t really about AI.
They were about learning.
I’ve found myself sitting with teachers and asking questions that feel both surprisingly new and strangely familiar.
Why are we asking students to write?
Why are we asking them to read?
Why are we asking them to discuss, solve, create and reflect?
The more I listen, the more I realize those questions aren’t really about technology. They’re about purpose.
AI didn’t create those questions. It simply makes them harder to avoid.
Streaming won the battle for access, but vinyl has survived because it offers something access cannot: participation.
Watching these conversations unfold at my school, I can’t help but wonder whether learning is forcing us to confront a similar distinction.
AI can increasingly provide answers. The question is whether students still need the experience of arriving at them.
My children thought vinyl records were obsolete. In some ways, they were right. Streaming solved the problem, and yet, records returned.
Watching students navigate AI has left me less interested in what technology can do and more interested in what learners still need to do themselves.
The value of vinyl was never the music.
The value of writing was never the essay.
The value of learning may not be the answer.
It may be the experience of arriving at one.
And as AI becomes increasingly capable of producing answers, that experience may become more valuable, not less.
That’s the signal I hear beneath the crackle of a record player. It’s a reminder that in an age of instant digital access and gratification, the most valuable things that will remain are those that ask us to show up.
And this may be one of the most important educational conversations of the next decade.
Perhaps the best part of this project is just how easy it is for others to get in on the action. Although the presentation certainly looks professional — and expensive, if we’re being honest — there’s nothing particularly exotic going on here. Specifically, there’s ESP32-C3 Super Mini behind the scenes cranking through the ADS-B data and pushing it out to a circular GC9A01 display. A minimalistic 3D printed enclosure holds both components, and while it’s undeniably slick as-is, we can’t help but think there’s potential here for more elaborate designs.
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