Keynote Presentation: AI in Education Summit

by | Saturday, December 16, 2023

Note: The image above is the result of a two-stage creative process—done in collaboration with AI. Dall-E was tasked, over multiple iterations, to craft a woodcut-style image, to abstractly capture the idea of AI and education, with dark and light motifs, aiming to represent the inherent risks and boundless opportunities in this space. The backdrop, the textured wall was generated using the Adobe Firefly. The overall composition and design aesthetics of the piece were curated by me in Keynote.

I was invited to give a Keynote presentation at the AI Summit organized by MACUL (Michigan Association for Computer Users in Learning) and Michigan Virtual in East Lansing, Michigan. It was great to be back in East Lansing, on the MSU campus. There was more than a bit of nostalgia in the cool December air, given the 18 years I had spent at MSU, before coming to ASU.

The nostalgia factor was heightened by the fact that I was staying in the Kellogg Hotel and Conference Center. As it happens, the last time I had stayed there was 25 years ago, when I had come to East Lansing for a job interview. The rest, as they say, is history.

At this conference, I was part of an impressive lineup of speakers, including Dan Fitzpatrick, Dr. Sabba Quidwai and Sal Khan. No pressure there! You can read a report about the conference overall, written by Justin Bruno on the Michigan Virtual website titled: Highlights from the 2023 AI Summit.

In my talk I spoke to both my excitement and concerns about generative AI and its implications for education and broader society. Sarah Wood (@myedtechworld) live-sketched my talk (what an awesome super power). In an email conversation with me she told me that the sketch was created using Powerpoint. Powerpoint? Wow. What an amazing super power. The live-sketch, capturing the key ideas of my talk, is included, with permission, below:

You can watch my keynote (synchronized to my slides) below.

Note: A couple of corrections. In the talk I showed a screenshot of an early version of my website and described it as being from 1996, it is actually from 1999. Also, the MSUrbanSTEM project worked with 125 STEM educators in Chicago, not 150.

It was great to meet up with some old friends, Ken Dirkin (one of the organizers of the conference), Matt Koehler, Kathryn Dirkin, Jon Good, Joe Freidhoff as well as a few graduates of the MAET program. Some photographs below:

Topics related to this post: Talk

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Designing learning futures through reflective practice: 1 of 2

Designing learning futures through reflective practice: 1 of 2

This is the first of two posts on the topic of bringing principled innovation practices to designing learning futures. The first post (co-authored by Punya Mishra & Cristy Guleserian) focuses on the need for designing learning futures, and how the PI practices...

Playing with Droste (on my iPad)

I have, for a long time, been interested in the Droste effect - a "specific kind of recursive picture... [in which] an image exhibiting the Droste effect depicts a smaller version of itself in a place where a similar picture would realistically be expected to appear....

Representing the election

How does one best represent all the voting information that we now collect as a part of the electoral process? Here are a few websites that really stood out for me. Send me any more that you have and I can add them to the list. The first is a series of cartograms...

Into mindfulness & creativity

Into mindfulness & creativity

We have covered a wide range of topics in our ongoing series on creativity, technology and learning (in the journal TechTrends), including 30+ interviews with some of the top scholars in the field. More recently we have been trying to create a series of 2-4 articles...

Artificial Intelligence, Math / Truth & other ambigrams

Artificial Intelligence, Math / Truth & other ambigrams

Lovers of mathematics relish challenges, enjoying the manipulation of numbers and geometrical figures, seeking and creating patterns. Their fascination sometimes extends into language and other seemingly unrelated domains. An intriguing example of visual wordplay,...

Posthumanizing creativity

Posthumanizing creativity

Dr. Kerry Chappell is a professor at the University of Exeter’s Graduate School of Education. She merges her training in dance, her doctorate in experimental psychology and interest in education to develop a transdisciplinary research program on better understanding...

Value Laden: Are LLMs Developing Their Own Moral Code?

Value Laden: Are LLMs Developing Their Own Moral Code?

Tesla recently quietly granted me temporary access to their Full Self Driving system (something I had written about in another context). It was interesting, to say the least, to give up control, in a relatively high-risk context and just let the machine navigate...

Educational Futures Thinking: New book chapter

Educational Futures Thinking: New book chapter

The philosopher George Santayana (1910) famously stated, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” (p. 284). In other words, the “best” way to prepare for the future is to study the past and through that, identify patterns and trends, and then...

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *