AI, Kids, Learning and Authorship

In this episode, I challenge us to think about AI, kids learning and authorship.  I set out the challenges that teachers are finding with kids and their use of AI. I also challenge us to rethink how AI might matter to kids' learning.

From the episode-  

I know a couple very smart people who use AI as a thought-partner.  Instead of simply asking an AI agent for a full and complete dissertation on something that they want to know about, they start with a simple question.  Based on what the AI agent offers, they follow with another question, a question that comes about from what the learner is curious about and from what the AI agent set out.  Back and forth this goes, questions and answers leading to deeper and more meaningful questions and answers.  The learner is building understanding for themselves in concert with what the AI offers.  In this dialog, the person is the author.  As the author, the learner determines the direction of the thinking by taking up or not taking up, or by redirecting, or by ignoring, by choosing.  The learner authors the road to understanding to suit their learning needs and interests.  

Transcript

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Hi everybody, this is Johnny. Today I'm going to talk about AI in education. There's so much to think about here. I will focus on the act of learning as authorship. We make our learning. AI complicates this. I've had some good conversations with peers about what is happening with AI, with their students, and with their teaching. My brother is a high school English teacher. He's gone from having students download essays from the web and presenting them as their own to now having students present AI written essays as their own writing. You have probably heard about teachers' response to this. Many are now having students complete handwritten essays or exams in class under the supervision of the teacher. My daughter teaches freshman writing at a university and is of course concerned about AI and her students' writing. She tells her students that she expects not perfect writing from them. She wants to see that a human is learning to write. A machine doing their writing does not make them better writers. This takes me back to the idea that learning is an authorship. We are the authors of how and what we choose to learn. If I were to bundle together all the fears that people have about AI and kids in school, there are a few key pieces. The first is that AI will allow students to step away from critical thinking for themselves. When someone has to work and rework something they have read, challenge their problem solving methods for a rich math problem, make complex arguments from a study of history, one is engaged in an internal dialogue, testing assumptions, asking furthering questions, living and making thinking. That's authorship, the teacher's self that I have been describing. When we offload that authorship wholly to AI, we might as well have someone else show up in our seat in class. We are not making our own thinking. We are not learning. This is a rightful worry. Learning is what humans do, it's what we are supposed to do. I am going to get complicated here. This first thought may not be kind, so apologies up front. I think we should be asking ourselves what kinds of tasks, learning and thinking tasks we are asking our students to do. How many millions of kids have been asked to write an essay on the catcher in the rye to an overused prompt where the expected resulting essays are almost all the same? Such a way of teaching literature flattens students' thinking, lessens their authorship, does not respect that they might be able to author some of their own good deep thinking. When teachers worry about AI authoring students' work, the question should follow what was it about the task that was so generic to the subject, so not personal or meaningful for the learner, that they would rather hire out their work, their learning, to an AI. The second thought may be uncomfortable as well. While some see AI as a monster in the shadows ready to wreck kids' learning, I see something different, something that will challenge us in hard ways. Think about writing, think about your own writing. I have family and friends who are quite accomplished and published authors. As much as we like to think about writing as a solitary endeavor, a writer wrestling with their thoughts for hours at a time, working the text over and over again, writing relies on other people. Other people whose work you have read or are reading from, to inform your own writing, or actual people who read your work, give feedback, give direction, catch your mistakes. When you think about writing this way, what writers do is not so different from what AI might do for writing. The AI has just read so much more than you ever could, and knows all of it instantly. The AI offers immediate feedback on what you ask for and of course thoroughly knows the conventions of writing, spelling, grammar, and style. It can be that other, the other you call on for eyes on your writing, for feedback, direction, catching your mistakes. Working from this understanding of what it means to write should push us to think about a different relationship with AI. Working from the ideas of authorship and the teacher's self, we understand that thinking and learning are internal dialogues, conversations we have with our own ideas and the ideas of others. In this dialogue, understanding is made and remade. I know a couple very smart people who use AI as a thought partner. Instead of simply asking an AI agent for a full and complete dissertation on something that they want to know about, they start with a simple question. Based on what the AI agent offers, they follow with another question, a question that comes about from what the learner is curious about and from what the AI agent set out. Back and forth this goes, questions and answers leading to deeper and more meaningful questions and answers. The learner is building understanding for themselves in concert with what the AI offers. In this dialogue the person is the author. As the author, the learner determines the direction of the thinking by taking up or not taking up, or by redirecting or by ignoring, by choosing. The learner authors the road to understanding to suit their learning needs and interests. A simple analogy. Most of us by now have gone to YouTube to learn how to do something. We make choices through the prompts we set out, the videos we reject, the ones we choose to watch parts of, the ones we embrace more wholly. There is an engine behind the videos that YouTube presents to us, but we are the ones who set the interaction with video in motion. We choose how to learn from what is offered. In our work with students, we could reject AI because it so easily steals thinking. We could simply ban its use, have our writing done under supervision, make the inside world of schools AI free. But AI is not going to go away. It will be a part of our students' lives now and in their future. We could instead work with them to better own AI for what they want for themselves. We could encourage and insist on their authorship of their learning, not simply accepting that they will have AI do that for them. We could and should work to imagine the kinds of activities, the kinds of learning and thinking tasks that might benefit from the use of AI. The use of AI as a tamed partner, not as an omniscient overlord. What does this look like? To start, this means setting out tasks that require some introspection, some thinking about who one is, where one comes from, what matters to oneself, the kind of knowledge not sitting in a database somewhere. An essay on the catcher in The Rye might ask students to interview each other about themes in the text and how they relate to them from their experience. How does a book written 70 years ago connect or not connect with their experience today? The writer might start working with AI as a partner by setting out the prompt, What questions should I keep in mind when comparing how we live today with how people lived when the book was written? What the AI will offer is direction, not answers, the kind of support a good teacher or mentor would offer. Along the way the writer could prompt the AI with portions of their writing, asking, How might I strengthen my claim? Or what's not here that I should give attention to? Again, what a good teacher would address in conversation with the writer. The attention in work with an AI should be on process, authorship rather than product, something that gets graded. What we want is for our students to improve the process of their writing, not simply write complete and satisfactory essays. I will close with this, it is a bit meta. I have used AI as a partner in writing this. I gave this question to an AI. What's the best way for AI to be used in schools? This is what it offered. The best use of AI in schools is as a tool that strengthens student thinking rather than replacing it. AI can serve as a thinking and reflection partner that asks questions, helps students clarify ideas, and supports revision of work they have already created, while also helping them explore their curiosities and practice skills like math or language learning. It can also assist teachers in designing lessons and responding to students' needs. The key principle is that AI should increase the learner's engagement in thinking, questioning, and meaning making, not automate the work of learning itself. When used this way, AI supports students in developing the capacity to guide and understand their own learning rather than simply producing answers. This is what the AI offered. To be fair, this response to my query was likely tailored for me because of the kind of queries I set out for AI. We have to remember that as much as we might learn from or with AI, the AI is learning about us from what we ask it to do. You might do a little experiment. If you have used AI much, ask the question, what is it that I care about? You may be surprised. This is a big topic. I will come back to it. It will be worthwhile to give attention to how AI matters to teachers' work. Lesson planning, reviewing students' work, deepening understanding of our teaching. Thank you so much for listening.