 I have the top of the hour, so let's begin. Let me welcome you, welcome everybody to Future Transform. My name is Brian Alexander. I'm the forms creator, I'm this chief cat herder and I'm your host for this hour of conversation. We have a terrific guest and we have a vital, fascinating subject and I'm really looking forward to our conversation. Late in 2022, the generative software program, ChatGPT came out and ChatGPT lit the world on fire and made many, many educators anxious, terrified, excited, confused, it gave us new ways of creating text with the help of software. There have been all kinds of debates, all kinds of issues so far. And in fact, two of our forms most popular sessions occurred in December, where they took a deep dive into that. This week, I'd like to bring back a return guest, a great, great hero of mine, Maria Anderson to talk about it. Maria, if you don't know her, is a wonderful person. She's a futurist, she's a devoted math teacher. She's an exceptional explorer of new technologies. She's the successful founder, co-founder of the great software course tune. And now she's here to talk with us about AI and curricula. How does ChatGPT generative AI, how does that change what we teach as long as, as well as what we teach? So without any further ado, let me bring Maria up on stage. And greetings. Hi, Brian, good to see you. Good to see you. Maria, where are you today? I am in Salt Lake City, Utah, at my home. There's two Huskies next to me on the floor. Hopefully, they'll stay quiet. Aww, good dogs, good dogs. And it's great to welcome you back. You're always a delight to have on their program. You always ask great questions and you throw out great insights. You know, I do want to ask you. I mean, you've just kind of closed a big chapter in your life with, you know, exiting course tune, which is such a huge, huge success. I'm curious, looking ahead, what are you gonna be working on for the next year or so? That's a good question. So when I left course tune, I wanted to kind of spend a year doing a Maria-style sabbatical, I guess. So my husband says that I'm like the most busy, semi-retired person he knows. So I decided that what I wanted to do was spend a year. I wanted to go back to teaching for a little while, because teaching just like fills my soul and makes me feel like a whole person. And after so many years of the corporate world and the last couple of years, I wasn't able to teach at all because I was so busy. I just really needed to kind of fill that bank backup. And I wanted to spend a year really thinking about all of the different technology arcs around us. So I agreed to teach for a local STEM school that's a mile from my house. So I decided to take an adventure in K-12 and I'm teaching a class that I call Technology and Society to the middle schoolers. The class is all about the human-made world around them. So the first semester was all about infrastructure, water, power, transportation, agriculture. So kind of like the fragility and complexity of the world that keeps them alive, right? And then the second semester, we're diving into all sorts of different technologies and how they have impacted society. So right now we're doing a unit on household appliances and then we'll move on to medical technologies, communication technologies, computer technologies and material science technologies. And so it's kind of an interesting way to just spend some time thinking about the long arc of all of these different technologies and what we do for and what we do now and what we take for granted. And to see it through the eyes of middle schoolers is really interesting because the technological world around us is their natural world. They don't know anything else, right? And so that's an interesting perspective to see it from. And then I'm also teaching some business, like a business class. So I taught entrepreneurship last semester to the high schoolers and I taught teaching marketing and social media right now to the high schoolers. And that's kind of an interesting pairing with looking at technology arcs and chat GPT. And we've been using chat GPT in classes. I'm here to tell you that all of my middle schoolers can use chat GPT like champs already. So that's the generation coming at ya in a few years. They are not slow to adopt. All my middle schoolers can use chat GPT like champs. Just wanna make sure you all hear that. That's an incredible, incredible statement but not literally so it's very credible actually. So friends, if you're new to the forum, usually I begin by tormenting our poor guests with a question or two of my own. But then I get out of the way and the floor is all yours. So as Maria and I, but mostly Maria, talk for the next few minutes, please start thinking about the questions you'd like to raise about chat GPT, about generative AI in general. And again, think on the bottom of the screen, that white strip, press your raised hand button if you wanna join us up on stage or if you want to just ask a question by text, hit the quick Q&A box and offer your cue or your thought. So I guess Maria, you mentioned the long arc of time. I'm wondering what are some of the lessons that you've learned in your reflections over the past year about how education absorbs and responds to technology that we can apply to chat GPT. Is this like the rise of the calculator in the 1970s for example or film in the 1950s? I think it's probably akin to the rise of the calculator for mathematics, but for every subject now. I think in general, I don't have a lot of trepidation about chat GPT like a lot of educators do, but that's because I've already been through this with math, right? So math has had so many challenges with technology. Math was the easiest thing to program. Math was the easiest thing to create tutors in. Math was the thing that we had Wolfram Alpha, like what was that like 15 years ago that could do everything in math and we had to rethink things, right? Now at a state level and in K-12, I'm still not seeing that rethinking. I see a lot of universities who still have not rethought that curriculum, but I do think this one's gonna be really, really fast. And so unlike other changes that, we kind of slowly start to think about about 10 years after industry, we're seeing the adoption on chat GPT is faster than any innovation we've ever had, right? And if you look at like Roger's diffusion of innovation theory, there's like five things that affect how fast a technology gets adopted. And since I've been studying with my middle schoolers adoption of technology, especially household technologies, which is an interesting one, it's the five things that affect the speed of adoption and think about not just education, but this is the speed of adoption and all of the businesses and all of the organizations that the parents work in, the kids will work in, right? You don't get to ignore how fast it's gonna happen. So one is, does the technology have a relative advantage over others? Yes, no question. If you don't see that yet, you haven't actually been trying. Is it compatible with our belief system? And this is the one, the only one of the five that I think there's even a hiccup in. And that's because some people think like, ah, humans versus technology, we can't do this, right? Pandora's box is open. Sorry, you can't put it back. The next is how easy is it to use? Is it very complex? And it's very easy to use. It is not at all complex. You can just have a conversation with it. You can tell it to do something over. You can tell it to add something in. It just does it. It remembers your private conversations. Unless you tell it to forget the private conversations or the prior conversations. And then the fourth is trialability, like how easy is it to try? It's free and it works on your computer. Of course, there is a premium version coming out. They've announced today for $20 a month, but it sounds like they'll keep the free version. And I'm super happy actually that they're going with a subscription model because the last thing we need is one more great technology that will be corrupted by people who pay to put your eyes on what they want you to see. We have too many click-based ad-based systems out there in the world right now and they are creating bad experiences and bad information streams. And anyways, the fifth hurdle to adoption is, is it easy to observe others using it? So from what we've seen, it hits the nail on the head for at least four out of five of these. It's almost a textbook perfect release of a technology in that they've made 100 million people use it in the first 64 days. Which means I think with five days to a million and 64 days to a hundred million, that means we should be at about a billion users in roughly a hundred days. That's an incredibly fast adoption. We haven't ever seen something be adopted that fast. And I think it's gonna change things. And I would like to just say that for the sake of this conversation, I don't wanna get mired in, but what if students cheat, but what if students cheat? Students have found ways to cheat with every single thing that has been invented. We need to have better assessments in general and guess what can help us write better assessments? Chat GPT. So if I wanna do more scenarios in my classes instead of multiple choice questions, I can ask Chat GPT to help me write business scenarios for my classes. If I want to incorporate more real world technologies that I know nothing about into my classes, I can use Chat GPT to learn about them very, very quickly, much more quickly than Google. Is it a hundred percent right? No, but usually it's wrongness is so easy to spot that it's not a problem. And our website's a hundred percent right? Our website's a hundred percent unbiased? Like I've been talking a lot about this boiled frog of Google. And I want you to pay attention to it. The next time you go to use Google, see how long it actually takes you to find the information you were looking for and how many websites you have to go to. Because I can get to the same point in Chat GPT, skipping all of the, like go to this website, go to this website, go to this website, go to this website. I can just get a paragraph of response. And then if I'm not sure about a factor, I wanna double check something, I can go look for that one thing. But I can get to a curriculum I can use in class so much faster using this, that it's really incredible. So I think the ability now suddenly for people to like leave the silo of what they teach and incorporate things from outside that silo has just gotten way, way easier. Way, way easier. Thank you. That's a great answer. That's a terrific answer. I was just gonna put in a plug for a Chrome plugin that lets you display Chat GPT responses in parallel to your Google search, which is a very, very useful exercise. But before I can even ask you another question, Rhea, questions have been flooding in all over the place. And so I wanna give folks a chance to ask them. And here is one from John at Oregon. And John asks, is it more important to know what AI can do so we can use it, encourage its use? Or what it can't do so we can create assignments that require individual thought? Or maybe it's both. Well, I do think it's both, but I think that this is the biggest, I have been waiting for like 15 years for something new to happen in educational technology. And it just does like the last thing for me, well, from Alpha was like the last big new thing that happened in educational technology. And everything else has been just tiny, incremental movements, new companies doing the same things that old companies did, right? This is the first time in 15 years that I think we've really had technology that can push us forward. And I think we need to look at that first part of the question, what can this do for us? You can use this technology to do a Q and A style training for students about a topic. Brian and I were talking about this a little earlier. I can use this technology to like if I wanna, this is especially great for differentiated instruction which we talk about a lot in K-12 but not as much in college. You know, you have students who naturally take to reading and students who don't naturally take to reading. I'm gonna challenge you all to take a guess here at what the dyslexia rate in children is right now or what the estimated dyslexia rate, the rate of reading disabilities in U.S. children is right now. That's a good question. Toss your thoughts in the chat. Without Googling it. Yeah, we're seeing a 40% Mathieu Plerd recommends 100%. Hello, Mathieu, 20%, 75, 22, 50, 10, 15, 17. It is about 20%. Human beings were not built over tens of thousands of years to read text. In fact, the first dictionary, I have it up here somewhere. I think it was 1828 was Webster's first American dictionary. 1828, so 200 years ago, the first dictionary went into some homes, the homes that could afford a dictionary, right? Books trickled in after that. Encyclopedias, if your family was wealthy enough to own them, libraries. But our access to information and our ability to read is not some kind of inherent quality of human beings. It is on a spectrum, like everything else, right? And if 20% of our students can't actually read very well, we should probably do more to address those things, right? And we suddenly have technologies that can help a lot with this, because where I was hesitant to use video, maybe as a means of teaching something before, because I had to watch the video, see what was in it, maybe create materials to go with it. I can actually use a chat GPT extension to grab the transcript from a YouTube video. I can have it summarize that transcript from the YouTube video. If I want a reading piece to accompany the video, I can have it pull vocabulary words out of it. I can go over the vocabulary words in class before we use the video. Like those are all things that have taken me hours and hours to do before. And so I just hesitant to do it, right? So in terms of like special education, we're asked to use graphic organizers for students who have difficulty reading to help them kind of summarize ideas and information, which means you have to create the graphic organizers and fill them out. But like I can actually have chat GPT create a graphic organizer and fill it out. So then I just have to delete out the content and give it to the student for something. I question sometimes why we teach like literature appreciation, but not presentation appreciation. Perhaps it's because 75% of the population is afraid of public speaking. So imagine all of you who are afraid of public speaking, imagine being thrown into an educational system where the focus was on public speaking instead of reading. And what that experience would feel like to you. But now if I want to like, one of the things I decided to do today in class was to create little plays that we'll start class with. So we're learning about vacuum technologies in technology and society. So we're gonna do a little play about a salesman coming to the door of a family in 1920s and trying to sell them a vacuum cleaner, which they've never seen before. And then in my marketing class, we're going to act out a focus group about whether or not the school should adopt laptops instead of iPads. And both of those scripts that I'm gonna use with the students I wrote in eight minutes using chat GPT. So those are things I wouldn't have done in class before because I didn't have the time to do them before. So my challenge to you is start thinking about this as a push forward, a hugely forward in like the amount of diversity you can have in the activities in the classroom. Because you can now, it's much, much easier. Oh, and one more thing I just have to mention for special ed to do things like rewrite, you know, like if you have a text you're using with the class, but you have a student who reads three grade levels below the rest of the class that was very difficult to accommodate before. But now I can take the body of that text, give it to chat GPT and ask it to rewrite it at a lower grade level. How good are the results? Very good, game changer. And then of course it's text, so you can edit it as you like. Yeah, but the point is that I don't have to do that work of rewriting it now, right? And so many of us are functioning in schools with OER and no, no like support materials, right? And so it's not like the textbook provides the text at six different grade levels for us, right? So anyways, it's, I think it's a serious game changer and you're not seeing it that way, you need to go experiment a little bit more because this is really different guys. Well, thank you. First of all, thank you for that great question and John and Maria, as always, thank you for that splendid answer, a multiple register. Friends, if you're new to the forum, that was the example of the text question. Now let me bring up a guest as a video question. Let's bring up David Sprunger from Whitman College and let's see if we can get him here. Yes, hello, David. Can you hear me okay? Very well. Yes, excellent. Nice to see you all. Greetings from pretty much sunny Walla Walla, Washington. So I, as I've been kind of digesting this and reading as much as I can read about this topic, I have been kind of, you talk about the long arc of things and deep fake technology, Russian trolls that mess with elections. Do you watch MSNBC or Fox? Do you turn in or use chat GPT generated material that you pass off as your own? Maybe not even as cheating, right? I read an article just recently about real estate agents who are using it to generate their content faster, right? One of the things that I'm really trying to synthesize and think about is trust, is the circle of trust that we, that in many ways is broken or reformed or lost or found or whatever. As we start down the road of open AI has chat GPT backed by Microsoft, Google is right behind them. You can bet Apple is right behind them. It's gonna, this is gonna be a flourishing bouquet of options, right? Which means that content that's generated and not just as you know, not just content that's text driven, video, image, image content, it's gonna be very, very, it's gonna proliferate a lot. And the question will be with so much content generated that way, what does that do to our circles of trust? What does trust mean now? And that's a broader question than just AI. It's a question that affects as I was listing pretty much every sector of our lives. So that's something I'm thinking about a lot is that issue of trust. So let me address two things. I just wanna write down the second one. So I get to it, deep fakes and relationships. Okay, so first I just wanna address the deep fakes thing because I've gotten this question a lot from my students. Actually, like if you can fake somebody saying anything from anywhere, then how do you know anything is true? Well, with every technology we build, we discover problems when we build another technology. So I suspect that within the next year, there will be an app that allows people at events to live stream their view of the event from the app and then puts together all of the different live views from people to verify that the speaker said what the speaker said at the place that they were at. So I suspect we will have, and we've seen some of this instant live streaming technology with some of the Black Lives Matter stuff where people who were witnessing an event would open a specific app that would immediately start live streaming to a server so that after their phone was taken away, the video would survive, right? And so I think this technology is just coming along. Like journalism will have to come up with a way to verify that things have really actually happened and were said in the context of what they were said. Now that won't solve the potential of human bias to want to jump at the things that enrage us and make us angry and feed our worst fears, right? One of the things we talked about in our marketing class just this last couple of days ago was that when one of the Facebook scandals was actually, which we didn't hear a ton about in the United States, but it was in Europe, was a political party in Europe that accused Facebook of forcing them to take more extreme stances because the only way they could get enough views on their materials to become elected was to take more and more extreme positions because that's what drove the algorithms, right? So I think that some of these things come with people becoming more educated about what is going on around them, which kind of brings me into my second issue, which I think that our curriculum is now seriously outdated, our curriculum is seriously outdated. So I went back and looked at what we've taught in the United States and the 1800s we taught primarily reading, writing and arithmetic is a shortened school day because people had chores to do. In the 1900s, we added science, geography and history to that. And we had a huge, at that point, the 1900s, especially after World War II, we were building the man-made world, right? And so we had a big push around science. We taught all the science principles in school. We built all this technology that's around us in the 60 years, 70 years after World War II, right? And so today, what do we teach? We teach reading, writing and arithmetic, science, history, government and a plethora of other electives which students may or may not get to. But we still have that core from the 1800s when information was super scarce, right? Super scarce. And that was how you accessed the information was the ability to read and write. That is not how our students access information today. They watch videos. Like my middle schoolers, they watch videos like champions. And some of them, a very small percentage of them, the same you would expect in the general adult population love to read, but reading is a spectrum, right? And so I think when you look at the world that we live in today, if you were to start over, I actually think one of the most important things is understanding the world around us because it's so complicated. And another one of the, to kind of bring it back to the first part of your question, I think there should be classes in relationships, alliances, negotiation, mediation, compromise, strategy. How do you get a group of people to come together and do something together? How does that happen? If we're gonna focus on history, maybe we should focus on all the moments in history where humans learned how to do something together because those are the things that are gonna save our society, right? I think pattern finding is still important, making connections between things, but understanding the fragility and complexity of the world around us. Every time I hear, sorry, if any of you want to hear our libertarian, but every time I hear a libertarian talk about, we don't need any government, we don't need any government, I think. Do you have any idea how the clean water gets to your house, how the electricity gets to your house, how the logistics of the transportation systems work? These all have a very large government hand, whether it's your local government, your state government, or the federal government. That's like Maslow's basic needs. And I think that most humans in the United States have lost the understanding of what goes into that. That should be an important aspect of the schools, plus it might teach our kids some survival skills because they may need that in the future that we are giving them. I think so. Maria, thank you for the answer. David, what a great question. And please say hi to our friends in Walla Walla and enjoy the sunlight as you can. We'll do, thank you. We have a ton of questions, friends. And again, if you're new to the forum, that's an example of a video question. In fact, we have more video questions coming up. So let me bring up the very fine Mahabali coming to us from American University in Cairo, Egypt. So let's see how our connection is. And hello, Mahabali. Hi, Brian, hi, Maria. Thank you so much for doing this, and thanks for having me. So I can see people are curious in the chat, so I'll share some context. I'm at the American University in Cairo here in Egypt, and there are three things I want to tell you guys about what it's like here in Egypt, and then I have a couple of questions for you, Maria. So the first one is chat GPT is blocked in Egypt. So if you try to use it, it tells you it's not available in your country. The only way to go around it is get VPN, get someone's phone number from a country that has chat GPT in it to be able to verify your number so you can't use an Egyptian number, and then use incognito window. I'm glad to do all that until I could figure out how to use it, but there are other text generation tools that are available, but a lot of students can do all this stuff that I just did, so it works, but it's just not meant to work here. So a lot of people say, oh, it's free to everyone with an internet connection. There's a lot of countries other than Egypt also that don't have it, and we're not really sure why, because it looks like OpenAI is blocking it in Egypt, not Egypt is blocking it, so there's that. The second thing is I've tried it in Arabic. You know how beautiful chat GPT is? Like you get infatuated with it at the beginning of the kinds of things it will do for you. It's Arabic is like a six-year-old writing Arabic, and I don't know if it's learning, so clearly it wasn't trained very well in Arabic. I think it translates, and then it auto translates back, so it doesn't do a very good job in that. And then the other thing we know is that it's trained not to be rude, right? But people are starting to talk about is that a restriction on freedom of speech and who gets to decide? So I wanna share with you an example of something that is really controversial and why it refused to tell me. So I was asking it to make feminist interpretations of Quran versus, now Quran is the holy book, right? And you know what it said? It said the Quran is the holy text of the sacred texts of Muslims, and I'm not allowed to, or I'm not going to get into this because I don't wanna offend anyone. Feminist interpretations of Quran, a little bit controversial, but not in themselves like an offensive thing. So I mean, I respected that they didn't wanna go there, that they didn't wanna show bias in some way or whatever. I also thought, why don't you wanna talk about this at all? Like not even at all, so that was an interesting thing. And so I have a couple questions about this in terms of just social justice. So I mean, in my institution, we're just trying to encourage people to learn how to bring this into classes. And I posted in the chat about critical incorporation of AI, recognizing its shortcomings, the ways it can be problematic and all that, which I think you've talked about, but also all technology is, right? No technology is new at all. But then this epistemic injustice element of, we know it's been trained on diverse data, but where's it going with all of that? What amounts of knowledge does it have no idea of? And if we keep using it, how is that gonna potentially limit how we think? I've used it to brainstorm. It's been great. If I get used to using it to brainstorm, will I start to lose my voice, my way of thinking? Usually I use it when I have a brain block, right? But my boss and I, the other day, we asked it to write something in the voice of a non-native speaker. And so that was very interesting because it could do that too. Because suddenly if all our students sounded like chat, she would be able to just tell something's wrong over here because they're not supposed to sound like native speakers, you know? Okay, Maria, epistemic injustice, I think is the one. Some really great perspectives. Thanks for sharing that. I think like any new technology, you can't build for the entire world and also every ability at the same time, right? You have to start somewhere and you have to release it fast enough that you can afford to keep doing the rest, right? So I would say that my guess is other languages, things like that, they're just gonna lag behind a little bit. The native technology. But I do know one of the things that I've noticed also, looking from a feminist perspective, is that I don't think that chat GPT, I think that it has a very male-centric perspective. And I'm saying this because I've asked it about like, when I was developing my syllabus for my class, I was asking it about like, what do you think are the top 25 medical technologies in the last two centuries? And it listed, cause I was just looking for particular ones I would pull out, right? Which is so great at generating lists. It didn't list the birth control pill, but it listed penicillin, right? It didn't list IVF, for example, but it listed heart transplants, right? And so I think it does have a little bit of a male perspective and probably other lack of diversity perspective is probably a white male perspective, right? It ingested all of Reddit, I believe. So the primary population of Reddit is probably not diverse females. And so I think what they're gonna have to do to balance it is have it digest some forums and areas that do provide it with more of that perspective. I mean, in the meantime, we're educators, we can make sure that students get these other perspectives and even that as they're working side-by-side with the AI tools that they actually add in those perspectives as part of the assignment, right? So I don't think that's a bad thing. I do, you just have to recognize that these are the problems. And then, but textbooks have had those perspectives, newspapers have had those perspectives, magazines have had those perspectives, right? This is not new to us that the media prevailing media would not have a female perspective, right? But what is interesting is to think that you could potentially add those perspectives in by just finding the right materials to digest, right? And so that these are curable things in the technology and that might actually introduce some of those topics more into the mainstream by surfacing them. When we send people out to websites to get their information, I as a technology platform cannot alter the websites, right? But as the technology platform for Cheshire PT, I could make it my mission to make sure that our platform is more, has a more feminist perspective and go about doing that, right? Whereas Google's not likely to be able to influence millions of websites to change overnight, right? So I think there's more potential here for fixing some of these things. In the same way that Wikipedia do feminist hackathons, for example, and they made the interface easier. Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's just if they block it in Arab and Muslim countries, where are they gonna get the data to improve it in that sense? Yeah. Thank you so much, Maria. Yeah, thank you for your perspectives. Thank you, Baha. Have a good night. Good to see you. And that's another example of video question. And I was about to say, to encourage you all to ask questions, but we already have an enormous stack. So just looking ahead a little bit since we have 19 minutes left, I would like, unless anyone objects folks in the chat, I would like to copy the chat and optimize it and publish it to the web afterwards because you have a lot of great conversation. And everyone who has questions, if we don't get to them, I would like to also put them online as well so that we can not lose sight of them. So if you have any issues with that, please let me know in the chat. I'll just add here that if any of your schools would like to have a longer conversation, if you wanna have a conversation with faculty or something like that, you could always invite me to come talk. I have to somehow supplement my income in the summer because as a K-12 teacher, I don't get income in the summer. So just store that up there. Always happy to see you there. We have another video question. This comes from Gail Ryder. And let me see if we can bring Gail up on stage. Gail, it looks like your camera is off and I think your mic is off. Must be behind the VPN or firewall, what's happened to me before. Or just need to reload the page. So if you just reload the page and make sure that you turn on your mic or give Shindig the ability to use your mic and your camera, that would be good. Cause I don't wanna lose your question, Professor Ryder. We also have a question from Doug Ho-hu-lin, whose name I always managed to struggle with but I hope I didn't get too bad at this time. Hello Doug. Yeah, Ho-hu-lin rhymes with no Foo-lin. Yeah. Ho-hu-lin, that's right, that's right. Yeah, like the Foo-lin. Great discussion, you know, I'm actually speaking on education and healthcare and chat GPT, though it's generative AI in general. So a couple of comments is I have this blog going, when will we have a billion of something? And so I worked at Motorola and Nokia, I worked in the cell phone business, you know, we had a billion cell phone users in 2002, a billion smartphone users in 2011. And, you know, and right now we have a five billion smartphone users. So there's one point, I think three billion students on this planet and the question is, how many of them will wanna be using generative AI? Actually, while we talk about chat GPT, there's actually, there's a site and I put it in the chat of over 600 different generative AI, you know, located, you know, companies out there doing things. When there was a talk on what is, you know, why, you know, like an Arabic or whatever, there's a site, one of the best sites I would recommend is Life Architect, which goes through all kinds of information and talks about what's in the, you know, what do they use to do the pre-training? So, you know, it will be interesting to see how this technology is used, is it gonna be for education, it will be used like a calculator, it will be used for something much more than that. I'm a big believer in collaboration. I trust chat GPT like I trust a very smart teenager who thinks they know it all and you obviously need to bet the information. So, and even an expert who thinks they know it all, you know, find three experts and find an expert who disagrees with the other experts to come to the right conclusion. And then finally, I'll just end in, there's a book called the Half-Life of Facts and I believe the average fact has about a 10-year Half-Life, you know, because information constantly is changing and being updated. In fact, the author of that book, here is in Kansas City where I live and I plan to reach out to him and what is the meat, you know, you do pre-training but if you do pre-training on wrong information, you know, garbage in, garbage out and so what does that mean as well? So, you know, I'm excited for this technology that it can be useful as long as the human's in charge, right? The human in the loop, you know and how do you keep the human in the loop? I would say use the technology but then I, just like you have to defend a thesis paper, you know, if you're a PhD, I would say whatever document, you know, a student turns in, they have to defend what everything is in that document. And so when they're using any tool, you know, can they defend this and say, okay, this is what the tool gave me but can I defend that that information is valid, is accurate, you know and so it translates from being a tool to it's not part of my creativity. So garbage in, garbage out but creativity in, creativity out and always vet the information. So those are some of my thoughts. Thanks, Ty. So I just wanted to add a couple of thoughts after that. I keep coming back to this example. It's like stuck in my head but yes, we can have misinformation and a tool like this, right? I've worked in curriculum for a very long time. We have states that publish textbooks that leave out important historical details of our country because they simply do not want their citizens to know those details, right? Some human has made that decision to completely bias the education of all of their children, right? So yes, a human needs to be involved but we also need to think about the kinds of humans be and I don't know, maybe ingesting all of the information is not so bad because at least all of the information is there not just the portion of it that one particular body wants the rest of the world to have. I think some of our discourse in the United States right now is because there's suddenly more information than there has been in the last, you know 100 years ago or 200 years ago. Right now, if you question what you're hearing you can go find other sources of information which was not the case when you had an encyclopedia and a library in your teacher, right? And so I think a lot of our mayhem is happening over the ability to access information. So maybe having systems that can actually pull the information fast from lots of different places is maybe not the worst thing that's gonna happen to us because maybe we'll see a more balanced perspective but I also just wanna challenge something about research and making sure that you do your research. We've now seen so many cases where the research studies and peer reviewed articles, peer reviewed journals they're not replicable as it turns out, right? And so without replication, we don't necessarily we can't actually even though you did everything you were supposed to in writing that dissertation or that thesis you went to all of the peer reviewed journals you pulled out the articles that supported or disputed what you wanted to say that even your half-life of facts, right? The facts in some of these journals aren't actually facts either, right? And one of the things that really struck me when I was writing my dissertation was when you get to chapter two and you're researching all previous history in this topic but you have to paraphrase it all you can't use the author's words you have to do it in your own words, right? But at some point when a thousand people have all paraphrased the words of the original authors in the same body of information with eight billion people on the planet that's for sure happening, right? At what point are we allowed to just say like there's this cited body of information here from 1800 to 1900 that I'm just gonna cite that and go from there, right? Like, I mean at what point is this just kind of a ridiculous exercise that stops somebody like if you read the body of information and then pulled out a couple of things but then cited it, right? Could you move forward faster? I mean, and isn't that what chat GP is essentially doing is it's just moving us forward a little faster? Like, yeah, you got to vet things you got to put it through your own filters you got to add perspectives that might not be there but I mean, at what point are we gonna stop forcing everybody to do some of these things because you did it, right? Like, I don't know, just some thoughts. Yeah, no, fantastic. One of the comments was about the tool where you can say, you know, write this in the second grade level and so forth. The NIH says that the average you should communicate healthcare at a sixth to seventh grade level and the, you know, like WebMD is at a seventh grade level. You know, and, you know, so I was playing around saying, okay, do take WebMD and make it at a second grade level. Yeah. So that's a really, you know, say, or a fourth grade level. Yeah, no, I've had a lot of fun teaching. I've been teaching Rogers a diffusion of innovation to my students and, you know, having it just take all of his language down to a sixth grade level. Yeah, so that's gonna be extremely valuable as well. No, I teach Rogers to my grad students and it's not easy for them. So maybe I should try a bit of this as well. Doug, good question. And is your colleague Sam Arbersman? Right. Yeah, someone in Kansas City, he's not my colleague but I know him, I've met with him before and I'm gonna reach out to him and see what his thoughts are with this. Because I put in, you know, what's in my AI today? You know, what do you get pre-trained? And, you know, some of the other tools coming out, generative AI tools, are looking at different ways of training, right? So, you know, in fact, there was an article about the Chinese are trying to have a equivalent, you know, so they have the chain, you know, what purpose of body do you have training on? And I guess going back to your comments about, you know, what information do you present to the student? What do you not do? You know, it's always like how do you filter that? And then finally, you know, you have this engine on top of chat GPT to say, this is my ethical engine. So I don't want you to say it, talk about X, right? And when in doubt, you know, don't talk about this because, you know, you know, fools rush in where angels fear the trend, right? So, okay, I'm not gonna talk about X because it's controversial. Though at the same time, you know, you're not gonna learn if you don't jump into some of these topics, it's how you will respectfully as well. So these are challenges of the human nature, but it's gonna be a great journey. And I think this just amplifies human creativity both at the, you know, at school level and then at the professional level. So I'm hoping we, you know, this is an AI tool that will just amplify the human ability. Maybe just one more thought about this. I've been saying for at least a decade, maybe two, that one of the best ways we can teach, especially some of the more technical subjects like math is to personalize the content to some of the interests of the students, right? To have word problems that are in the field that they're interested in in college. But certainly in K-12, we can do it as well. Like if you have a bunch of students who are interested in Minecraft or Legos, you can have a LGBT, write word problems about Minecraft and Legos, right? Like write me linear modeling problems about Legos, write me linear modeling problems about these topics, right? Like it's so fast and you can target the interests of the students you have. And that was not easy before, right? Like so, again, if you're not looking at this as a way to really start connecting in a deeper way with your students and to really start to meet them where their needs are and to help them to like hone their own skills. Like, so many of our students think they don't have a lot of creativity, right? For whatever reason, we maybe have driven that out of them. But ChatGBT is actually really creative. Like for my entrepreneurship students, they used it to generate potential names for businesses. So I had a student who was, we had talked about, we were talking about climate change and how it might change the mountains here in Salt Lake. So what if there's no more ski resorts? How could we use the mountains in a different way? And one of the ideas was to build hiking trails in the mountains that follow the plots of books. So as you're walking, you can do the walk to Mordor on a trail, right? And so one of my students had ChatGBT generate names of businesses that were in the Wasatch Mountains that at least planned to build trails that followed the plots of novels. And then a second and had 20 names that were better than any we could come up with that incorporated plays on words about reading and novels and used the mountain setting and Utah. And like, you know, some of these things are just gonna be great for people who just don't have a particular skill, right? Move them forward and get them to the next thing then to actually plot the business they're gonna make instead of getting stuck on it, whether they get a name, right? Yeah, we build on the shoulders of giants. In fact, what I would encourage and this is what I do when I use ChatGBT is I say, okay, this is the prompt I use. This is the output I got. And then this is what I did to enhance the output, right? Yeah. And for students, it's like, okay, just don't regurgitate whatever ChatGBT gave you. This is what you're the prompt engineering. This is what was created. And then you have to go on top of that creativity, right? And why did you do, you have to think about what are you doing above ChatGBT? You're a human, you should have more intelligence in the AI, especially around creativity. So if a job is very dangerous, difficult or dull, give it to the AI. But for jobs that are creativity, compassion, kindness, those are where human spirits shine. So anyway, that's my encouragement to all the educators out there. Thank you. Thank you, Doug. Thank you. And thank you for joining us on this journey. It's always good to hear from you. Friends, we're running out of time and I wanna make sure that we get some of these questions and here's one that came up about three or four times. Ed Finn asked it and one other person asked it and we've touched on it briefly. Mahabali raised it as well. Let me just share this. Do you think that tools like ChatGBT will further accelerate a learning divide for those who don't have access, a new steeper digital divide? That's John Upper. Thank you, John. I think that's a great question. I think it depends on the model they use for monetization of these tools, right? Thankfully, there are a lot of tools coming out, it looks like. And a lot of tools means competition and competition usually drives down the cost for the consumer. I am really hopeful that we will end up with one of two models or maybe both models. One model would be just subscribe the subscription. Schools could pay for the subscription. People could pay for the subscription. If it ends up being around the cost of a streaming service, then we can probably, most people can probably afford it if they need to. That doesn't deal with the bigger issue of do you even have internet, which is still a problem, right? And so if you still don't have internet, yes, the divide's worse, right? But the other model I think that I hope would be the possible model is, you know, like do a search, see an ad, look at the TikTok model. Here's your second ad, do a search, see an ad. That would be better than what we have with the Boiled Frog Google phenomenon, which is that you will see the things that marketers want you to see in the searches. That is what you now get in Google, right? Because that is what they have optimized for. And I think it's actually quite bad and biased the search results now. What about learning how to use chat, GPT and similar tools effectively, the whole skill call it prompt generation. Is that also one that might be shaped by divide? Well, I think it's maybe too early to say, but we already don't do a very good job in K-12 of adapting or higher ed. Higher ed is just as guilty, adapting to new things. I still don't think we've adapted fully to the information rich world in higher ed. We still teach a lot of projects exactly the way we taught them in the 1900s. And that should have changed by now. I actually am really hopeful that chat GPT will actually force this to change, that we will actually be forced to come up with better curriculum, better ways of teaching things, to humanize some of our curriculum in ways we don't, we have factized curriculum still in so many places, but maybe we need to have more humanized curriculum. It's hard to teach about some of these things. It's hard to incorporate brand new events in the world into your curriculum. As chat GPT adapts and like right now, the information is two years old. So you actually one great way to change an assignment right now for those of you looking is just to make sure you incorporate some very current event into it because chat GPT doesn't have that information yet, right? But I think we can use it to create a better curriculum in general. And I'm hopeful this will force the issue on us. Well, let me ask one question. This is a synthetic question drawn from some of the questions and some of the chat. And I think this might be a good way to wrap things up. We're looking at chat GPT three as a singular item because it is singular. Is four out now? Or not out yet? Not yet. We're using three. But we should expect to see a proliferation of similar tools. And I'm curious what you anticipate. I mean, for example, should we expect to see similar generative text tools driven by individual corporate needs? So Google eventually releases their own. Apple releases their own, perhaps tuned more towards media. Perhaps nations release their own. So China publishes one that is biased towards Xi Jinping thought. India releases one that might be more in tune with Hindutva. Maybe we see a Catholic chat GPT appear. Maybe we see one that comes out of the library world, one that comes out of the academic world. I'm just looking ahead, that kind of proliferation. Do you see that as well? And how should education start thinking about that? I do think we'll see all of that. I think if it exists in the dating world, it'll probably exist in the AI world. So if there's a dating app for that particular population, probably there'll be an AI for that particular population. And certainly for different disciplines, having different needs. I'm already kind of imagining how we're gonna see this quickly built into all sorts of different software that we use. Microsoft says it's incorporating chat GPT into Word, all of its products as fast as it can do it. Google, I think rightfully so, is very worried about what's gonna happen to Google. I think they should be. My students are like, as soon as it's there and Bing, I guess we're all moving to Bing. There will be a proliferation first and then probably some consolidation of those engines, right? I mean, we've seen that we seem to have no problem letting monopolies form in the United States. So it's probably good that open AI is a somewhat independent entity right now. They can probably gobble up some competitors as fast as they grow, become a new power in the world in a way that I don't think Google would be allowed to gobble up anybody at this point if I had to put the brakes on some of this anti-competitive behavior. So I don't know how good of an answer that is, but I do think you're gonna see a wide variety of stuff at first. In the same way we've seen a wide variety of social media companies and a wide variety of dating apps and anything else that involves human beings. So dating apps and we should anticipate AI antitrust coming up. Lovely. Maria, we are sadly out of time and as always with you, our time passes swiftly and well. Thank you so much for being a terrific interlocutor and just a wonderful fountain of ideas. What's the best way to keep up with you in your manic world of thinking and teaching in the future? These days I tend to just post quick things on LinkedIn. I'm pretty busy with teaching and trying to get my K-12 teaching license is really something else. And then busyness girls is where I've posted things in the past and I'm thinking about moving over to a new site, so I guess if the RSS will go to a new site, so if you subscribe at busyness girl it'll eventually subscribe to the new site too, so. Very good. Well, we'll follow you and once again, thank you so much. Looking forward to having you back for a follow-up. Yep. Take care. And friends, don't go away. Let me just point out, let me wrap things up with a few notes and thank you all for the terrific questions and comments. Again, we're gonna put these up on the blog just because this is such a rich discussion. If you wanna keep talking about this, I've already been tweeting this at Twitter so you can use the hashtag FTTE. You can tweet at me at Brian Alexander or at Shindig events or if you're on Mastodon, there's my Mastodon handle and of course my blog, Brian Alexander.org. If you'd like to dive into our previous sessions on chat GPTE as well as related topics, just go to tinyorl.com slash FTF archive. And looking ahead, we have a whole series of sessions including another one in March on AI and academia. Just go to forum.futureofeducation.us to learn more. If you're doing your own work on AI, please suit me and I would love to be able to share that with everybody else, just email me right there. And again, thank you all for a great conversation, international, intercontinental conversation. It's an absolute pleasure. I hope this has been useful for you. Good luck and keep exploring all this and we'll see you next time online. Take care, bye-bye.