I've been part of this community for a while, however, I really didn't want to dox my main account. Been teaching internationally for some time, and over the past few months decided to write more...
I've been part of this community for a while, however, I really didn't want to dox my main account.
Been teaching internationally for some time, and over the past few months decided to write more publicly. I have been trying to share my thoughts on whatever crosses my mind for tech and education on my website.
While some of my colleagues are my readers, I have been trying to get a wider diversity of perspectives on things I write about (building an audience can be hard). I find I gain a lot of value from perspectives and fields outside of education. For example, Stronger By Science led me to a paper titled Learning vs. Performance: An Integrative Review, which led me to reading much more current research on learning than has been presented in my field at any professional development conference.
When it comes to any emergent technology (and this piece definitely leans more to the generative AI side of things) I find that most schools are not being bold enough in how different society may look, nor are they bold enough in their usage. Most conversations simply stop at...how to use generative AI to write report card comments, change a word problem, or level a text. There is a lot more potential that I find is being left on the table, that could be genuine industry use cases such as entire VFX productions.
I have some previous pieces that I hope people find interesting. When o1 Pro Mode was released, I took a look at it's use for Mathematics to try and find where the actual frontier of it's use was for my use case (and found it lacking for a lot in Mathematics). When I first started the website, I wrote a personal piece on AI (and I was trying to get used to writing again as I have not done so in a while).
My next piece is likely to be focused on OpenAI's Deep Research, or talking about a responsibility to provide equity of access to AI models in schools.
Looking for readers, and looking for different perspectives, conversations, and critiques of my writing so that I can accelerate my own learning, and the value I can bring in my writing to others.
My perspective: 15 years working in private childcare/prek in the leading center in our area. I am also looking to move into primary teaching in public schools by next year, though I cannot speak...
My perspective: 15 years working in private childcare/prek in the leading center in our area. I am also looking to move into primary teaching in public schools by next year, though I cannot speak to the particulars of any school in the area. In that sense I can only provide "vibes".
I would like to say I really enjoyed this read, and it gave me some tough questions to answer! Let's try and tackle them.
I can’t help but foresee immense short-term turbulence as we grapple with restructuring labor markets—or even rethinking the fundamental economic structure of society.
Agreed, and I believe we are going to face a crisis as people that lack meaningful employment become more and more disillusioned with their situation. As we've seen though, the media circus has done an excellent job of diverting our attention from the problem of power inequality and instead we quibble over geographic features and genitalia. I absolutely do NOT mean to minimize any particular groups woes by that statement, but rather to point out that I believe many of those topics are becoming secondary to the increasing threat of the marginalization of a majority of the human population by a handful of people.
AI is a massive catalyst propelling us forward to an inflection point along that path.
If we view workforce development as one of education’s societal roles, then I would go as far as to muse that most school curricula worldwide are not prepared for this impending labor market churn
Currently? Absolutely not. I don't keep abreast of AI developments in secondary education and beyond, but my hunch has been exactly what you've put to words: The current model is to cling to the old, and those who embrace and flow with the new will overtake the rest. I've been saying to anyone who will listen for the past year+ that all the drama over AI content in students' essays should be a wake up call. If we policy against it, we will hamstring a generation by reducing their ability to practice using this technology. Those who are savvy will ignore the rules and find ways to use it anyways, like yourself and Wikipedia, but it will leave the rest lagging behind.
What does my school, or my class, actually offer that is so unique that it can not be displaced by an infinitely patient, and much more broadly knowledgeable AI?
Now we get something to really chew on. I am speaking for my own rather narrow area of expertise, so bear that in mind - I do not work for a public institution, and while some would call what I do a form of glorified babysitting, I take my work seriously. I work with children ages 4-5 primarily, most of whom face no particular struggles in the home lives or personal abilities. In my particular industry, I could imagine a "real human" being a selling point - that there is guaranteed to be real, genuine, human interaction at all stages. Much as there is a market for organic produce and gluten-free bread, there is going to be a market for limited AI schooling and care. I don't believe omitting AI entirely would be enough of an edge, though. Some areas I see AI being particularly useful are:
Lesson Planning
Assessment
Documentation
Reporting
Screening
Additionally, quite a bit of direct instruction could be done through AI presentations. With sufficiently trained staff supporting the AI lessons, it could greatly increase gains in and retention of skills for children through childhood. In none of these cases do I see either humans fully walling out AI, or AI fully automating these jobs.
What does it offer under how our society is currently structured, and what does it offer if we completely rethink the model of a traditional schooling day as we know it?
My center is open 12 hours through the day. We already have a very different model to public schools. Our aim is to provide an education, but it is in parallel to providing care for the children of other workers. It's this last bit that is what threatens my industry most - if a majority of people cannot find or do not need employment, then the need for external care decreases. As long as there is a demand for a place for children to be away from home for whatever reason and in the care of a professional, there is room for my industry.
While AI may currently lack true therapeutic effectiveness (I generally find responses from ChatGPT to be too agreeable), these are the weakest versions of these tools—future advancements may easily overcome these limitations.
I do not disagree with your assessment, but I also feel that in childcare we won't see this level of interaction until we have sufficiently advanced androids, for lack of a better name.
I've already outlined some ways I envision AI will integrate itself into childcare centers in the near future, but what of primary school? The deficit in literacy and mathematical skills will likely push policy makers towards a choice that you have already elucidated. My estimation is that schools will adopt AI in curriculum to give better individual attention to students through "private AI tutoring" as classroom sizes continue to increase and teachers continue to leave the field. Teachers will need to reskill to become far more tech literate - more than they already are - and I foresee a widening gulf for some time between the technological expectations and abilities of teachers and students, and those students' parents. I see it already; I'm a fairly tech-y guy and still it's a huge headache to navigate my kid's schoolwork on their Chromebooks. We may see an increasing push for e-learning, even though (based on vibes, I haven't looked into research) I don't believe that full e-learning is as effective or impactful for young learners. Anecdotally, most students disengage during e-learning days moreso than they do in class, and it's more pronounced the younger that students are. If a push for e-learning falls flat, we may see a switch to bi-phasic schooling, with students attending 3-4 hour days and teachers working one group in the AM and another in the PM. I wonder where this would leave parents at, since most people already struggle with what to do with their children outside of school hours. I am intimately aware with how expensive childcare is, and while there are supports, they tend to favor those with no or low income; the working class will be left in a lurch... If there still is a working class.
This is all in the short term. Long term, I have no idea.
Thank you again for posting, this has proven to be a wonderful diversion.
Happy that someone here found it enjoyable! Debated on if there would be much value given to others here for the topics I write on. The biggest disruption, one that I have enjoyed, is the old...
Happy that someone here found it enjoyable! Debated on if there would be much value given to others here for the topics I write on.
The biggest disruption, one that I have enjoyed, is the old models in education that were already broken but were exposed. The in-class or take home essay has been a broken assessment practice for...at least two decades now. The practice ended up being more of an assessment of syntax and external revision rather than actual idea generation, evaluation, and synthesis. Teachers also all suddenly seemed to care about cheating, which has been pretty amusing overall, considering 60-70% of students were cheating before anyways and there has been no significant change since. Complete misunderstanding on why cheating happens in the first place, and a shift of blame again to try and cling to our old models.
Your point on a "real human" selling point I do think will hold true, for now. One thing I never ended up writing in this article, as I haven't had time to really dig deep into the thought, is how much value that we place on human interaction is unique to our generations experiences? We see people moving towards AI models for companionship and therapy more and more. In 30-40 years, once people grow up with AI integrated much more closely in their lives, is the "real human" selling point still going to hold up? We may value in person interactions as I grew up in between a large technological change, but still had a childhood where technology was a specific place in my household I interacted with and could get away from. Hard to tell, but was a thought that popped in my head as I was writing.
Thanks for engaging with the piece, and writing back.
I've been part of this community for a while, however, I really didn't want to dox my main account.
Been teaching internationally for some time, and over the past few months decided to write more publicly. I have been trying to share my thoughts on whatever crosses my mind for tech and education on my website.
While some of my colleagues are my readers, I have been trying to get a wider diversity of perspectives on things I write about (building an audience can be hard). I find I gain a lot of value from perspectives and fields outside of education. For example, Stronger By Science led me to a paper titled Learning vs. Performance: An Integrative Review, which led me to reading much more current research on learning than has been presented in my field at any professional development conference.
When it comes to any emergent technology (and this piece definitely leans more to the generative AI side of things) I find that most schools are not being bold enough in how different society may look, nor are they bold enough in their usage. Most conversations simply stop at...how to use generative AI to write report card comments, change a word problem, or level a text. There is a lot more potential that I find is being left on the table, that could be genuine industry use cases such as entire VFX productions.
I have some previous pieces that I hope people find interesting. When o1 Pro Mode was released, I took a look at it's use for Mathematics to try and find where the actual frontier of it's use was for my use case (and found it lacking for a lot in Mathematics). When I first started the website, I wrote a personal piece on AI (and I was trying to get used to writing again as I have not done so in a while).
My next piece is likely to be focused on OpenAI's Deep Research, or talking about a responsibility to provide equity of access to AI models in schools.
Looking for readers, and looking for different perspectives, conversations, and critiques of my writing so that I can accelerate my own learning, and the value I can bring in my writing to others.
My perspective: 15 years working in private childcare/prek in the leading center in our area. I am also looking to move into primary teaching in public schools by next year, though I cannot speak to the particulars of any school in the area. In that sense I can only provide "vibes".
I would like to say I really enjoyed this read, and it gave me some tough questions to answer! Let's try and tackle them.
Agreed, and I believe we are going to face a crisis as people that lack meaningful employment become more and more disillusioned with their situation. As we've seen though, the media circus has done an excellent job of diverting our attention from the problem of power inequality and instead we quibble over geographic features and genitalia. I absolutely do NOT mean to minimize any particular groups woes by that statement, but rather to point out that I believe many of those topics are becoming secondary to the increasing threat of the marginalization of a majority of the human population by a handful of people.
AI is a massive catalyst propelling us forward to an inflection point along that path.
Currently? Absolutely not. I don't keep abreast of AI developments in secondary education and beyond, but my hunch has been exactly what you've put to words: The current model is to cling to the old, and those who embrace and flow with the new will overtake the rest. I've been saying to anyone who will listen for the past year+ that all the drama over AI content in students' essays should be a wake up call. If we policy against it, we will hamstring a generation by reducing their ability to practice using this technology. Those who are savvy will ignore the rules and find ways to use it anyways, like yourself and Wikipedia, but it will leave the rest lagging behind.
Now we get something to really chew on. I am speaking for my own rather narrow area of expertise, so bear that in mind - I do not work for a public institution, and while some would call what I do a form of glorified babysitting, I take my work seriously. I work with children ages 4-5 primarily, most of whom face no particular struggles in the home lives or personal abilities. In my particular industry, I could imagine a "real human" being a selling point - that there is guaranteed to be real, genuine, human interaction at all stages. Much as there is a market for organic produce and gluten-free bread, there is going to be a market for limited AI schooling and care. I don't believe omitting AI entirely would be enough of an edge, though. Some areas I see AI being particularly useful are:
Additionally, quite a bit of direct instruction could be done through AI presentations. With sufficiently trained staff supporting the AI lessons, it could greatly increase gains in and retention of skills for children through childhood. In none of these cases do I see either humans fully walling out AI, or AI fully automating these jobs.
My center is open 12 hours through the day. We already have a very different model to public schools. Our aim is to provide an education, but it is in parallel to providing care for the children of other workers. It's this last bit that is what threatens my industry most - if a majority of people cannot find or do not need employment, then the need for external care decreases. As long as there is a demand for a place for children to be away from home for whatever reason and in the care of a professional, there is room for my industry.
I do not disagree with your assessment, but I also feel that in childcare we won't see this level of interaction until we have sufficiently advanced androids, for lack of a better name.
I've already outlined some ways I envision AI will integrate itself into childcare centers in the near future, but what of primary school? The deficit in literacy and mathematical skills will likely push policy makers towards a choice that you have already elucidated. My estimation is that schools will adopt AI in curriculum to give better individual attention to students through "private AI tutoring" as classroom sizes continue to increase and teachers continue to leave the field. Teachers will need to reskill to become far more tech literate - more than they already are - and I foresee a widening gulf for some time between the technological expectations and abilities of teachers and students, and those students' parents. I see it already; I'm a fairly tech-y guy and still it's a huge headache to navigate my kid's schoolwork on their Chromebooks. We may see an increasing push for e-learning, even though (based on vibes, I haven't looked into research) I don't believe that full e-learning is as effective or impactful for young learners. Anecdotally, most students disengage during e-learning days moreso than they do in class, and it's more pronounced the younger that students are. If a push for e-learning falls flat, we may see a switch to bi-phasic schooling, with students attending 3-4 hour days and teachers working one group in the AM and another in the PM. I wonder where this would leave parents at, since most people already struggle with what to do with their children outside of school hours. I am intimately aware with how expensive childcare is, and while there are supports, they tend to favor those with no or low income; the working class will be left in a lurch... If there still is a working class.
This is all in the short term. Long term, I have no idea.
Thank you again for posting, this has proven to be a wonderful diversion.
Happy that someone here found it enjoyable! Debated on if there would be much value given to others here for the topics I write on.
The biggest disruption, one that I have enjoyed, is the old models in education that were already broken but were exposed. The in-class or take home essay has been a broken assessment practice for...at least two decades now. The practice ended up being more of an assessment of syntax and external revision rather than actual idea generation, evaluation, and synthesis. Teachers also all suddenly seemed to care about cheating, which has been pretty amusing overall, considering 60-70% of students were cheating before anyways and there has been no significant change since. Complete misunderstanding on why cheating happens in the first place, and a shift of blame again to try and cling to our old models.
Your point on a "real human" selling point I do think will hold true, for now. One thing I never ended up writing in this article, as I haven't had time to really dig deep into the thought, is how much value that we place on human interaction is unique to our generations experiences? We see people moving towards AI models for companionship and therapy more and more. In 30-40 years, once people grow up with AI integrated much more closely in their lives, is the "real human" selling point still going to hold up? We may value in person interactions as I grew up in between a large technological change, but still had a childhood where technology was a specific place in my household I interacted with and could get away from. Hard to tell, but was a thought that popped in my head as I was writing.
Thanks for engaging with the piece, and writing back.