A little over a year ago, I stood in front of a group of less than 20 people and showed them OpenAI’s Playground and used GPT-3 to produce a few simple examples. That was my first presentation on generative AI. Since then I’ve done close to 70 talks/ presentations. A few weeks ago I gained access to Google’s NotebookLM, an interface that lets you upload up to 10 documents with 50,000 words per document and use Google’s AI to summarize, explore, and synthesize up to 500,000 words. In the space of a year, we’ve gone from context windows of a few thousand words to half a million. I struggle to think about the use cases or implications, but here is where we are, and generative AI isn’t going anywhere. As we near the one year anniversary of ChatGPT’s release, let’s take a moment and consider just how generative AI is already impacting education.
Marc - Thanks for this. Have you considered creating or helping to facilitate either an online community of K-12 educators who are deeply immersed in the potential for generative AI in schools? Your post also deals almost exclusively with LLM's. I've seen teachers experiment with Midjourney and OpenAI's Dall-E-3 to incorporate images into their classrooms and express interest in many of the other AI platforms you covered in your online course. Perhaps some kind of AI summit or other space to bring together folks who have been following your work might be of interest to people to get together and share what they've experienced. Many thanks for all your updates.
Yes to "thoughtless adoption" as a concern. I think we need to understand why it happens. I see three major causes: 1) administrative leaders need to show they are aligned with 'innovation', especially in institutions that are in more precarious financial states--it becomes part of a branding strategy; 2) mid-ranking administrators and managers need to show "proof of life"--they have to demonstrate continuously that they aren't just keeping the lights on but are producing new efficiencies, innovations, etc.; 3) ed tech is relentlessly patrolling around secondary education and higher education like a tiger prowls around a pig in a cage: we are one of the few pinatas that "disruptors" haven't fully broken into smithereens yet, there's a lot of candy inside, and after the substantive failure of fully online education in the pandemic (they got what they'd been loudly demanding, and it turns out almost nobody likes it and it wasn't effective), AI is their desperate hope for some new whacks at the pinata. Against that, pointing out that generative AI isn't any more of a magic fix than fully online education or MOOCs or anything else was is as unhearable as earlier cautions were.
I was recently told by the superintendent of my district (at a mandatory half day conference) that phonics is the lodestone.
Apparently, all we need to do to halt the decline in literacy and increase in incarceration is teach more phonics at all levels. Rigorous instruction in cursive handwriting is probably next. So, no worries about AI everyone. Everything can be solved with 20th century pedagogy, because science.
Marc - Thanks for this. Have you considered creating or helping to facilitate either an online community of K-12 educators who are deeply immersed in the potential for generative AI in schools? Your post also deals almost exclusively with LLM's. I've seen teachers experiment with Midjourney and OpenAI's Dall-E-3 to incorporate images into their classrooms and express interest in many of the other AI platforms you covered in your online course. Perhaps some kind of AI summit or other space to bring together folks who have been following your work might be of interest to people to get together and share what they've experienced. Many thanks for all your updates.
Yes to "thoughtless adoption" as a concern. I think we need to understand why it happens. I see three major causes: 1) administrative leaders need to show they are aligned with 'innovation', especially in institutions that are in more precarious financial states--it becomes part of a branding strategy; 2) mid-ranking administrators and managers need to show "proof of life"--they have to demonstrate continuously that they aren't just keeping the lights on but are producing new efficiencies, innovations, etc.; 3) ed tech is relentlessly patrolling around secondary education and higher education like a tiger prowls around a pig in a cage: we are one of the few pinatas that "disruptors" haven't fully broken into smithereens yet, there's a lot of candy inside, and after the substantive failure of fully online education in the pandemic (they got what they'd been loudly demanding, and it turns out almost nobody likes it and it wasn't effective), AI is their desperate hope for some new whacks at the pinata. Against that, pointing out that generative AI isn't any more of a magic fix than fully online education or MOOCs or anything else was is as unhearable as earlier cautions were.
I was recently told by the superintendent of my district (at a mandatory half day conference) that phonics is the lodestone.
Apparently, all we need to do to halt the decline in literacy and increase in incarceration is teach more phonics at all levels. Rigorous instruction in cursive handwriting is probably next. So, no worries about AI everyone. Everything can be solved with 20th century pedagogy, because science.