Of Stochastic Parrots and Drunk Interns: My Chat with Win Coalition

by | Saturday, November 23, 2024

I recently sat down with Ryan Gray and Robin Bryce of Yavapai College for Win Coalition’s What’s Next Speaker Series. Regular readers of this blog will know exactly what I must have talked about – no surprises here! We dove into AI, education, and where all this is headed.

During our conversation (and yes, I probably got a bit passionate at times), we covered familiar territory – why it’s important to understand AI as a “smart stochastic parrot” rather than some all-knowing oracle, and how educators might actually use this technology thoughtfully rather than just jumping on the latest hype train.

We spent quite a bit of time unpacking my current obsessions: how AI can be a useful thought partner (when we understand what it actually is), why we need to pay more attention to our own cognitive biases, and the broader implications of living in an AI-mediated world. You know, the usual set of ideas I have been exploring on this blog for a while now.

One of the more interesting parts of our chat focused on creative ways to use AI in education – not just for churning out lesson plans or study guides (can we stop this argument for efficiency, please), but for things like creating simulations to help teachers prepare for difficult conversations or understand different student perspectives. We even got into some examples of how AI’s tendency to “make things up” might actually be a feature rather than a bug in certain educational contexts.

You can listen to the full conversation below – that is, if you want to hear me ramble on about these topics in more detail.

A few randomly selected blog posts…

Community Design Lab at Madison

Community Design Lab at Madison

One of the greatest pleasures of my work here at ASU (with the Office of Scholarship & Innovation) has been the work we have been doing with local school districts. Essentially we collaborate with partner districts and community organizations to develop...

Autonomy, mastery, purpose

This presentation of a talk by Daniel Pink has been making the rounds on the Interwebs. I am including it here just as a personal reminder for me to use in my teaching AND as an example of a wonderful presentation style. Check out RSA Animate - Drive: The surprising...

Koehler, Mishra & Yahya 2007

Koehler, Mishra & Yahya (2007) is an important paper in the TPACK related work for a range of reasons. The research captured in this paper actually predates the TCRecord (Mishra & Koehler, 2006) article, but the vagaries of publishing and journal waiting-lists...

It Takes Two: A scientific romp using AI

It Takes Two: A scientific romp using AI

Dark 'n' Light is an e-zine that "explores science, nature, social justice and culture, through the arts and humanities." It is a labor of love by a small, dedicated team led by Susan Matthews, former legal and policy wonk, turned editor and podcaster. I came to know...

Of hernias and hiccups, the evolutionary story

Interesting article in Scientific American about how flaws in our biology reveal our evolutionary history. Steven Gould talked about it in his famous essay on The Panda's Thumb. This is a wonderful argument for Darwinian evolution since it points not to perfection...

Peer review in the science classroom

Peer review in the science classroom

Fig. 1: Header image. Credits: Illustration by Punya Mishra. License CC-BY-NC. The scientific method is a myth. In more ways than one. Typically in school you are taught that the scientific method consists of making observations, developing hypotheses, testing them by...

Cool i-Images at MICDS

I just spent a day at MICDS in St. Louis talking with a small but select group of teachers about creativity in teaching, the role of big ideas, the meaning of TPACK, the importance of trans-disciplinary learning (among other things). What a wonderful way of spending...

Grant Hackathon 2016

Grant Hackathon 2016

On October 21, the Office of Scholarship partnered with the Research Advancement Office and the Teachers College Development Team to host the first MLFTC Grant Hackathon at ASU SkySong. Over 30 faculty and staff members attended the event. More...

Rube Goldberg website

Just found out about this through a list-serv I am on. Very cool. Hema is a Dutch department store (started back in 1926 and has over 150 stores all over the Netherlands). Check out HEMA's product page... and just wait a couple of seconds and watch what happens. Don't...

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