THOUGHTS
10 posts
Those built-in AI assistants popping up in your email, your notetaker, your CRM are genuinely helpful, and they're free, which is exactly why I'd pause. When something digital is free, you're usually paying for it with something other than money, and here that something is your data. So this week, figure out whether your AI is training on what you feed it, and set your limits.
"ChatGPT, write a response to this message." Quick, easy, done. And that's exactly how outsourcing the work quietly becomes outsourcing the thinking. There's a name for it, cognitive offloading, and the research is unsettling: the heaviest AI users score the lowest on critical thinking. But I don't think the fix is less AI. It's remembering that AI can generate, but a human should elevate.
Lesson learned: for factual analysis, consumer-grade AIs like ChatGPT and Gemini can be dangerously unreliable. The project: create an AI study partner for the California psychology licensing exam, feeding in over 1,000 pages of dense legal text plus strict rules to ONLY use the sources provided. And it had to be an off-the-shelf AI with …
Yet 60% of teachers still don’t use it. 🤔Spoiler alert: it’s not their fault. Plenty of past EdTechs have claimed they will revolutionize teaching. Most have failed. Remember filmstrips? Interactive whiteboards? The list goes on and on. The difference with AI, as I’ve argued in past posts, is that no other EdTech can replace thinking. …
Teaching is way more than telling. A great teacher unearths their learners’ misconceptions and misunderstandings, and then targets them to fill gaps and build higher quality knowledge. In other words, you don’t just teach what’s next; you teach what’s NEEDED. One of the more challenging elements of teaching is figuring out what our learners need …
No, ChatGPT isn’t dead yet. But this weekend was chaos weekend at OpenAI, the company that created it. (CEO Altman was out! Then maybe he wasn’t! Then he was hired by Microsoft! And then most of OpenAI’s employees were ready to follow him! Wheeee!!!!!) OpenAI may survive, but the sharks are circling. Now’s a perfect …
My edu-geekery dial went to 11 last week when OpenAI announced custom GPTs. And here I’ve been talking about how you can use ChatGPT for learning! 🤓 I’ve been building an AI tutor ever since. Turns out it isn’t easy. Here are a sampling of the things I wanted it to do:🤔 Start by evaluating the …
How do we nurture excellence in a world where “artificial intelligence can do it for me”? I homeschooled my elder daughter last year and this year. This year she’s attending Sora Schools (and loving it, I might add); last year I built her curriculum. This story is about last year, when she was in 7th grade. I …
Another notable voice has spoken against banning ChatGPT in schools. Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, was interviewed by Education Week yesterday. He says banning ChatGPT and other AI technologies will leave students at a disadvantage: “The same week that New York City public schools banned ChatGPT, Anthropic [an AI safety and research company] posted a prompt engineer …
Fine, it’s a provocative title. Of course we do. But here’s a real question for those in a school or professional learning environment: how are you preparing for a world in which AI writing is indistinguishable from human writing, what are you doing regarding AI/ML and evaluating student learning, and how are you considering incorporating …
