It’s been 1000 days since ChatGPT launched. Not that anybody was clamoring for a hallucinating ChatBot but here we are.
A friend once told me about a Gujarati business principle: give any new venture 1000 days, roughly three years, before deciding whether to continue or stop. It’s a wisdom that acknowledges the messiness of innovation, allowing time to move past initial enthusiasm and inevitable struggles to see what actually works.
Well not that we have the option to stop the AI juggernaut, but it IS a moment for reflection.
It is also fitting that we’ve reached this milestone just as we mark the anniversary of the 1956 Dartmouth Conference, where John McCarthy first coined the term “artificial intelligence.” As I explored in a recent blog post (Cybernetics or AI: What’s in a Name), that naming decision was far from inevitable. In fact a bunch of ideas were tossed around including the term “cybernetics.” It appears that McCarthy deliberately chose “artificial intelligence” to avoid association with Norbert Wiener’s work and personality. That choice of words profoundly shaped how we think about these technologies today, loading them with anthropomorphic expectations that might have been very different had we gone with the more neutral “cybernetics.”
Be that as it may – what we have to accept, particularly as we prepare to head back to school, is that questions about GenAI and education are foregrounded like never before.
It seems like the perfect moment for that kind of honest evaluation my Gujarati friends would recognize.
And that is exactly what we did in our ongoing AIR | GPT conversation. I joined Caroline Kurban, Liz Kolb, Ruben Puentedura, and Helen Crompton for a conversation reflecting on how our views of AI in education have evolved over the past three years. Under the wise guidance of our orchestrator Errol St. Clair Smith, we had a candid discussion on the ups and downs in our journey through periods of awe, skepticism, joy and concern. We discussed our personal AI use and our thinking on the challenges of assessment in this day and age. We expanded the lens to examine tech companies’ AI promises, why Grammarly’s new feature is shaking up grading, and how AI is impacting our relationships on many levels. As always a fun and enlightening conversation.
Listen to the episode at the link below or wherever you get your podcasts.
Below is a list of all the episodes of AIR | GPT
- The Creators of SAMR, TPACK, Triple E, SETI, and GenAI-U Launch New Podcast With a Review of NoteBook LM
- Para-social Relationships: The Pros and Cons of Falling in Love With Generative AI
- 2024 Mic Drop on the AIR GPT Podcast
- AI Schools Are Catching On: What They Get Wrong, What They Get Right, What They Are Teaching Us About Teaching
- Some Think More Deeply With Gen AI, Some Less: Here’s What’s Behind The Emerging Critical Thinking Divide
- The Science and Art of Teaching Creativity in the Age of Gen AI: What Every Educator Needs to Understand
- The Blindspots in AI Guardrails, Guidelines, and Good Intentions: What We Need, What We Don’t, and Why
- All Gen AI Studies Are Not Created Equal: What These Two Highly Cited Studies Overlooked, Why It Matters
- Grok This: When AI Goes Off the Rails, What Educators Need To Know About the Root Causes
- Three Years of Gen AI: The Lessons We’ve Learned, What We Plan to Do Differently As We Head Back to School