AI Advocates

S1 E1: AI Advocates: Empowering Teachers with AI Tools & Strategies

• Lisa Dieker • Season 1 • Episode 1

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In the debut episode of AI Advocates, Dr. Lisa Dieker and Dr. Maggie Mosher introduce their podcast, aimed at helping teachers integrate AI into education effectively. They discuss their backgrounds, personal motivations for advocating AI in education, and their shared passion for equity and accessibility, particularly for students with disabilities.

The hosts outline the three main types of AI:

  • ANI (Artificial Narrow Intelligence): Task-specific AI, like Siri or Zoom.
  • AGI (Artificial General Intelligence): AI with human-like reasoning and learning capabilities.
  • ASI (Artificial Super Intelligence): A future AI that surpasses human intelligence.

They emphasize the benefits of AI in saving time for educators while acknowledging concerns like privacy, bias, and misinformation. Future episodes will provide practical AI tools, strategies, and safety guidelines to empower teachers.

Music:

Reclaim your time….., time…., time.

Lisa Dieker:

Welcome to a new podcast series. AI Advocate. I'm Dr. Lisa Dieker.

Maggie Mosher:

And I'm Dr. Maggie Mosher.

Lisa Dieker:

Well, we're excited to be here with you. We both work at the University of Kansas, and I have the privilege of being the Williamson Family Distinguished Professor and run a center through the Achievement& Assessment Institute. A lot of words here so far, called the FLITE STEM Center, which stands for Flexible Learning Through Innovations in Technology and Education. Maggie, you want to tell the group what you do?

Maggie Mosher:

Yeah, I'm an assistant research professor at the Achievement & Assessment Institute. I also work for FLITE and a few other centers, one of them being Reimagining Education, and we do a lot with AI and innovative technology.

Lisa Dieker:

Yeah, so Maggie, we're excited to launch this, and we want to thank KU, the Achievement Assessment Institute and the library for helping us host this podcast on really, we called it AI Advocates because we want to help teachers, and that's our primary audience here, use AI more effectively, or AI more effectively. So Maggie, do you want to talk a little bit of, kind of like, what brought us to this journey in our collaboration, and kind of why you're interested in this podcast, reaching teachers?

Maggie Mosher:

I think what brought us to this journey, at least what brought us together was the love for innovating education and making sure education is equitable and available to everyone and easily accessible. And I think that when we talk about AI, we all know that it's never going to leave. It's here to stay. It's been here for a really long time, and we don't plan on getting rid of it anytime soon. And even we know that our students are going to need to know really well how to integrate AI as a tool, just like any other tool that helps them to do a better job learning. And we even know that 62% of employers, according to a survey, say that they will hire or more likely to hire someone with generative AI knowledge. So we want to make sure that our students have that knowledge so that they're more likely to be get jobs, get hired.

Unknown:

Yeah,

Lisa Dieker:

Yeah, and, you know, I think our other why is, we both are very passionate about people with disabilities, and I know my why is not just, you know, I'm the daughter of a mechanic who loves to tinker and try new things. My mother was a librarian, so you read everything. And then I'm a first-gen college student that, you know, know that sometimes can still get opportunities. My school didn't have a computer. I didn't even have a Bunsen burner. I went to got my first chemistry class and didn't know what a Bunsen burner was in the and I was like, we had a cookstove. So, you know, again, AI is one more tool that I feel like if kids don't get opportunities. But my personal why comes from both being a sibling, a sister-in-law, and a parent of someone with a disability, and I understand those being tools that if they were born today, will change their intelligence. I like to call AI, not artificial intelligence, but I stole this from the chairwoman of Dell of augmented intelligence. And so a little bit more about your why. Beyond that, we both just love to help teachers and all of that, but what's kind of your grassroots why about AI, not just equity and access, but really, what's your personal motivation?

Maggie Mosher:

Yeah, I think a lot of it has to do with I grew up at a school really close to the Navajo reservation, and I was in their special education services for being twice exceptional, and really a lot like your school in that we were a rural school in the middle of nowhere. Our encyclopedias said that we had yet to have a man on the moon when I was growing up. So that's how old we were. The computers were those kinds that barely had the little dots and nothing else to them, and so I remember having to do a lot to figure out what the rest of the world was learning, and having to do a lot of research and having to go to a lot of different places to learn because that learning wasn't available. And I think nowadays, technology has that ability to bring all this knowledge into the school and into the classroom in a way it didn't before. In my mind, as you'll hear me on the podcast, I can talk so quickly because my mind works so quickly and I think AI helps me, in some ways, get out a message that sometimes I'm so quick people can't hear, or sometimes I'm so fast that I'm not understandable even. And AI can help me slow down and it can help me to make sure whatever I say is then written in front of me for everyone to hear. So it just provides a lot of tools that I don't have available and that are free. So it helps me to access a lot more presentations and a lot more audiences, which I'm appreciative of.

Lisa Dieker:

Yeah, and so we're really excited and I this very first podcast, we want to let you know, teachers, if you're listening to us, short five to eight minutes maximum, we're going to keep it short, going to give you a tip, a tool, a strategy, and that's why we called it AI Advocates, because we both advocate that you should be using it, and then when it's safe for students to be using it, and we both believe it should be in the hands of the students. I, my own son has Tourette's dyslexia and dysgraphia, and honestly, he's now using it in his life, but throughout in third grade, he was accessing technology and it was a game changer for him. And so we're really excited to celebrate. So Maggie, for our very first podcast, short and to the simple, let's just tell everybody the three types of AI that often is talked about. So, you know, we have ANI, AGI and ASI. So which one would you like to start with, telling them a little bit about, and I'll pick up the other ones.

Maggie Mosher:

You go ahead. You start off.

Lisa Dieker:

Okay, so you know, ANI, you know that narrow piece, that's really what this podcast is going to be about. Maggie and I, Maggie is definitely smarter than I am, younger than I am, and we both laugh. But Maggie also is, you know, a coder and a writer and and, and AI will do that for me too, but I've really chosen to be in the lane of using AI. And I'm not cheap. I am cheap. I love coupons. I grew up in garage sales, but I am the person who tries to figure out how to use things for free, not because I don't think your school shouldn't pay for things, but narrow AI are those things that you can use, like Siri, like FaceTime. Those are AI tools. This Zoom is an AI tool. But again, they're narrow in that they can be working with the human but they can't think without human direction. And that's narrow. Maggie, I know you're living in the generative world. Do you want to talk a little bit about the generative AI?

Maggie Mosher:

Yeah, generative AI and general AI also has known as strong AR or deep AI, but it's more human-like intelligence. It can learn, it can reason, it can make decisions, it can generate things in a wide variety of contexts. So it can you can put in words, and it can make you a picture of that. It doesn't need your input to be able to generate new information. It can come up with it based on all of the stuff you've said before. So it's got a little bit of the ability to do a little more than just the narrow AI.

Lisa Dieker:

Yeah, and then as we get to that super AI, there's not a lot of that. There's not any in my house. I don't know about yours, but, but down the road, that will be a part of our world, and you're starting to see it emerge. But that's the AI that can think for itself, can and that's what I think that scares people sometimes. I'm scared of all AI. I don't know if you've ever you know, I talked to my mom about a brand of ice cream yesterday, and what do I get on my website? That brand of ice cream and it doesn't even exist to this day. So I do get nervous about privacy. We'll address those issues, but we want you to understand that for you as a teacher, we think the two things this does the best, which is kind of our theme song for this, is it saves you time, which is the greatest gift we can give you. No teacher we've ever met says they have enough time, and Maggie and I both get asked a lot. Hey, can you do an after school PD? Can you tell us your favorite tool? And we decided just to tell you in this podcast. So any last words Maggie, that you want to say as we launch this podcast and excited to be working together?

Maggie Mosher:

Yeah, I would say also, when we're looking at superintelligent AI, to remember that it can problem solve, it can do social interactions. It's creative on its own. But whenever we're looking at everything, I love that you said the safety piece is really important. It's also important to realize how biased AI can be. So to really make sure you're putting other voices in with the AI voice, because it's been trained on a very specific population, and then to make sure we don't put anything in AI privacy wise that we are worried about. So on top of all of the fun podcasts we're going to get to do on all of our favorite tools and how they can help you transform education or transform your own learning. I think it'll be fun to also talk a little bit about, okay, how can I make sure that it's safe, secured, not as unbiased, truthful, real? We're getting good answers that and some fake information. So I'm excited about that.

Lisa Dieker:

Yeah, that's fun. And I'll leave with the last comment there, which is hallucinations. We have all heard of that word, but it's very common in AI. So if you're a novice, this podcast gave you just a drop in the water, and the joke we always use are actually our dean talks about is we're one chapter ahead of you, so we're just going to keep running in front of you and giving you great ideas. So thanks for joining us. If you have any questions, you can also send us a Tweet at our Twitter account, which you'll see the link on our podcast. Thanks.

Maggie Mosher:

Thanks.