I love to read magazines. When I want to find out the latest chit-chat on a subject of interest to me, I go browse and buy. I usually purchase when I’m at an airport or at Barnes and Noble. I’ve recently taken to explore the latest on AI in education, yet the online headlines keep moving the AI end zone with ever-increasing morsels of contradictory predictions.
I happen to be at Barnes and Noble earlier this month and had a wild-hair to purchase all of the magazines that featured AI. I wanted to find something positive about AI in classroom situations where fear mongers wouldn’t have the upper-hand on the tone of the articles. The May/June 2023 MIT Technology Review was among my pulled collection. The cover promised teachers who believed that AI could improve education.
Enter Will Douglas Heaven, senior editor for AI at MIT Technology Review and author of “The Education of ChatGPT.” Heaven quotes many teachers and educators who have found ways to utilize ChatGPT for student learning and even suggests that “banning them [chatbots] is futile, possibly even counterproductive.”
Heaven follows up this statement with a quote from Richard Culatta, CEO of the International Society for Technology in Education (ISTE) and a former colleague of mine from the early 2000s. “We need to be asking what we need to do to prepare young people—learners—for a future world that’s not far into the future.”
Bingo! Culatta hit the educational AI nail on the head for me. With all the doom and gloom swinging around about AI, there seems to be more sour soothsayers talking about the end of education than prescient prophets like Culatta who sense a beginning of “new” education that must innovatively prepare learners with knowledge and skill sets to navigate within the digital acceleration.
Granted, there is much to be done to figure out this future, but I’m with Heaven on this one to the positives of AI and with Culatta on prepping learners for the inevitable. Heaven ends with another quote from Culatta: “We have to withhold some of our quick judgment. That’s not helpful right now. We need to get comfortable kicking the tires on this thing.”
Excuse me for a moment. I’m pausing to go kick some tires.