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AI-Supported Civil Discourse

Sway is a chat platform that connects students with differing perspectives into one-on-one conversations and facilitates better discussions between them. Developed with Heterodox Academy and inspired by John Stuart Mill’s radical view that engaging with opposing perspectives is an essential tool for improving reasoning and solving complex problems, Sway aims to create online spaces where we can all learn to discuss controversial issues more openly and constructively.

Wrong answers, right learning: Using errors to deepen understanding

This systematic review examines how instructional materials that embed errors (so-called “erroneous examples”) or juxtapose incorrect and correct solutions (“contrasting erroneous examples”) can influence student learning across a variety of domains (mathematics, medicine, science). The authors reviewed 40 studies and found that these approaches can enhance learning — especially by helping students grasp both what not to do (negative knowledge) and what to do (positive knowledge) — but the benefits depend strongly on how the errors are used, what scaffolding (prompts, feedback) is provided, how complex the task is, and how much prior knowledge the learner has.