aiEDU Studios
aiEDU Studios is a podcast from the team at The AI Education Project.
Each week, a new guest joins us for a deep-dive discussion about the ever-changing world of AI, technology, K-12 education, and other topics that will impact the next generation of the American workforce and social fabric.
Learn more about aiEDU at www.aiEDU.org
aiEDU Studios
Greg Toppo: The promise and perils of AI in schools
What makes AI different from previous waves of education technology?
Greg Toppo, education reporter at The 74, joins us to unpack how AI is reshaping education from the classroom to district leadership. Drawing from his extensive journalism career and time as a teacher, Greg brings a measured perspective to the AI revolution that's sweeping through schools right now.
The conversation dives into the landmark Massachusetts court case, where a student challenged academic cheating accusations after using ChatGPT on a history assignment. Rather than viewing this as simply a policy failure, Greg frames it as a complex example of how even well-prepared schools must navigate uncharted ethical terrain: "When you're trying to design a bank that is impervious to being robbed, it really helps to consult with a bank robber."
For educators navigating this landscape, Greg recommends balanced information consumption – seeking perspectives from both enthusiastic advocates and thoughtful skeptics. The future of schooling depends not on blindly adopting technology, but rather on carefully considering how it could enhance the fundamentally human endeavor of education while preserving meaningful learning experiences.
You can follow Greg Toppo and The 74 at:
aiEDU: The AI Education Project
Hey everybody, I'm Alex Katran, I'm the CEO of AIEDU and we're here at AIEDU Studios DC Edition. I'm very excited to have Greg Toppo, a reporter for the 74, one of the leading publications covering the education space, someone that I've talked to formally and informally over the past year, two years, and Greg has been both a confidant and sort of a co-learner as we try to make sense of this space and sort of how technology, and specifically artificial intelligence, is changing education or not, and so I'm very excited to flip the script and put the mic in front of you and give you a chance to talk about you know, from the vantage point of a journalist who's talked to a really wide range of folks in our space, what you're learning, questions you're asking. But before we go into sort of the day-to-day you know this sort of this AI moment, this AI zeitgeist I'd love to zoom out a little bit and hear why don't you start with just sort of you know what you're doing at the 74 and then you know how did you come to cover education?
Greg Toppo (The 74):Sure, sure Thanks for having me and, just as a quick aside, most journalists hate being interviewed, by the way, so you know I'm good with it. I think we're going to have a good time here. I cover a couple of things at the 74. It feels like it keeps changing, but I cover basically the intersection of AI and education, and I also have sort of a I don't know if you'd call it like a side hustle at 74, but one of the things we are very interested in is the future of high school, and so one of the topics that I spent a lot of time on is writing about visiting and thinking about and writing about innovative high schools, and the two haven't quite merged yet. I expect we're going to be seeing more and more in the near future.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I mean there's a lot of reporters covering AI A lot of good ones. There's a lot of good ones, and a lot more today than there were three or four years ago Not that many covering AI plus education intersection. How did you get to be doing specifically sort of this like sort of view of the future of school and innovation?
Greg Toppo (The 74):Yeah, well, I mean, I was interested in it for a number of years. I co -wrote a book in 2021 that actually looked at AI and education specifically, interestingly enough, actually looked at AI and education specifically, interestingly enough, what it was going to do to high school. We were very interested in just sort of projecting forward what all these technological marvels, if you will, were going to the effect they were going to have on education. I had a co -author, my co-author and I. He was an educator, he still is an educator. He and I wrote kind of. I thought it was a fun, really interesting book.
Greg Toppo (The 74):We basically did a what if a high school principal fell asleep in 2020 and woke up in 2040 and then went and visited his old school? What would it look like? You know, after all these technological changes, we've been seeing so sort of a Rip Van Winkle story, interspersed with some reporting on what's happening actually now and different models of high school so big picture. I've been thinking about this for a number of years. I've been covering AI you know AI daily for two years and change at the 74. And it really began where I think most of us started covering it, which is November 2022, when chat GPTs were burst on the scene and people started messing with it and freaking out about it and wondering what was going to happen. Um, and you know, decrying the death of the five paragraph essay, et cetera, et cetera. Um, that was when we as an institution started really paying attention to it and when I basically started saying you know, okay, this is something we need to cover full time.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Yeah To me cause we were chatting earlier. You, you know, okay, this is something we need to cover full time. Yeah to me because we were chatting earlier. You mentioned that you'd even did you do a story on GPT-2 or had you just sort of.
Greg Toppo (The 74):In the book. Actually, one of the things that we looked at was and it was actually not specifically related to education, it was just in 2019, I want to say they were playing with OpenAI, was playing with the ways you could essentially make GPT-2 into kind of an approximation of a journalist, and actually the chapter in the book where we talk about it is where we talk about, um, what's this going to do to journalism and the? The example we gave, which, of course, you could imagine even more clearly now, was that it basically just they gave it a couple of words from a, you know, a real existing I can't remember it was guardian story or something like that and it just basically just went to town and wrote the whole story I remember yeah, and you was lots of crazy stuff and it was even, I think, one of the one of the things they said at Luzon was imagine a reanimated JFK.
Greg Toppo (The 74):you know, just patently crazy stuff.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Yeah, I think GPT-2 was a time when there was, I think, only a couple hundred people in the world who had really had the chance to look under the hood of these language models. But for me, the zeitgeist moment that ChatGPT ushered in, because I've been in the AI space since 2014. Ai has been around I mean, you can actually go quite far back and some people argue the Turing computer. But machine learning reached technological maturity in industry in the 2010s, so AI was not a new conversation. There were plenty of people portending a lot of the stuff that is now reality today. It was sort of lived in the realm of futurism. I think the challenge for artificial intelligence in part was it was a concurrent technology with this suite of emerging tech. You know crypto, you know blockchain, virtual reality, much of which you know 3D printing the metaverse, all this NFTs, nfts.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):And while there's actually arguments that a lot of those technologies are still nascent and will bloom in later years and will transform society in ways that people have predicted, they were clearly a bit ahead of their time. If we're being gratuitous and some of them are probably just like patently you know we're overhyped and over embellished, and so I think there was this fatigue from OK, the futurists are at it again talking about some crazy future. I think people were understandably cynical and incredulous at some of the claims that were being made. Chatgpt put everything into their hands. It made it tangible in a way that it wasn't before. I think in the abstract, people understood that there was an algorithm curating the content that they view. It's very hard to really wrap your head around. You know what that means. You're not really using it. You don't really understand you know what the weights are or even what that means when you have a tool that's just as and the user interface was really powerful, right.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):You just ask a question, you press enter and you get this output and these turn, you get this output, and these outputs were, you know, astounding, I think. Today we're sort of we are the bar continues to to increase, um, but I think most people will be able to tell you like exactly the first thing that they put into, whether it was chat, gbt or gemini or something else.
Greg Toppo (The 74):Where were you and what were you doing at the time?
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):yeah, yeah did you have? You been in education your whole, your whole life um, I actually sure um we were all in education, you know, the first part of everybody's lives generally.
Greg Toppo (The 74):Exactly, I spent a long time in education. When I graduated from college. I actually got right into teaching, actually was in a teacher prep program the Monday morning after I graduated from college, um, and stayed in education. Stayed in, uh, elementary and secondary secondary education for about the next eight or nine years, um, mostly, I have to say, if I'm being honest, wanting to get the hell out of it. As soon as I got in, not quite sure how, I knew I wanted to write, knew I wanted to do something different and about you know, like I said, eight or nine years in I finally just said, okay, I need to change what I'm doing. And so started freelancing, doing lots of magazine pieces, and finally got my first staff job at a newspaper in New Mexico at the great great paper still exists, the Santa Fe New Mexican, and really just loved it and had the time of my life there.
Greg Toppo (The 74):Spent three years there and then went to Baltimore to work at the AP. Spent two years at the AP in Baltimore, two more years at the AP in Washington. Was there just in time for things like the Clinton impeachment and ended up covering some of the Monica Lewinsky stuff. We actually, as luck would have it, I was the only person in the Baltimore Bureau who lived a couple of blocks from the courthouse where the Linda Tripp wiretap case was taking place, so I ended up covering that I don't know. After the AP in Washington, spent 15 years at USA Today and was the national education writer there. During that time, wrote a book in 2015 that looked at the possibilities in learning games and really got kind of like a graduate level education all my own, you know just self almost entirely like self-taught, if you will. Um, the kind of how that works, how that sector works gamified learning yeah, yeah, um, and really had the time of my life, um.
Greg Toppo (The 74):by then, um, I was really wanting to do something different, was kind of sick of the you know nclb race to the top standards, testing on and on and on um, and just wanted to just explore something new and different and weird, and that was really. That was probably the most fun I've had in my career. Um, and I'd love to actually maybe at some point talk about the parallels between what I saw then so now going on a decade ago and what I'm seeing now with AI.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Yeah, so you, you found your way out. You're covering national politics. We were just talking to a reporter yesterday from one of the big publications, people in education. I think sometimes there's a lot of stories of folks becoming cynical. Education is a tough place for people who are well-intentioned, trying to do work and have an impact, and there's just a lot of systemic challenges, um, but national politics is its own uh cynicism factory. Um, so you went from one very you know uh place where a lot of jaded people to back to education.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Um, but at the 74, you, I mean your reporting is interesting because it's a lot more, it's longer form. You're doing much more of a deep dive. You're not like, I haven't seen too many process stories from you, and is that because of your remit at the 74? Is that something that you're trying to be more intentional about in terms of? I mean, especially right now, there's so much to cover, you know, and AI is not a narrow space anymore. I mean, how do you think about sort of your beat, as it were, like what is the frame or sort of the aperture that you're using?
Greg Toppo (The 74):Yeah, that's a great question and I think, in a way, the DNA of the $74 million is that you know, on the one hand, we're a national publication, so we don't have to be writing about the Cleveland School Board or the, or you know what's happening at the, you know the State Board of Education in New Hampshire, so we're we're not worrying about those little processes unless they're interesting to us. So so if there's something happening on a local level that we want to dip into, we can dip into it. The perfect example to me is the story I wrote a couple weeks ago about this case in Massachusetts with the student who was accused of cheating on a history project using AI In a way, a local story. It was in a federal court in Boston, but we found it interesting enough where we just said you know what we need to write about this.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Yeah, I remember you reaching out to me for my thoughts on that story and shortly thereafter and it was around the time that your piece had come out, I mean, it started to really gain national traction. I don't know if it's actually the first, but it certainly appears to be the first, at least the first example of this that has been talked about and covered nationally. Do you know, was this actually the first time someone has gone to court challenging an accusation of cheating because they used Chad GBT?
Greg Toppo (The 74):Yeah, here's the thing you need to know, because they use chat gpt. Yeah, um, here's a, here's the thing you need to know. Um, we will never say first, ever, or, or, or never before, or, uh, anything like any, any superlative like that, unless we can absolutely prove it. Because somebody always comes along and says no, no, no, you know, I was the first ever and I filed a lawsuit in 1988. And so we're basically among the first, or the known first, so we will always hedge our bets.
Greg Toppo (The 74):That said, as far as we can tell it's a and it's an interesting case too.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):It's an interesting case We'll link to your reporting on this.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I also wrote a substack that sort of was a follow-up, you know, very much inspired by our conversations um the last, and I and I and I'll admit I haven't actually checked in on whether there have been any updates the last thing that I have seen was a preliminary injunction that was denied by the judge, and I remember when we had talked about this case, you know, one of the things that you and I both sort of agreed on was we just don't know enough, like we don't like there's we have one side of the story, which is the student is, you know, claiming that they were unfairly penalized, um, and you know, uh, for, for cheating, when in reality, uh, from the student's perspective, um, this was purely just a misunderstanding. And you know a lot, you know miscommunication or lack of sufficient communication from the school about, you know what constituted cheating, and I think there was a lot of, um, uh, reactionary outcry that was like, ah, this is completely unfair. The student, you know, shouldn't be penalized for the school just not being up to date or up to speed.
Greg Toppo (The 74):Not having a good policy.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Not having a good policy. But when I read the preliminary injunction the judge actually quoted specific excerpts from the school academic integrity policy where they say you know you're not supposed to use, you know technology and they ensure they don't necessarily specifically name artificial intelligence. But so there was even even the the out of date academic integrity policy, I think arguably did cover it. But then the other other sort of like you know detail that I think was lost in some of the national coverage is the school had actually had a whole class where they talked about appropriate and inappropriate uses of chat GPT. Right.
Greg Toppo (The 74):It was an English class I think it was an English class. And just for the record, the kid had been punished in a history class.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Yeah, and so so what we, what? Basically, what the case kind of evolved into was to me very clearly the student cheated, and this was basically a semantic argument about whether you know a policy in an English class is transferable to a social studies class and you know I'm not a student of the law and I don't know exactly.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):You know I'm not a student of the law and I don't know exactly. You know I don't believe that there's been a ruling yet. In the case, the judge seems pretty aligned with the school based on his commentary in the denial of the injunction. But you know, I think I actually think that school in Massachusetts is an exemplar of what most schools should be doing. And sure, maybe there, you know, I think there policies school wide and be really intentional about letting kids know. But I also think that, as a student, you know there is a there's, there's these gray areas, even before Chad GPT.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):And one of the one of the points that I make when people ask well, you know, chad GPT shouldn't be cheating because a student is just, you know, using a tool. You know chat GPT shouldn't be cheating because the student is just, you know, using a tool. You know, one of the questions I'll ask I'll be curious for your take on this um is imagine a student's writing an essay and, um, it's an essay on cold war history and their parent is a professor of cold war history.
Greg Toppo (The 74):Um, no, you're going with this, but while they're writing the essay, and while they're writing the essay, their parents are sitting right next to them.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Right, and you know, maybe not literally writing it, but helping them write every single thing like sort of like you know, provide them with all this feedback, you know, not just reviewing it and providing like red lines, like actually co-writing it with a student Right.
Greg Toppo (The 74):You know there's a sculpture project in there. Dad's a sculptor, yeah, yeah, I mean is that cheating I mean.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I like if you were the teacher in that situation no, I think it's a great it's.
Greg Toppo (The 74):It's great, it's a great question and I think the the to me the kind of the short answer to that. The short response is you know, transparency says you should indicate that you know I got help from my mom, who's a Cold War historian, or you know, here are the contributions that that she, you know that she was able to offer and I. You know. It's interesting, cause I think a good teacher maybe this goes back to you know, like basic principles, principles like a good teacher would probably know. Like you know, alex's mom is a cold war historian, so he's gonna write a killer paper on, you know, the q and missile crisis. Um, and I think in in a way, maybe that's beyond the pale for most teachers. Maybe they don't need to know that much about their students, but it's probably a good, smart teacher would know that. It's kind of the same thing. I think you should be able to expect from your students a kind of transparency about their work and their sources and the advantages they've got.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Because the student didn't appropriately cite their use of ChatGPT and that was one of the things that they'd covered in English class was first of all, if you're going to use ChatGPT, you have to. I forget exactly how they framed it, but it was like the spirit was you can't just type in one sentence and press enter. The goal is that you're and if you're going to use it like you have to cite it in the same way that you'd cite an encyclopedia or some other sort of like online technology based information product.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):And so I think that there is, but there's generally not.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I think the point with the parent is there's not a right answer, but there is sort of the goal of education, the goal of an assignment is ultimately a student, you know sort of this, this like sort of productive struggle, yeah, um, and I think and I think this is where I'm very I'm very biased towards teachers in the debate about whether chat GPT is cheating, because the answer is it's complicated.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):But ultimately I think teachers actually have an instinct and, to your point, you know, teachers know their students and like they generally have a sense for whether something is, like you know, kind of wildly out of scope of what is what that student was able to do. Um, and I think the challenge is the parents, students are looking for sort of a blanket answer to a question that I think society and industry has not even really quite answered, because we have not figured out. I've not seen any company that has like really honed in on what does it look like for humans and language models to sort of co-create together? And so in this moment where we're actually figuring this out together, I think there needs to be some latitude.
Greg Toppo (The 74):I think you're right, and, and and you know I mean another way of thinking about productive struggle is, you know, effortful thinking, right? You know this is what school is about, right? This is you. This is basically practice for your brain. You know solving these problems, and I think if if we're relying on a technology just to get the student to the end of the assignment, then we've lost the narrative, and to assume that kids aren't going to do that is naive.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Another reaction is well, if students are cheating, it's simply because the assignment isn't, it's out of date, um, and I think there was an assumption that this was just sort of a standard book report, but again in the, in the judge's uh denial of the preliminary injunction, so more was revealed about sort of the nature of the assignment.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Um, my understanding is, uh, the student had to choose the topic, right, they were working in groups, so a lot of components that we would actually generally advise teachers, like how do you design uh assignments and work that is more meaningful to students?
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I mean, there was a lot of agency provided to students and it was also multifaceted and, interestingly, the teacher, the reason the student got such a bad score on that assignment was because, um, the it wasn't even the final assignment that was turned in, it was the, the research and the outline. Um, because I think the teacher's mindset was uh, there were a few different ways that they could present what they learned, and so, rather than grading everybody on just sort of like whether their PowerPoint was good or whether their report or their write-up was good, they were focusing on the process of gathering the knowledge, and so that's again something that we've, that's advice that we often give teachers is you have to focus less on the work product and more on the process. So could the assignment have been honed? Perhaps, but again, I find this an example of even when teachers and schools are doing everything right. Kids are crafty. I guess you should get maybe some points for trying, I think this was a little bit.
Greg Toppo (The 74):Ham-handed. Yeah, I guess it was ham-handed, I think this was a little bit, um, ham handed.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Yeah, I guess it was ham handed, I guess I guess there's also a concern that teachers that that and I think this is actually reality. I think some teachers are incredulous at the idea that students would cheat and so, rather than interrogate, this is actually Victor Lee's research out of Stanford and Victor's research, which I want to talk about. Victor Lee's research out of Stanford and Victor's research, which I want to talk about, by the way, found that incidents of cheating post-JETGBT have not increased and the hypothesis is that students are always going to use sort of like the latest tools to cheat, like when I was in high school, we had our lunchrooms or these round tables.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):And so you know, before our AP uh, european history class with Mrs Janini, um, we kind of had a pact where, like, at least one person would make would have the homework done and everybody would sort of pass the the sheet around and sort of like copy the answers Um, and you know that was sort of an old school, that was like pre uh, social media and, and you know, now students have Tik and other Copy and paste.
Greg Toppo (The 74):Your early copy and paste.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):So I think part of the argument is that you know teachers are always going to. The worry is that teachers are taking it personally, that it's in front to them that students would cheat when researchers like Victor Lee would say you know teachers need to create learning experiences that students, you know, sort of inherently understand and connect with their own world. And that are meaningful Right.
Greg Toppo (The 74):I love the word I've seen a number of instances around this the word artifacts, because I think that's a. To me it's a powerful word. It's like what are the artifacts you want as a teacher? Is it just you know? In Alex's history class, you just want you know eight questions answered and if everybody gets the right, you know, if everybody copies and pastes the right answer, then the work is done. Is that a satisfactory artifact? Or do you want a different kind of artifact? Do you want something where individualism is essential? So I think we're coming up against that in terms of what do teachers feel is like the satisfactory, um, uh, proof of learning and uh, I mean in a way like I, I hate to say this is a really interesting conversation for teachers to have and for parents to have and for students to have. So maybe, like all that, maybe this technology is really like forced, uh, forced that upon us. So let's do it, let's have that conversation. We certainly weren't having this conversation 10, 15 years ago, that's right. So in a way.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Progress is upon us. Yeah and you covered the future of. Is it high school, the future of school?
Greg Toppo (The 74):Future of high school.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Future of high school or the future of school, Future of high school, Future of high school. I've been a part of a lot of conversations with folks and there's different sort of monikers for this.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):There's school transformation, reimagining education, reimagining schools, schools of the future and those conversations have been going on and you can attest to this, for decades, centuries for centuries and you know, as a nonprofit, as the head of a nonprofit, I spend more time than I care to admit, you know focusing on fundraising. And one of the phenomena in the education space, in K-12 specifically, has been a shrinking of the number of philanthropies and the amount of money that philanthropies are giving education, and in part because they're sort of throwing up their arms, they're just like we've been trying and we're just not seeing the results.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):it's just too hard and just there's. It's very multi-dimensional. You're trying to, you know, address math scores, but you know the schools that you're working in are dealing with, like you know, literally a hundred different other sort of connected issues, um, and I think philanthropy has been been having trouble sort of like pushing that forward. I think, you know, at a certain point people are just exasperated, not just the funders, but the stakeholders and the parents and all the folks that you need on board for this. And I'm curious if you see this. But from my vantage point, the powerful thing about artificial intelligence perhaps even more so than what it can do in the classroom and we can talk about sort of like what, how AI is going to transform the classroom but to me the bigger, uh, the bigger part of this moment is it has actually reinvigorated interest in this conversation about the future of school and suddenly it feels relevant, tangible and actionable. And you know, tangible and actionable.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):And conferences are selling out, and I think the challenge is how do we make sure that the conversation stays on this question of what is the future of school without moving too quickly to the answer of? Well, it's just AI, tutors and hyper-personalized learning and just throwing products, because, basically, I think the space has been inundated so quickly with generative AI products that and I'm curious for your take on this is AI products certainly a component, perhaps, of this conversation? How much of the conversation about the future of school is truly about the AI tools that we're going to use, as opposed to some of this more maybe philosophical or almost like the spirit, the conversation about what is the spirit of what we're actually?
Greg Toppo (The 74):trying to achieve. That's a really good question. So I have many thoughts about this and I think, basically I think at the very base of this you're right there is a lot of interest in what this is going to do. I think people's imaginations in 2022 were really fired by this to your point, and now they're wondering okay, how is this going to apply to my kid's school? What could they possibly do with this? That will make a difference.
Greg Toppo (The 74):I will say that it's probably a safe bet to say it's not going to make much of a difference, just in terms of basic achievement and NAEP scores. And we're already seeing just last week we saw the flood of terrible, disappointing, very bad, no good NAEP scores.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Can you for our audience explain, naep?
Greg Toppo (The 74):Sure National Assessment of Educational Progress. It's a test given in various forms every two years or so. It basically tracks fourth and eighth graders' reading and math skills and, as we're seeing now, five years out of the beginning of the pandemic, they're just not really recovering in a lot of ways and a couple of places they are Louisiana, I thought, was a really interesting outlier where their skills of those kids and I can't remember which group it was, but really defied sort of the expectations. But mostly, you know, we're in sort of a like a very kind of grim holding pattern and it's been like that since actually before the pandemic, since like 2019, I want to say Certainly the pandemic didn't help. So I don't think, on the one hand, it's going to really have much of an effect, these new tools, these new ways of thinking on that, because it feels like very little, if anything, has any effect on that. I'm not quite sure systemically, why, other than that, you know, I mean there are lots of people who would say you know well, you know we keep, we keep judging the, the standard for what it means to be basic and advanced, and so you know we're always chasing this, the standard that keeps incrementally increasing this standard that keeps incrementally increasing. But I think to me the really interesting question is is, like, what do we expect in terms of these tools? And like, how much of that are we expecting to be student facing?
Greg Toppo (The 74):I would have thought at the beginning of all this two years ago that are we expecting to be student facing, right? I would have thought at the beginning of all this two years ago, two plus years ago, that it was going to be like all student facing, like we were going to just get, you know, tools that students are going to be using. You know, you know 24, seven, and there it's just going to be just this sort of amazing revolution of kids just interacting with the technology and just doing different things and different kinds of learning, and it's just going to be. You know, we can't predict it.
Greg Toppo (The 74):I think to me what I'm seeing, which I didn't predict and that's just my lack of imagination is, to me, the most interesting piece of this is not the student facing stuff, it's the teacher facing stuff and the you know kind of, in some sense, the drudgery, in some sense figuring out what students should be doing at any given time, and that can be as basic as, like you know, predicting who's going to be absent, or you know, I mean, you're familiar with all these things. To me, those are the things I think we should really be paying more attention to. In a way, it's interesting because I talked to someone who said a couple of weeks ago, who said you know, ai is weird enough right now and it's so unpredictable that I think, until we, like figure out more about it and how it works and really what it does, I don't think we should put it in front of students at all. Let the adults mess with it, but students shouldn't have access to this.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Anyway, I don't know how you feel about that. Well, there's this assumption that we are the AI education project, and so oftentimes I actually will often now start meetings with. This is what this meeting is not. We are not here to try to put AI in front of all of your students, or rather, we're not here to accelerate that process. There's, I think, a lot of questions that need to be answered in terms of how to do that appropriately, safely, but also in a way that complements rather than replacing education. I want to talk about an anecdote specifically where you're replacing teachers, or replacing, when you say, complements.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):That complements teachers. Okay. Yeah, but also that complements the learning process.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I think, there is a world where you could imagine students. In fact, if you go to china, they actually I remember this. There's a picture that hit me really viscerally uh, it was students preparing for one of the big national exams in china and they had this giant like I don't think it was even a gymnasium, I think it was a warehouse, okay, and it was like 3 000 students in in cubicles with headphones on getting personalized learning. And it just hit me that, even if the scores are higher, the idea of just a student sitting down in front of a computer all day digesting information, there's something really wrong with that. And I see sort of flavors of that with this sort of obsession with AI tutoring. But it's complicated, right, because actually AI tutoring is still really exciting and interesting as an after school support, as a support for neurodivergent students or, uh, students in special education more broadly.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Um, you're blind If you're an English language learner. Um, if you're deaf, right, this technology is sort of unequivocally going to add incredible value and, in sort of like, giving you access to learning that was otherwise, um, you know, much harder to access. So so it's very hard to say blanket, you know, ai bands, I think, ai bands, I think for that reason are um much harder to access. It's very hard to say blanket AI bans. I think AI bans for that reason are sometimes looked down upon. To me, if I was a superintendent, it would be more like we're going to pump the brakes. You described it really well. We need to understand this technology. We can't just rely on what the vendors are telling us.
Greg Toppo (The 74):Outside of the vendors, I've talked to most of the smart people who are really obsessed with this question and most of the smartest people will admit that we don't have the answers yet and most of the vendors, by the way, in 12 months time, are going to be moving on to something else If they have any capital left. Yeah.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Right, right, if they have any capital left, right, and so I think the but on the other, the challenges. Let's say we're superintendents, we're trying to design this high school of the future. Maybe we should do that. Let's put those hats on. Let's go through some of the decisions we have to make. So decision one we don't have any new budget. We have a technology line item. We've been spending it now on things like smart boards, uh, chromebooks for students. Um, we're keeping an eye on the. Uh, is it enet? E the government? Uh, there's a government subsidy for technology access. E-rate.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Oh.
Greg Toppo (The 74):E-rate.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Yeah, we're keeping an eye on E-rate funding. We're worried that that might expire, so we don't have too many extra dollars to spend, but maybe some stuff we can move around. Okay, and the first decision is we need to send some sort of a letter to parents and students explaining whether or not students are allowed to use chat GPT One step short of writing an integrity policy, but what's sort of step one? Do we blanket ban while we figure it out, or do we encourage students to use it but ask them to be transparent about how they use it?
Greg Toppo (The 74):I'll let you go first. I think you let everybody download DeepSeek onto their Chromebook and call it a day. This is a really good question, and for our audience.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Deepseek is the language model that was released by a company in China. Two weeks ago now. Technically in December. There's an earlier version. Lots of privacy concerns there yeah.
Greg Toppo (The 74):And it was built for cents on the dollar in comparison to.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Reportedly, although there's actually some new reporting out. We'll come back to that.
Greg Toppo (The 74):Yeah, we can come back to that. You know, my feeling is I don't think you send out a memo to everybody, to the parents and the kids. I think the first, to me, your first step, is you give teachers some time to play around with it and you really give them the opportunity to find a comfort level with it, find what is the most likely way they might employ it. Let them figure out what the risks are. I'm not saying it's like security, because I don't think most teachers know enough about that. You can read the 74 million to find out that, because we cover it really well.
Greg Toppo (The 74):I, yeah, I think you start with that. I think you start with teachers just playing with it, and I really do mean playing. And I want to talk at some point about the parallels that I'm seeing with the reporting that I did 10, 12, 15 years ago on games and learning, um, because I see a lot of similarities, um with that and with with AI, um. But I think, I think you do, I think you let teachers mess around with it and see what pops out and maybe, as part of that, you require them or strongly suggest that they like get together, you know, once a week, once a month, and just let each other know. You know what the. You know what the coolest aspect of this is.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):OK, I'm in line with that. So we don't ban. In fact we just avoid that whole all the controversy around that by just not addressing it, because anyways the kids are going to access it out of school, they're going to access it on their phones. A ban only really makes sense if we feel confident that we can enforce it. And then the other thing that a ban does is it orients teachers to this defensive mode where, rather than focusing on learning the tool, they spend more time focusing on enforcement.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I think my modification to what you're describing is and this is a plug this is the work that the IEDU does. We have cohorts of teachers and we facilitate those professional learning communities so that there's some structure. I don't think you need to work with nonprofits like us to to create those sandboxes, but I think it does help to have, you know, some subject matter experts who can sort of like sort of helpfully guide teachers towards, you know, some of the best, sort of like some proven ways to actually sort of like like some some scaffolds for their exploration. But the other reason I think that's important is you know, ultimately, what is likely happening in our district is teachers, and maybe even with the way we discovered. You know ChatGPT. I don't know that we were covering. You know, I guess as a superintendent we're not reading Wired, or you know MIT Tech Review, right, maybe we saw a headline about ChatGPT, but we probably before we actually got the chance to use it.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):My guess is, a teacher went to the lunchroom and was just like, look at Sally's paper. It looks like it was literally written by a college professor. And I asked her. You know, I confronted her about it and she showed me this crazy tool called chat GBT. Like check this out, and but it's with that frame of like students are using this to cheat and but I, but I think this idea of, I think as as a superintendent or a co-superintendent, my answer to those teachers who are like, well, how do we deal with this?
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):It's like my answer to those teachers who are like, well, how do we deal with this? It's like you're trying to design a bank that is impervious to being robbed. It really helps to consult with a bank robber who is really thinking about how to do this. You have to get into the mind of somebody who is trying to cheat and the way to do that is, uh, you need to use it yourself. There is no sort of cheat code, unintended um, uh, or shortcut or rule that we can put in. Um, you're probably going to have to if not definitely going to have to adapt some of your assignments and you're not going to know how to adapt those assignments to be more resistant to cheating if you don't have a sense for how the tool could be used.
Greg Toppo (The 74):Okay, I like that yeah. I'll go for that, Find the kids who are doing the most mischief with it and maybe even, you know, have a, have a some sort of like a regular round table or something we're actually doing that at one of the a couple of the upcoming conferences that we're doing, sessions that we're we're having teachers, I think we're literally calling them like cheat-a-thons.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):We're going to have some like oh you know, sort of like traditional assignments and we're like we're going to spend the next hour literally cheating on these assignments and we're going to show you how, uh, how, you could do it sort of get into the mind of a of a student.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Have some students get involved in that? Um, how are there, you know, as this wise superintendent who is, who was around for the time of? Um, you know, gamified learning. What are those you mentioned? You saw some parallels there, like, how, like, can you just talk about that?
Greg Toppo (The 74):yeah, I mean, you know, just like you're sort of suggesting here, I mean the, the, the place where 10, 15 years ago, um games and learning were the most interesting and where things were getting done that I found really exciting were places where an individual teacher, um had discovered something on their own, or had discovered something with a group of friends, or went to a conference and was like, oh my God, you've got to play this game or met some developer or became, you know, a couple of them actually became, like you know, game developers themselves, just literally teaching themselves how to build this stuff themselves, just literally teaching themselves, um, how to build this stuff. Um, and I, I, I loved the excitement around that, I, I and I also loved, um, what kinds of conversations were happening because of it? Because a lot of instances, um, instances when teachers discovered really good learning games, especially something like math, which is really easily adapted to a game, teachers were asking totally, totally different kinds of questions than they had been before then, totally, totally different kinds of questions than they had been before then. They were really, in a way, kind of like turning their curriculum inside out, because this one game or this couple of group of games had just basically asked them to say to themselves, like what is algebra Like? Why do we have algebra and what the heck is it? And there's one game in particular that I wrote about in my book. It was Dragon Box. I don't know if you're familiar with that, so this is by a French developer and it basically asked students to kind of like almost like invent algebra from the ground up and almost like discover, like, what X is and what X plus one equals Y is. So really just kind of like I said, just turned everything inside out.
Greg Toppo (The 74):When you have students doing that, when you have teachers getting excited about that, it's a totally different kind of conversation than why can't my kids do algebra, why aren't they interested in algebra. And I see the possibilities for that kind of thing with something like AI. If students can come at a math problem from a totally different point of view or do different kinds of problem solving, then I think we're really in a different place. And you've probably experienced some of these things. I mean you've probably seen teachers, you know, looking at some of these tools and getting, you know, pretty excited. I mean the easy way to do it is just to ask chat GPT to, or the easy and stupid way to do it is just to ask chat GPT to. You know, give me 10 algebra problems, right, but there are other ways to, to, to recruit these tools, to do, I think, much more fascinating, much more fascinating things.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Yeah, the, the. So I'm going to sort of draw out from what you're saying that stands in contrast to you know, presumably there were lots of companies approaching districts and saying here is a you know gamified learning product. Can I improve your math scores? You should put it in front of every single teacher. And my guess is that those districts, as is often the case with new curriculum, they encountered a lot of pushback from teachers. It worked in some classes didn't work in others and so, as we.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):The challenge is this is like it'd be really nice if the answer to this question of like, how does AI going to transform learning? If it's just like, well, you just give teacher, you know, just have teachers use AI to do X Y Z. They're going to have more time, they're going to use it to personalize learning in X Y Z ways, and then your goal is just get that in front of every single teacher, train them on how to use it exactly in that way and something that's repeatable, prescriptive. And for districts like Prince George's County, where we're just up the street from here, where we're doing work, they have 10,000 teachers.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I suspect that the answer to the best outcomes in terms of how AI will transform education is similar to what you're describing, where you create the conditions for teachers to hyper-c, hyper, customize and explore and use it as a, as a force multiplier with their own spin. And I guess the challenge for for superintendent for schools, for school leaders, is you know, for PGCPS, they have 10,000 teachers. You know you start with the sandbox, that learning community of 50 teachers, but you really want this to get to every classroom and, in fact, if you have a mind for, you know, reaching the kids who are at risk, or most at risk, of falling behind. They're very often in some of the lowest performing schools that really struggle to retain the brightest teachers. Is there anything whether it's from your time in sort of like gamified learning, but is like how can this sort of get into the bloodstream?
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Like what are the conditions, for I guess the way to describe this would be it's almost like what is your understanding of some of the best ways to build and enhance, like the teacher workforce, and upskill them in the ways that they need to explore and understand and iterate on the technology in their own way.
Greg Toppo (The 74):I have a couple of thoughts, by the way, and I'll just preface this by saying I think a lot of people in the games and learning space would take exception to your use of the word gamified. They would say that gamification is kind of a lesser form of what they're doing. They're actually using games at a higher level than just getting people to behave a certain, to sort of behavior, behave a certain way. They. They would say that gamification is a little too low level. I don't want to spend much of our time talking about that, but I know it's interesting.
Greg Toppo (The 74):You, you use a phrase a second ago get into the bloodstream, and I guess I would, maybe without with your permission, maybe explore that a little bit. So you're talking about, like a virus getting into the bloodstream, something being viral. I mean, why are things viral? In the sort of social sense? They're viral because somebody's really excited about it, or it's new or different or weird, or just, you know, getting something done in a way that, um, we've never seen before, um, and so people get excited about it.
Greg Toppo (The 74):I'm not sure where you go from there, um, but I do see almost like the necessity of getting people excited, and maybe it's just one big natural experiment where the people who are excited about something test it out and try it out and have a certain amount of success and the vast majority don't have access to it and either their results aren't as good or they're. Maybe their teacher satisfaction isn't as high, or um, you know, I, I, I I'm not familiar enough with sort of the ways systems like these work to be able to say, yeah, this is all you need to do is just you, you know.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Well, I think even the deepest experts in teacher professional learning would struggle to answer this question right. There is no quick fix. It's the challenge, this idea of like the components of virality. It has to catch people's attention. In education. You know there's. If something works, presumably you know that is the type of thing that teachers are going to be talking about. If something doesn't work, or for whatever reason they're perceiving that it doesn't work, then they're going to. They're going to resist and also they're just in many ways, especially if a teacher of like 10 plus years they're on cruise control, they've been teaching this class it really is going to take something profound for them to change course. It's a lot of work.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):You have your script, your lectures down pat, you have the homework assignments. It's not trivial, even if something is pretty good. I do see. The lever is this idea of if you find the right teachers, they actually can be catalysts. I think I bought into that. I'd be curious. You know we don't have to answer this now, but I think one of our wonderings if you come across anything like this in terms of you know analogs that we can find where really successful whether it's curricula or teaching practices, project-based learning we're big proponents of that. Most of our curriculum is PBL or inquiry-based learning. A lot of the schools that we work with have struggled mightily to get project-based learning into the classroom. And.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I think the answer in part is because they just have project-based learning is sometimes perceived to be at odds with, like, the standards and all the content knowledge and the rigor that teachers are expected, and so their teachers are getting these conflicting messages where they're being told you need to have more project-based learning.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):And then they're also. Their salaries, in some cases, are literally determined by how their students are scoring on these sort of like very rigid standards. Okay, being a superintendent is really hard, so I think this is our chance to take off those hats. Thank, God. Okay.
Greg Toppo (The 74):So I don't have to be a superintendent anymore. Okay, good, no, not anymore.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Put your journalist hat back on. There's so much happening right now in ai. What are the stories that you're just keeping an eye on? I'm especially interested if you're willing, anything that you maybe haven't covered yet but that you're, you know, just trying to learn more about, that we could sort of like dive into sure, I'm actually going to be um and this is not a self-promotional plug, but what the heck um at by Southwest.
Greg Toppo (The 74):I'm going to be doing a panel with folks from Curriculum Associates and Khan Academy about AI and assessment, and that's one of the things that I think is really interesting about AI's potential to mess with assessment and improve it and make it I mean, the word I would use would be more invisible.
Greg Toppo (The 74):I wrote a story a couple of months ago about curriculum associates buying this Irish startup that has developed speech recognition for kids, and it seems like a minor thing, but I think it's kind of huge in a way, because you know, it's one thing for you know an eight-year-old or nine-year-old to be able to ask Alexa, you know to.
Greg Toppo (The 74):You know play a song or turn on the lights or whatever, but imagine a three or four year old being able to do that. You know, I actually have a personal experience with that. I've got a three and a half year old grandson who has figured out how to very clearly ask Alexa to do stuff, but I think that's rare, and so they have developed essentially a way to help with AI, help computers understand the utterances of very small children, and this is. You know, it doesn't take much imagination to think like, okay, if I'm a preschool teacher or kindergarten teacher, you know, this really revolutionizes, um, what I can do with instruction, because I can sit a an entire class down and just have them read into a, you know, a tablet or a microphone or what have you.
Greg Toppo (The 74):And, um, you know on their own by the way, and that, you know, not even in the presence of a teacher, just have them, you know, open up a passage and read it and have the AI, you know, assess how well this kid is reading. In a way, that's one of the examples of to me I was going back to something we were talking about earlier like that's not really student-facing AI. In a sense, it's AI for the teacher's sake, and I think that's a really exciting aspect of this, and I think, you know, if you want to talk about force multipliers, I think that could be really cool and I'm excited about, like, the ways in which technology can play with assessments in other ways, you know, maybe make them absolutely invisible. Maybe, you know, take, let's say, work a student is doing already in class and has already swallowed up all the responses you've just offered over the course of a week or a month or a unit, or what have you?
Greg Toppo (The 74):Getting back to the games piece, this is what games do, right? Games assess you constantly, all the time, from the you know minute one to the end of the game, right? That's one of the things people love about games. Right, they're constantly being assessed, but in a way that is invisible and I think. I think with AI we have the potential to do that in a way we'd never have before.
Greg Toppo (The 74):Again it's not student-facing, it's totally teacher-facing right, but it does something we couldn't do before. You're skeptical.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Well, I'm not skeptical. I just imagine the perfect iteration of this, where you'd probably get the best outcomes from the perspective of like, accurately assessing students, would be to embed AI and obviously the students Chromebooks, every single homework assignment. You know, if they have access to some kind of a chat bot or a tutor, that data is all digested. There's probably like the classrooms, maybe with video as well. And let's just assume, let's take for granted, that we've absolutely solved the privacy aspect. Right, the data is anonymized. So my skepticism doesn't come from a space of like oh, data privacy. But in this world, presumably we wouldn't just use it for an individual class, the students. You could use the same approach to evaluate the student over the course of their entire year and then over the course of their entire academic career, and perhaps we don't need college exams or perhaps we don't need SATs or college applications colleges. But in that world it's kind of like the sorting hat You're told. Here are the three colleges that you can choose from.
Greg Toppo (The 74):I understand what you're saying. It feels like you're getting ahead of yourself.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):So I'm absolutely getting ahead of myself.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I don't know if that's 10 years away, 20 years away. I do think that it's, it's, it's it feels inevitable and it's it's sort of like we just have to make a choice as society, that that's the direction we're comfortable going down. And if not, I suppose and the question is simply, how do we build in a sufficient amount of student agency? And I think we've done similar things in the space of using AI to screen resumes, I think, at least in many places, even though you, theoretically we don't use any AI to screen our resumes, even though we clearly could, because we just made this decision, so sort of like a normative decision about um not wanting to surrender that process to to the ai um, I just, I just wonder if, like, are we sleepwalking into sort of this world where you know students are sort of just? I mean, there's the, uh, the ayn rand book, um, where everybody's sort of just told what their job is, and I just know your take that's just so far out, it's yeah, you went very dark very fast with what I was saying.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I guess I was just envisioning and I think a lot of people are envisioning just a just a more seamless transition from work and thinking to um assessment product um, so I guess is there because maybe, then maybe the answer is um, there's some amount of this, like because I assessments are clearly need to be changed, right, so, like the alternative, the flip side of this is the current assessment regime does not work it works in a certain way, and that's how it works.
Greg Toppo (The 74):Some of it's great and some of it's terrible.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Maybe assessments. It's not that they do not work, but there's a lot of room for improvement in assessments. There seems to be a middle ground where we use technology to improve and enhance and address some of the gaps that exist in the education system and maybe we just need to be sort of forward thinking about where do we need to sort of draw the line.
Greg Toppo (The 74):Yeah, no, I would say that I guess maybe the thing I'm proposing is a little different. Maybe I'm not describing it very well. My feeling is that the best assessment is one that you don't even know just happened that, um, you are assessed on something because you've been working on it, let's say all day or all week, and, uh, at a certain point the system has enough information about what you know and how well you know it that we're done. We're done here. Very much again like a game. Right, there's that great quote by Jim G, who's a sort of game scholar. He says if I get through every level of Halo, this is going back 10, 15 years if I get through every level of Halo.
Greg Toppo (The 74):This is going back, you know, 10, 15 years If I get through every level of Halo. You don't need to give me, like, a Halo final exam. Like I got through every level, I'm done, I mastered the game right. There's no like final test and I think that's I think, what a lot of people are envisioning Now, whether that's got you know necessarily, you know Ayn Rand implications to it, because you know the student isn't choosing to sit for an exam. That's another really interesting question. But I guess I'm not quite there yet. I'm just thinking of, like, what is the process we were able to just knock out and what can we replace it with?
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Yeah, I think you've convinced me that I am. This sort of catastrophizing is maybe valuable for futurists Totally, but actually I think I can also imagine the flip side, where 10, 15 years from now, people are like there was a time when you spent all the time in school and you did all this work and none of that mattered. All that mattered was just the score you got on this one test on one day, and if you happen to be sick or if you happen to be having a bad day didn't matter.
Greg Toppo (The 74):Or if it was a bad test and oh, by the way, some of these tests are not very good yeah, um, and so, yeah, I, I think, I think there's a lot of, there's a lot of power.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Then there's all the other piece about, um, sort of uh, recognition, like sort of natural language processing, um, one of the things that people have been saying about. Well, assessment, assessments need to change. Homework needs to change. You know, we need to do more oral assessments. Right, and teachers will often kind of be a little bit they'll scoff at that because they're like I just don't have the time. Yeah, it's, I just like, like homework is efficient because people are doing it simultaneously as opposed to like once at a time. Um, so this is perhaps an example of a problem that AI can actually, a problem that AI perhaps created, but that it can also help to solve.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I don't generally think that about every single problem AI creates, but I think this is this might be one of them. It is a bit challenging. When have you seen that this has been? I think it's one specific person, but there's probably, I think probably more than one on social media applying for management consulting interviews.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):And he has his setup where he has chat GBT live transcription of all the questions that he's getting and then it's answering the question and he's reading it aloud and literally doing the interview, acing these interviews with the help of his chat GBT module. That's great doing the interview, like acing these interviews um with the help of his sort of like chat GPT module. That's great.
Greg Toppo (The 74):That's great, but yeah, that's amazing. Um, yeah, I, you know, um, I guess I am of the opinion that um and I and I I'm sure there's research on this, maybe you can even cite it now but there's a lot of wasted time in school. It now, but there's a lot of wasted time in school and I think the product of that is disengagement on the part of kids and dissatisfaction on the part of teachers. So, if there's a way to to close that gap or not gap, but there's a way to, to, to, to get rid of some of that wasted time and you know, and use it for something much more interesting I'm not going to say productive but, then I think that's a really interesting possibility.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Yeah, teacher retention is increasingly. I don't know if it's getting worse, but it's certainly really bad right now. Yeah, right now, Um, you wrote a story a couple of weeks ago about um, uh, a survey that had come out. It was serving, uh, uh, teacher schools of education. Um, and I forget these specific numbers, but it was startlingly few colleges of education have any kind of a formal curriculum or approach to talking to teachers about language models or generative AI, let alone actually teaching them anything, and I was curious if any follow-ups on that have you.
Greg Toppo (The 74):No, I haven't but. But. But to me that you know, on the one hand I would say it's not a surprise Because I think a lot of teachers' colleges, a lot of teacher education programs are just, you know, they're kind of trapped in the past. They're kind of trapped in the past.
Greg Toppo (The 74):I don't think they've got much incentive to do something new and different and innovative, and some of them probably with good reason, because they're being asked to turn out a certain kind of product. Stepping back a little bit from that, I would say I'm not sure if it's the job of a teacher's college to teach a, you know, a 23 year old about artificial intelligence.
Greg Toppo (The 74):I mean, we're all learning about it on our in our spare time and you know, and you know over breakfast, and you know like it's to me it's it's kind of a in a way it's sort of like a responsibility that we all have, um, just to you know, just to like. We follow politics and the weather and you know climate and culture and music and all the rest. Um feels like this is just another thing we should all be kind of learning about at a very basic level. My kids are interested in it. They're by no means like technically savvy, they just think it's an important thing to learn about. So I don't know, I don't want to say I give teachers, colleges a pass, I just think it's just something it's in the air. So it seems reasonable to expect that young people just figure this stuff out at a certain basic level, not, you know, saying they don't need to learn all the ins and outs, but they certainly need to know how it's used and what it is and the difference between the models, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):And this is we recently, over the past like two years, we started shifting from talking about AI literacy to AI readiness, and that insight, I think, is sort of part of the reason behind that, sort of part of the the reason behind that, and is this idea that, you know, when I close my eyes and try to look into the future, um, yeah, I see a world where ai is just, it's so ubiquitous and seamless and invisible. Um, it just seems it'll feel very like quaint that we would have to teach people how to use it. In the same way that my guess is that teacher colleges, um, you know, 20 years ago, didn't have a class called like the internet, right?
Greg Toppo (The 74):Um, how do you use your? How do you use your iPhone? How do you use your? I know, I think that's exactly right.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Mobile is even a better example, because that was, you know, the early internet was actually kind of how to use your phone. Um, and and teachers, colleges actually have a lot of important work to do, which is how do you build those durable skills, which is when we talk about AI readiness. Sure, ai literacy is a part of it. We're assuming that that's actually going to be. Maybe one of the easiest parts is like teaching people about what AI is, and how to use it.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Um, the more important pieces of like building agency, critical thinking and those sort of soft and hard skills that you know. I think most teachers, whether they realize it or not, they are. They like they have the knowledge and skills to get kids ready for the future. I just don't know that you know, 21st century skills has kind of been it's been talked, was it's been. It's been talked about so much that I think it sort of lost its its punch.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I, I my my big sort of like scheme is this is our chance to sort of reinvigorate 21st century skills and sort of almost like reframe it, as, as you know, ai is really just another way of talking about a 21st century skills. Yeah.
Greg Toppo (The 74):I mean, I think in a way to me I don't know what, as I think about it, like how I use AI in like my daily life. You know I'm by no means like a technophile. You know I'm interested in it and I like to kind of think about it and explore it.
Greg Toppo (The 74):But you know, in terms of like being a journalist like to me the most I mean, once you dig in and start looking at these different models, you know what's caught. Or or chat, GPT, or any of the other ones. Google, the Google one, fascinating, you know that came out a couple of months ago. You know that allows you to create these crazy little 10 minute podcasts notebook.
Greg Toppo (The 74):LM. We had a lot of fun with that, not only in my house but at work. We were just we were playing with feeding our news stories into it and just seeing what it created. So once you get past that, the sort of basic literacy with that, and knowing what these things do and what they don't do and how one is different than the other, then to me the big challenge and I'd be interested in hearing your take on this is keeping them at arm's length.
Greg Toppo (The 74):I think that's really maybe the most important skill of all, and what I mean by that is like I would never use one of these models, certainly to write a story, okay, that's like verboten, okay, and I would never feel comfortable doing that, right, um, I wouldn't even feel comfortable like taking like a report. Let's say you know some government agency you know sends out a PDF of a report. Um, like a report. Let's say you know some government agency you know sends out a PDF of a report. I wouldn't even feel comfortable asking Claude to like summarize this report because, like I, you know, I, who the hell knows what Claude's process is in doing this in a way, like you want to, you almost want to do, you know, like a kind of like a test of it. You know, you want to take something that you know really well inside and out and ask these models to summarize it and then just see, you know what it's, what it's going to tell you.
Greg Toppo (The 74):So I, I really feel like, um, there's, there's almost no way in which, like, relying on these models for something with any stakes um, is a good idea for me. Yeah, no, I others may others may differ. Um, I would, but I feel like, at this point, february 2025, this may change in March or April but I feel like the place of something like AI is very low-stakes territory. I'm curious about something. I want to see something. Territory, right, I just want to. I'm curious about something, I want to see something. I want to get the, you know, the AI's take on something, but I'm not going to rely on it in any way, shape or form, and I don't know if that where that comports with your conception of this stuff, but I, you know it's just, it's almost like a as a journalist, I think stuff, but I, you know, it's just, it's almost like a. As a journalist, I think, um, I have a kind of an like an allergy to relying on this stuff for for something that really matters well it does.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):The challenge is that it's uh, um, it's really good in some, in some cases, Um, and you are a journalist with integrity who has respect for the craft, but I think I don't know the study that it was. I think this is very hard to actually put a put a number on Um, but there's a large portion of the content now on the internet as AI generated and if you go and read any sort of like the, just like sort of clickbaity, SEO optimized blog posts like a lot of that is AI generated.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I know ad agencies are using AI to write things like ad copy. Like if you're doing programmatic ads, you now can not just do an ABC test, you can do ABCD, efg, all the way, like 300, 10,000 hyper personalized um. But then there's like certain very specific uh uh applications where you know quality is not necessarily the measure, there isn't necessarily like sort of an integrity aspect and you're not necessarily even as concerned about accuracy, yeah, um.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):So setting those aside, um, I worry more about what you just described. So, if you're reading a report and you're going to write about it, the way to really be able to write intelligently about something and add value beyond just all the noise because we're in a world now where they're just like everybody has something to say about everything and it's mostly service, service level to actually add value, you have to really like deeply understand the thing that you're writing or talking about, and I just do not think there is any substitute. I was talking to one of my board members. She's she's a corporate lawyer. Um, she has her own, uh, consultancy now, um, and so she advises.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):You know really big, you know blue chip clients and she gets tapped to speak at these. They're like, they're esoteric, um, you know legal conferences. So she was like, I think, doing a conference on, um, you know financial services, uh, you know policy in in brussels and like, oh, I've got this like keynote tomorrow. It's presentation. I have to make all these slides. I have to like down, digest this like 70 page um regulation or something I was like well, perfect use case for ai.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Why don't you use ai to summarize it? I hadn't even gone to the place where I was still sort of taking for granted that people that ai was good at summarization. I have since found that it actually hallucinates maybe 20 of the time whenever I ask it to summarize. And so, setting that aside the fact that that just incorrect, you should never use it to summarize if you're trying to like accurately reflect what's in a report. But let's just assume that, even if it was a hundred percent accurate, her point was my like process for preparing to go and speak and the reason I'm tapped to speak is not because I have I'm reading off of a like a series of bullet points or talking points that I've memorized. I actually am going up and like speaking as an authority figure and the only way that I'm going to be able to like speak authoritatively and intelligently about this topic, like the process of actually reading those 70 pages and like writing out everything that I want to say, like that's how I get to a place where I'm ready to go and speak off the cuff, and my experience with writing has been absolutely like that's how I get to a place where I'm ready to go and speak off the cuff, and my experience with writing has been absolutely.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I just wrote something on deep seek on sub stack and I used it. Actually, I will admit I use chat duty quite a lot and the way I used it was I downloaded, I watched a lot of. There's a lot of good YouTubers who had sort of like done like much deeper, longer, like a lot of the coverage was like you know, a thousand words. It's like hard to get into the, into the weed, so I wouldn't watch like hour long YouTube videos, got the transcripts, plug that all in the chat GBT had to sort of synthesize it and then created my outline and then sort of like had chat GBT sort of expand out in particular like sort of like the technical explanations of how DeepSeq was potentially how DeepSeq was trained.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):But CJ and I worked on this together and I think what we found is that it would get you something that's maybe like a C+, maybe a B-, but to get something that's actually worth publishing we basically rewrote almost every word. Now it was helpful to have a little bit of a scaffold, but at the end of the day, I'm still unclear about whether the juice is worth the squeeze, because I couldn't have written that without watching all those videos myself, and I think that when you talk to folks, especially people who are really deep in the AI space, this is something that's really common. Most people are not using these language models. The exception, I think, is coding or data science. I think there's some applications where it's just actually legitimately game-changing, but I think for the humanities, I don't know about law. I've only I only know the story from the lawyer that got disbarred or penalized for submitting a I don't know if it was an injunction, some document that was like wildly hallucinated and um right Making, making up cases or what have you yeah?
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Um, so my guess is, most big law firms are not allowing their lawyers to.
Greg Toppo (The 74):I'm hoping that they're not what else are you covering? Uh, and if not covering what else?
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):are you just like tracking?
Greg Toppo (The 74):Yeah, we're just like tracking. Yeah, we're, I mean, you know, as you'd expect we're. You know we're covering the administration and you know seeing what's happening there with you know their work, um, uh, with, uh, executive orders and and whatnot, the fate of the department of education. Um, we're, uh, really still interested in the future of high school. I'm always on the hunt for suggestions for the next school to visit.
Greg Toppo (The 74):Just a couple weeks ago was up in Albany, visited a really, really fascinating school called Tech Valley High School. One of my favorite aspects of it is that when you walk through Tech Valley High School you see almost no tech at all. It turns out that this school was built, was originated, at a time when people were very, very bullish on the idea of like incorporating schools into sort of like tech hubs. And so there's this area in Albany called Tech Valley and the school sort of got got his name from that. But it's very it's, it's almost, you know, a humanities centered high school that just is settled with the name Tech Valley. A really cool high school, really interesting, you know, individualization, lots of lots of project-based learning, lots and lots of um real focus on um students ability to get up and just like speak about topics. Uh, really interesting place, and I think it's it's a model that I that I'm really seeing more and more, which is schools that are focusing on giving their students the ability to be experts, if you will.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):If there's someone listening, that is the head of a school and they want to reach out to you.
Greg Toppo (The 74):We'll share your contact information or your email or whatever, I get the 74 million on ORG.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):What? What advice would you give to a building principal who is trying to pitch their school Like what are the types of things you're looking for? I'm sure you get a lot. I mean there's we actually don't get a lot of pitches.
Greg Toppo (The 74):Interestingly enough, we've been writing these stories for a while now and I do not get emails from people saying come visit people to know if they're really doing something innovative.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Yeah, I suppose more powerful for you to hear about a school not directly from someone who's sort of like promoting it.
Greg Toppo (The 74):No, I think that's right.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Maybe just some parting advice for folks. I mean, I think one of the common threads of this conversation is, you know, you clearly have this curiosity. It's been part of your entire career and it's it hasn't always been ai. It was really sort of much more broad about sort of like the future of education, um, but you are now really, I think, one of like a very small group of of journalists who are, true, I don't know if you call yourself an expert, but but as close as you can get to someone who just deeply understands the intersection of these spaces, what advice would you give to our audience in terms of folks who are early on in the learning journey? They get it. Yeah, we need to learn more. Maybe they want to use ChatGPT and experiment, but are there any specific outlets that you're following? Maybe they want to use chat, gpt and experiment, but are there any like specific like place the outlets that you're following? You know, I don't know, is it like Reddit, like, like, how can they sort of just like stay, keep their finger on the pulse?
Greg Toppo (The 74):Hmm, I mean, my problem is, I read everything? So what are your?
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):like what's the best, what's the what's?
Greg Toppo (The 74):the I mean what actually? Um. Interestingly enough, um you know, one of the podcasts that I like is the times podcast about um tech the hard fork. Okay.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):Um love those guys.
Greg Toppo (The 74):Kevin Bruce Um, I I think his coverage specifically is really um, really really well done. Um, and he's covered a lot of the education slash, safety aspects of it. Um, you know I uh, I cover, or excuse me, I, I, I, I read and follow. You know the the skeptics, if you will Um, you know the Ben Riley. He's got a um uh, cognitive resonance. Who you? Um I'll I will actually um if you don't mind you um I'll I will actually um if you don't mind, my um flogging you guys as incredible podcasts that you did with the disagreement, which I'm hoping, by the time this runs, it will be public. Um, you guys uh and I even said it at the time, I think, on Twitter, x or wherever the heck it is Um that the conversation you guys had back in the fall was like the best conversation I've heard a very high level, with lots and lots of respect for one another, but also were able to very carefully pry the threads from where you disagreed and not scream at each other. I really enjoyed that, so I would recommend that highly.
Greg Toppo (The 74):Um, I follow um Dan Myers blog. Um, he's got a very specific focus on math Um, and I think that's a really important um thing to think about when we're talking about this world. You know I've always been a big fan of Audrey Waters, who never met a piece of technology she liked, and it's interesting because, like somebody like Audrey, for people who may not know very much about her, but you know she's been thinking and writing about this stuff for years and years and I think one of the the sort of the big themes she has really been focused on for as long as I've known her, is this idea that Silicon Valley is not your friend, that there's a lot of dark thinking coming out of this place and I uh, just speaking from, uh you know some of the stuff we're seeing with our new administration. I mean I, without getting like political about it, I mean I think you can see the self-serving aspect of a lot of what these guys are doing, and I don't think that's something we saw very clearly until now.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I think it's surprising they got to pass for as long as they did, because I don't think people would look at car companies, oil companies, electricity companies, all these megalith capitalist institutions. Their incentive structures are highly oriented towards one, only one thing. Yeah.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):And they will push in whatever direction that they can right. So I think, but I guess you're, I guess I think it's interesting that you're naming some skeptics, because I actually think that is. We have a lot to learn from the skeptics, because there's plenty of optimists and there's a lot of legitimate optimists who are super smart, but then there's also a lot of optimists who are shilling right, Like they are self-interested, whether it's they're either at companies or invested in those companies invested in the future of AI being successful and I think the kind of sift through all because I think the origin of my question, what I want to leave
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):with the audience is like yes, there's a lot of noise, you don't have to read every single thing. Not everybody is a journalist covering AI in education but I think it is important to find some smart people that you trust. And when you're trying to figure out, is this like, legit? Like, is this legit, is there a there there? You don't want to be relying on the. You don't necessarily be on the bandwagon while you're evaluating that.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):And especially for decision makers who are education systems. I think they're dealing with this a lot right now. A lot of AI conferences are 95% of the people who are there and the sponsors are all aggressively pro-AI and AI products. In reality, I think it's much more of. I don't know if it's 50-50 exactly, but it's definitely not 95% good and 5%. We just have to figure it out.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):It's much more complex um and so the information ecosystem is not. I don't. I don't think it's very balanced, I think it's oriented very heavily and then you have, like the, and a lot of the skeptics or a lot of the pessimists are not useful because they're like the existential risk folks who are worried about, you know the singularity. I find that a very interesting philosophical discussion. I just don't think there's anything actionable that certainly an education leader can do. Besides, pay attention and keep your eye out for AGI.
Greg Toppo (The 74):I mean to be fair. I mean a lot of skeptics, I think, have a different view of education than maybe you or I might have. I mean they see it as a different kind of enterprise and some wouldn't even be willing to. You know entertain, you know functions of a teacher, you know being, you know, augmented in certain ways by technology. So you know, I want to be clear on that. I guess where I come into it is I'm really interested to read the and to talk to the. You know the makers, the vendors, the, the people who run a lot of these outfits, just to see what they think they're doing, like what, you know where they, what their place is and all this. And some of them have really interesting ways of thinking about this stuff, um, and really interesting ways of thinking like. You know, here's our niche or here's all we want to do.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):But I guess you can't plug yourself but I will. I think, while it's not everybody can necessarily talk to, you know the founders of companies like this. I think you know reporting like yours. You're not blindly excited, but you're intensely curious. But you're intensely curious and I think you're willing to.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):I think his orientation towards the future of high school is an interesting place to come at this from as a journalist, because your incentive is for schools to transform for the better, and so there's a desire for things to be. I can sense a desire for us realizing the potential that AI has, and yet I think you've been in this long enough that you know that there's generally more to it than some of the first claims, I suppose, that are made.
Greg Toppo (The 74):Yeah, no, I think that's right. I think that's right.
Alex Kotran (aiEDU):All right, greg. Thank you so much for coming by. It's been fun.