Episode 190: Innovating Education with Generative AI

Episode 190_ Innovating Education with Generative AI

[00:00:00] Fonz: Hello everybody and welcome to another great episode of My EdTech Life. Thank you so much for joining us on this beautiful Saturday morning, or it may be well into Sunday , depending where you are in the world. I just simply wanna say thank you so much for joining us today and making us part of your day, and you're joining a wonderful conversation today.

[00:00:45] I am really excited to have an amazing guest today that I've been following, probably since December, when this whole AI thing just kind of started blowing up in our education landscape and really in every landscape. So I'm really excited to dive in into some generative AI talk. But before I do that, I always wanna thank each and every single one of.

[00:01:08] For all of your support. Thank you so much for all the likes, shares, and follows. Sharing our stuff on social media, subscribing and following us on all of our accounts. It really means a lot to us. As you know, our mission is to connect educators and creators one show at a time. Well, let's go ahead and dive in because this is gonna be a great conversation.

[00:01:30] So today I would love to welcome my great friend Stephan to the show. Stephan, how are you doing this morning? I'm

[00:01:37] Stefan: doing very well and thank you Vonn so much for having me. Uh, you know, as I mentioned to you about a month ago as we were working on the book, um, I started listening, uh, to your show and I got some great, uh, uh, quotes and, and thoughts from you that I, I integrated into the book and I met a lot of the people, um, who have been involved in these conversations, right, right here on LinkedIn and through got to listen to them through similar podcasts, uh, like yours.

[00:02:03] And it's just really expanded the. The dialogue and the discussion. So I really appreciate the opportunity, uh, to be here and to speak with you.

[00:02:11] Fonz: Yes, absolutely. I'm really excited too, because what, in the LinkedIn space, you were all, you know, one of the first people also that I started following that you were putting out just some amazing content, just some amazing thoughts sharing, you know, what is going on in that space.

[00:02:26] And, you know, it, it's great that we're having this conversation because like I mentioned to you earlier, I'm one of those, I'm, I'm in the EdTech space, but I'm also over here on the LinkedIn space and I just, you know, seeing the way things are, you know, perceived and seeing those different lenses, you know, I really just wanna be in the middle and like I mentioned to you, see how we can connect those thoughts and just really you.

[00:02:49] Take, in other words, um, I guess just use the AI to its capabilities, but also using it in a very obviously cautious way, making sure that we're following through and protecting of course, our students and protecting data privacy and all of those things. But I'm just excited to be here with you. And before we get started, if you can just give us a little brief introduction and your context in, um, you know, in your space, in the debate space, because I know that, you know, you're doing some great things also through that.

[00:03:20] So give us a little introduction for our audience members that are just getting to know who you are and are getting familiar with your work.

[00:03:27] Stefan: Thank you. Yeah. So, um, you know, my, the background I bring to this is, is primarily, uh, an academic debate. One, I started debating in the eighth grade in 1984, and I've been involved, uh, as a competitor in one way or another ever since.

[00:03:41] And one of the ma main skills I've got out of that is debate involves actually an enormous amount of research, organizing ideas, presenting ideas, and, you know, sometimes their topics will repeat or we debate about climate change a lot. We debate about taxes, right? But sometimes there's like a new issue that comes up.

[00:03:58] And I always loved really getting involved in an issue and really taking it on and, and really kind of tackling it, which is a bit how I ended up here Now, beyond working with students in, in coaching them and how to debate, I also, uh, co-direct a, a large debate, uh, league in New York City, the New York City Urban Debate League, uh, for students from, uh, more, uh, disadvantaged socioeconomic backgrounds.

[00:04:20] I've helped develop debate programs. Overseas and, you know, related to EdTech, you know, we use a lot of technology in debate. Um, I know how to use a lot of these applications. I was kind of helping teachers directly or indirectly with them. And of course when the pandemic started, debate went online and debate was really the first student activity to go online.

[00:04:39] I ran a tournament in early April on a platform, uh, with more than 400 students and 200 adults and helped support a, a large national tournament in June that year that ran with 6,000 students, uh, online. And then we supported the online architecture each year. And I, I've had, uh, various sizes depending on, uh, the laws in China and online tutoring program over there.

[00:05:00] So I have some kind of general background, um, and what we're doing, but I really, what really hit me, what re well two things got me involved in this. Well, one day I was sitting in a library waiting to have some debate practice with my students and I saw an article in the New York Post that I think kind of talked about some kind of a new search engine, right?

[00:05:18] We can discuss whether that's. Inappropriate metaphor, but I, I said, okay, so this interest me. I clicked on it. Wow, this is really cool. And I signed up and I, I just did a really simple thing. I said, tell me 10 reasons why socialism is bad. Now, you know, I'm not like a, you know, arch conservative. And I thought, you know, semi debated about in high school, it's just a simple topic and it listed out like 10 reasons that socialism is arguably bad.

[00:05:42] And I thought, wow, not only did it do this quickly, but when I skimmed the list, I really thought to myself, this is basically the main arguments that have been involved in these different contexts of the debates or different issues for a long time. And I thought, this is really going to impact my field because what are some of the basic things I helped students do?

[00:06:00] I helped them learn to, to, to write speeches. I helped them learn to write rebuttals. Um, I helped them learn to do research, which I knew at that time it, it couldn't really do even, you know, within about a couple more. Of playing around with the tool and learning about it, but I knew that it would soon be able to, right, that it was gonna connect to the internet or somebody would connect it to the internet or put it in part of an enterprise system.

[00:06:20] It seemed obvious to me where the trend was going. Then I got even more involved in the debate when schools started banning it, uh, because it really kind of, you know, made, made me a little angry, to be honest, that schools are banning it. Once I learned more a little bit, you know, about like the privacy issues and the laws, I, I see where those kind of concerns came from.

[00:06:36] But from the academic side, I, I couldn't imagine that you'd want to take this away from students. So I kind of got involved in the, uh, the discussion there, and then it led to a webinar and a book and, you know, I, I can talk more about that, uh, a little bit later, but that's kind of how I got involved in this.

[00:06:51] And then, you know, I'm just a sponge for information. So I started basically reading everything I could find that came out on this, everything that was posted on LinkedIn, every article, um, and talking with all kinds of people, both on LinkedIn and friends who started, um, becoming involved in this at the, you know, at the K-12 level, at the university level.

[00:07:08] Um, and met a, met a lot of great people. That is wonderful.

[00:07:12] Fonz: That is awesome, Stephan. Um, and like I said, uh, when this all came out, obviously we saw, you know, it blow up in the education space and then on LinkedIn and just really seeing the reactions and so on, but it just seems like you, for your. Your example, like you said, you're very much like I am just a sponge and just wanting to absorb everything and just learn everything and just take it in and just see, put it to the test and see where it goes.

[00:07:36] See what you can do. So I love the fact that some of the things that you put out that, you know, you're saying, you know, for debate, using it for your use case. So I wanna know just a little bit more too, because obviously I wanna get to the book also as well. I mean various authors and just really a, an extensive amount of content, 650 pages worth of content that's coming up and so I'm really excited to learn a little bit more about that and your collaborators as well.

[00:08:03] First of all, I wanna thank Amanda for joining us in the chat and Rebecca Jordan also, thank you so much for joining us in the chat. Thank. Please make sure that you check out the links that I'm popping into the chat because you will find the link to the book on, uh, the Kindle version that is on Amazon.

[00:08:17] So please make sure that you go and check that out as well. So, Stefan, I or Stephan, sorry, I apologize Stephan. Um, so for myself, I got really excited with the fact that, okay, this is how I can introduce this to the education space. This is what we can do for teachers saving time. Obviously we saw that fear that came in many, uh, educators like myself and, you know, and your like yourself too.

[00:08:43] We kind of, you know, we we're not very fearful. We're kind of like, Hey, we're gonna go for it. We're gonna adapt, we're gonna see what we can do and learn from this and how we can use this. But I wanna know a little bit about what you saw as far as the reaction once this, uh, you know, chat g p T was released, and like I mentioned to you, which is one of the quotes that you got, you know, and it became front facing.

[00:09:05] You know, what were the initial reactions of the people in your space, maybe in the LinkedIn space and the debate space and the educator space that you work with? I'd love to hear from your side.

[00:09:16] Stefan: You know, so I think, I think you saw those two reactions, right? Like, you see it, okay. You see the reaction on LinkedIn, right?

[00:09:22] You see, you see, I, I saw reactions in the debate space of, wow, this is really amazing technology. We want to show our students how to use this. I got other reactions of like, why are you telling anybody how to use this? You're going to destroy debate, right? It, it, it kind of came, the same thing happened in schools, right?

[00:09:40] Like some teachers, you know, they, they wanna embrace it. They want, they wanna learn, they wanna figure it out. Uh, a lot of them, you know, they, they were initially put off and I think part of it is like, you know, we can blame everything on the media, but sometimes when you really get into a space and you see how it's represented in the media, you see why people maybe that you don't even like, complain about the media, uh, all the time because the media made this all about plagiarism.

[00:10:05] And when the history of the birth and the development of generative AI is written, student plagiarism is gonna be at bass. Small footnote. We're talking about societal wide changes, right? And we're talking about maybe massive unemployment or new jobs or deep fakes and, you know, all this kind of automation of industry and o and other types of artificial intelligence.

[00:10:25] Student plagiarism is not really gonna be, be, be no, no one's really gonna talk about it. But if you look at all the media reports, it was all just as if someone had invented a tool that they were giving away so students could write papers. We, I, we had a friend of mine, uh, we ran a, a pretty large webinar and, and early January on this, we, 200 people register.

[00:10:43] A hundred people showed up and went for two and a half hours, 50 were still left after two and a half hours. Uh, and they were engaged. And one of the people who came was a friend of. She posted on Facebook that next day, oh, I went to this webinar. It was so informative. I thought this was just a plagiar, like a thing to help kids plagiarize, but I learned so much about it.

[00:11:02] I'm gonna start using it with my debate team. So I think with this initial narrative, and look, it, it can obviously, you know, depending on how you define plagiarism, academic dishonesty, whatever you wanna say, right? It can clearly support that. It can clearly, you know, enable students to just wrongly copy and paste a whole document that is an issue, right?

[00:11:21] It should not be dismissed. Students still need to learn some, like writing skills. We could unpack all that a bit later, but it is so much more than that. And kind of my own theory, and I haven't, I, I have no idea. There's, there's really not much data right out there right now, right. About use, especially in education.

[00:11:38] You can find it in industry and there have been some interesting studies that have been done. But my own theory is that as teachers become more acclimated to using the technology, if they try to use a technology to write a lesson plan, to build a quiz, To, to provide, you know, first level of feedback for a student, then they will hopefully become more comfortable with their students using it.

[00:11:58] Right? If their students are using a piece of technology that they don't understand, they don't relate to that. The only thing they've read about is that how it enables student plagiarism. Well, of course, how are they gonna react? Anybody would react that way, right? So I think that, uh, I think that that was a normal reaction, I think is in part driven by the media.

[00:12:17] I think it's gonna take a lot to unpack that. That was, you know, one of the motivations for the, for the book and the webinar. Um, and I think there are a lot of, you know, exciting opportunities to use this both in speech and debate. And I think as everybody says it, it basically allows you to do a lot of the basic work that you were doing either really quickly, and I think more and more you just won't be able to produce it.

[00:12:39] So then the questions, the broader questions start to become, you know, how do we spend that time, right? We, we were spending on what we might call grunt work. Right. And what kind of new hire order, whether it's a speech and debate activities I've suggested, you know, maybe, maybe not right now, right? And things can only say, but maybe next year you think about some new speech and debate events, right?

[00:12:58] That may test students ability to, or demonstrate their ability to use some of these technologies to, to tell stories, to create kind of creative speeches, right? To um, you know, have more questioning in the debate rather than more speaking of like a pre-written speech, which is a lot easier to write than it used to be, right?

[00:13:15] So I think there's gonna be like some modifications, those types of things. But that all requires a lot of thought, requires like a lot of human creativity. Um, which I think is something that people are also starting to think about. Like how to, how to celebrate.

[00:13:28] Fonz: Excellent. Yeah. You know, a lot of things that you hit on is also, like you said, that fear initially, and you're absolutely right.

[00:13:34] It was all about plagiarism, that's all it was. And right now, currently, I know within this week, turn it in, released their AI detection pla plagiarism tool, which to be honest with you, I've tried it and it's not great at all whatsoever. I mean, I, I,

[00:13:49] Stefan: I wanted, so, you know, you, you've seen how I post, I, you know, if something page, I'll post about it, I'll share it.

[00:13:54] When that happened, I couldn't think of a, I was pretty nonplus. I was like, okay, we have another plagiarism detection tool. Mm-hmm. It has all the problems of, like the other one, it has the worst name ever. I think it's originality. Yeah. Which we could have a whole theoretical discussion about. And I was like, it's, it's time to move on.

[00:14:13] No, I see it's time to move on. You know, I know everyone has their superpower, their own superpower, and if detecting plagiarism is your superpower, then I, I suppose, I don't want to take that away from you, but,

[00:14:23] Fonz: um, yeah, no, and you know, and even before that, like in January, I guess when we came back from Christmas break and since I'm part here in Texas of, uh, thread with CTOs and everything all over Texas, everybody was worried about that.

[00:14:35] And that's all they talked about. And they brought up, you know, G P T Zero and they brought out all these other plagiarism tools. And then I said, okay, I'm gonna go ahead and put 'em to the test. And I created a video for them. And so what I did is I typed up my own stuff on a Google Doc and then I popped it in there and it said 84% AI written.

[00:14:56] And then when I actually used AI to. It came back with 100% human. And I'm like, yeah, this isn't gonna work. And then I tried turn it in and there's another creator that I follow also on TikTok, that we both tried it and we came up with the same results where we just put it to the test, created something full on ai and it said that 10% and it, it was really 10% was about two sentences that it picked up, that it said possibly AI written.

[00:15:22] And I was like, oh my gosh. You know? So there's definitely still a lot of work to do and obviously, you know, higher ed might be like, well this ruins the college essay and so on. But you see work like Ethan Molik, what they're doing, even my professors this semester, they're like, look, we know that this is out there.

[00:15:38] Yeah, we know that. You know, if this is only gonna get better. However, they said when you submit something and I do have some questions on it as far as the writing or so on, all I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna ask for a one-on-one meeting. We'll discuss the writing and, but he actually said, if you did use this tool, please.

[00:15:57] Justify reference it and why did you use it? And they were so cool with it. And, uh, you know, after that, nobody even like, you know, thought about it at all. They, we just moved on and going on with our work. So you saw a lot of that going on. And like I said, right now, I think for teachers, I told, I, I, you know, we've, I've had several guests where I said, you know, for me, encyclopedia Britannica and I'm dating myself, was my chat G P T back in the day, my mom would drop me off at the library.

[00:16:25] I had to do my research. I would just go to the encyclopedia and then I would go ahead and do my book report. On that. And then of course internet came up, type it up, look it up on Google. So this isn't anything new at all whatsoever. You know, what I do, I think is just, it's gonna definitely enhance, like you said, getting rid of some of that menial work for teachers, educators, or anybody in any space.

[00:16:48] But it can also help enhance the lesson and really dive in deep. Which brings me to my next question. Uh, a couple of weeks back, I did have a, uh, gentleman, William Grubby, who is out there in Iowa, and he's going into the schools and sharing what this tool can do. And for him, mainly his focus that he sees a lot of teachers concerned about is that this is gonna get rid of any of those critical thinking skills, communication skills, or effective communication skills that are essential.

[00:17:17] What are your thoughts on

[00:17:18] Stefan: that? So, you know, I think, you know, and I'll kind of address them a little bit differently because, because they have some different impacts, right? Like critical thinking. You know, we, we actually have a chapter of the book on critical thinking by an old friend of mine who was a, a Stella Debater, a debate coach.

[00:17:35] He went on to get a, a PhD in education. He led Nashville's charter schools for a while, was a, uh, um, a department chair, an education department chair. And he really kind of unpacks, uh, you know, what critical thinking is in, in how we go about it. But, and you know, the initial when, when the, when the New York City Department of Education, bandit, their initial thing was, well, this, this, you know, we can't have this.

[00:17:56] You can look out the statement. It says this will undermine critical thinking. And to me it it, it was the opposite. Now, it depends on how you approach assignments and assessments. So in. Debate's always kind of been a bit collab, collaborative, right? Like students and coaches work together to write speeches, to share knowledge, students share knowledge amongst themselves.

[00:18:17] Uh, students build their rebuttals. Students prepare questions. They're, they're ask, ask questions, they have to answer questions. They have to summarize and organize material. That's, to me, where, like, you know, I see, and one of the values I always saw in debate is critically thinking. Now, if you're, if your, if your standard assignment is a one-off paper and you think that the critical thinking is gonna happen, As the students go through and write the paper.

[00:18:43] And writing does serve different purposes, right? One of the purposes of writing is to create an end product that's valuable. And if you're in a business, right, that comes sold and consumed. Another purpose of writing is the process, right? It forces you to think through an idea. It forces you to organize information.

[00:18:59] When I first started learning about some of the underlying technologies behind these, right, like n natural language models, large language models, gans, I started writing some stuff out, even though I didn't think anybody wanted to hear from me about the technical details of how that stuff worked, I started writing it out to help me think through it and organize it and remember it.

[00:19:17] So there's that process of writing and that way of critical thinking, and I'm saying that can be lost. And if that's your tool for ge, for for moving through student think. Critical thinking that could be a problem. But if you, I think the, the, the other side of this is that if you change the type of assessments, right?

[00:19:36] If you use more things like business, business case competition, if you use debate, right? If you use project based learning, then the, the, that initial paper or something of that nature, that initial artifact, even if it's largely generated by a generative AI tool, right? Whether it's chat, G P T or the ping integration, or you, or whatever you're using, right?

[00:19:57] Or the, the Microsoft material, if that's the initial artifact and you have it set up so the students are engaging in thinking after that, okay, let's debate this, right? I mean, most topics are, are debatable, right? Even some of the ones we feel strongly about, we recognize, all right, you know, maybe hard sometimes we recognize that there is another side we've gotta think through about our sources, the reasoning, the organization.

[00:20:19] The statement that the conclusions are being drawn from the information that's available. We've already seen some of this start to creep into education, right? When, you know, we had the new s a t and like all those kind of things, right? So this presents a lot of opportunities to me to actually improve student, like use of, for lack of a better term, use, use of critical thinking.

[00:20:41] But if you're relying on that paper to be the source of the, the process of writing the paper to be the source of critical thinking, it's gonna get lost there. But since those things can be produced more easily, I think we can build it stronger. You know, one of the co-editors of the book Pre and Shaw, he's actually a, a former student of mine who helped develop a lot of this.

[00:20:57] Like, uh, well, he let and say helped him. We came up with the idea together. But he was the tech guy led the, led the development of it on the, on the tech side. You know, he said, when I started talking to with him about this, which was one of the origins of the book, he said, what's hard for me is said, I don't have any time during my day where I just do simple tasks anymore.

[00:21:15] He says, I'm using this chat. At that time was Chad gbt 3.5 all day to do all the basic work. And I'm constantly engaging in higher order thinking. And he's like, that is exhausting. Right? And I, so I, I think that, and you know, he's a really, he is a really smart guy, right? He, he went, he went to Harvard. He have a, he has a Harvard Masters.

[00:21:34] He, he built all this infrastructure from scratch, right? So there's someone who's used to kind of using his, his brain in a higher order way. Um, but you know, he is just like, this is exhausted. But it, it's not, if you just give the same assignments, that that is a reality. If you just give it the same assignments and all these tools are present and all these tools are gonna get a lot better, we're not gonna be able to tell that I'm in this play.

[00:21:55] We, I don't want, I don't wanna talk about plagiarism anymore, so I won't bring it up. But, um, if, if we, if we just keep giving the same assignments, That use to support a critical thinking process, then critical thinking will be lost. You have to, you have to change the classroom activities, the assignments, right?

[00:22:10] Even parts of debate I think will need to change a little bit. Not as much cuz there's already a lot of this, these other parts of the process built into the activity of debate. But I think we kind of wanna devalue a little bit, maybe that like first initial speech it's students gave, which we always kind of did, right?

[00:22:23] Like you could, you, you, you, your coach could write your whole first speech. You know, I've coached debate for 35 years. I can write a pretty good first speech. But if the students couldn't do the first rest of the part of the debate, what did it matter? They would lose it. Didn't matter who wrote, who wrote the speech, whether it was the computer, whether it was me, whether it was the most accomplished debate coach in the history of the world, right?

[00:22:40] They would still lose the debate. So that, that, because the assessment really happens in those other parts. So I, I think that's where people need to start thinking, where do these assessments. And you know, I think people need to think of that, whether in their own field, whether, you know, if they're, if you're a high school science teacher, like how, how does that move if you're teaching writing, how does that move?

[00:23:00] You're teaching social studies. How, how did that move them? What do you wanna teach? That's one thing I started asking debate coaches. Okay, what skills do you want? You know, you coach debate, a lot of debate coaches, they don't pay the very little money or not, or no money. They're volunteers. They put in all this time you're doing this because you think the students benefit.

[00:23:16] Why do you think they benefit? What are they taking with them? The students you've had who've come back to you and said, wow, I'm, I'm really glad you were the debate coach. I got so much outta debate. What are they telling you they got out of it? Right? And what are those things? Maybe they won't keep getting all of those out of it.

[00:23:30] Maybe they'll get a, a fewer number of things, but they're also going to of those things, but they're gonna get some other additional things out of it. Now on communication, I. Again, it kind of depends. We could really talk about how this is gonna strengthen communication skills, but because we talk about the, as the assessments that are being given, we can also talk about, hey, if we're just communicating with machines, a a a former debater brought this up to me and I hadn't thought about it until he said it.

[00:23:54] He said one of the things that he got outta debate was the intuition of a human exchange. And really in all the years I've done this, in all the years I've promoted debate. Nobody had told me about that before. And he thought that could get kind of lost if we're just debating with bots. He's like, why are you telling her to debate with bots?

[00:24:11] You're gonna lose the, the intuition. I was saying, well, I don't think we should stop debating with each other. Um, we should also like maybe debate with the bots for practice, right? To, to use these to build our skills the same way some schools might have an assistant coach and work with their students to improve their basic skills, but I thought his point may, you know, we've had a lot of conversation about it since, right?

[00:24:29] Like if there, there is, there is a bit of a human intuition that goes away when you're primarily dealing with a bot. So I, I don't think in any way we can pretend that. There aren't any downsides to this, but the downsides are gonna become more manifest if we don't engage the technology. If we don't think about like, how we're going to use this in education, if, like, as educators, like the way I see it, we can either take control of the prompt and like drive the integration of the technology into schools, or we can let other interests, this technology is coming, it's already here, right?

[00:25:02] Because it's being developed in industry that's accelerating. What does industry want? Industry wants great products. It wants to produce them cheaply. What can generative AI do? Produce really awesome products really cheaply. The, the, the, the downside is a lot of current assessment is based on students producing products.

[00:25:21] Well, the, the products are going to, the technology's gonna keep advancing because industry's gonna drive it, like to create these product. And then we have educators, right? Who, you know, the traditional assessment is to create a product. And the schools, they're not, they're not as isolated in that way as they hope to be.

[00:25:38] You know, for many unfortunate, terrible reasons, we have to really strengthen the physical security of the schools. But while the physical security of the school has been strengthened, the, the porousness of the knowledge that Right. Has collapsed. Right. Like there's no used to be like, you had to get all your knowledge, like from a school, whether it's from a university Yeah.

[00:25:57] Whether it's from a high school, right. And then the internet kind of crept in there a little bit. And you know, we, we have filters and those things, but you can get a lot. Now everyone has it on their phone. Everyone has whatever they want to learn, like on their phone, on their computer, they can bring that into the school.

[00:26:13] They can get on their own personal networks regardless of what's blocked on the internet. Or you know what the, if the school's block chat, G b t, they can use it on the phone. Yeah. Some debaters, I know they, they pay for their own vpn N so they, they don't have any limits on the debate research they can do at school.

[00:26:27] And then of course, you know, even as we saw in like this, you know, debates about off-campus speech and regulating it, right? The, the, the, the environment's porous, right? Like what ha what happens at home is not just completely distinct from what happens at school. And so all this is. This is all inside of school.

[00:26:44] The kids are all learning this, they're learning outside. A lot of kids didn't go to school for a year, two years during the pandemic, physically. Right. So they, they existed and like learned in all these mediated environments. That's where they're getting their knowledge from. Right? Like, I think the, I think some students must wonder about like, adult sanity.

[00:27:01] We're sitting around debating about whether books should be in schools that a lot of the kids don't even use. Right? Like if you, I I, I, I teach debating in a school library in, in, you know, in, uh, I, I said there some times before it starts and it, it's a wonderful place. The, the librarian is very nice to all the students.

[00:27:17] The students come in, they work on their computers, they work, they work on their phones. They, she helps them, their teachers help them. But you know what, I, I randomly picked up 10 books on the shelf and I looked to see if anyone had ever checked out one of these books just randomly. Zero. Okay. Nobody had and used any of the.

[00:27:33] That we're on the shelves and we're spending all our time as adults debating about what books should be in the library, where students are learning online with information and that's how they're learning and they're learning a lot. And that's gonna impact education whether we wanted to or not. We don't have control over that as educators.

[00:27:48] Fonz: Excellent. And I mean, you hit on so many great points here, and I wanna bring up a comment from Amanda, Amanda Messias, who's joining us, who kind talks a little bit about this. But this will kind of take us into the next question because I also definitely wanna give enough time so we can talk about the book and of course the co-authors and everything.

[00:28:03] But this is such a great conversation here. So her comment was this, it says, critical thinking and understanding are important here. Focusing on understanding ethical use and student privacy of data isn't up for debate. It's part of the policy that policy we all have to follow. Which brings me to my next question here, which is, what are some of the legal and ethical challenges associated.

[00:28:26] With the use of generative AI that you may see?

[00:28:30] Stefan: Well, I might, um, I, I might bracket that into, to two questions. The one I'm more knowledgeable than about the, uh, you know, it's easier to have an opinion on the ethical side. Mm-hmm. And I can talk a little bit about the, the legal side. We have a chapter in, in the book.

[00:28:43] Mm-hmm. Um, just to kind of a brief that's written by a, a law professor in a law student where they kind of go through some of the different legal considerations. Right. Especially potentially relevant to privacy. So, but let me kind of start with kind of the first one. I think the privacy issues, you know, are, are real.

[00:28:59] Right? And they're talking about how, you know, when you put information into this, you don't, you don't really know like how it's being utilized by the companies. It's not, you know, is the people will say, you know, even experts in this area. It's, it's open as it used to be. We see Italy kind of band chat, j p t three primarily, like from what I read on, on pri based out of concerns about.

[00:29:19] Privacy. Now, to me, I, I kind of have a couple gut RA actions to that. Like, one, it's important, we need to think about how these systems implement student privacy. My second reaction is like, well, you know, we, we have students who spend the entire day on TikTok. And as far as we can tell, and you know, we know a lot of that data like goes to, to a foreign government.

[00:29:40] Um, and they spend a lot of other time on adults do on applications that are really just free because we, we give away all of our data and, you know, now we've kind of started to draw the line and say, well, we're not gonna give it to, uh, open ai. Um, okay. Like, you know, to me it's like, you know, the, I, I don't, I don't know why.

[00:30:01] One thing I don't understand, and I understand the value of privacy and protecting privacy. I kind of, it seems to all be laid at the foot of, of this one particular application or one particular use of technology. When we're engaged, we we're giving up privacy every day, every time we use. An application.

[00:30:17] There are other forms that are, you know, this is GE kind of generating information, you know, these kind of basically surveillance uses of, you know, monitoring where kids go to school every day, like monitoring their grades. There's all kind of information that that is collected about you. Uh, so to me it seems a little bit different.

[00:30:34] And ultimately as a society, we have to weigh things like, you know, yesterday they, there was a, um, uh, they call these, uh, uh, uh, plugins for Chad, g p t three, and I, I think it was the, uh, the stable diffusion plugin came out yesterday for, uh, for Chad G P T three. And you know, of course now you can do even more with it.

[00:30:54] And this guy from Italy, he says, well, at least we have privacy. You know, and he was like, okay, you know, we have, we have, we have privacy here, but we can't use any of these technologies. There's incredible, like, academic research coming outta m i t preliminary research, but showing 18 to like 30% increases in productivity have dramatic effects.

[00:31:13] And I, but I think it's a conversation that we need to have. You're on the legal thing about schools, which I'll briefly mention. Like I say, I'm not, I'm not as qualified there, but we, we have to have discussions about like what, what's important right. In our society and like what roles do we wanna have?

[00:31:27] Every, you know, people want everything they want, they wanna have industry productivity, they wanna have economic competition with China. They also want all their privacy protected, right? Like, these are not necessarily things we want, we. We wanna be able to differentiate lessons for students, okay? And we want tools to help us do that.

[00:31:44] We know that, I mean, teacher, like conceptually, like even to me like this, never like, okay, how am I supposed to teach this less than 30 different ways, right? And it's easier for me as a coach, right, than as a classroom teacher. When I talk to other classroom teachers, they're like, yeah, it's a nice idea, but like in practice it doesn't really work that well.

[00:31:59] But the only way we can really do that is we, if we collect student data, right? Like if, if, if maybe different types of systems, like I'll call 'em surveillance systems. So that sounds a little bit scary, right? Kind of collect this data. They know exactly where Johnny is in math. Maybe Johnny's in the fourth grade, uh, but he only learn, he only has third grade math abilities at this particular area.

[00:32:18] So you, you, you, you, you, the, the machine spits out an assignment that he can do it, but also kind of starts to push him up a little bit. We can only do that with data. To me, these are big questions that we need to ask. Like, yeah. You know, in the, in the chapter on the law, they talk about how one of the major laws is like written like 20 years ago.

[00:32:36] Um, and you know how, so I think there might need to be some legal changes. I do think educators need to think about a couple things, right? One is, Do we hold all the apps that we allow our students to use or that we don't block from our networks to the same standards, right? Like mm-hmm. Okay. I get it. You block chat G P T because it says you're supposed to be 18 and there's these privacy concerns.

[00:32:56] There are millions of applications out there. Do you block all those or is it just kind of this one that you don't really like? You know, I, I was on the New York City Department of Education Network the other week for a debate tournament, and I basically could use everything but chat G P T. Okay. I, and even then, I could use a lot of the, I use a lot of the websites that use the api.

[00:33:16] I could use them. Right. So, so, you know, we're not like strictly policing it. The only thing I would say is this is a transformative technology and people need to figure it out. You know, there's this old story about. Uber and the general counsel there. You know, I don't know if this story's true, but even if it's not true, it makes the same point.

[00:33:34] The general counsel kept saying, you can't do this. We're gonna get sued. You can't do that. You're gonna get sued. And somebody said, look, we have to get a new general counsel because part of the job is the general counsel is to make it work, right? We have to, otherwise we're gonna shut down the company.

[00:33:47] So we, people in charge of these decisions in schools, they have to figure out how to make this work because this is transforming the world. We can't let students graduate from high school. Only 50% of students go to college nationwide, and all of those don't graduate for college. We can't rely on colleges to do this.

[00:34:02] We can't rely, okay, on industry industry's just gonna hire the person who already knows how to do it. So you can at the end of the day say, Hey, like we really, our school district, we have the greatest privacy protections ever. Yes, we know that when our students get to college, they can't use these technologies and they're struggling to get jobs in like copy editing and writing, but their privacy is protected.

[00:34:21] May, maybe that's what we decide as a society. We shouldn't dismiss that. Right. Hmm. We shouldn't dismiss that. But you can't. You can't. If you just isolate education from the rest of the world, then people are gonna start to lose value in education and they're gonna start, maybe not education as a concept.

[00:34:38] You're gonna see more private schools, you're gonna see more classes there already are, that are popping up about teaching students, about using these technologies and how to use them to prepare for college. Right. You're going to, you're gonna see more homeschooling. I know people in the homeschool kind of movement, I guess, for lack of a better term, that I know some of them, they're really excited about these technologies because these technologies are gonna allow them to teach things and do things that they otherwise couldn't do.

[00:35:02] That's gonna put more pressure on schools. The schools don't wanna adapt. They don't have to, I guess. Right? But then they're gonna, they're gonna lose some of their relevance as an area of learning, and they already have a little bit to no fault of their own, just because knowledge, knowledge is more porous and is available in all these different ways, and students figure that out a bit during the pandemic, but, You know, you know, one of the questions you asked is like, where is this heading?

[00:35:23] That concerns me a little bit in terms of kind of e equality, like public schools, they've always been, people can criticize them and, you know, maybe they're not perfect. No school is perfect, but what they've done a really good job of is kind of like reduce inequality, right? Or reduce the potential, right?

[00:35:41] For inequality. When, when the pandemic happened, they made sure every student at least had a device. A lot of schools made in incredible efforts, including the one where I coached debate to make sure kids that didn't have internet in their homes were given a, were given like a device to like connect to the internet.

[00:35:56] And why? Because they thought students needed to learn. We couldn't have a set of society that just didn't learn for however long. Well, we now, it now it's about kind of like content and skills that they need to learn, right? And these are very important contents. These are very important skills. Um, that's one things we tried to demonstrate in the book.

[00:36:15] You know, initially we're like, Hey, maybe at least outta think about using this. A friend of mine. Who, uh, is an attorney, uh, uh, does federal appellate work. He saw one of my posts on Facebook and said, agree with you a chat. He came to the webinar, he wrote in the book, he's a federal appellate attorney. He's been using these types of technologies in his legal practice for two years, writing rush drafts of his work.

[00:36:34] He said, okay, now, now I paid for those. Once Chad g p t came out, right? And then I, I started, I started using that cuz it was actually better. But I was really thinking to myself, if it's good enough to do rough drafts of federal appellate for legal work, why is it not good enough? Like, everyone's like, oh, there's a mistake here and there.

[00:36:51] I don't know what I, I don't know. I I, I don't think I've ever produced something without an error. Had a student turned in a, a re a speech or something? No, I didn't think need corrected. But, uh, you know, it, it's just a really important thing. You know, bill Gates has called us the AI world. He's probably right.

[00:37:07] We're moving into it. Um, I would, I wa you know, like as a, as a, as a, if I were a school district leader, I would wanna move. I would want my school to be part of that. I wouldn't want my school to be isolated from the world. Right. I would wanna not only be a part of that, I would wanna lead and help decide how my school was gonna be a part of that world.

[00:37:24] I wouldn't want someone else to decide how I was gonna be a part of that world. I wouldn't want someone else to say, oh, well, okay, well you don't wanna teach your students. Well, we figured out we got all these apps, you know, we can like sell them online. Right? Like, so to me it, it is just kind of a, a question of what drives it.

[00:37:39] And then, you know, you get to meta questions of people. Like, we want people driving this technology. We don't want the corporations that own this technology driving how we use it. They're gonna drive a lot of how we use it. They have a lot of money. They know how to use these, they know how to message, right?

[00:37:52] Part of these technologies is messaging. They know how to message, they know how to get us to spend the money we wanna spend. They know, they know exactly what we'll pay for it. They, they are gonna have a lot of influence regardless of what we do. But if we just say, eh, not for us, it's gonna still be for us.

[00:38:06] It's just gonna be for us on their terms. It's gonna be a relationship between them and us that's solely defined by them. And nobody wants to be in a relationship that's solely defined by another person.

[00:38:16] Fonz: Excellent. Perfect. And that's a great point that you mentioned there. And I just wanna highlight a couple things that you mentioned in the very beginning, because I know one of the biggest things is that when chat g p T came out, everybody, a lot of people in the education space is like, oh, you gotta use this, you gotta put it in the classroom.

[00:38:31] But like you mentioned, it's like, well what did the terms of service mean? Like, you know, it's, you gotta be 18 and older and then they dropped it to 13. But it says, there're specifically with parent consent. And I put up a poll on Twitter and I left it up there for a couple days asking, okay, how many of my educator friends actually have parent consent?

[00:38:49] And not that many people answered, but the ones that did it was a whopping 63%. Did not ask for any parental consent to bring that into the classroom, you know, and do it that way. However, you did mention. Even as a, as a district, there are programs that we use that use some sort of ai obviously, because you hit on a couple things, uh, like search engines.

[00:39:12] Yeah. But at the beginning of the year, at the beginning of the year, uh, we visited a teacher who panicked because we got a new platform. That pretty much what it does, it gives a student a pre-test and sees where they're. And says, okay, I'm, I need to build you up. Exactly like you said, you know, closing those gaps.

[00:39:28] She's an algebra teacher in ninth grade and saw that the student was having difficulty with a fourth grade concept and she's like, I don't like this program. I don't like this at all. And because it's giving them fourth grade material, but they're in ninth grade. And I said, well, that's the reality that we live in, where there are often a lot of gaps and you don't know what the deficiencies those students are coming in.

[00:39:48] So it was kind of an eye-opening experience for her. And I said, well, this is what the program does. And so now we just really have that really forward facing and interface and now how are we gonna use it? Obviously the data, you know, I did a little research project that I did share online and a lot of it was the da it called Data re rentership, where companies pretty much saying, if it's free, you pretty much are the product, right?

[00:40:14] Because of our digital footprint, our digital think that we're living, leaving in there as teachers and as students and whatnot. So they're using that data obviously, and, you know, to get to obvi, build their platform up a little bit more and, you know, other things. So I like those points that you highlighted, but again, it's like we need to adapt also to this world that you said and actually have a voice, like you said, I don't agree with, with that aspect of the being, having the relationship a one way, uh, only relationship.

[00:40:45] But let's have that conversation. Let's open up that dialogue and everybody in our spaces, having those voices to be able to talk and give feedback and create policy, create, you know, equitable use, create anything that'll protect ourselves, our students, our industry and education. Because like you said, this is here and it's only gonna get a lot better.

[00:41:04] Now Stefan, I wanna talk about your book. So tell us a little bit about this. I know I've been popping in the link and what I'm gonna do here also as well, I'm gonna go ahead and share. You know, on the screen here as well, just so people can be familiar with, uh, what they're looking at. So this is what we have G Chat, G p t, navigating the impact of generative AI technologies on educational theory and practices.

[00:41:27] So tell us about the, how this idea came about.

[00:41:31] Stefan: Well, it came out of, I guess, you know, there, there were two steps. So, you know, I mentioned Preton earlier. Uh, we were talking one day, he was actually helping us run an online tournament for our debate league. And, you know, he talked about it used in work. I started chatting and I said, you know what, what I see, I said, you know, when on social media?

[00:41:47] And at that time, you know, I, I was gauging in more on Facebook than, than LinkedIn. I said, there's a lot of stuff people don't know about this. We need to. You know, like an opportunity for people to learn. And of course, I, I, I started with some friends, uh, a sibling, a good friend of mine who I know started using it at his senior seminar.

[00:42:06] Um, it is university and, um, we, we organized a webinar with some different people who were, were gonna talk about how different parts of special education, you know, in special education. And first, in first grade. Like I said, my friend David, the law, I see Bonnie in here who came and talked about like, which really that was one of the most mind-blowing parts of it.

[00:42:25] I didn't even realize it had all those capacities. Bonnie started putting up lessons that were like tied to, to different learning standards, um, and very well organized with the objectives and all these types of things, but. What everybody, you know, got everybody really excited. So we had this webinar, as I said, like a hundred people came, 50 of 'em, made it all the way to the end for two and a half hours.

[00:42:44] And the initial idea was, Hey, we, we have a lot of good stuff here. We should take this and make it into a book. And I thought, well, each of the chapters, you know, we'll have like 10 people, it'll be around 3000 words. We're just gonna get our ideas out. I said, I, I can push out a transcript of what everybody said if you wanna use that to help your chapter.

[00:43:00] But then the idea really grew. I started meeting a lot more people who were kind of involved. You know, a lot of the authors, at least half of the authors probably I met, I met on LinkedIn and I saw what different areas, especially, you know, they were contributing. Um, You know, to the, to the book, like what they would contribute.

[00:43:16] I got in a, a group by Dr. Uh, Laura Doman, who, who wrote two chapters in the book. She's a higher ed writing professor, so this immediately impacts right what she did. And she organized this Facebook group, then in like three weeks, had a thousand members. Now it is over 2000 members. She started writing. I, I met another person in there, wrote a, about the large language models and the, and the plagiarism, uh, detection tools.

[00:43:37] I, I had reconnected with my friend aan, who I talked about earlier, about, uh, critical thinking. I, I had met just like a lot of different people, had a lot of different ideas and we started organizing a book and, you know, having four editors in this case helped a lot. We pre knew up with the technology side on, with a lot of the, the university p p policies.

[00:43:57] We had she shrock who, um, spent her whole life, well not now, she's retired in, in K-12 education. She taught, she taught there aren't too many people to do this. She taught on the humanities side and on the science side. She had a school instructional technology role. She was the assistant superintendent of.

[00:44:13] Instruction. And she retired as the, in the interim superintendent. So she knew like about everything that's like, you know, what are all the major issues in educa K-12 education? What are the terminologies of all these things? What are we trying to do? What, what, you know, what's the role of the educational technology specialist?

[00:44:28] What's the role of the principal, the teacher? All these things. It could really speak that language and help us get all those ideas into the book. So the book's set up with a, a ba it has, you can anyone can download a 30 page editor's intro, which has like 150 citations, which we talk about the development of the technology and all the major issues associated with it.

[00:44:46] And we talk just basically how it works because I think a lot of problems could be solved if people just had basic, really core, basic understanding how an LLM predicts the next word. They would solve all these people getting irate about the bibliographies and trying to use it for facts and those kind of things.

[00:45:01] And then, You know, so we explained that how the technology works and someone from, uh, South Africa that we met, he, he's done a lot of work with prompting. He has a whole set of prompting classes. He talks about prompting. Then there's a section just about the values that education should consider. Like I say, there's a chapter on critical thinking.

[00:45:18] There's like this whole idea of what's the purpose of education, career, and college readiness. Alan also wrote a chapter on how you can use this to facilitate your applications to university, because a lot of kids are paying five, 10, $50,000, uh, for, for these types of, of support to help their maximize their college applications.

[00:45:35] That's their, then we go into a lot of practical uses. We start with elementary school. We start special ed, as they say. We have Bonnie uh, writing about high school. Shar wrote about the bot bots. I with a debater who, whose technology knowledge is, is quite amazing actually on and son Sebastian. You know, I, I follow Ethan Mulk too, and what.

[00:45:53] Is really great. But one time I noticed that he, Sebastian showed us and one of the classes we had, Sebastian showed us how to do something that Ethan Mulk like wowed everyone with like three weeks before it happened. Um, finding direct quotes and sources and producing academic papers. Uh, so, you know, he made, he made a, a big, uh, contribution there.

[00:46:14] A lot of people talking about the future, uh, integrating, uh, Paula McDowell and one of her grad students integrating like into VR and just like how we relate to the environment looking forward. Um, someone I met, uh, on, on LinkedIn, a lot of these people I met, but I met her talking about principals of, uh, universal design and applying them to schools.

[00:46:32] I actually had it backwards. I thought, oh, well this is great. She does universal design. We have to design this into schools from the top down. And she's like, no, ma, this whole thing's backwards. You, you've gotta understand what universal design is. And so really that ended up towards the end of the book starting with, you know, some of the themes we've talked about, starting with teachers, starting with students like.

[00:46:49] Starting with society, like starting with our humanity. Like how do we want to, how do, how do we want this to be a tool? We don't wanna become the tools, we want the technology to be the tools. So there's a lot of that theme that gets unpacked and, you know, it kind of, it was, it was enjoyable to kind of work, uh, with her on learning that and those ideas.

[00:47:08] But I thought it was kind of a good way to end the book. And then it kind of just concludes with some of my, uh, final thoughts. But this book was produced by a team, right? I mean, you can't write a 650 page book in 60 days, um, without an amazing, without an amazing team. And our, our contributors, um, were really amazing.

[00:47:26] You know, we have, uh, you know, I said too, like D Dwayne Matthews leads it off with like, uh, you know, he's a keynote speaker. Uh, you may be connected to him about kind of just the future and the future of education and, you know, um, industry 4.0 and all these like, exciting technologies that they kind of gets contextualized in the books.

[00:47:42] But we wanna leave this for. You know, a few different things for people to think about. We open like all the major issues, right? All the major issues to discuss. We think, okay, if you're in your what field, what part of education are you in? Are you primary school teacher? Right are, are you a secondary science teacher?

[00:47:58] Are you a writing professor? Are you working on your school's AU policies, aup P policies or your senior seminar? Like, are you just wanna understand how this works? Do you wanna understand what the meta issues are? Because I think the one other thing common I wanna make, we also need to teach students about these technologies, these technology, whether we teach, you know, whether the schools wanna pretend that they don't want to teach 'em how to use it.

[00:48:19] Schools students need to understand there are deep fakes. No students need to understand that. At the very least, this is gonna probably cause massive changes in our employment pattern. Students need to understand that like, weird, strange, like emotional attachments can happen to bots and those can like happen to any, anybody and they need to be aware of that.

[00:48:35] In schools teach about safety, right? They say, well, don't smoke, don't, don't use drugs. Like, you know, hey, be careful on social media. You know, there, there's a lot of like negative interests out there. This all needs to contextualized in terms of, we also need to teach students about the world that they live in.

[00:48:51] It'd be kind of a little strange. I mean, we can just say, well, we're just gonna teach them about it and not with it. But you learn more about something when you're using it, right? And it just like, Hey, there's all these technologies out there. We don't use 'em in school, but we wanna let you know that like, you know, when you graduate, you're gonna need this in your job because it is gonna cause massive disruptions in employment.

[00:49:10] We're not gonna show you how to use it. So it, it would create a, like a, a strange situation, but I think at a minimum. And then, you know, there's another, uh, uh, some essays in there. Oh, two other one of the essays talks about developing AI literacy standards and technology standards, right? Because even AI literacy, you know, people were shocked when I told them that there was AI in a, in, in Quizlet, in Grammarly, like all before this happened, right?

[00:49:33] Like that's how all these technologies work. Um, so there needs to be a good amount of AI literacy and then we have reflections from people in other countries. Um, they're not every other country in the world, but those were eye-opening because there's a lot of other countries, especially in, in, uh, international schools.

[00:49:48] I would say more. But that are really jumping on the board to use these technologies and integrate these technologies, and they're gonna give their students a huge advantage, um, in, in the global marketplace. You know what I mean? In countries that learn how to use these technologies. I was thinking if, if, if, if, if the technology, if the computer can perform the labor, then labor can be bought and it can be bought cheaply.

[00:50:09] So if you have countries, some countries have a lot of money, right? They're primarily the oil monarch monarchies, right? They have a lot of money. They can just purchase labor really cheaply and they know how to like, maximize the labor. One, one big, one big determinant of productivity is labor, right? So, you know, maybe, maybe someday the UAE in 10 years is gonna be easily competing against the United States because they've really one ones who learned how to use all these technologies.

[00:50:35] The fact that they don't have that many people doesn't really even matter because they, these can all, they all this labor productivity can essentially be bought. Right. Um, so that's like a broader issue, but it is interesting how, and it, it makes sense, right? You have countries where there aren't a lot of teachers and, and, and, and Laura from South Africa, I don't want, I don't wanna mess up her, her last name was one of the people I met.

[00:50:57] Uh, she was originally writing about DA and I, and uh, she was talking about how this meant for South Africa. And I thought to myself, oh my gosh, this whole book's just about the United States as if there aren't other countries like using this. And that kind of gave me the idea to include other countries.

[00:51:10] Mm-hmm. But then when I started speaking with people in other countries, I thought, wow, they're really like jumping on this. And it makes sense because they don't have enough teachers. They don't even, they don't have the level of education that we have even in some of the most difficult circumstances. So they're thinking about, they would love to have some of the education systems we have even in, in the most difficult areas of the United States.

[00:51:28] They're not even there, right? So they're thinking, how can I use technology? You know, Laura was telling me like in South Africa there's like one teacher for like every a hundred students or something like that, right? So, you know, how can you know? And John Kelly from Mexico said like, we don't even have like enough universities to meet.

[00:51:45] Like the growing global demand. There aren't enough professors, right? So these people want to use this technology to them. It's almost like this, this is the, this is, it's this or nothing to us. We're trying to evaluate it against what we. Right. But for a lot of people it is this or nothing. And they're gonna use this and they're gonna figure it out.

[00:52:02] They're gonna take advantage of it. Whether it's chat g p T three or some other model, or you know, when Google figures it out and they will, right? They're gonna use Google or they're gonna build their own, or you're gonna have some government just build its own really awesome a model while the us, well people in the US sit fi fight about what books we should ban or who gets to live where, or do what or whatever, and engage in culture wars, right?

[00:52:25] The rest of the world's gonna be out there engaging in how are we gonna use these technologies to boost our economies, to boost our educational systems. And I think it's something we, as a country, like, you know, we talked a lot about the district level, essentially, whether, you know, the state level, the district level, where wherever the authority lies about like using these technologies.

[00:52:42] But I, I have other people, this is a given. They're using it, they're figuring it out. They're figuring out how their students are gonna benefit from it. Um, and that's part of the world we can decide to live in or not. And we can sit around and have our own ING squabbles about things that. Absolutely distracting us from the major issues.

[00:53:01] Fonz: Absolutely. No, I agree with you with a lot that you said and I did share right now also briefly, let me see, let me go ahead and just bring it up one more time, uh, that way we can put it into the chat. Where we at? Right here, the. The outline right here of the book. Yeah, I mean the sections and so on, and I love that.

[00:53:21] And most importantly too, I mean the work that was done with so many educators that are out there from different levels, different countries getting their perspective, getting to know how they're using and leveraging the technology, this is something that is amazing and it should definitely be a must have for every educator or for anybody in this education space, whether it's K through higher ed.

[00:53:43] I mean, we really need to know this a little bit more dive in deep peaker curiosity, because like you said, one of the things is like we don't wanna get left behind. And you're absolutely right. You know, even right here, locally where I live, right along the border, if I cross the border, there aren't enough teacher.

[00:53:59] For the demand that there is. So for them, like you said, this is all or nothing. And here we are, just should we block it? Should we not block it? Let's create more plagiarism trackers, let's create more of this and more of that and originality reports and this and so on. And like you said, they're leveraging it because this is what they have and the only thing that can help them continue to succeed.

[00:54:20] So for sure, and definitely I agree, uh, with Bonnie. Bonnie here, states, you know, grateful, uh, Stephan put a great, uh, marvelous team together. And truly comprehensive. I definitely agree with you, Bonnie. Thank you so much for yourself too and everything that you contribute, um, not only here in the book, but also into the education space and putting all that out on LinkedIn.

[00:54:41] You are definitely amazing and it's always great to be awesome like you, Bonnie. So thank you so much for joining us. I love Bonnie's amazing.

[00:54:50] Stefan: She's great. Yeah, she was, she was awesome. I said, wow, you know, then I was like, wait, you can make a table, and that's it. Like we're all learning, right? Yeah. Like we're all like learning a new thing.

[00:54:58] There's new prompts, like there's. There's new ways of doing things. It's so we're all learning from each other. And I think that's like, you know, you have educators, that's why at the bottom we put like, we was like, oh, should we put like the editor's names on it or should we, you know, kinda list 32 names.

[00:55:12] That would be hard, right? But, um, we, you know, so then we sit by educate cuz everyone here like is an educator, whether they're teaching or coaching or um, uh, doing all those kind of things. And one other thing I'd say at the end, you know, we had, there's some very, we call them young authors at the end, and it, it was my, uh, nieces and nephews and Savos, one of the, the book authors, she got her nephew to do it.

[00:55:32] And I thought, oh, and I had some different ideas and then on and said, well ha have 'em use that, uh, scribble diffusion. And I thought, oh, they're gonna use scribble diffusion. They're gonna think this is like out of this world. And then I'm gonna ask them how is out of this world? They used scribble diffusion.

[00:55:45] And they were like, that's cool. Like as if we turned on a colored tv. And I think, you know, to us it's like, they're just like, well, technology's supposed to do this. Right. Like, and it, it, you know, it kind of reminded me and, and somebody posted the other day about technology change and I said, yeah, when I, when my parents turned on their first color tv, I was blown away.

[00:56:02] My younger brother, he was like, whatever. And my, my future siblings were like, whatever. And I think, you know, I, I'm sure if you showed somebody to the internet a hundred years ago, they'd be, they'd like blown away. Now we're like, okay, there's a new website. Like whatever. And I don't think these techno, and I don't want to characterize it that way at any, at any points, but the point is, is that what we think, like this, like students are using scribble diffusion, they expect they're gonna be able to use technologies like this.

[00:56:30] They expect they're gonna be able to write something down and something else is going to appear. Right. And if it stops doing that, then they're actually regressing, they're actually going backwards. We already, we already have students, if you take this away from this, I call it de-skilling. Yeah. Right. We always try to upskill students where we kind of give them more skills than they might have.

[00:56:47] Right. Um, Otherwise have, we don't wanna de-skill them. These are stu, these are technologies that students are gonna see being used, that are gonna have been used in other contexts, even if it's something that their aunt shows them, like an iPad with scribble diffusion on it. And if they don't have access to these technologies in schools, they're gonna start to not maybe so, um, shockingly, but they're gonna kind of say like, well, why can't I use all this stuff I use at home?

[00:57:11] Right? Why can't I use all this stuff I use there? And then we're spending the school day. Kind of taking away their knowledge at, at a broad level.

[00:57:20] Fonz: Yeah, I agree with you. I, I'm with you a hundred percent on that. Well, Stefan, it's been an amazing, amazing interview. Thank you so much for everything that you've shared.

[00:57:29] Thank you. Amazing insight. And I mean, just from a short period of time, and of course, you know, but with the team and people and all those connections just coming together, I just love the fact that we're, the knowledge base is continuing to grow and we can dive in deep and just can continue to learn from one another as we all are all navigating this space together.

[00:57:48] And then even with our own professional and personal learning. As well. So it's just great to have amazing resources and I have been sharing the link to the book here as well, so people can definitely go and check it out on Amazon. Please make sure that you do so. Also, I have been placing your link here so people can connect with you via LinkedIn and then of course all of that will be in the show notes as well.

[00:58:10] But before we go, I always love tend to show with the following three questions. So this one's gonna be a little bit different cuz normally I'll, I'll ask about, um, you know, the edu kryptonite, which is, you know, kryptonite in the education space. But for you, I am going to ask just a different variation.

[00:58:28] It's just your AI kryptonite. So at this moment in this current space, what would you say is your current AI kryptonite?

[00:58:38] Stefan: So, you know, I meant to ask you this before the interview started, but is kryptonite like a, a superpower or is it the opposite? It's the opposite. It's like some

[00:58:46] Fonz: Superman. Yeah. Ok, that's what I meant.

[00:58:47] It's what weakened Superman. So Superman's weakness was kryptonite. And it's like when you brought it close to him, it was like, oh, I get weak. So in the current state of ai, what would you say is your current AI

[00:58:59] Stefan: kryptonite? So my, I would say, and it's related to this last question that Lindsay put in, uh, the chat, my current AI kryptonite is that I, I I, it's great that we have all this information assembled.

[00:59:13] I can't really stop, right? And uh, Lindsay says, well, when's the book available on print? It's actually should be available Monday, Wednesday. But we wanted to get the book out there immediately and then kind of think, okay, is there anything else we wanna add? We could keep adding. I said, at some point we have to stop.

[00:59:26] And the one thing I've realized in education, And I said this to someone yesterday, like, I think, you know, I do it too, right? So like we're always posting on the new coolest thing we've found that these technologies can do, right? Like I've, like there was something where you could build a whole classroom and then I made a little video about like all the things teachers could do with it.

[00:59:43] I was like, look, this is pretty cool. I was doing some cool stuff yesterday. But a lot of people, they need to like know how to, like, whether it's a prompt or just like a natural language, they, they need to know like that it's an app, but it's on the internet. That this is how you sign in, that this is how you write a, a, a, a query.

[01:00:01] This is how you might ask a follow-up question because it's a bot and not just simply a search engine. This is how you can look, you can produce a lesson plan, you can organize this in a table. And I think that my kryptonite is that I keep trying to push the limit and push the boundaries and learn absolutely everything I can about every, every little different thing.

[01:00:21] But if I want to do what I talked about earlier, If I want this to become like, you know, I think it does need to be included in education and it will be included in different spaces and different ways, and I want to get people to think about how to use it. If I want to have a practical impact, then I need to kind of work in a, with people in a little more of a practical way.

[01:00:41] Um, so, because say the book I believe will be out on Wednesday, we're just kind of finalizing the things. It's very large. It's actually over 900 pages in print. Yeah. Uh, somebody who interviewed me said is kind of like a bible. I hope maybe it starts to be thought of that way, but I'm very excited about it.

[01:00:57] Um, and thank you, Lindsay, for your question and, uh, having your, uh, university order copies of the book. I'll obviously love to talk about this. My coworkers, my other job, they're, they're a little tired of me talking about this, so I, I really appreciate the opportunity. To speak about it and hopefully to connect with even some more people on LinkedIn, um, after this, after this podcast.

[01:01:16] Fonz: Yes, absolutely. And I'm really excited about it. And it, it says here, it says it's approximately 996 pages. Yes. So almost a thousand. So, but it's great. And like I said, it's a great start. Like I said, there's a little bit of everything and we know it's gonna be ever changing and evolving, but what a great way to start.

[01:01:34] And again, because even as the, what I see sometimes is, like you mentioned, I'm very much like yourself. I'm like multi-passionate, creative, and I just wanna dive in and go hard. But like you said, even with something like this, it's a great. Way to just start at a practical aspect too, and just think about those things.

[01:01:50] And just like you said, keeping it simple many times helps out a lot. And then keep, uh, you know, that'll get people up on that train. And then of course, just, uh, you know, getting 'em excited about, that's how we

[01:02:00] Stefan: all started. We all started with a simple prompter. Exactly. We didn't start with producing like, you know, a multi like modal video.

[01:02:06] Hopefully. Yeah. All right. The newest, the newest tool. So

[01:02:10] Fonz: here we go. Question number two. Yeah. Question number two for you, if you could have a billboard with anything on it, what would it be

[01:02:16] Stefan: and why? You know, you send me this question be before and, uh, if all the questions you asked, I was like, oh man, I was really struggling with this one.

[01:02:25] But then, you know what I thought, I thought, but the answer is obvious. How could I not have now? How could I not have it say debate? I've been in debate. I'm 50, I'm almost 52. I've been debating since I was 13 years old. Like I said, you know, I've been a coach a. Uh, of a publisher, a, a tournament organizer builder, their debate abroad.

[01:02:45] But what does it have to do with this topic? Like, so the other people, like, you know, I saw Becky was in here, I met her many years ago at a debate tournament, uh, when she was a, a debate coach, right? So, but what does this have to do? So then I kind of thought, started thinking, and I made like a little, I made a, I made a little acronym sheet.

[01:03:03] I think the one thing is you, you start with the D you have to dream. You've gotta. How do you wanna relate, relate to this technology? How do you wanna bring it into your school? Like how do you apply that? You have to engage it. When you engage something, you think about it, you pay attention. You don't just say, oh well I'll just buy this Microsoft tool and like play around with it.

[01:03:22] Nothing against Microsoft. They have a lot of great tools from what I'm seeing. But we need to give it, they're faster. We need to engage, we need to engage each other. Whether it's on LinkedIn, whether it's on these types of conversations, whether it's in inform informal conversations, we need to think, right, we gotta go with the B.

[01:03:37] We need to think beyond like where we are. And that's another theme I've been trying to pull into some different discussions. Everyone keeps reacting to exactly what the technology can do at the moment, right? And then say, oh, I, I recreated my class based on what this can do. Now they added this plug-ins, it connected to the internet.

[01:03:52] What's going on here? It's obvious kind of where this technology is headed, even if it, if it's not there. So I think you want to think about. In terms technology beyond where it's gonna go. We're other people who have knowledge beyond yours. And it doesn't have to be beyond in a technical sense, in an ed tech form, you're gonna say, well what, what does somebody in ed tech know about technology that I don't You wanna think beyond you?

[01:04:13] What is a first grade? Like? I don't know how to teach first grade. I've not famous idea. I haven't been in first grade and what, like 45 years. Okay. So I asked my sister who, who taught first grade for 10 years and runs an innovation academy at a university about, okay, what's a lesson? And then we talk through how to make it work so she has knowledge that I don't, right?

[01:04:30] And and that's infor and forces. And then a, we got a lot, we got three more to go. You gotta kind of activate all these ideas and apply them. That's what I was talking about. I can talk on your forever. I have a lot of thoughts on this. There are a lot of thoughts in the book, but we have to activate what we're doing and get teachers to use it.

[01:04:45] We have to tee, that's easy talk. I like to talk. You may have noticed I, I've talked a lot. Um, in this interview we have to talk and kind of share as ideas and then we have to evaluate. We have to evaluate where we are, what's working, what's not. I probably had some things I think is a great idea at the moment when a teacher takes us or a debate coach takes us and uses in the classroom, it's not gonna work very well.

[01:05:04] And one of the things, I took a class in the fall and one of the professors is ancient. It was, it was above the art development. But everything has to be iterative. We're always gonna be, we, we should be iterative anyhow. Even with things we've done for 30 years in a row. Even if we're coaching, debate the way we've always done, we can always be better.

[01:05:18] We can always be better. We can always, we can always evaluate where we are and improve and think about where we're doing. So I think. And debate, like, yes, you can think of it as a student activity. You can think of this president standing up there and just kind of saying random things they wanna say regardless of what their opponent says.

[01:05:33] But we can think about it kind of in engaging, we can think of it like confrontational, we can think of it sy synthesis, but it's all an idea. A debate is a way to interact with other people. Um, and it's a way to synthesize ideas. It's a way to evaluate ideas, it's a way to share ideas. It's a way to build up our friendships and our community.

[01:05:50] That's why a lot of students who try debate stay in it. They make friends just like anything else. And I just think debate represents a lot, a lot of, of kind of the concepts and ideas that are all related to this. And I think that's one of the other reasons I got excited about it.

[01:06:04] Fonz: Excellent. Well thank you so much for sharing that.

[01:06:07] I really appreciate it and it's been an amazing conversation. I know I'm leaving just really full of just things to think about and definitely taking this in and digesting it. So I'll definitely be listening to the audio in the episode for this because I definitely learned a lot about what's going on in this space and obviously too, you know, getting to be able to connect with these amazing authors and what they're bringing in.

[01:06:29] And obviously looking forward to, uh, purchasing my physical copy of the book too as well. Cause I'm one of those, I like to just flip through pages. Highlight. Yeah. I flip through the

[01:06:38] Stefan: Yes. Well, when I, I've met, you know, you say the authors and sometimes they, oh, you need like a better platform. You know, like, your idea is so good.

[01:06:44] You know, these are a million people. They're like, oh, well I did a keynote. It's like, you need a keynote for like a million. This is, you know, and, and, and, and I think like, you know, Bonnie needs to be showing everyone like, how, how to write these like lesson plans right here. I'll just use her example because, you know, she's there and that, that the one thing that just had a, a power like.

[01:07:01] You know, I knew this was gonna have a big impact on the world, but when I saw Bonnie's thing about like the lesson plans and it generating that, you know, a big impact in education. When I saw my sister's friend Susan talked about, she talked about Charlotte's Web. She, she works in special education and I guess with low incidence disabilities.

[01:07:17] That's what she says. I, I don't know a lot about what that means. I couldn't unpack it for you, but she had took a show, it's Web Passage, and she had Chad G B T adjusted to a student for the nine Q 50. And that was like, You know, I don't know anything about special ed, but I know the kids are in different spots.

[01:07:32] Yeah, right. Especially, you know, in, in reading levels that, that you can read about that in the newspaper. Right. So, um, you know, this stuff's just like really positive and, and transformative and, and yeah. I think all the authors in this book, like I. You know, they, they all, they, they all really need their own, their own platforms to really kind of talk about their ideas.

[01:07:51] They're so

[01:07:52] Fonz: powerful. Absolutely. And if you can make sure you contact them and have them contact me, because I would love to have them on the show and amplify their voices, amplify their work, and of course, keep learning about this in this specific area, you know, through their lens. Through their eyes. So educators, business leaders, anybody around the world can see how this can make a beautiful impact in our society and in ourselves as we continue to grow.

[01:08:16] So thank you so much, Stephan, for being here and for all our audience members who joined us, we thank you so much, Bonnie, thank you so much for joining us, Bonnie Lindsay also joining us. We had Rebecca Jordan, we had, uh, Amanda Macias also who's joining us. So thank you all for joining us in the chat with all your lovely comments and everything.

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