Eric Hudson, Education Facilitator and Strategic Advisor.

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Welcome to AI, a podcast in which we examine and discuss the future of artificial intelligence in Canadian education. I'm Ryan Oliver, the chief executive officer of Ampere and Canada Learning Code, and I'm Melissa Dean, the co-founder of Canada Learning Code. We've both spent the last decade and a half building opportunities in tech education across Canada through our work, and are now facing the biggest challenge in education AI.

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This podcast hopes to answer some of the questions I'm sure you have on the future of Canadian education in the era of artificial intelligence. Questions like, are my students learning anything? Are they cheating? Were those years of teaching, writing, math and especially for us, coding all for naught? How important is teaching AI in school? How do you integrate it in learning and what even is learning?

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If a super robot has all the answers, we have all the same questions you do. And throughout these episodes, we bring in experts from around the world to discuss how they're looking at the future of education and what educators, parents, and governments can do to ensure our education is relevant, useful, and grounded in Canadian values. In the coming weeks, we will hear from individuals and schools that are diving headfirst into the AI world, skeptics that think the entire thing is a huge mistake and everyone in between.

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Our hope is to foster a dialog and an understanding on what AI can and can't do in the classroom, and hopefully give you some ideas on where you see it fitting in your life. But first, we want to start each episode with our own exploration of AI through a segment we're calling one reel and one unofficial, in which we share examples, use cases, and stories of artificial intelligence and things we found uniquely human.

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Ryan, why don't you start us off this time? Yeah, I wanted to start us off this week with a conversation just around what Ampere and Canon Learning Code are doing with an approach to artificial intelligence. We, like any other organization, are feeling the pressure of what does an organization who, you know, in the case of canon Code, is named after teaching individuals to code or in the case of Ampere, formally has a long history of teaching digital skills, specifically coding.

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What do how do we approach artificial intelligence? Especially because, as we'll get to in this interview with Eric, the critical thought process, critical critical thought is that really high risk? If we offload too much to artificial intelligence, we as an organization developed an AI policy years ago around large language models as they were coming out. And to sum it up very quickly, get really just focuses on you cannot replace the creative industries with artificial intelligence in this organization.

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You cannot use AI art in in anything we put out publicly. You can't offload your work to to artificial intelligence. As I often tell our staff, we hire people because of who they are, not for their prompting abilities. But as AI continues to evolve and as we continue to evolve as an organization, you know, like the reality is we live in a country that has created a department of artificial intelligence, and that very much seems to be embracing the fact that AI is going to be a part of our future.

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And so how do we as an organization address that? How do we in our classrooms address it? And so I wanted to celebrate something that's primarily real, but really to address the artificial with this with this first segment and just introduce what we call our access and return policy. And so we may get into this more in future weeks.

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But, you know, we developed this policy of how we want to run our classrooms, how we want to run our sessions with learners as a way to maintain critical thought as a critical discussion and ensure the community knowledge is kept at the forefront of what we do in the conversations that we have. And so what it looks like is, is we have instructions for our teachers, our educators, no matter the type of classroom, is virtual or in person, in our makerspaces or in in an actual classroom is to to welcome generative AI, welcome the use of artificial intelligence, but to do so in a way where you always return to your community, whether that's your

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class or your peer group, it always come back to them to to to have a discussion, to have critical analysis of what the AI helped you with. And so this is something that was a very human made. This is a policy that we did a ton of different co-design for. We talked to our communities, to people across the organization, solicited feedback both from the employees as well as the people coming into our spaces, and really heard that what people want is to still have access to their community, the not become, you know, individual automatons online that just all communicate through decisions AI is making for them.

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So the way this policy works is in a classroom, in an Ampere classroom, you will have access to AI, but it's a place you go. It's it's kind of in line with at least how I grew up in, in the mid 90s, early 2000 where like the internet was a place you went to and you went there and you did your thing and then you came away from it.

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And so in an Ampere classroom, you you can go to AI, you can go and and ask it a question. It can go and do some consultation, do some research, crunch some numbers, you know, do an analysis. But whatever comes back out of that, our classrooms are going to encourage you to go back to to your peers, to the group you are working with and discuss it and kind of wedo bias wedo things that that makes sense and really figure out how it's how it's going to work for you and and what you need in your solutions.

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So how this works is we say that AI use within Ampere starts and ends with community. We focus on community centeredness, one of our key values. So real human approach to what we do. But access to general AI tools can occur as these purposeful moments. Within a learning day, learners have access to and training on top of the line AI tools in an impure class, and they can use it to drive curiosity, to seek efficiencies and answer questions whatever you want.

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But ultimately, purpose of AI should be to drive you back to your community to implement those solutions. It's like a calculator. It can be accessed when needed, with purpose and with a specific goal. But then you come back to the individuals, to the humans that you work with, that you live with, to your community to implement the solutions.

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So upon the conclusion of the use of generative AI, learners, then return to community and or to their class in our case, and to utilize human creativity and critical thought to implement the new data in solving the challenges of the day. So this is a policy that we co-designed across a variety of different artworks, and we're really, really excited about.

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I think it covers kind of a little bit of both here. It is very much human made. It is very much very real. But it is going to help us as an organization, address how we want to take artificial intelligence forward and how we want to make it a part of our programing and make it a part of the education that we're bringing forward.

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On today's episode, we are talking to Eric Hudson, a facilitator and strategic advisor who supports schools and making sense of what's changing in education. He's an independent, Massachusetts based consultant who's already working with a number of Canadian schools to help them figure out how they want to approach artificial intelligence in their classrooms. You can follow them on a Substack.

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Learning on Purpose. I'd highly recommend digging into the work he's doing. We're very fortunate to have him join us on this episode of AI for our first conversation. AI in the classroom.

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Thanks so much for joining us on AI. Appreciate it. Thanks for having me. Happy to be here a pleasure. So I mean, I think the the kind of starting point with, with your work is, is these four pillars that I just want to jump straight into because I think we can kind of build that, that, that the conversation around this.

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And so you've developed what you call the four priorities for human centered AI. Do you want to kind of walk us through what those four priorities are, and how you think schools should be approaching artificial intelligence? Sure. So the four priorities that I build my work around with schools are augmentation over automation, literacy over policy, design over technology and vision over decisions.

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And I came to those priorities because, you know, I've worked with more than 100 schools in the last couple of years on AI, and all of them are interested in human centered approaches to AI. Every all these schools believe that schools should remain a human centered institution. And so I really thought about like, well, what does that mean?

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And I expressed those priorities in that way because in my experience, schools are really focused on sort of the second works, like they're very focused on automation, on policy, on technology and on decisions, when in reality I was finding that, like for a human centered approach to AI, you really need to focus more on augmentation, literacy, design and vision.

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And so I express those priorities in that way to try to get schools to sort of reframe their approach to AI, to be a little bit more human centered, be a little bit more strategic, and think about, you know, what it means to prepare kids for a world in which this technology is going to play a really big role.

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Well, yeah. And I wonder when you're thinking about those, like, can you talk a little bit about how they sort of interplay with one another as well? And I have, you know, a bunch of questions around that in practice, but maybe we can start there as well. How do they sort of like reference each other? Sure. So the shift, the overall shift is trying to think long term about what students need, right.

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And what it what what skills students really need to succeed in a world in which AI is present. And so specifically for the first two, I think students need to be literate in how this technology shows up in their lives and how to make good decisions about it. And the primary use case of human centered AI is going to be leveraging it to extend human capabilities, like leveraging it to augment things that we can already do rather than delegate tasks to it.

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And I really do deeply believe that this is much more of a pedagogy and design issue than it is a technology issue in schools. How do we design learning experiences with or without AI that build that sort of deep ethical augmentation mindset and skill set in students? And that's how I see all of it kind of interacting, that this is really about thinking about the core work of schools and just incorporating AI into it in a thoughtful way.

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I guess I'm curious what the response, what is the response been from from some of the schools you're you're reaching specifically in the public system? The reason I'm curious is we recently had a teachers conference here, brought in all sorts of teachers from from the local school district. And right before it started, we got a message from the school board like, don't talk about AI.

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We're not we're not ready. And, you know, that's that's the public system. I get it. It's enormous. It is it is a boat that moves much slower than than something more important. But like, how are you finding kind of this response both public and an independent school? Well, I mean, I'm in the States and, you know, I was at the public high school in the town next door to mine just yesterday, and I've been working with a couple of dozen teachers there over the course of this semester.

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And yeah, I think.

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They are really open to it. And their district is much more open to it because of their on the ground experiences with students and AI. They don't like the status quo. They don't like the dynamic that AI has created between them and their students. When the district is highly focused on restriction and cheating and, you know, keeping this technology out, they want to have more open, honest, transparent conversations with students about using this technology productively and ethically and kind of bring it out of the shadows.

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And that's been my experience with both public and independent school teachers, to be totally honest with you. Like, I think public schools that I work with are a little more open to it than a lot of independent schools I work with, and a lot of that has to do with the just the way they're seeing things go on the ground.

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They know that the current kind of mode of doing things is probably not sustainable and not great for their relationship with kids either. And there's so much like constraint to write in the public school system in terms. I mean, think about Canada here in terms of resources and like it just seems like a natural place to get a bit of leverage, for lack of a better word.

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Right? I'm curious. So I had this interesting conversation when I was teaching. So post-secondary students and we were talking a bit about, I guess they were sort of forthcoming about, you know, them putting the case discussions in ChatGPT every morning and how they're leveraging it. And, you know, I just asked them quite transparently, you know, what their concerns were like, you know, how they thought about it.

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And it was interesting. And I think some of the data we're seeing supports this, that the youth specifically are way more, I think, concerned about what's going to be lost, you know, in their overreliance. They're obviously really willing to use it. I'm curious from the student perspective as well. You know, teachers seem open to it. But are you are you finding that kind of discourse or that concern, like in terms of navigating the pros and cons of AI in classrooms and like, what's the pulse on students you're working with?

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Yeah, I mean, I speak to students a lot. The two questions I get the most from students are, am I going to be be able to have the career I want because of AI? And then some version of what is the world going to look like 25 years from now because of this technology, specifically around climate change and also around sort of algorithmic bias, those kinds of questions, you know, are we all going to become sort of a homogenized world?

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And I think, you know, students are pretty tapped into those issues. And the those are the kinds of things they want to talk about. They are not, in my experience, super interested in, you know, discussing or debating academic integrity. They're thinking bigger and more broadly than that. And I think that's a gap between teachers and students right now, for sure.

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Yeah. What what is the answer to like, how do you answer the question of like, am I going to get the job I want? I think like I've teenagers, one who, despite what their father does, you know, is very nti to the point where like it's a media, it's an immediate revulsion from it. Right. And you know, I've heard a story, a story as well recently where like, you know, kind of the new that's so fake in the classroom is just, oh, that's AI man.

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Like, no matter what you say, that's AI. Like, what is, what is, what is what is your opinion on like what the jobs of the future are going to look like? What are what are our kids going to be able to go from. Yeah, I, I mean, it depends on the field, right? I think if you're a kid who's interested in coding, for example, right now it feels very precarious because, you know, we're already seeing lots of data to show that some of those entry level positions are getting replaced by AI.

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I mean, I there's this econ professor out of the UK named Jonathan Boheman, who has a quote I really like, which is, you know, you guys have probably heard this cliche that like, as soon as ChatGPT came out, people started saying, you're not going to be replaced by AI, but someone who knows how to use AI, right? And he has this spin on that quote that I find really helpful, which is you're not going to be replaced by AI, you're going to be replaced by a person who has mastered their field so deeply that they're able to leverage AI better than you can.

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And what I say to students is like, we don't know exactly what's going to happen in the job market, but all of the research that we're seeing around effective uses of AI in the workplace still involve things like domain mastery, expertise and complex skills. The ability of the human to leverage AI effectively within their field. And so they should continue to study things deeply if they don't want to use AI.

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I don't think you need to be good at ChatGPT to get a job, but I think what's really going to what's really durable, what's really transferable, is going to be your sort of passion and understanding and expertise in whatever field you choose. And that's what I hear from people in the workplace to that. Yeah, like tons of fields are bringing in AI, but the sort of what's distinguishing effective users from just users remain sort of human expertise, human ingenuity, the ability to leverage the technology effectively.

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Yeah. And then domain expertise. And that's why I actually love the question my students brought up around, you know, how do we strengthen our critical thinking skills? Like they kind of know what they whether it's like a talk truck or not, like they know what you know or being exposed to what is going to be important going forward.

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And I think they have truly valid concerns about, you know, how teachers are reacting to them into the classroom. So that was sort of this to kind of pick back on my thread earlier. That was the second part of it, which is cool. Like, you know, we appreciate now that you're letting us use AI here, but you know, what are what what what are we not learning, you know, and how are you going to make sure that we're focused on sort of the critical thinking pieces and all of that?

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So I think that's like so interesting. And, and so I want to maybe double click a bit on the gap. So it seems like students, you know, teachers I guess to some degree are open. Do you think or maybe I want to be not like leading about this question. But you know teachers are they are they ready and like what gaps are you seeing on the on in the classroom that orgs like ours can support and fill in the work that you're doing?

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When we talk on the teacher opportunity, I know I got right on. Be careful. I'm kind of agnostic about teachers get into AI at this point, like in terms of, you know, if you if you're if you're interested in exploring it because you want to become more efficient, you want to save yourself time. I'm down. Right. If you want to get into it because you want to change your lesson plan just more effectively, I'm totally in like, I think.

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But I think the ultimate goal here for teachers has been this is not the endpoint here is not this is a tool for you. The endpoint here is how are you engaging students on this topic? Right? And are you engaging students in a way that demonstrates an understanding of how this technology interacts with your discipline, with the kind of work you're asking students to do?

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How are you? Are you being transparent with students about what you think about it, how you're using it, how you're adapting your work to this? Right. And I think, you know, the gap for me is really an exposure gap at root. You know, there's you know, if you look at some of the data coming out, when you survey students and teachers about their AI use, you know, there was a report by the College Board that found like 80% of high school students they surveyed had used AI for schoolwork at some point.

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Right. And then there was a study from Gallup that came out around the same time that surveyed teachers to found that, and that found that 50% of teachers had never even used AI at all. And that sort of exposure gap, to me is the thing that needs to be closed, which is I in my work, I'm not I don't walk into a room and say to teachers like, you need to use AI every day.

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I do walk into a room and say, you know, it's kind of your professional responsibility to become a little bit more literate about this technology and what it can do. And so let's get you in the box. Let's try things. Let's learn how to use it, not in service of sort of adopting it wholeheartedly, but in service of building your capacity to make good decisions in your classroom and have good conversations with your students about it.

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Yeah. I'm curious. So this is, this is this kind of touches on that second piece of of of that second priority. You have the literacy over policy piece, which like I think for people in our jobs is a little easier. And I guess I'm kind of curious, like how you would advise a teacher to to remain AI literate when they have to do all the other things in a day, right?

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Like, like how does is the requirement here that all teachers are chronically online? Is it is it is like how can what's what's some practical advice would you give to teachers just to like just to stay in the loop? Because last week Gemini three comes out, you know, it's going to be replaced in two weeks by something else.

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And and AI is moving so quick, how can a teacher stay stay literate in AI? I talk to their students. I think that's like just create a more transparent environment where you're where you're where, you know, it's a two way conversation. So what are students seeing how our students using it. What are they? Their students are in tune.

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But I usually say to teachers, you know, try to try to identify an area of focus. So for some teachers that might be I really want to learn about how this tool is affecting my discipline in the world beyond school. So if I'm a science teacher, what's happening in medicine? What's happening in biological research, like some teachers really are into that and they weave that into their teaching.

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Other teachers are sort of more probably like us, like tech jocks, like they really want to play with it, play with different tools. That's great too. And some teachers are much more interested in the ethical lane of things. Right. How is this technology being applied in different ways ethically, not ethically? What are some of the ethical concerns in the design of the technology itself?

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And so I say try to pick an area of focus and just explore that part of it. And then for schools, I say you need to offer both your teachers and your students high level ethical guidelines for use and approved tools. Give them a playground in which to play. You know, it's kind of that lifelong kindergarten thing of wide walls, but still walls, right?

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Like, you need to give them a defined space in which you're going to them. This is a safe space for you to experiment. And these are the tools we want you to use to do those experiments. I think all those things can be helpful in helping teachers, kind of, you know, not stay up to date, but kind of just stay in touch with it.

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I love that, and I also really love that priority. And we'll dive into some of the others too. But this for me, it's like very much biased towards action, right? Because I do think the last couple of years have been very focused on the policy, and any conversations I've had is what can we can or not can't do.

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But I think the idea is like actually like first off, you can do a lot within your classroom. Like, I'm a big believer in agency and teacher agency. And also you just have to start somewhere. And it feels very, very similar to when we started, like teaching coding. Right? Like teachers didn't have exposure. They weren't learning this in, you know, their pre-service or, you know, posts in the classroom.

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And at the end of the day, the advice then was like, just start with what you have, where you are, whatever you can. And so I think that's so important because it's so easy to get, especially in AI, to get pulled into all of the like, higher sort of order things. And I think the idea is like, just do it.

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I'm curious if you if you could like, share an example, obviously don't have any names of like a practical like something you've seen a teacher do or like how they've, you know, there's a lesson or an exercise or something in the classroom just to give people an idea of like how easy this could be for them, like really tactically.

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And I gave some examples, but I think that could be really helpful. Sure. I mean, in terms of literacy activities with students, I think the simplest thing a teacher can do is project a chatbot into the screen of their classroom and give the chatbot an assignment from their class so it's given a math problem. Give it an essay prompt, anything.

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Look at the output with students and critique the output. How good is this at the work of our class? What do you see in it? How could you do better? How do you think AI made this? What do you think it got this information from? Like that's basic literacy 101 stuff. And I think for teachers who are, you know, maybe ethically not super into integrating it into their practice but still want to engage students, engaging students in how to critically evaluate AI output in the context of their work in school is really important.

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And then certainly I've seen teachers who bring AI into the assessment process to support kids and doing things that maybe weren't possible before, right. So a teacher I work with who teaches an astrophysics class, taught kids how to use ChatGPT to code little apps that allowed them to process these kind of gigantic public data sets we have about astronomical, you know, planets, exoplanets, moons, that kinds of things.

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You know, I've seen a teacher whose kids wrote, whose students wrote short stories in the sort of traditional on their own way. And then she asked the students, all right, now, use AI to turn your short story into a novel. What would that look like? How would you do that? How could you even begin to know if that novel was good?

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I think those kind of moves that are sort of micro moves, as opposed to macro moves to your point, can be really effective. I love that. I was just saying, well, I love that because you got like any of the colleagues that I've spoken to or maybe reluctant, you know, you can even get one of your students to pull it up.

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Like, you know, like you don't even have to touch the technology, like to be able to facilitate a discussion. And I think that's a big piece, recognizing that there are still 50% of educators out there, you know, give or take, that are not even exploring it. It's like it's quite simple. So hopefully that's like a key takeaway is like it is, you know, a bias towards action, I think.

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And getting the reps and cycles in is like what's more important probably than like perfect, you know? And I think we're still back there. Sorry, Ryan. No, no that's great. That's it kind of speaks to your third priority like this does idea of like design over technology like that, regardless of the tool design, something that that works well.

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And I think like there's there's kind of this theory that like is we're on the spectrum right now for educators and it's from one end, which is more similar to the school board that I am residing in right now, which is zero use of AI. Pretend it doesn't exist all the way to like the Alpha school model, which is just here's AI go wild.

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You advocate for something kind of more in the middle in this in this priority. You want to speak to that? Yeah, I just, I mean, technology has been a part of my career since the very beginning. So I was a very tech forward teacher in the classroom. I spent ten years in the online education space, and all of that experience has taught me that technology is never the answer.

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It's the application of the technology that is the answer. And in educational contexts, application of technologies and academic settings are really about pedagogy. And so if the pedagogy isn't there, if the teacher doesn't have a deep understanding of their field, if they don't have an understanding of how their pedagogy interacts with the technology, then you're going to get things like, we've seen a lot of schools, which is a teacher, you know, a school or district on boards, an AI tutoring platform, and the teacher just pushes an AI tutor at the students and says, use this.

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Right. That to me is not it's not building student literacy. And it's not really a design move. That's a technology move. Right? And so for me, I think the real question is not about what tools can we buy, what technology can we onboard. Nor is the answer like how do we, you know, how do we kind of ignore this?

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The answer is how do we investigate this technology both as a tool but also as a current event? And how do we think about how it interacts with what we do and our expertise? And then how do we make decisions about adapting our work in a way that brings it into our students lives in a productive, more assets based way?

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Because that is, I think, the best way to engage, especially adolescents on complex topics, you know, and not try to either hide it or blindly adopt it. Yeah, I like that. Something that I, you know, I guess the fourth priority, which is, you know, vision over vision or decision, I think. Right, is. Yeah. And you talked on to write and as you're taking it, one decision leads to another decision.

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And again it goes back to this. Like what what is preventing action. You know. And I think that's a big thing is we get caught up in like all this the steps especially here and all the things we don't know. But I like this idea of like, what is the vision for your class or you know, and maybe can you talk to more practically how that priority shows up in the classroom, how you're working with teachers to support them, you know, being focused less on the technology, more on the design, but specifically on the vision piece.

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I think that's like a really interesting kind of even higher level priority. I mean, for me, the vision thing starts with the school or the district, not the teacher, because this goes back to how the district is guiding their people, or how the school is guiding their people in how to think about this. So when I work with schools, I'm like, I start with literally, what do you believe about this technology and its role in education?

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Like, do you believe that this technology has some utility relevance to your work as a school? The answer 95% of the time is yes. Right. But then schools have a really hard time moving from there. And so I think the vision comes from okay, great. You think that there's some relevance to your work. Now let's go from that high level all the way down to like super concrete.

00;30;22;10 - 00;30;49;24

And I give them ten different scenarios of ways students and teachers might use AI and ask them to react like, how do you feel about this? Does this feel appropriate, inappropriate, productive, unproductive? And from there you start surfacing some values, right? So we really value, for example, teacher student human interactions. Right? We really value creating time for teachers and students to engage in meaningful conversation.

00;30;49;26 - 00;31;14;27

Great. How could a teacher leverage AI to create more time for those conversations? Right? How could a student leverage AI to be more prepared for those conversations? And so that's the vision piece, because if a school can articulate to its people employees first, we believe that this technology has relevance and application or educational setting. We want you to explore it.

00;31;14;29 - 00;31;50;11

Here's four five lanes that you might choose to explore it. Here's a tool we've invested in that is going to allow you to explore more safely and more securely than if you were just kind of using ChatGPT on the wild. Now go do it and report back, right? Like I think it starts there. Like it has to start at the system level because teachers, in the absence of system level guidance, teachers are making decisions based on their own perspectives, their own ethical stances, their own experience, their own feelings about technology.

00;31;50;11 - 00;32;09;04

And that's resulting in a lot of inconsistency in the student experience, right, that they're seeing really mixed messaging and getting kind of whiplash around. Is AI okay in this class? Is a not okay in this class? This one teacher says it's burning up the world. This other teacher says, I'm not going to get a job without it. Like, how do I navigate all this?

00;32;09;04 - 00;32;29;25

And that's for me. That's the vision piece of it is what are the non-negotiables that the system is articulating to allow a more consistent and coherent approach. And I love just how like human it is, right. Like, I mean, I was like, that's so obvious. But you know, the, the I think we, we get caught up in, in the tech, right?

00;32;29;27 - 00;32;50;07

Like the number of people that I hear that are just so, you know, so overwhelmed with it. But at the end of the day, like the starting point is actually not that. Right. And I think that's like so important to emphasize, you know, because even, you know, like I think Catalonia was teaching AI since 2016. And I will tell you every single day feel behind like, you know, and I'm keeping up to speed as much as I can.

00;32;50;08 - 00;33;07;25

And so, you know, at the end of the day, I can only imagine, empathize with educators and, you know, folks in the school system, like at the end of the day, it is it is you. It starts so much further back. Right? So I think that's so important. I appreciate that, Ryan. Yeah, I, I think we've touched on the major topics.

00;33;07;25 - 00;33;27;02

I just kind of like we have a so we have a segment that we're going to be experimenting with. And I wouldn't mind hearing what you think is it's kind of it's so bring it. We want to we want to start every episode here with talking about kind of like one thing real and one thing artificial that we kind of really wanted to celebrate or observe or talk about this week.

00;33;27;03 - 00;33;44;23

I'm curious, like, what's the neatest, what's the kind of what's the best thing you've seen in the last little while? That's real. That's not connected to AI in teaching. What's the what's really kind of gotten you excited? Disconnected from technology, disconnected from technology? I mean, but can we can it still be about it, even some order of it?

00;33;44;23 - 00;34;05;03

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I spent three days at a school last week, and the reason why they brought me in for three days is they wanted me to spend time in classes. And so I spent a lot of time sitting in classes. I was in independent school, so the classes were pretty small. So 16 to 20 students.

00;34;05;03 - 00;34;37;27

And, you know, I think the, the that was the most inspiring real thing I've seen is the kind of questions that students were asking about it. They were all using it. They were all using it in different ways. And they were really genuinely curious about questions of ethics and the impact on their own learning. And they, you know, a couple of students sent me inquiries through my consulting website after looking for like, resources and links to so they could do more reading.

00;34;37;27 - 00;35;03;09

And, you know, I think that that's that to me is one of the most important opportunities in schools right now is, you know, schools tend to view this technology as something to control, whereas it's actually something that's really worth learning about. And that's where a lot of those students were, is no one's taught us anything about this.

00;35;03;09 - 00;35;19;11

Can you teach us? Right. Like that was kind of the energy. And so that was the Substack. I mean, by the time we released this, it'll have been two months ago. But in early December, you wrote a piece called nine AI messages for students. And I really just like the first one because it's I mean, I like them all.

00;35;19;14 - 00;35;39;11

Like at the end of the day, just say, like, you're not a good or bad person if you use AI and, and I think we are going to approach a world in which, like economically, we are telling kids, actually you, you aren't going to succeed without AI. Like how how? Yeah. What what I know we've spoken about a bit, but like, what do you want to speak on.

00;35;39;13 - 00;36;02;27

Like what those messages for students are like, what you would say to a student about AI who is maybe a little hesitant or or worried. I mean, those messages are really about how do you make decisions about AI. And so I think something a dynamic I see in schools, which is reflective of, you know, political culture and culture writ large is just a lot of polarization.

00;36;02;27 - 00;36;28;22

That's why that was my first message, is I've kind of been blown away by the amount of like blind, both celebration and shaming that goes around AI at schools, which you would think would be places where nuance would play a larger role. But both among students and adults, the way they judge people one way or another. And so that was my first message.

00;36;28;22 - 00;36;45;17

But then beyond that, I think students just need to have some basic information, right? Like you need to understand that artificial intelligence, like many other technologies use every day, is not a neutral technology. And what does it mean if something is not neutral? And what is the human influence on AI? And how do you think about the ethics of it?

00;36;45;17 - 00;37;05;26

And it really is that core message of this is something that you're going to be making decisions about the rest of your life. And so it's probably worth learning about in different ways and also trying in different ways, so that you can make more informed decisions about the role you wanted to play in your life. I love that.

00;37;05;26 - 00;37;31;08

Are we going to do the one artificial? Oh yeah, I'm going the one the something that you've seen? Obviously not. But like any technology or any, you know, use of it could be in the classroom or in general that you're really loving or any tool you're using. Claude swore it on the other day that was that kind of that took me about it called it called it called.

00;37;31;08 - 00;37;40;17

Can I swear on this? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. It called, it called one of my ideas. Bullshit. Which kind of blew me away.

00;37;40;19 - 00;37;56;10

That's amazing. I was getting the message. It's been two. I mean, I had I had told it to give me critical feedback, right? Like, I, I, you know, because I, you know, I pay for all the bots because of my work. Right? And so I go into the settings and or whatever, like I either prompt or go into the settings like I needed to do whatever.

00;37;56;10 - 00;38;13;13

And so I was going back and forth with Claude about something I was prepping and I was like, okay. And Claude something. They did something to Claude recently or just got super sycophantic recently. And so I was like, all right, I need critical feedback. So we went back and forth a while and I was like, all right, well then I'm going to try this.

00;38;13;13 - 00;38;34;22

And it's responded, maybe. But I think that's bullshit. I couldn't believe it. I couldn't believe it. And I was like, is that I sort of sat and thought about it for a while. I was like, is this a good thing or a bad thing that this is now how Llms respond for prompting? But that's probably the most memorable artificial thing that's happened to me recently.

00;38;34;22 - 00;38;57;19

That's perfect. I and the reaction you're like, should I be impressed? Or if you're like, well, I mean, and a couple months before that, this was the thing that actually did very much impressed me. But it did surprise me a couple of months before that, it disagreed with me unsolicited. Right. So it it said its first this response was actually, I'm going to push back against that.

00;38;57;19 - 00;39;21;00

And that has never happened to me with an LLM. Right. Like I constantly train people to be like, this is sycophantic. Its default is validation. Its default is to agree, its default is to expand or elaborate, blah, blah, blah blah. And that was my first experience of the bot actually pushing against me, without me sort of guiding it to do so without me prompting it to take a certain tone.

00;39;21;01 - 00;39;39;27

And I thought that was also super interesting. That is really interesting. Yeah, that's, that's fascinating, I think. Yeah, in the world in which we've heard for the last six months that the AI agrees to much to have it, to have it pushed back like that. I often I'm curious, like which of the tools which are the tools do you use the most?

00;39;39;28 - 00;40;14;21

Like is it are you defaulting to cloud more often for those types of conversations there? Yeah, I think Claude's probably the one I use the most. Okay. And then after that, probably ChatGPT and then Gemini. I've sort of. I used to use perplexity a lot, but then when all the other bots got search stuff, I sort of moved away from perplexity and find like, you go to them for different topics, like I find I go to cloud for coding questions, and I don't know why, I just associate cloud with coding.

00;40;14;21 - 00;40;39;27

And then I go to Gemini for work schoolwork. I mean, if you ask programmers, they're all using Claude. Okay, there you go. You know, that's I mean, I was just, I'm trying to decide if I can say this on a podcast. I was just I was just on a call with an executive at a very prominent technology company, and she told me that coders use Claude and that that's sort of.

00;40;40;00 - 00;41;00;13

I mean, what I tell people is for me as a consultant in my work, the primary use case for me with AI is three main things to support in planning the workshops and presentations I do to do data analysis. Specifically, I get a lot of incoming qualitative data from surveys and stuff like that. And then third is just feedback.

00;41;00;15 - 00;41;22;14

And so for me, in my experience, Claude's the best at those things. But I meet people who use the others like my husband is very into ChatGPT. He's an editor of a magazine. He finds the multimodal capabilities more relevant to him. And so it is this idea of you sort of have to find the tool that most aligns with the use cases that you're using it most often.

00;41;22;14 - 00;41;41;07

And I think, you know, this is why teachers kind of get frustrated is a lot of that has to do with trial and error. And that takes time and money. Right. And that that can be really hard for educators. Yeah, I love that. I am, as you can tell, I'm always like practice. Like I want the tactical. I mean, also I'm not spending time in classrooms right.

00;41;41;08 - 00;42;01;10

As much. And I think Ryan's point to. Right, like, any like really awesome things you've seen students or teachers do, like, really tactically like I'm just wondering if they've, like, created something like that. You've been like, oh, I'm so impressed with your with your use of AI. Specifically, I don't put you in the spot, but I'm like, what?

00;42;01;11 - 00;42;28;11

Like because I'm always constantly blown away by kids, especially. So, I mean, kids in terms of, in terms of beyond schoolwork, kids are using in really interesting ways. So kids are using it to, you know, code apps and build apps. They are using it to process sketches for artwork and design. They're creating wireframes for websites, using AI, that kind of thing.

00;42;28;14 - 00;43;07;25

In school work, when it comes to schoolwork, kids tend to be very, very practical and transactional. So they're using it. You know, they're using voice mode to quiz them or they're generating podcasts on a notebook, LLM to give summaries of that, you know, study materials that you see a lot of that. And then with teachers, I mean, I think teachers, in terms of their interactions with kids, I was interacting with a middle school a few months ago, and they were teaching the kids how to build prompts that would allow the bots to give the kids better feedback on their work, and they were teaching the kids how to use the teacher's rubric, how to craft

00;43;07;25 - 00;43;29;02

those prompts. Because this is a public school, the teachers just wanted the kids to get more feedback more often, and the teachers were at their limit. And so they decided, look, instead of fighting this, we're going to teach kids the proper way and their parents the proper way to leverage these tools to give feedback that's more likely to be aligned to feedback the teacher would give.

00;43;29;02 - 00;43;59;10

And they're finding that's super helpful for students. And students really like it. And they're also finding, which I think a lot of teachers are finding, that that kind of work of how do we design good prompts, how do we leverage AI for feedback or whatever is an exercise? Is a rigorous intellectual exercise, right. That that kind of work actually does support critical thinking, that it does support high quality conversations, that it does support reflection, and therefore it's a learning experience.

00;43;59;12 - 00;44;29;29

Right. And so I think that's that's the stuff in schools that I get most excited about is how do you treat AI as an opportunity to learn. And that's those are the applications that I think are most interesting. Yeah, I love that. I was just like the possibilities, right? So I mean, I probably skew on the like the side of the spectrum that's like really excited about AI, but that's like I think those are like really helpful just again, show people what's what's possible to and again, like there's a where you can start and where you can go.

00;44;30;05 - 00;44;47;03

But yeah that's great. Cool. I don't know if we're kind of final. No I think I'm good. We taking more than enough of your time? Eric, anything. Anything you want to plug? Keep it in mind. This is probably end of January. Start of February. Now, any anything you want to, anything you want to plug or I guess, I mean, maybe even before that.

00;44;47;04 - 00;45;05;28

Like, thanks so much for joining us. Like, it's really, really interesting the work you're doing. I am excited that, you know, I get to my daughter gets to benefit from from the research you've done by the with the school she's going to because they work with you. But yeah. Any thanks so much. And you guys should talk to Lakefield about their two lane assessment approach.

00;45;05;29 - 00;45;23;03

That's a very good that's a very good podcast episode. Yeah. It it may be the one that aired in front of this because that was that was really where a lot of this started was me reaching out to Heather Adams and and to and just be like, we I want to hear about this is really interesting. Yeah, they're doing very interesting to your point around like interesting applications.

00;45;23;03 - 00;45;39;11

There's a lot going on there. Yeah, I mean, I would encourage people to if they want to read more about kind of how I think about these things and what I'm seeing in my work. Subscribe to my Substack, Learning on Purpose. It's free to subscribe. And if you want to learn more about my consulting work, my website is Eric Hudson.

00;45;39;14 - 00;45;44;24

Or those are the two things. Amazing. Thanks. Thank you so much. Pleasure.