Episode 319: Rob Nelson

Fonz Mendoza: 0:30

Hello everybody and welcome to another great episode of my EdTech Life. Thank you so much for joining us on this wonderful day and wherever it is that you're joining us from around the world. Thank you, as always, for all of your support. As always, we appreciate all the likes, the shares, the follows. Thank you so much for interacting with our content, as always, for all of your support. As always, we appreciate all the likes, the shares, the follows. Thank you so much for interacting with our content.

Fonz Mendoza: 0:49

We really appreciate your support and I definitely want to give a big shout out to our newest supporter, book Creator. Thank you so much for supporting our mission and believing in what we're doing and bringing some amazing conversations into the education space so that we may all continue to grow together. And I'm really excited about today's conversation, as always, like I said, being able to have your own podcast and being able to look for guests. It's always amazing when things line up and you get to bring a guest on that. You follow on a certain platform and you just are really interested and intrigued by their views and what they post and you just want to bring those conversations and amplify their voices also here at our table at the my EdTech Life conversation table and I'm really excited to welcome today.

Rob Nelson: 1:39

Mr Rob Nelson. Rob, how are you doing today?

Fonz Mendoza: 1:41

I'm doing great Bonds, Thanks so much for having me on the show. I'm a big fan of what you do here Thank you very much, rob and I'm a big fan of what you do. And you're posting on your blog and, of course, on LinkedIn. And, of course, as you know, you know, 2022, from then on, has been just so much content for us, so much conversation sparking so many things and so many new ideas. And we're going to get into that, you know, because I really love your take, your perspectives and, like I said, being a cautious advocate and, you know, kind of being in the middle of things. You know, I always love to bring various viewpoints to the table when it, you know, excuse me, bring various viewpoints to the table when we are talking about AI. So, before we dive in, rob, for all my audience members that are out there listening at this moment and may not be familiar with your work just yet, but after today they will can you give us a little brief introduction and what your context is within the education space?

Rob Nelson: 2:38

Sure. So my ed tech life was as an educational bureaucrat in the provost office at the University of Pennsylvania for 18 years. So at heart I'm a teacher. I started out as a teacher, but I learned early on that teaching will burn you out, and so I made a decision when I finished my PhD at Rutgers to go into administration, and so I oversaw academic technology for the provost office at Penn for 18 years, and that meant implementing enterprise technology, things like Canvas, course evaluations, grad admissions applications, and so that's really where my professional experience lies. And then I also taught part-time and continue to teach part-time. And recently, as you said, I've made a transition. I left my job as a bureaucrat and now I write full-time and still teach on the side and do a little consulting and public speaking as a way to pay the bills.

Fonz Mendoza: 3:30

Excellent. Well, that is a great background which kind of, in a very natural way, just is a nice segue to my first question. Based on all the experience that you just finished sharing with us, I wanted to ask you how have those experiences shaped your perspective of AI in education and what experiences, from your years overseeing technologies and initiatives and so on, you know, what are some things that we may be missing in today's AI in education discussions.

Rob Nelson: 4:02

Yeah, I think it comes down to adoption of new technologies, which when a new technology comes out, it sort of explodes on the scene and the early adopters and enthusiasts start talking about it. It's often in the context of like, wow, this is going to change everything and it feels like it's going to be instant because it's so obvious to the early adopters that this is going to be so great. Sometimes it turns out to be great and sometimes it turns out to be kind of a dud. So, for example, I think the MOOCs the massive online courses, were a technology that everybody looked at and thought, wow, this is going to disrupt education. Places like Harvard and Penn are just going to disappear. That turned out not to be the case and I think you know we can talk about that specific case. But I think the lesson I've drawn from my years implementing technology on campus is that change happens at the speed of universities and colleges and schools, not at the speed of the technology companies and technology enthusiasts would necessarily think.

Fonz Mendoza: 5:02

You know, and that's something that's very interesting, like you said. You know, for those early adopters, it just seems like everything like this new technology and anything new that comes out, is going to be, you know, the solution to all our inefficiencies. And, of course, in education right now I'm just going to go ahead and throw it out there in the state of Texas, we're getting ready in the next couple of weeks to start, you know, state testing. Prior to this, a couple of weeks ago, we started seeing where around the district, you know, schools were purchasing specific platforms and you know, kind of like at the last minute, hoorah, you know, trying to get those grades up, and pretty much it's just a triage to make sure that the students do well. But, you know, trying to get those grades up, and pretty much it's just a triage to make sure that the students do well. But you know, one of the things is is that, from my years of experience, it just seems that, starting January, everybody's trying to find that one answer and I think sometimes, even with AI, when that came out in 2022, and even until now, you still see that and hear like, yes, this is going to change things, this is going to change things and from 22 till now, you know I feel that there still hasn't been enough research. But I'm still interested to see you know some of that research and see if grades are going up, because, of course, like you mentioned new technologies I've seen the iPads roll out and everybody's one-to-one, and this is going to revolutionize education and this is going to get those test scores up.

Fonz Mendoza: 6:24

Haven't really seen that either. Chromebooks, everybody's one-to-one, and the Chromebooks are going to be the next best thing and they're going to help our students and I personally have not seen that either. So it's very interesting that you do mention that and, especially with your experience in higher ed I did have Jason Guglia on the show yesterday and interviewing, so I want to get your perspective as far as what you have seen and experienced in higher education that divide, you know. So I want to hear what has been your experience.

Rob Nelson: 6:57

Sure. So I think it comes down to some of the different perspectives I was talking about. Educational technologists, the people who develop and build new technology are, I believe, in most cases earnestly trying to solve problems, but they see problems differently than the way that classroom teachers see them, and Jason's a good example. Somebody talks about this. Dan Meyer, I know you've had on the show, is another great example of somebody who sees that difference. And so I think you know what I've seen is a lot of polarization, people who are rightly concerned about the way that Silicon Valley in particular, the sort of big giant technology companies, are using their not just their financial capital, but the cultural and social power they have to sort of impose a vision of what this technology is supposed to do. And then you've got people who are resisting that, and I'm certainly among those.

Rob Nelson: 7:47

I think there's a great deal of concern about the social and economic context in which this stuff is happening. But at the level of classroom instruction, I think what's happening is, for the most part, teachers are coming to grips with this technology the way they have all the technologies you've talked about. You know everything that's from iPhones to iPads, to the PC, Chromebooks, laptops, going back to the earlier history of technology. Even the adoption of chalk and chalkboards Like those are changes that technology has sort of pushed on or confronted teachers with, and they've responded and turned those tools into things that are useful. I think that's the process. That's what I see. That's the positive aspect of what's happening right now is I see lots of teachers experimenting with these tools, trying to figure out what their value is as an educational tool, as opposed to what the people who built them necessarily think they should be used for, how they imagine it's going to play out Nice, Excellent.

Fonz Mendoza: 8:42

All right. So I want to kind of talk a little bit about your writing, too as well. I know that you have the AI log, you know which is where on Substack, which I follow and that you post and you share a lot of great views, but one of them that draws my, or has drawn my, attention, and I wanted to ask you about it today, was the way that you use the rabbit and the duck metaphor. We have the rabbit of glad tidings and the duck of doom, so can you elaborate on this dual perception and how it impacts education policy and decisions?

Rob Nelson: 9:13

Sure. So the duck rabbit is a famous example of what's sometimes called an ambiguous picture, like what you see. When you look at the picture, you can make it look like one thing or the other. And the duck rabbit is a famous one because the philosopher Wittgenstein used it in some of his work and the sort of way that teachers received that was certainly in the realm of like.

Rob Nelson: 9:49

Oh my God, this is changing everything. It's awful, we need to stop it. We need to stop our students from using it, but then you've got people who see it. Well, this is a new technology. It's an exciting way to understand and use knowledge. These models, these partial language models, summarize information and spit it back out and use knowledge. These models, these large language models, summarize information and spit it back out in ways that are interesting and potentially educational. And so, seeing those two aspects, this thing that's going to is very threatening to our jobs. You know AI is going to replace this. That message gets repeated over and over again. On the other hand, ai is going to save us all this work because it can do the boring stuff so that we can turn our attention to the important work. So that's the sort of swirl of what's been happening. I think that image of the duck rabbit is a nice way to say it's both those things and something else, something new.

Fonz Mendoza: 10:40

Now, with your experience and I know that you're a speaker now and you go out there and train or people go and listen I want to ask you, when you talk about this and one of the things that you mentioned that duality of this being both things what are gonna take our jobs? And then there's the other side that says no, no one's gonna take your job, only somebody else that uses AI effectively. And then one side, I see also is just real, like playing into the fear of this, like if you haven't even been using this today, you're doing your students a disservice. And then there's that side and so, like I said, what is it that you're seeing out there and how do you, you know, just kind of bring that together for yourself to say, okay, where is it that I stand on these issues?

Rob Nelson: 11:33

Yeah, well, I think we still have an enormously wide range of people responding to this. There are still people who have never really used one of these tools before, and so they're getting all their information secondhand. On the other hand, you have people who have been using them from the very beginning to try to do interesting or educational work with them, and so I think that challenge remains. But what I've seen over time I mean it's been two and a half years, basically, since chat TBT sort of exploded on the scene, and that's not a lot of time, but it's time enough for people to have moved away from the sort of freak out modes that we saw.

Rob Nelson: 12:11

And when I've been giving talks lately, I've used the image of like maybe it's a revolution, but maybe it's going to be a boring revolution that the notion that this is going to be transformative and we're going to see these things, super intelligences appear, and everything's going to change overnight just isn't how we're going to experience this. Much like things like the iPhone and the PC. They feel and are transformative and they're going to change things, but that process takes place over a period of time, there's adjustments, and what I really believe is important is that we use our critical thinking skills and analysis to think about how we use these things to improve education, to improve organizations, and that's where I think the conversation is starting to move.

Fonz Mendoza: 12:56

Good and that's excellent and that's so good to hear, because there's webinar after webinar that I'll sit on too as well. And I don't know if it's so much more in the K-12 space as it is in the higher ed space, because I'm not involved in webinars at that level, but in the K-12 space there just seems to be this sense of urgency like hey, if you're not doing this, you're doing your students a disservice, because this is the way that they're growing and this is the way that they're going to need these skills to get into college and for the jobs of tomorrow. And it's almost this attitude of move fast and break things as opposed to just simply. Like you said, it can revolutionize, it will, but maybe it's in a slower, more boring and more, you know, calm process process. But it just seems like it's a go go, go, go go mentality.

Fonz Mendoza: 13:44

And going to conferences you see some of the top platforms that are out there that are just pushing this so much and you know, I feel sometimes they may be even preying on some educators, as far as you know, onto the burnout aspect. Like this is going to save you that time. This is going to give you back that time. This is going to do this and this is going to do that, but you have to pay us, you know, I don't know X amount of dollars per license, per site and so on. And a lot of educators are like, oh my gosh, I really need this, because they feel overwhelmed and they feel like this is going to be that sense of relief. Now, in higher ed is there kind of that mentality, or maybe is there a crowd like that too as well.

Rob Nelson: 14:26

Absolutely. I mean, higher ed is sort of the same pressures that K-12 has in terms of you know it's cast in terms of business needs right, businesses need graduates with these skills and I think Silicon Valley I mean you mentioned the Zucker fame, zuckerberg or Facebook idea move past and break things. You mentioned the Zucker fame, zuckerberg or Facebook idea. Move past and break things. They're very much using that as a marketing term, right, as a as a way of marketing these projects and trying to raise revenue, which they have invested huge amounts of capital in this technology and they need to get a return and that's a big problem for them.

Rob Nelson: 15:02

It's not the problem that K-12 or higher ed is trying to solve. We're trying to figure out how to educate students for this new society, for the changes that are coming, for the way this is going to transform the work of people who work in knowledge, business and education, and so I think refocusing our attention on, well, what is it we need these tools to do and how do we get the tools to do what we want them to do, is really cutting against the grain of the way that Silicon Valley and giant technology companies and a lot of the startups who are in that sort of movement that move fast and break things, movement um are are talking about it, and so that that's that, that misalignment. I think that that I, I, I think, slowly but surely um teachers, institutions, um are coming around to uh to establishing their domain, their uh ability to control or decide how these things get deployed.

Fonz Mendoza: 15:56

Excellent. Now talking about deployment, you know, kind of going back to your writing, because if you haven't, for those listeners that are joining us today or watching us on the replay, please make sure that you do check out Rob's Substack. He has great writing there and you know a lot of these questions you know is just going a little bit deeper into the writings and that he has and has available to all of us, which is a great resource. So please, I mean you know we'll definitely link it in the show notes as well. But, rob, I wanted to ask you you know you have this series it's a two part series is what is an LLM doing in my classroom? So I want to ask you how do you perceive the role of large language models in enhancing or possibly hindering the learning process?

Rob Nelson: 16:39

Yeah, thanks for asking about that. So that series is actually going to wrap up, maybe tomorrow, but certainly next week. I've got one more piece to write about for that, and that was really a reflection on my own practice in the classroom. I'm a history teacher and the history I teach right now is in the grad school of education at Penn, and I'm teaching mostly aspiring educational bureaucrats, people who want to go into administration, and so I'm enormously lucky to be teaching in that environment, and one of the ways I was lucky is that, unlike a lot of teachers, I didn't have to figure out how to get one of these commercial tools to use, because there's a research center on campus that was willing to work with me so that I could use this technology in my teaching.

Rob Nelson: 17:27

I'm somebody who believes in. It's often called a flip classroom. I called it structured activities, and so my class is activities-based. It's very much student-focused, and so I treated the use of the LLM not as something I had to decide, but as something the students and I could work out together. How is this going to influence their work? How is it going to be valuable to them as an educational tool? How is it going to, you know, frustrate those aspirations or aims, and so we worked with that tool. It's called GPTA and it's basically an LLM-based assistant. They call it an assistant. I think of it as just a tool, just like a chalkboard or a pointer or anything else that you use in a classroom, and so we use that technology together, and those essays are reflections on how that went Excellent.

Fonz Mendoza: 18:20

So what is it? Do you know? As far as your essays that you've written, you know, and looking into that, you know. What do you see as far as this possibly hindering, or is this something that can possibly enhance the potential of learning in the classroom?

Rob Nelson: 18:34

Yeah. Well, I think it starts with again resisting that notion of it being like a teaching assistant or a teacher. These things are not going to replace teachers. There's just no way, and Dan Meyer is one of the best at describing that difference between what a tool is and what a teacher is. But so, taking that as our base, like, okay, this is a tool, what is it and what is it going to do for us? What value does it bring? I think what I discovered through this process is that students are very much able to make decisions about their own education. I believe that I see evidence of it in their activities, and so they were making choices, with my guidance, about how to use it, and it wasn't to write their essays for them.

Rob Nelson: 19:16

I am very confident that the students were not using this tool simply to replace the educational work that they needed to do. It was instead an additional resource. So one of the ways we used the tool was to add a layer of peer review, or add a layer of review to a peer review driven process. So in my classes, we write a long research essay about an institution of higher education. So one of the ways we used the LLM was to.

Rob Nelson: 19:44

Before they sat down with their student peer review group, they had the LLM do a review of their essay. It was trained on post-trained, I should say on my rubric, my sort of language that I use, that I want them to use too when they're evaluating a piece of writing, and the tool did that for them. I printed that out with the papers. And the peer review wasn't just about a student's reaction to the paper. It was about the student's reaction to the paper and then this initial machine review of the paper that they could incorporate into their own analysis of their peers' paper and the feedback they were going to give to the student.

Fonz Mendoza: 21:13

All right, and so for a lot of your students that are working with you in this class, did a lot of them already come in with experience using large language models? For some of them, was this their first time and what were some of the reactions there? If you can share that with us, because, again, I definitely want to get that perspective for our K-12,. You know educators that are saying you know we need to prepare them now for you know higher ed too, as well, as if higher ed is starting to adopt this. So what were some of the reactions there from some of your students?

Rob Nelson: 21:45

Yeah, to start with, I tried my best to make it clear that I wasn't going to be surveilling what they do, I wasn't going to be looking over their shoulder, that I wanted it to be a space of genuine experimentation. So I wasn't going to put limits on their use, tell them they couldn't use it for this, couldn't use it for that. But I did want them to come to class to share what their experience was, and initially, almost all of them had had pretty significant experience with ChatGPT and they used it, like many of us do, as just a sort of replacement for Google Search, a natural language interface to the internet. And I think that's one of the ways. I mean, that's definitely one thing that these models do is they provide a natural language interface to lots of information, including the ability to search the internet. And so we started with that sort of baseline, and the question I kept asking is what value can we get out of this tool? What educational value can we get out of this tool?

Rob Nelson: 22:42

And it's very clear when you frame it that way that simply having it do your work for you is not going to be educational value. There's no value there, and so, turning that from, okay, it can be used to cheat or it can be used to replace the output you need to give your teacher. How can we turn this into a process? And what are those processes look like? And I think there are lots of. You had Mike Kintz and Nick Podoletsky on the show. They're examples of people working in KT12, or very familiar with the KT12 environment who are doing this same kind of work, and so I think it's about working with your students in groups, learning as a social activity and taking that social nature and really just experimenting with the tools. And, like I said before, I think we're still in the early days of this, and so we're still finding out a lot about the educational potential for these tools.

Fonz Mendoza: 23:30

Excellent. Well, that's so good to hear and, of course, just for them, getting that experience and really seeing this as a maybe higher level experience, as opposed, like you mentioned, just, you know, kind of Google search using ChatGPT in that way, but now really going in deeper and seeing what can be done. So that's fantastic. But kind of brings me to my next question. You know, being that you are, you know, an educator too as well. I know that you've written extensively about anthropomorphizing AI.

Fonz Mendoza: 24:01

Anthropomorphizing AI Now, there was a post recently that I read, where there was somebody that posted you know, things that I will, I love to use AI for, and one of them they put the reasons was historical figures, you know. And then, of course, I had another gentleman that I saw there who's you know that I follow also as well that they were just opposed to it as far as you know, kind of going into and leaning into this, where now you're talking to this historical figure and the dangers that can come about. So what are your thoughts on that as far as anthropomorphizing, and what has been your experience with that?

Rob Nelson: 24:32

Yeah, thank you for that question. It's as a historian. It's something I care deeply about and thought a lot about. Some of my earliest writing was my experiments with um Conmigo's um uh tool that allows you to uh chat with a historical figure, uh, or um, a uh uh or a literary character. So John Warner who, uh, I hope you have on your show sometime because he's a he's a great, a truly great writer on this topic uh, on these topics, um, he calls it digital necromancy, in other words, the sort of sense that you can revive a historical figure using an LLM.

Rob Nelson: 25:09

I think that's just the wrong way to think about what these tools are, because they are they. You know, the whole project of artificial intelligence. It has been built around this metaphor that a machine thinking machine is like a human mind and it's gotten us some great new tools. But I think it's a fundamentally flawed way of thinking about this in the context of education, because, of course, you're not talking to another person. You can pretend that it is, but it's simply a machine, and I think there are just much better ways to think about how we use a cultural technology, like a large language model, than having it pretend to be a person, and so that's where I start. If all we're doing with these tools is pretending they're people, an assistant, a dead historical figure, then we're missing a lot of their potential use.

Fonz Mendoza: 26:00

Yeah, and that's something that I know, that I see often in the K-12 space there, missing a lot of their potential use. Yeah, and you know, and that's something that I know, that we I see often in the K-12 space, there are a lot of platforms out there that will offer these chatbots, and then, of course, teachers put in information and so on. And I know one of the comments was like well, this is what we can be doing, you know, and really getting the students to know more about history and learning more about history. And to me it just seems like you know, many times, like you mentioned being that it is a large language model and there are a lot of data sets that go in there, and my thinking is always well, but whose history is it sharing, you know, and what viewpoints, and so on and so forth, and it's always just concerned about the bias too as well. And so you know, for me that's just concerned about the bias too as well, and so, you know, for me that's just one of the biggest things.

Fonz Mendoza: 26:40

But also, when there might be an attachment, you know, to a certain nlm, llm and, like we see now with a lot of platforms too as well, that like character ai, when you know we can't deny that that has been in the news or it was in the news last october and so on, and when we start seeing these, uh, chatbots and starting to have parasocial relationships with them and thinking like it is another human being, like hey, I can do this at home, I can do this on my own, and that can lead into other dangerous you know aspects of using AI as well, so thank you so much for sharing that, which kind of also now, in talking about this, you know two very, excuse me, two very indifferent viewpoints. You know that could be very polarizing and I wanted to talk to you about this because I love the way that you put this in your writing. It's like the ai fight club, you know, and it just sounds like, wow, you know. So I want to talk a little bit about that. You know, as far as education and we talked a little bit about it in the in you know pre-show, where there are, you know, two sides and sometimes it could be very rightly divided. But, like I mentioned, I at least would love to see myself and I think I see myself and others see myself as just kind of like a kind of in the middle, cautious advocate, trying to bring you know both viewpoints to the table to be able to share and see and learn and just kind of you know, see how we can kind of maybe bridge some gaps there and so on. But I want to get your perspective and what was the inspiration behind this term?

Fonz Mendoza: 29:19

The AI Fight Club.

Rob Nelson: 29:23

Yeah, so I should be clear. This is not my term. I am borrowing it from one of the best writers on the topic of large language models as a cultural technology. His name's Henry Farrell. He's a political scientist at Johns Hopkins and he has a blog on Substack called Programmable Muda, and we'll make sure that goes in the show notes because I want to make sure that he gets the attention for having come up with this great metaphor, which is he says that it's an example of the way that these things are being polarized. Right, there's this.

Rob Nelson: 29:58

We talked already about the dynamic of enthusiasts and resistors, and a lot of that gets caught up in the power around Silicon Valley and the power of educational technologies, and so I think there is a way I mean, it isn't obviously just this question, there's a whole way in which these social questions and educational questions get polarized, and that happens around particular approaches to writing or particular approaches to learning comprehension, like all the sort of wars around just basic pedagogical methods, and I just think we need to back off of that.

Rob Nelson: 30:32

I think you said something earlier about there not being one best method or one best set of practices. We just need to sort of open ourselves up to pluralism and to think that it's perfectly okay for a student to come to my classroom and be given free reign with these tools to explore their educational potential and then go to somebody else's class and be constrained and told no, we're not going to use those tools for this educational experience. That sort of pluralism, that notion that we are trying to work towards, an understanding of this that's shared as opposed to ah, I figured this out, I'm right. I'm going to tell you what you have to do.

Fonz Mendoza: 31:13

You know, and that's something like I said, you know, in a lot of conversations that we have and, of course, on LinkedIn, you know, you always have those great conversations too as well. And you know, again, to me it's like I do definitely see that that there's like those two sides and, like I mentioned earlier, it's just like that move fast, break things, kind of fear, like your kids are missing out, you're doing them harm. And then the others that are OK, let's wait and see. And then the others that are okay, let's wait and see, let's make sure that there's more research out there, and so on, and just kind of just trying to bring those parties together. And then, just like you mentioned, understanding that there's more than one way.

Fonz Mendoza: 31:45

I know, recently I was in a conference in Puerto Rico and the keynote speaker it just seemed like everybody in the room was very quiet because of the amount of fear that was put into the educators of saying, if you haven't been doing this, if you have this and this and so on, your students are already going to be left behind. And the teachers are like, well, just kind of taking it all in. And you know, and once I went up there we had a panel and the same speaker was there and I just, you know, told the teachers, just to kind of bring some peace to them, I said, listen, you know we're all at varying levels in this you know trajectory, this journey that we're all moving to together. Of course, renee Dawson I you know she's great and she says, you know, there's the speedboats, there are the tugboats, and then there are the anchors. The speedboats are going to take off, they're going to roll with it, they're going to be able to do some great things and add it to their practice immediately. Then you've got, you know, the tugboats that are like okay, let's, let's check this out, let's see what I can do, let's wait and see, kind of attitude, but you're still moving forward. And then, of course, you've got those that will highly resist this. And, you know, slowly, as the tugboats start kind of tugging on and kind of moving away, they kind of start at least moving towards that.

Fonz Mendoza: 32:58

But that's one of the things that I always say like everybody is in a different, you know, situation. They're in a different, you know, as far as learning path is concerned, but we'll all eventually get there. But I just don't like that fear that is being put into the teachers as well. So that's something that I wanted to talk to you about, so thank you so much for sharing that, and so I want to ask you to now talking about beyond hype and fear. You know you use the words changing rather than transforming. That's one of the things disrupting or revolutionizing when discussing AI in education. So how does this perspective help teachers?

Rob Nelson: 33:46

Yeah, well, I think again, this is. I'm a historian and so I often go to a habit of mine that says well, look, this isn't completely new, things like this have happened before. And so the notion that what we're experiencing is some kind of transformation, the notion that what we're experiencing is some kind of transformation, that's a word that describes basically the modern experience. Like you know, the speed, the incessantness of change, both technological change and social change, is just a fact of modern life. And so what we're experiencing now, in this moment, feels not unlike what it was like to experience electricity during the decades that was being implemented, or the steam engine or the printing press, to go back even further. And so these changes, even though they feel very exciting and new, and because they are, those are genuinely new technologies.

Rob Nelson: 34:37

The process of social change, uh, doesn't necessarily, you know, mean it's instant or transformative, or, you know, going back to like these things, these things really did change our lives, um, uh, and, and they, they solve some problems and they create some new ones, and we're just moving through the process of figuring those things out. Same thing's going to happen with ai, and I think, for a teacher, what that means is just, you know it's okay. Like you, you've got a job to do. Tools are meant to help you. Um, don't let them, uh like, prevent you from doing your job. Don't let the pressures of learning something new, adopting a new technology, interrupt your role, which is, of course, to teach your students and to reach your students.

Fonz Mendoza: 35:17

Excellent. Well, before we kind of start wrapping up, I just have about two more questions. But I want to ask you specifically, you know, on resource allocation for higher education and, as we know and you've talked about in your blog and in your writing, about California State's university agreement with OpenAI. So what are some of the concerns that may come about? If there are other institutions that are open to this, how should they kind of proceed when moving into something like this?

Rob Nelson: 35:46

Yeah. So I've got two things on this that I think are really important. The first one is that these giant technology companies, especially the startups and OpenAI is really a startup and it acts like a startup and some of that goes back to the move fast and break things mentality. That's a risky proposition because there's a good chance that they're going to move fast and the thing they're going to break is you and your institution or your students, and so I think there's a great deal of care that goes into evaluating what kind of agreement to have with a company like that. I think my concern about what CSU did is they moved all their institutions onto, signed on to the enterprise agreement to bring chat GPT to campus, and I just think that's an extraordinarily risky thing to do. So that's one issue. The other issue is I think we don't as institutions whether school systems, as institutions, higher ed we don't have to sign these enterprise agreements right now.

Rob Nelson: 36:55

There's still plenty of time to develop a greater knowledge about what these tools are and how they can be used, and you can do that in small projects and you can do it incrementally.

Rob Nelson: 37:05

You don't have to have the latest, largest model. You can go get a small open source model and get a team of people in your system IT people in your system or at your institution and work with teachers to explore what value they might get. I mean again, I'm talking about my own experience here, because I had that chance to do that. I just wish that was a model that more institutions and more school systems were thinking about, as opposed to these large enterprise agreements where you're signing on for a license and you don't know what it's going to cost in two years. You don't know if the company's going to be around in two years for a license and you don't know what it's going to cost in two years. You don't know if the company's going to be around in two years. All that uncertainty, I think, goes back to the message of we can move slowly here. Our speed of change doesn't have to be Silicon Valley's.

Fonz Mendoza: 37:49

And that is a great point, rob, because that's something that I see in the K-12 space and even since 2022, all of a sudden, all of these K-12 education platforms popped up, and my biggest fear was that that, because a lot of them do tie into OpenAI, you know, through their APIs and so on, as OpenAI makes changes as their prices go up, the way that I see it is well, those platforms, their prices are going to go up, or they're going to go up enough to where that platform may not be there, and then some schools have signed on to a three-year agreement and then that platform's only there for one year, and then what can you do? You lose out on that money. And so those are some of the things that I am very cautious about and that I really look into and really just have conversations with a lot of people in leadership as far as CTOs are concerned, and even explaining it to teachers, because oftentimes, you know, we go to a conference, we see a new tool and it's always the next big shiny thing where it may have just one additional little button, but that button is going to make a difference, at least in the mind of educators. They may say like, oh, that makes a huge difference. But then the price point is expensive and again, going into the move fast and break things, you don't know if they're going to be there. And then from one year to the next, you know, prices go up seven to 11 percent.

Fonz Mendoza: 39:07

Small school districts like myself, where I'm located we may get priced out of those opportunities and we may not have those opportunities that a neighboring district has, have those opportunities that a neighboring district has. So those are some of the things there too that I see in the K-12 space that you know. That can kind of relate to what it is that you're talking about, and it's always just that big fear of the money and fear if that company is even going to be there that next year or maybe within the next two years. So excellent point. Thank you so much for sharing that. And then just to kind of wrap up here, I just wanted to talk to you. You described your approach to generative AI in one of your writings as an opportunity to tinker towards utopia. Can you tell us a little bit more about that and where your thought process is on that?

Rob Nelson: 39:52

Sure. So that's the title of a book probably my favorite book of educational history by David Tyack and Larry Cuban, and their argument is essentially that that should be our model, that we don't need a big transformation, we don't need a revolution. What's happened over time in the US because this is really a book about US educational history is that we've tinkered our way toward a better social system, is that we've tinkered our way toward a better social system, and I think that kind of tinkering and this is the context of what's happening in Washington today, especially in the attack on higher education is really the exact opposite of this right, the notion of moving fast and breaking things. We can actually think about incremental change and building social community around. What kind of change benefits humans? And that includes especially the humans that are in our classrooms, the teachers and their students. And so for me, that notion of tinkering towards utopia echoes a lot of the themes we've been talking about here, which is that the pace of change should happen at human speed, not necessarily the speed of our computing technologies.

Fonz Mendoza: 41:04

Excellent. Well, rob, thank you so much. This has been a very insightful conversation. Thank you so much for sharing your experience with this, obviously through your writing too, as well, for all our audience members. Please make sure that you check out the blog. We will make sure we link the blog and all the resources that were mentioned in today's talk there so you can go ahead and you yourself, you know dig deep into that, those resources, and, of course, sprinkle them on to what you are already doing. Great, so, thank you, rob, for spending this morning with us. But before we wrap up, I always love to end the show with the following three questions. So, hopefully, rob always love to end the show with the following three questions. So hopefully, rob, you are ready to go. All right, here we go, rob.

Rob Nelson: 41:43

Question number one.

Fonz Mendoza: 41:44

Perfect Question number one Every superhero has a weakness. For example, superman had kryptonite, which weakened him, or was a pain point for Superman as well. So I want to ask you, in the current state of education, what would you say is your current edu-kryptonite?

Rob Nelson: 42:06

For me it's a kind of intellectual arrogance. So it's the notion that because I write to explore, right, so that's why I write. But I can lose sight of that sometimes when I get hold of an idea and I think I figured something out, and so AI log the reason I call it the log, one reason I call it AI log is it's a log of my thoughts over time, and sometimes I can go back to something I wrote when I first started the blog and go, wow, that is so wrong and so that that. So that notion of like a kryptonite is that like, I think I figured something out because I've been able to write it down, but it's not. That's not how things work, that's not how truth works. Really. Truth is always open to revision, and that's especially true in an environment that's changing like it is, and so for me that's my kryptonite, that arrogance, and AI log is a way to sort of manage that, the risk that I get hold of some of that kryptonite.

Fonz Mendoza: 43:02

Excellent. Thank you so much, rob. That was very insightful. Thank you so much for sharing that. Question number two if you could have a billboard with anything on it, what would it be and why?

Rob Nelson: 43:14

This is going to speak directly to my kryptonite it's arrogance. This is going to speak directly to my kryptonite it's arrogance, but it is AIlogblog. It is my blog, because, for me, what I'm trying to do through my writing is exploring these ideas in ways that are social, and so if there's one thing I want to put out in the world, it's the thing I'm doing with my writing online, which is very much reflective of what you're doing with my tech life and what I do when I do speaking or my teaching. It's taking up these social experiences and trying to make some kind of understanding or truth out of them, and so where I do that, the sort of nexus of where I do that, the focal point of where I do that is on AIlogblog, and so that's what I would put on the billboard.

Fonz Mendoza: 44:00

Love it and don't forget to put on that QR code. That way, as people drive by, they can definitely scan it for sure.

Rob Nelson: 44:05

There you go, all right.

Fonz Mendoza: 44:06

All right, and the last question, Rob. If there is one person that you can switch places for a day, who would it be and why?

Rob Nelson: 44:16

So I'm a historian, so I'm a historian, so I'm going to take advantage of the open-ended nature of your question finds and say I'm going to go back in time. So it's not digital necromancy, You've given me this sort of superpower to transfer myself back in time, and it would be my absolute favorite historical figure that I write about a woman named Anna Julia Cooper who was a school teacher, a high school principal and eventually the president of Frelinghausen University, and she was also a writer. But because of her responsibilities as a teacher and administrator and because she was a Black woman living in a period where there were no university posts or, you know, the ability to get a writing gig somewhere, she really wrote for a very small audience. She did publish one book. It's a great book called Voices from the South, but she also wrote a lot of her later essays were written and self-published and they are amazing pieces of work.

Rob Nelson: 45:16

And so what I would want to do? There's not a lot that's known about her because she wasn't all that famous in her life, and so there isn't an archive like there is for other great historical figures of that time, and so there's a lot that's unknown. So I would love to go back in time and spend time in her life trying to understand something about what her experience was like.

Fonz Mendoza: 45:37

Thank you so much, rob. I really appreciate your shares. Thank you so much for this wonderful conversation. Also, and again, we'll make sure we post all the information so you can go ahead and contact Rob or follow him on all socials. Please make sure that you also follow him on Substack, his blog, and it's fantastic and you'll definitely get some great insights and, like you mentioned, just some great experiences as he continues to blog and continue to grow and continues to write.

Fonz Mendoza: 46:02

So definitely great resources, especially for this time and the time to come, because, as you know, this is going to be changing, and as fast as it may seem, but I love the way that Rob says it, you know, changing at the speed of people, you know, and it's all on us, so just let's just continue to move forward. And so, rob, thank you so much for joining us today and for all our audience members, please make sure you visit our website at myedtechlife, where you can check out this amazing episode and the other 318 wonderful episodes where, I promise you, you will find something that you can sprinkle onto what you are already doing. Great. And again, I definitely want to give a big shout out to our new sponsor, book Creator. Thank you so much for your support. Thank you so much, eduaid and Yellowdig also for believing in our mission so we can continue to bring some amazing conversations week in and week out. So thank you as always, and from the bottom of my heart, my friends, don't forget, stay techie you.