Listening to my new favorite podcast this morning: FutureU . They had a guest podcast on discussing how students motivation will be affected by AI, Learning Curve. Honestly I think this is the real story! Everyone is so worked up about the cheating side of AI. I’m not too interested in that. I’m more interested in what my students get out of their learning. I think if student’s are highly motivated, they’ll get a lot out of school, regardless of what I do as the teacher. This podcast this morning was pretty amazing. I highly recommend you go listen to it. Here are some miscellaneous thoughts.

I think student motivation is the issue. We have to find ways to challenge students and to get their brains to make connections. This is why I wrote my book Be A Shark. I think if we can solve the motivation issue and students get excited about learning and innovating, we will use AI as a tool and have amazing outcomes. If we don’t make those connections then we become the tool. HAHA!

Model AI for Students: My kid’s AP history teacher made a test with AI. Ugh. But its worse than that. He didn’t review it and gave it directly to the students. The students took the test and struggled. They asked their teacher one of the questions and the teacher did not know the answer. The teacher looked up the answer on AI in front of the class! What message are they sending about education?

Does the history teacher need to know everything? No, that’s not the issue here. The issue is that the teacher modeled really bad behavior! Everyone is whining how lazy the students are when they are using AI. Well, this teacher was worse. AI can me an amazing tool. But you got to work with it and mold it. You can’t be lazy with it.

The GPA metric should go the way of the dinosaurs – at least in its current form. A hard working B is always better than a lazy A in the long run. But the GPA does NOT support that.

And what does that even mean for somebody on the outside looking in?

Here’s what worries me. In the podcast, they used a simple example where a student gave a couple of prompts to AI and they generated a really nice persuasive essay. The student just made up their opinion and the computer did what it could to make them happy. The student didn’t really have to contend with their ideas.

Now – let’s fast forward to when that student is running for political office later in life.  They can just make up whatever claim they want to and tell the computer to justify it. The computer spits out garbage that justifies the dumb argument. Everyone thinks they are right and not a single neuron has been fired. The politicians are happy because they think that their ideas are worth something because the computer came up with an answer! 

Oh, I’ve just described the dystopia that we already live in. Shit. Whelp, I’m out