Everyday AI Podcast – An AI and ChatGPT Podcast - EP 188: AI in the Classroom - Focus on literacy not detection

Episode Date: January 18, 2024

The conversation around AI in the classroom has been ongoing for a while now. Should it be used or banned? How should you use it and monitor it? Laura Dumin, a Professor at the University of Central O...klahoma, joins us to discuss why we should focus on literacy and not detection when it comes to AI in education.Newsletter: Sign up for our free daily newsletterMore on this Episode: Episode pageJoin the discussion: Ask Jordan and Laura questions on AI in the classroomUpcoming Episodes: Check out the upcoming Everyday AI Livestream lineupWebsite: YourEverydayAI.comEmail The Show: info@youreverydayai.comConnect with Jordan on LinkedInTimestamps:01:30  Daily AI news05:30  About Laura and her role at University of Oklahoma09:39 Considering using AI in assignments requires thought.13:01 Challenges in developing new teaching policies.16:39 Students adjusted to PDF annotations, benefiting research process.19:13 Loss of student trust from false accusations.22:51 Instructors explore AI in various fields.23:45 Adapting to AI in technical writing education.27:59 High school curriculum concerns about AI ethics.32:06 AI programs should be trained with care.Topics Covered in This Episode:1. Challenges of Integrating AI into Education2. Ethical Use of AI in Education3. Preparing Students for AI Integration4. Educator's Perspective on AI in EducationKeywords:Generative AI, classroom, literacy, AI detection, New York Times lawsuit, Sam Altman, OpenAI, artificial general intelligence, Google DeepMind, alpha geometry, International Mathematical Olympiad, Samsung, Google Cloud, smartphone, Laura Doonan, University of Central Oklahoma, AI coordinator, AI usage, AI literacy, AI courses, AI ethics, education, adoption of AI, micro credentials, workshops, guidelines, academic integrity, student AI usage, annotated PDFs, AI detectors, Gen AI skills, elementary education, secondary educationSend Everyday AI and Jordan a text message. (We can't reply back unless you leave contact info) Start Here ▶️Not sure where to start when it comes to AI? Start with our Start Here Series. You can listen to the first drop -- Episode 691 -- or get free access to our Inner Cricle community and all episodes: StartHereSeries.com Also, here's a link to the entire series on a Spotify playlist. 

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Starting point is 00:00:00 This is the Everyday AI Show, the everyday podcast where we simplify AI and bring its power to your fingertips. Listen daily for practical advice to boost your career, business, and everyday life. Meet Firefly AI Assistant, now live in Adobe Firefly, the all-in-one creative AI studio. Just describe what you want to create and the assistant handles the rest, orchestrating multi-step workflows across Photoshop, Premiere Express, and more in one conversational interface. You direct the outcome. The assistant accelerates execution. Here in the U.S., a new school semester is started, which means also that the conversation is going to start, again, around generative AI in the classroom.
Starting point is 00:00:56 Should it be used? Should it be banned? How should you monitor it? How should you govern it? How can we do this ethically? There's so many questions, and it's a never-ending discussion and one that I'm personally passionate about, but I'm not the only one. So we're going to be having a discussion today on AI in the classroom and how we should be focusing on literacy and not AI detection. I'm excited for today's show.
Starting point is 00:01:19 I hope you are too. So if you're joining us on the live stream, thank you for joining us. Please make sure to get your questions in. As always, if you're joining us on the podcast, thank you for that as well. Your support has made us a top 10 tech podcast on Spotify. So we super appreciate that. Always, I say this every day. Check your show notes.
Starting point is 00:01:40 We hide so many more great resources in the show notes. So if you care about AI and education and how it's working and different takes on it, we have a whole section on our website of other podcasts where we've talked to other experts on their take on AI and education. So if you enjoy this one, make sure to check out your show notes as well. All right, before we get to that, we're going to do, as we do every single day, start with what's going on in the AI news. So if you haven't already, make sure to go to Your EverydayAI.com.
Starting point is 00:02:11 Sign up for the free daily newsletter. We'll be recapping not just this AI news, but also some depth and detail from our conversation today. So let's start with Sam Altman. Yeah, Sam Altman. So Sam Altman says that OpenAI doesn't need New York Times data in a new interview. So Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, addressed the New York Times lawsuit against the company for alleged copyright infringement and express surprise. at the legal action. So Altman spoke at the DeVos at the World Economic Forum, and he stated that training on the New York Times data is not a priority for Open AI and that they do not need to use
Starting point is 00:02:50 the New York Times data to train their AI models. Altman also in related, I guess unrelated, but related for sure, news changed his tone a little bit on artificial general intelligence. So in an interview. He did say that he no longer believes in a sudden and radical disruption by AGI, but stated that it will be a continuous improvement process and humans will adapt. He had previously kind of written about the potential harm and benefits of AGI, but now has a much more measured outlook. All right. Next piece of news that matters is Google DeepMind is again flexing its math skills. a new artificial intelligence system developed by Google DeepMind, which is Google's AI arm. It is called Alpha Geometry and it can solve complex geometry problems at the level comparable to human gold medalists at the International Mathematical Olympiad.
Starting point is 00:03:48 I honestly did not know there was a gold medal at the International Mathematic Olympiad, but there is. And alpha geometry combines a neural language model and a symbolic deduction engine to solve geometry problems. This new system performed well on challenging problems and can even discover new mathematical theories. Yeah, I had a whole show on that once, and it kind of blows your mind to think about how generative AI can create new math problems. It's fascinating. All right, our last piece of news is Samsung and Google Cloud made an announcement on their multi-year agreement for more AI smartphones.
Starting point is 00:04:26 So Samsung has announced their partnership with Google Cloud to integrate generative of AI technologies into their latest smartphone series, including the much talked about Samsung Galaxy XS24, which is probably going to be the kind of the most popular and first smartphone to market with that AI edge or, you know, edge AI on the device. So this partnership aims to enhance the user experience by providing advanced AI features, such as text and image editing, real-time translations, and intelligent search capabilities. Samsung is also exploring the use of Google's Gemini. models for more complex tasks and on-device language processing,
Starting point is 00:05:05 enhancing the efficiency and capabilities of their smartphones. Ooh, that was a mouthful, y'all. A lot going on, as always in AI News. So if you want to know more about those, and we always have so much more, make sure to go to Your EverydayAI.com. Sign up for that free daily newsletter. And, hey, while you're there, it's like a free generative AI university.
Starting point is 00:05:25 We have more than 180 shows with expert guests, taking deep dives into all kinds of topics like we're doing today with our guests. So I'm ready to talk AI in the classroom, right? It is, you know, new semesters, you know, just kicked off either this week or, you know, just around the corner. And this is going to be, continue to be a topic. If I'm being honest, y'all, I thought we would have already figured this out at the college level, but it's not that easy, right?
Starting point is 00:05:51 There's so many complexities and difficulties that educators are having to go through. So with that, I'm excited for today's guest. So please help me welcome as we bring her onto the show. There we go. We got her. Laura Dunin is the professor of English and technical writing at the University of Central Oklahoma. Laura, thank you so much for joining the show. Good to be here.
Starting point is 00:06:14 All right. Hey, can you tell everyone a little bit about your role and a little bit about, you know, a little bit about, you know, kind of the courses that you teach there at the University of Central Oklahoma? Sure. I have a lot of different roles, but the one that kind of, matters today is that I am the AI coordinator for our university, which means that I work with a group of people to make sure that if there are issues happening, we have a chance to address them. If there are educational opportunities for faculty or staff or students, I can help put those
Starting point is 00:06:49 together or I can be there to help moderate or whatever's needed for that. And with my students, right now, I'm actually back in the first year English composition classroom. I'm very excited about that. And I am also working with graduate students. So I teach a range of intro to English and then technical writing courses as well as a few graduates classes. All over the place. All over the place. I love that.
Starting point is 00:07:16 Yeah. And, you know, hey, if you're joining us live like Tara, who says she's excited for the conversation, thanks for tuning in. make sure to get your questions. And now, if you have any questions about how AI is used or should be used, or shouldn't be used, love to hear your comments, feedbacks and questions. So let's just start at the top, maybe, Laura. And at least at your university, help us understand, like, how is AI, how is generative AI being viewed right now? Sure. I think at our university and probably most universities, you've got some faculty who are really on board. You've got some faculty or kind of in the
Starting point is 00:07:51 middle, and then you've got faculty who haven't quite gotten on board yet for whatever reason. And I think that spectrum makes it both difficult and also a really rich space for us to engage with each other, because there are some really great conversations that are happening. There are faculty who aren't on board yet, but who have really good reasons for it, and so those conversations can get really rich. But I think, you know, as we see that spectrum, it also can make it difficult for students because they don't necessarily know what is allowed in each class because, you know, professors can do whatever they want to with AI. So, you know, my big thing is let's get guidelines in place, you know, have a syllabus statement of some kind that talks about AI, have guidelines on your assignment sheets so that students know what's allowed or disallowed in the class. And that way they're less likely to accident. step across the line into academic misconduct, and hopefully they're also less likely to purposely step across the line into academic misconduct. Yeah, not that students would ever
Starting point is 00:08:59 try to always be one step ahead of the teachers and the rules, right? That's never a thing. I'm curious, Lord, because like what you said there, to some, it might sound so simple, right? Get guidelines on AI. But I'd imagine that it is multifaceted and not very easy. Can you even talk a lot of a little bit about the challenges and maybe not just specifically about, you know, at the University of Central Oklahoma, but what are the challenges of getting guidelines on generative AI usage in higher education? Sure. I will take one of my assignment sheets as an example. So in a comp one class, this is a space where students are usually learning how to write at the college level. They're learning to find their voice. They might be learning to do a little bit of research and
Starting point is 00:09:46 do good citation. Some faculty feel like brainstorming and drafting have to be done by human, possibly by hand. And other faculty don't see that as such an issue. So as you're thinking about putting guidelines together, they might even be very different across classes. And you know, the same class, just instructors. And it can also be one of those things where if you haven't had a chance to play around and experiment with the different AI programs, maybe you don't know what they can and can't do,
Starting point is 00:10:20 which also makes it hard for you to know what your students should or shouldn't do. So for a lot of us, it takes time and real thought to go back to, what do I actually want my students to come away from this assignment with? Okay, so how might AI augment some of that? How might we need to have human-only moments?
Starting point is 00:10:42 And so it's not just as simple as saying, yes, you can use AI, no, you can't use AI. It's really sitting down and think about, you know, so for my assignment, we've got topics, so brainstorming, rough draft, peer review, final draft, and then a reflective memo on the writing process. And AI fits into those spaces for me in different ways. So each piece of the assignment sheet has AI guidelines for how students can or can't use it in that moment. And, you know, again, that's not something that you just sit down and draft in three minutes. That's, you know, maybe a day long or a week long process to really think about each assignment sheet.
Starting point is 00:11:16 Yeah, and I'm curious because, you know, what Alfonso is saying here is with the speed of change, sure, policy can be difficult. How much does that complicate things? Because, you know, as a daily podcast that covers generative AI, we can barely keep up with, you know, all these big advancements, new models, new capabilities, whether we're talking, you know, the text to text of the chat GPT and Google Bard world or, you know, the mid-journey Dali, like how difficult is the same. speed of generative AI technology. How difficult is that for the education system to try to continually create policies that are both effective, ethical, but also that empower students? Yeah. I think as much as possible if institutions and instructors can come up with somewhat future-proof guidelines. So instead of saying we're going to use chat GPT at this time in this way, we say, all right, so with large language models, we might do this, we could do this, check with your instructor, number one. And then number two, as instructors, I think we need to
Starting point is 00:12:23 be willing to put in the time throughout the semester to update our guidelines if we need to. Right now, mine are pretty wide in that I say brainstorming, if it makes sense for you to do so with transparency. So everything is with transparency. I want to. to know which program my students used, how they used it, if they liked it, did they get what they wanted out of it? And then we do AI literacy throughout the semester. And it's not always big things. Sometimes it's just, hey, this new program came out. Look what it can do. Let's play with chat, GBT, and see what it says. Let's compare it to Claude. You know, those kinds of things. So for me, it's having that constant curiosity to see what's going on. But I also realize that's
Starting point is 00:13:09 exhausting for a lot of instructors. So I think if we can just find some high-level things, like, you know, I don't want you using AI for the problem set on this assignment. We'll check it, you know, in three weeks and see what AI is doing at that time. You know, like with just yesterday with the math one that you were talking about, you know, that was brand new. We didn't know it could do that. Yeah, yeah. It literally just developing, you know, new capabilities day by day. So, yeah, the policy side is understandably difficult. So I'm curious, you know, so it sounds like, you know, your situation, which is kind of like, you know, professors, you know, kind of being on their own a little bit or, you know, having to come up with their own policies on a, you know, class by class or department by department basis, which I'm sure is, you know, pretty standard across the country. But what, at least for your own classroom, I would love to hear more even what are your guidelines for the classes that you are creating,
Starting point is 00:14:05 How are you telling students, you know, to use it, to not use it, and how are you even focusing on literacy? Sure. So I'll go back to that one assignment sheet. And this is the basic guidelines for all of my assignment sheets. So brainstorming, I'm cool with AI if students need it. You know, I realize that the brainstorming is part of the learning process, but sometimes, especially if we're thinking about accessibility, students get caught at that cursor that I don't know what to do. And then sometimes they freak out, they procrastinate. So if we can use AI so that they're not procrastinating, that to me is a good thing. But again, transparency.
Starting point is 00:14:41 With drafting, they're allowed to use AI to help with their drafts. They can have up to 40% of their drafts be AI generated, and they need to highlight that text in red. And I do that. I know there are citation guidelines. That's great. But with the red text, we can see if there are large blocks of texts that are AI written. And that becomes a learning space. Why are there large blocks of AI written text?
Starting point is 00:15:05 Was it 11 o'clock at night? The papers do at 1159. You didn't know what to write. Did you like the AI better than what you wrote? Did you not know what it was talking about? You just set it in there. You know, there are a lot of reasons. And then in peer review, they can put their own work into the AI to get feedback,
Starting point is 00:15:23 but they may not put other people's work in. And that's something that I continue to talk to both students and faculty about is because of privacy issues, we don't want to stick anybody else's work in. With the final draft, 15% of that can be AI generated. Again, red text. With their reflective memos to me, because that is a personal reflection, I don't want them to use AI there. They're also talking about their AI use, what they did, what they didn't do.
Starting point is 00:15:49 Same thing with the peer review. They actually will give me a reflection on how good the AI information was compared to the human generated feedback. And then I've also added something that I call annotated PDFs and that information. I have just a real brief discussion of that on my website as well in the Creative Commons files area. But what I have students do is every source that they use, they have to turn it into a PDF and then they have to highlight the quotes that they used and talk about why they used them
Starting point is 00:16:21 and then highlight any other spaces in those articles that maybe gave them an idea or made them think something interesting or led them to another topic. And yes, I know that AI can do that for them. But for the most part, like at this point, I have not had any obvious cheating through AI at all since it came online, which I know is a big thing. So my students seem to be willing to go on this journey with me. Yeah, I was curious. I love the approach, right? It's super specific, but also doesn't seem terribly hard to implement.
Starting point is 00:16:55 I'm sure there's extra challenges on the back end for you or anyone else that may be grading or checking it over. But what's the response been from the students so far for that kind of policy? So far my students have been fine with it. We struggled a little bit last semester implementing the annotated PDFs because students hadn't done that before. And so there was a little bit of a learning curve for them. But once they got into it, especially my graduate students last semester, really appreciated the opportunity to sit down with the PDFs and mark them up. Because, you know, a lot of people say, well, let's just do an annotated bibliography, which is great, but most of us as researchers are not going to sit down and do an annotated bibliography as we're working through a topic.
Starting point is 00:17:41 That's something we might publish, but not something we would often do on our own. And I think a lot of us do just go out and read the articles and mark them up and highlight things that we're interested in. So this also gets to a more authentic research process for a lot of students. And I think when students see that a process is authentic to what they actually need to do as opposed to feeling like busy work, they're also more likely to go on that journey. It's interesting because I feel that your approach here, Laura, it's forcing students to use AI in the correct way, right? Because I think if colleges and universities just say, oh, you know, we don't, we don't really care. Just tell us if you do. You know, obviously, I would say vast majority,
Starting point is 00:18:31 you know, kind of like, you know, we had a, we had a comment from, from Woozy here saying he can't imagine, you know, ever, you know, he said, I can't imagine being in college right now and not using AI for everything, right? Yeah. But I guess that leads me to the next kind of elephant in the room. And I'm going to try my hardest, Laura, to not go on an accidental hot take on this. That's okay. Go for it. Yeah, even even Tara asking about it. So if you've seen issues with plagiarism checkers, because that's something that universities are using across the country where you take the text and plug it in and it says this is this percent AI generated. Is that something you all are using? And if so, have you seen problems? And I'm going to try not to go on a hot take
Starting point is 00:19:17 too here. Okay, so AI detectors, can we please as instructors stop using them? And I say that for a number of reasons. We watched OpenAI pull their AI detector last fall saying, hey, it doesn't actually work. We've seen all sorts of problems with AI detectors. And some people will say, well, it gets it right most of the time. You know, there's a 1% error rate or a 6% error rate. That's not bad. But, but what happens to the students that were falsely accusing? And I have watched this over and over in the groups that I'm in. I've had students come and talk to me about it. And what happens is we lose our students' trust.
Starting point is 00:20:02 And they stop being willing to go on that learning journey with us if they have to spend time defending themselves. They also, you know, even Jason, our mutual friend, you know, was talking about his own experience being accused of using AI to write something that he didn't. And how emotionally impactful that is and not in a good way. So if we want to create a space for our students to learn, to grow, to have a chance to make mistakes and recover from them, I don't think AI detectors are a space. It's a policing space that as instructors we shouldn't be in. So instead, I take the time, you know, with those guidelines that I have, talking to my students constantly about, hey, look what the AI is doing this week.
Starting point is 00:20:50 Check out Claude. See what Bard's doing, you know. And we play with these technologies and we talk about them and we learn, hey, chat GPT gave me this answer, but it really wasn't that great. And I had to spend an hour fixing it. And we also, you know, through the transparency, See, that gives us the ethical space. So to say, yes, I used it.
Starting point is 00:21:11 And then we've got things like Grammarly AI, where students are using it. And a lot of times we're going to see students who are non-native English speakers using something like Grammarly to, quote unquote, fix their language or students who are developmental writers trying to sound more academic. And they're going to get caught up in the AI detector. We've got students who are neurodiverse. We're seeing those students get caught.
Starting point is 00:21:37 but more in the AI detector. And of course, as more information gets fed into the AI programs, more of what we write on our own is going to get flagged as AI because it's going to say, oh, I saw another person write like this, therefore I'm going to flag it. So if we can just move away from the idea of policing and spend time, and again, I know we're exhausted, I get that, but we have to spend time creating spaces in our classrooms
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Starting point is 00:23:05 portrait retouching, and creating social variations. Every step the assistant takes is visible. so you can refine, redirect, or take over at any time. You stay in the driver's seat as the creative director. Adobe Firefly AI assistant now in public beta. See it today at firefly.adobie.com. You said it perfectly. I'm going to try to only follow up with FAC. So even Open AIs detector, they did shut it down because it was 26% accurate in testing.
Starting point is 00:23:40 So, you know, yeah, you're more likely to, you know, just flip a coin. or to have a cat walk and choose between two boxes than using any AI detector out there. They are fake. They don't work. All right. That's enough. I got it out of my system. Okay.
Starting point is 00:23:56 That was good. I was hoping we didn't accidentally go 30 minutes on that one. So with that in mind, Laura, because not everyone is going to have your very calculated, multi-tiered, well-thought-out approach to implementing AI in the classroom. So just as a whole, how can other university instructors, you know, prepare students, right? Because that's the other thing I talk about all the time. Gen. AI skills are the most in-demand, you know, skills out there right now. But so many universities aren't doing anything about it.
Starting point is 00:24:30 So how do universities find that balance, especially when it is all so new, so fresh? Yeah. Again, I think instructors have to be out there experimenting with the AI in their field. and knowing what can and can't happen, I think it's helpful if they are able to talk to actual practitioners in their field. So what's going on in nursing right now with AI? What's going on in dietetics? What's going on in history? Right. And so we're out there talking to people and saying, okay, what skills do our students need? How can we implement them? And just taking that time. And I know, I keep coming back to that, but we really have to take the time to figure out what our students are going to do with it.
Starting point is 00:25:21 And if it can solve math problems and, you know, we're looking at the possibility of AI being able to reason. You know, people are questioning right now if it can reason. And, you know, with GPT5, people are saying, yeah, that next leap is going to be reasoning. So what skills do our students need to thrive in this space? And then we can just focus on those. So, you know, I teach technical writing and I want my students to be able to show that they still have value when AI can write most things. Maybe not well, but it can write them. And, you know, if we can go out to Grammarly and have it edit, you know, what's the point of an editor?
Starting point is 00:25:56 If you've used, you know, if you've ever even used Word and you've gone, what is that suggestion and why does it think that this verb should be that, right? You know that these programs don't always get things right. So helping students to understand where their value lies and helping students to learn how to learn about the AI programs. So yeah, I'm going to talk about four major large language models. But I want students to know how to go out and find other programs and learn how to use them as benefits them in their work so that they can again show value. So that's kind of my approach is that instructors need to figure out what makes value for their students. Yeah, it's great, great advice. So two-part question here.
Starting point is 00:26:39 We'll tackle it one in a time. So Monica asking, are there specific AI courses right now being taught at your university? Sadly, no, not really. Not that I know of, let me put it that way. Somebody might have one on the books that I don't know about. I did try to offer an AI in writing course for the spring, and unfortunately it did not make. So what I am doing is I'm just putting AI literacy into my courses.
Starting point is 00:27:04 I've got other colleagues who are putting AI literacy into this. their courses, but no, not that I know of. And then the second part of her question is asking, what are some of the more unique pros and cons for AI in the college setting that maybe we haven't heard? Hmm. That's an interesting question. Let me think on that.
Starting point is 00:27:22 I think some of the pros are that we get to be out there playing and learning at the same time as our students, which I think also might be a con, right? because we have to get really comfortable with that gray space of not knowing everything. And I think as instructors, we're used to walking into the classroom and being like, boom, I know this material and now I'm going to transfer it to you. But with the AI, I think it's one of those challenges where you walk into the classroom maybe and you say, okay, hey, what have you all used it for this week? What's Snapchat up to this week?
Starting point is 00:27:57 Anybody using it for LinkedIn? You know, that kind of thing. And so the pro is that we get to be on that journey with our students. The con is that we don't know necessarily that much more than they do about this topic. So I think that's going to be the one I'm going to sit with. No, that's good. So my thought on maybe how this could be done or should be done, and I'd love to get your feedback is I think universities should have dedicated
Starting point is 00:28:25 and required courses in generative AI. You know, my thought is it's, you know, in the, future, it's going to be just as important as, you know, math or science or English or, you know, business, right? That's my thought is there should be required courses in different areas of generative AI. And then hopefully those learning should be carried, you know, as you go into your more specialized colleges and departments. Is that a good approach? Is that feasible? Or is that just, you know, not really, you know, how you think it might shake out? Sadly, I'm going to disagree with you here. So for us, but we need this on the show. It's always, it's always.
Starting point is 00:29:00 much agreeing. The thing about the curriculum cycle for us, and I think we may have a longer one that a lot of people do, but it's about a two year, one and a half to two year process. So we get classes that we start putting together summer or fall of year one, then spring of year one, they go to committees, and then fall of year two, they go out to the academic affairs curriculum committee. And so then summer of year two, they're finally on the books. So it's a two-year process.
Starting point is 00:29:32 And I think right now what we are dealing with is we are dealing with the students who didn't learn how to use AI in high school. Because K through 12 was banning it at first and now you've got people who are on board. But there's the concern about, well, people under 13 shouldn't be using them and how are we going to get this into the standard curriculum in high school? So right now we've got students who don't necessarily know how to use it ethically. My guess is that that's going to shift in three to five years as high schools get on board with this, have a curriculum that they can use to implement good AI usage. So I think in about three to five years, our students are going to come to us with better ethical understandings of AI. And I think what that means is that any courses that we get on the books, A, they would be slow.
Starting point is 00:30:23 And B, because the technology is changing, you know, every day, every week, It's really hard to have a curriculum that's going to move forward that way. And, you know, in a lot of universities, you can't just have a special topics course that's open to anything. You have to have, like, a somewhat normative curriculum that's going to go from each time you teach it to each time you teach it. So I think that's a huge challenge as well. And I think that's also unfortunate because it means that instructors are left to try and figure out what fits into their field. and students may not get some of that in-depth ethical training that they need. So I don't know what the answer is, aside from we'll be trying to get into early first-year
Starting point is 00:31:09 courses and have some sort of dedicated learning model that can change every semester, but we go into those courses and maybe we have a day on AI where we talk to students. But I don't know what the other solutions might be at this point. Yeah, that makes sense. It also brings me to, you know, a point here that Alphonseo was making saying, you know, slow adoptions. People are always talking about this is the way we've always done it mode. Does higher education, even the way that it operates, the way it works, the way it approves courses, does it need to change because things are just moving faster than they have been before? There's a lot of conversation around that.
Starting point is 00:31:48 And I think it would be great if we had a faster way to get things going. And to an extent, we do have some things we can do. So microcredentials, we can get out there really quickly for students and faculty and staff. So maybe six weeks to three months to get something together, which is pretty quick for academic purposes. I think things like that, workshops where people can attend but they don't have. have to. If we can give students some kind of credit, you know, maybe a badge of some kind is, you know, I love badges. I'll go to all sorts of workshops for badges. And we've seen, you know, that kind of thing works. So I think things like that, we have to get a little bit
Starting point is 00:32:33 creative doing things outside of the box and not doing things the way that we've always done them because things are shifting so fast now. So, you know, one, there's so many good questions. It's hard to stop here, Laura. So, you know, literacy, you know, you talked about it, right? Like, it starts obviously before, you know, higher education. It starts before college. A great question from Cecilia here asking, what are your thoughts on the best ways to use AI in the elementary and secondary education?
Starting point is 00:33:02 What are your thoughts on that? Okay. So I have an 8-year-old and 11-year-old. There we go. And my 8-year-old is not really interested in AI yet. And that's great. That's fine. I think some of the learning programs,
Starting point is 00:33:15 that learn with your kid can be really helpful as long as they are walled gardens. They're closed off. They've been trained on the data sets and we know they're giving the right answers, which is not what happens with large language models right now. With my older son, he has a coding class that he goes to. And sometimes he has questions that are something that the teacher can't help him with. So I've actually taught him how to get into Bing because he can use Bing for free. and he can use it at his coding class on the computer so he can pull up Bing and he can ask it his coding questions as he's going through.
Starting point is 00:33:51 And I think that's a really good use of it because the program that they're using had an AI assistant built in, but you only had so many tokens and he ran out of tokens. So I think things like that can be really helpful. You know, I'm wary of things like your AI best friend that we've seen in some of the social medias, because we've seen that those don't always have really good guardrails, and they might be talking to children about things that are grown-up topics, and that children certainly don't need to be discussing in the way that these AI programs are discussing.
Starting point is 00:34:28 So I think the biggest thing is that if tech companies want to help educators, they need to work with educators. And then again, they do need to be those walled gardens, closed systems, trained on the data specific for that topic or specific for that grade level. so that we know that whatever information is coming back is valid. So Laura, we've talked about so much here. We've talked about, you know, ethical and responsible use of AI, literacy, content detectors. You walked us through your own process, which I think is fantastic.
Starting point is 00:34:59 But maybe, you know, as we wrap up here, because I'm sure there's a lot of educators who are going to be listening, what's your one takeaway? What's your one takeaway that you want people to say, hey, going forward, this is the one piece of advice that I give you in order to bring more AI literacy into the classroom? Oh man, only one. Okay. I think that my advice is that AI is here, whether we like it or not, our students are going to be using it, whether we like it or not. And that means that if we want our students to use it ethically and effectively, we have to spend some time with these programs. We have to spend some time with our assignment sheets. And even if that means taking time over winter break, over summer break,
Starting point is 00:35:48 to just really sit down with it and think about it, we have to figure out where it works for us. And I think my biggest takeaway from that is that every instructor and every course is going to have slightly different needs and values from the AI. And it's great for us to be having conversations with each other, but we also have to dig deep and figure out what works for us and go forward from there. All right. Class is closed, y'all. We just got a great 30-minute education from Laura. Laura. Thank you so much for coming on the AI show and sharing your insights and expertise with us. We really appreciate it. Thank you. And hey, as a reminder, we went over a lot. So make sure to go to Your EverydayAI.com.
Starting point is 00:36:31 We're going to be recapping everything that we talked about with Laura and a lot more, sharing some other resources. So Your EverydayAI.com. Check it out. Sign up for. the newsletter and come back. See you tomorrow and every day with more everyday AI. Thanks y'all. Meet Firefly AI Assistant now live in Adobe Firefly, the Allman One Creative AI Studio. Just describe what you want to create in your own words and the assistant handles the rest, orchestrating multi-step workflows across Adobe Creative Cloud apps, including Photoshop, Premiere Express, and more in one conversational interface. You direct the outcome while the assistant accelerates execution, Stay in control with the ability to step in and refine at any time.
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