Comment by thundergolfer
11 hours ago
I've listened to a handful of podcasts with education academics and professionals talking about AI. They invariably come across as totally lost, like a hen inviting a fox in to help watch the eggs.
It's perhaps to be expected, as these education people are usually non-technical. But it's definitely concerning that (once again) a lack of technical and media literacy among these education types will lead to them letting (overall) unhelpful tech swarm the system.
Ed tech has been like this for a while. Software companies just fleeced the crap out of our school. Why are we paying for gsuite when we have office 365? Why am I getting a one drive account and a google drive account and also a drop box account, while the school rolls their own supercomputer? Why are we changing the website where the slides are posted every three years to a new system no one understands for the first semester or three it is rolled out? LMS software will have 100 features but is just used as a dumping ground for slides and also a clunky spreadsheet for grades 99% of times.
All the administration knows is to spend money and try and buy what others are buying without asking if it would actually be useful. Enterprise sales must be the easiest to land I swear.
Because school IT doesn't pay salaries to attract top-tier talent (50-125k, depending on position level?).
So you get the typical (a) IT makes bad decisions or (b) admin is so annoyed at IT's slowness that they override them by buying a vendor solution.
And add in that there's a huge amount of centralization of vendors, especially at the platform solution level.
>It's perhaps to be expected, as these education people are usually non-technical.
I don't think that's totally correct. I think it's because AI has come at everyone, equally, all at once. Educational academics didn't have years to study this because it was released on our kids at the same time.
I definitely see what you're saying, but:
> has come at everyone, equally, all at once
is not true. It's obvious that certain people and certain fields are technological laggards or technological early adopters.
Other computing and IT technologies also provided a good training ground for this stuff. LLMs have really interesting new properties, but all have familiar properties and decade+ old methods of distribution.
This stuff is difficult, sure. But we have long set a low bar for education management and the results—declining literacy and math in countries which have become stupidly wealthy—speak for themselves.
> But it's definitely concerning that (once again) a lack of technical and media literacy among these education types will lead to them letting (overall) unhelpful tech swarm the system.
I hate this kind of framing because it puts the burden on the teachers when the folks we should be scrutinizing are the administrators and other stakeholders responsible for introducing it.
AI companies sell this tech to administrators, who then tell their teachers to adopt it in the classroom. A ton of them are probably getting their orders from a supervisor to use AI in class. But it's so easy to condescend and ignore the conversations that took place among decision-makers long before a teacher introduced it to the classroom.
It's like being angry at doctors for how terrible the insurance system is in the US.
Read my comment again. I deliberately did not use the word "teachers".
> education academics and professionals
You're absolutely right and I apologize for that.
EdTech has been like this for a long time. It's more education (educators) than technology.
What's exciting is that tech will be able to help provide more meaningful support instead of throwing dozens of software tools at a student.
Look up some of Tressie McMillan Cottom's writing, podcast appearances, public lectures, etc etc. She's a McArthur-certified Genius and a full professor at UNC, and she's a spectacular writer and public intellectual.
She wrote "Lower Ed", about for-profit colleges in America and has identified places that more elite schools are copying that playbook.
https://bsky.app/profile/tressiemcphd.bsky.social
https://www.instagram.com/tressiemcphd/
I am pretty close to this because my spouse is a school board member and I do a lot of AI work for my job, and the problems of AI in education are completely intractable for public schools. The educators lack the technical background to use AI effectively, and moreover, they are completely out of the loop in terms of technology decisions, and the technology staff lacks enough knowledge in both education and AI for them to make competent decisions about it.
It’s a recipe for disaster, and you are going to see school systems set money on fire for years trying to do something with AI systems that never get rolled out, or worse, rollout AI systems that tells kids to kill themselves or makes revenge porn of their classmates.
School boards default answer to everything AI related right now should be “no”.
I think a good question to ask, is if these schools would have paid for cliffnotes for all their kids. The answer is of course “no,” not only due to the presumed expense but also the fact cliffnotes are the easy way out of having to use your brain in English class. AI is no different. Kids are using it as an easy crutch to cram and avoid actually learning to study material, not as some research tool like it is pitched. It is like worse than wikipedia, and somehow everyone in education had such strong feelings about wikipedia but are rolling out the carpet for chatgpt school wide subscriptions.