AI & The Future of Education

hey everyone welcome back to another episode of the thrive in edu podcast I am your host Rochelle Danae post super excited to have you join today because I have a guest joining me and I've been really looking forward to talking to my guest today because we are going to talk about a topic that I enjoy learning about hearing other people's thoughts on and I know this very important topic that a lot of educators are interested in so I want to extend a very warm welcome to my guest pretentia who is the author of a fantastic book that I will make sure that you have the links in the show notes but it's Ai and the future of Education teaching in the age of artificial intelligence so welcome to the podcast yeah and so for anybody who is just tuning in they likely are familiar with AI so we'll be talking about AI of course during this but I always like to know the background story of my guess I think that is so important to know who you are what you do what got you to where you are today so if people want to know more about you give us a little bit of your backstory yeah education I started my first at Tech Venture as a high schooler we were building a medication non-profit that provided online tutoring this is back before this was the norm on New York State standardized test so then the school year and it was peer tutoring and so that was my first Adventure kind of figuring we spent 45 years for some funding and got a chance to come I'm in the non-profit space of making educational number accessible and that that got me addicted and so I've been spending the next 10 something years and finding different technological solutions to whatever the like the problem of the year is an education and we always seem to have a new one every few years and so I've worked on everything from Civics projects that use technology to make public disc better to think that focus on critical thinking of reasoning using natural learning and I worked a lot during the pandemic with organizations to help transition academic events online and so we got a chance to work with like debate events and model un and all sort of public speaking of competitions to make sure that students still got a chance to complete I'm Educators education organizations figure out what what exactly what role and I can play for them how to deal with some of the challenges that's created and throughout all of this I kind of bring like my academic background isn't philosophy so my undergraduate degree was a philosophy and then I went back to school for a Masters in Education policy and so my brain was to think in terms of the big picture and think about with the implications are a little bit taught summer camps for the last 10 years including directing a few of my own Civics one in particular so yeah I try to keep myself busy with all try to see education from all the different sides and use that before and my practice well you definitely sound like you're very busy and and I always love everybody's answer to that question because I think sometimes we don't realize how much we do and how how like windy or path has been or a journey to get us where we are today and I often when somebody says what do you do like I usually forget a couple of things that I've done too and then somebody says well don't you have or didn't you do this and I think oh yeah I did and a lot of the things that you were talking about in your background really resonate with me especially like coding and making things and I won't say when this occurred but I remember just being so excited to come home from school and to get on the computer and to try to write programs just for myself using some simple like if this then that kind of I don't know it was just fun and it was exciting because I love technology and all things technology but I love teaching my students that are in 8th grade now because I think about my experience when I was in eighth grade and changes we start to see and then now like how fast things are advancing so thanks for sharing your background and I of course am interested in the AI component of it and I know when I started to be interested in it but you have been involved in learning about talking about everything AI for so long so what really got you started on that path or what was the kind of thing that like oh you know what this is like really interesting I'm going to investigate this further so there's like two pivotal moments there's the first time I ever think about this in my context and outside like a computer science class or philosophy class thinking about like Ubi was I was actually studying I was trying to build a language learning tool in college to help learn highly inflected languages like Latin language models natural language processing coming out that was targeting sunscreen because it's a very formulated language and so if you know the rules and you can program the rules it's also very complex in pools because I work in combined into larger ones there's all kinds of fun things about the whole episode just and natural language processing but that was the first time I was like oh there's a there should be really cool