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Great post! Thank you for sharing your thoughts. IMO, we need a 'systemic capstone' for AI Literacy across all lifelong learners (by curricula, major and job role/function). It's something I am passionately solving for currently w/ Solvably's AI Centers of Excellence (check out www.solvably.com, select "who it's for" upper right then "AI"). Imagine if every student (or professional for that matter) not only participated in a project to understand and apply AI to a real-world challenge relative to their curricula (or job) but did so in a fun, engaging way, with evidence(!) and developed soft skills as part of that process? As the urgency dials in, we will get to scale fast enough - it has to. Pls let me know if you, or anyone on this thread would like to collaborate! Stay curious. - Angelo

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Jan 21Liked by Marc Watkins

If any of these issues are to be addressed with the urgency Marc suggests, administrators in particular are going to have to significantly ramp up their learning into how genAI is actually being used by teachers and students and start engaging stakeholders in serious conversations about the ramifications generative AI poses going forward. My limited and mostly anecdotal experience as a 30 year veteran K-12 independent school teacher is that virtually every admin I know (and it is the same talking to teachers from other schools) - Heads of School, Division Directors, Department Heads, and even Academic Deans (and these are likely to be the decision makers on virtually all policy decisions surrounding AI use in schools) are woefully ignorant of even the most basic AI literacy beyond "catching students cheating." The task Marc outlines is daunting for all sorts of reasons but to me the biggest one is the asymmetrical level of knowledge within schools. In most schools, there may be a handful of teachers on the cutting edge of genAI who are flying blind with little to no direction from their supervisors or admin. Adding to the confusion is the haphazard and sporadic ways new genAI tools are being introduced (as Marc says, it's not just ChatGPT - there is voice, music, video, etc...) weekly, making the AI literacy task even more challenging. This is why I am looking for or would like to be part of a Summer Institute dedicated to AI literacy for all K-12 stakeholders, in-person or online. If anyone knows of any program that fits that bill or would like to be part of helping to organize one, please feel free to reach out. I have been following the developments in gen AI disruption, primarily at the K-12 level, but I share all of Marc's concerns.

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