← ASU+GSV Summit
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- [00:03]
Dr. Maria Ortiz
This session was recorded live at the
- [00:05]
Matt Miller
2026 ASU GSV summit in San Diego.
- [00:14]
Greg
As I was thinking about this panel, I was thinking about kind of the theme of it. This idea that AI is sort of like taking jobs, taking tasks, sort of overtaking the things that we used to do that young people used to have to know and do and learn about. I was thinking about my own relationship to technology just. And sort of like all of ours. Like, I think I'm probably the only baby boomer on this panel, but I think about like, you know, since I was like a little kid, like, I've had a robot in my house cleaning my clothes, right? And I've had like this robot, like keeping my house warm and cool. I've had a robot that like, curates my music, that like, shows me movies. And I'm trying to think about, like, what do I do with this free time that I've been, that I've been afforded. And I realize, like, I'm not using it very well. One of the things I do a lot of is like watching tiktoks of like people building survival shelters, right? So it was like. So I think I'm like regressing back, right? And I guess I was thinking about, like, maybe that's a frame that we could use to think about this topic, which is, you know, we have this incredible technology that keeps getting better every week, right? As they, as people like to say, like, the technology is as bad as it will ever be. And I guess the question is like, what are we doing with the free time? What are we doing with the affordances? The panel is called what Learning Must Do Differently. And there's one thing I want to maybe do an asterisk and say, I think it's what the adults should do differently. Let's claim some responsibility here. So I want to start out by letting the panel introduce themselves by answering this question. And this is the question, just going to find it. If a parent in the audience asked you, should I be worried that AI is going to make my kids education irrelevant? What would you tell them? If a parent asked, is AI going to make my child's education irrelevant? What would you tell them? Can I put you on the spot? Yeah, okay.
- [02:40]
Colin Kaepernick
Absolutely. Good morning, everyone. I am Colin Kaepernick, founder and CEO of Lumistory AI the simple answer to that question is no. What I think it's going to do, it's going to be able to enhance it, it's going to be able to personalize it, it's going to Be able to allow your student or your child to go further and be able to better support them. Especially when we think about classrooms at scale and the requirements that we have of our teachers and what we demand of them. Oftentimes we're asking an impossible task to to have teachers walk into a classroom. And we know in an 8th grade classroom we may have students at capabilities from 4th grade to 12th grade and teach all of them and teach them the same curriculum and make sure you meet all of them where they are at any given moment. It's extremely difficult task to get accomplished. So I think when I think about that from a parent's perspective and having a three and a half year old that's going to be walking into the education system soon, I think the future is going to be much brighter and much better for our students, for our teachers and for society as a whole.
- [03:51]
Greg
Just for people who might not know much about Lumi's story, just give the 30 second pitch. What is it? What does it do?
- [04:00]
Colin Kaepernick
We are a AI and creation company. We use that to improve student engagement, improve literacy and build their AI skills. And we also do all of the professional learning, professional development that sits alongside that for our teachers, our administrators and culminate all of this work with showcases at the end of the school year. So highlight and celebrate our students, bring parents in the community together. Also opportunity for our school districts to bring corporate philanthropic partners in so we can build broader support.
- [04:28]
Greg
Excellent. Okay, wonderful. Maria, do you want me to repeat the question or you have it?
- [04:34]
Dr. Maria Ortiz
You want to repeat it? I'll repeat it the audience.
- [04:36]
Greg
If a parent in the audience asked you should I be worried that AI is going to make my kids education irrelevant, what would you tell them?
- [04:44]
Dr. Maria Ortiz
Good morning everyone. I am Dr. Maria Ortiz. I am the assistant superintendent of all of the high schools in the largest city in the state of New Jersey, Newark, New Jersey. Irvin, I'm really excited. I'm also a parent of an elementary school young girl and a cheer mom. Not by choice, but I also have cheer moms. God bless us. God bless us. Yeah. Take out a mortgage just for chow cheer. And I also am a mom of a 14 year old 9th grader who is doing incredible work and they both attend the high school the in school system that I work in. And the question about as a parent, this work about teaching and relevancy, I have to say that no is the answer to that. That is the short answer. But we, we are at an advantage now where we have programs like Lumi, like Khan Academy that are Starting with our elementary school students and teaching them those skills where the gap is closing. It's an equity conversation because if you start thinking about what is happening with students around the world and the advancement that the privilege have, the fact that we have students in our urban school districts that have that advantage and have that opportunity in order for them to learn the AI skills, have a voice, and instead of thinking that AI is something to be afraid of, embracing it so that they are able to control it as opposed to it controlling them.
- [06:26]
Greg
Okay, excellent, Matt.
- [06:29]
Matt Miller
Yeah, thank you. Super excited to be here. Matt Miller, CEO and co founder of OKO Labs.
- [06:38]
Greg
And I'm going to ask you to tell everybody what Oko Labs is too, by the way.
- [06:41]
Matt Miller
Yeah, happy to do that. Maybe I'll start by answering the question and then pivot into Oko and try to avoid shameless self promotion. Definitely an emphatic no that education will not become irrelevant. However, I'd say there's an important if. There's the if is that we need to turn our attention towards really educating around the durable skills, the human skills that actually matter for lifelong success in a post AI world. So as long as our education system is making those changes, we as the adults in the room are activating student agency, are developing curiosity, creativity, communication, critical thinking, then education will be even more relevant for their lifelong success. What I'm working on is building oko. It is very much an operating system for teamwork in the classroom. We sit at the intersection of developing durable skills alongside academic growth through a small group collaborative learning model. So we have an intelligent assistant that's kind of a co pilot with small groups of kids, helping them to by facilitating these small group collaborative learning activities and giving them feedback not only on their academic growth today, that's in math, but also how are you doing as a teammate and how do you improve at the practice of collaborative learning?
- [08:26]
Greg
Excellent, Kim.
- [08:28]
Kim
Yeah, I'm happy to go at this end of this awesome continuum you all just heard because I think I'm like the furthest outlier at the end of the spectrum. So as a parent, I have an 18 year old and an 18 year old senior in high school, freshman in college. So in that area where we're assessing is what our educational system did K to 12, preparing them for the next stages in life. And so I would say to that parent, kind of, you kind of need to be worried that the way we've organized education in the past, and this is kind of riffing off what Matt said and all the work you all are doing to build us in the right direction, we do need to pivot what we think about what education means, right? So, no, it's not that everything they've learned is irrelevant. It's the way we organized our system of schooling was designed for a different age. And so at Learner Studio, what we focus on, our core question is what do young people need to be inspired and prepared to flourish in the age of AI as individual human beings, which we didn't really think a ton about when we designed our school system for careers, which you all have mentioned, and for democracy, which we also have kind of forgotten about. And what everyone has set up here is still relevant. It's not that we have to get rid of any of these things things it's that we need to do more. So what I would emphasize, and as a parent, what I realized, particularly during COVID as I watched our system be like distilled down to like, it's just the nub of it, right? Kids sitting passively in front of a zoom, the worst possible thing, right? And we do more in a regular classroom, which is great, but it's just. As a parent, I realized passivity, it's not helping us. Kids have to have that agency. They need to be critical thinkers. They need to have problem solving. And so maybe one thing I'd add to the great things you all have put on the table is why aren't we crediting kids with the learning they do outside of the classroom too, right? There's real world learning, right? That doesn't mean we don't need to learn all the things you're already talking about. We do. So we're not getting rid of any of that. But we need to pare that down to kind of the right set of skills and the modernized content knowledge they need when they can get a lot of content knowledge backup from AI and then b, have agency, have critical thinking, have discernment, be able to pay attention for longer than a TikTok. Much as I appreciate your TikTok, I'm
- [10:34]
Greg
a lost cause, by the way, so it's okay.
- [10:36]
Kim
But there's a set of challenges like sustained attention that we didn't used to think were jobs for us to do in education that are jobs for us to do now in the age of AI, similar with the connection and teamwork, right? So there's just a set of things that we always cared about that we just need to now engineer back into our learning environment. And so don't be worried that education as, as an experience is irrelevant. It's never going to be irrelevant. But let's do re engineer it so that we're paying attention to what do we need to emphasize so they're really ready to thrive in the age of AI.
- [11:09]
Greg
I guess I want to just ask you kind of follow up on that. So you said there aren't things we need to take away. We need to add this, sort of modernize, as you said, content knowledge. If I were a teacher hearing that, I would be like, oh God, here we go. They want me to do one more thing or whatever I'm doing more intensely. Just talk about that. Because one of the questions that I wanted to ask, which you're kind of implicitly answering, is are there things we need to stop doing? So let's just start with you, Kim, and then we'll kind of jump from there.
- [11:41]
Kim
Well, so the first thing I would say we should stop doing is locking kids in the classroom and sort of pretending that's the only place learning happens. Important learning happens there. So I'm not expecting us to do away with the classroom, but we need to think, think broadly about where learning happens and be able to credit it and be able to measure where it's happening in other contexts and start doing. Let's go to your point about modernized content. We have given teachers binders full of standards. It's literally impossible to teach them all. We can't add skills and we can't add learning out in the real world on top of that. So we do need to sit down with employers, colleges with life parents around. Okay, maybe we don't need trigonometry for every kid, but we do need statistical reasoning and computational thinking and problem solving. So we had a set of courses you had to take that were defined at a different moment in time. They may not be the right courses anymore.
- [12:31]
Dr. Maria Ortiz
Right.
- [12:31]
Kim
So what do we really need young people to know and be able to do to thrive in the age of AI is the critical question. And some content knowledge we won't need. We've talked about writing and I'm sure you're going to get to a column. We still do need that, right? So let's just be real about what we need and where are places we can pare back a little bit on a course progression and insert teamwork instead and think about real world problem solving instead.
- [12:54]
Greg
This is good. See, it could have been like a survivor thing where like, you know, you're thrown off the island if she said we don't need writing, but sounds like we still do need writing. So you can stay.
- [13:04]
Kim
Yeah, for sure. Maria, go ahead, you can all stay.
- [13:07]
Dr. Maria Ortiz
So I would say I agree with Kim in terms of doing a standards audit, which we really do need to do.
- [13:13]
Greg
Standards audit.
- [13:13]
Dr. Maria Ortiz
Standards audit, you know, at the national level and find out, you know, in the English classrooms, English have about 48 standards that in one grade level you have to, as a teacher, you have to review. Right. So technically what that means is that you have about two to three days on one standard for the kid to master it, mastering mean meeting or exceeding the benchmark. And when that there's a gap there, teachers have a very difficult time differentiating and tailoring the instruction in order to ensure that that student or that group of students meet or exceed that standard. If for whatever reason there's an assembly or a fire drill and they miss that day or whatever the case may be, that standard gets compromised, then we have to start thinking about not only are we considering that specific standard you're talking about, is that standard high leverage. So in comparison to what are the demands of the workforce or what are the demands that students and human beings now have to accomplish. So I think that we definitely need to do a standards audit and really revisit what are the expectations of everyone, including parents, students, teachers, and really analyze. There's still only seven and a half hours in one school day. And there's still maybe 185 to 200 days average nationally for schooling. And 30% of that is not for school. It's for things. For example, walking transit in school is two weeks a year just walking from one class to the next. So if you really start thinking about timing and how much timing you have in comparison to the standards that everyone is expected to achieve, especially now that you have such technical and skills demand in order for them to be ready. Of course we're not ready and we all know that. So I think there needs to be a conversation of alignment in order for us to shift where education is going.
- [15:21]
Greg
Okay, well, let's shift to writing. Let's talk about writing. We've been invited to why do we still need It? Not to put you on the spot, but, you know, just.
- [15:35]
Colin Kaepernick
See, based on the laughs, I'm going to make you answer that.
- [15:39]
Greg
Sure. I am a writer. I just realized that. What am I? I set my own trap here.
- [15:49]
Colin Kaepernick
No thinking about writing. We do a lot of work in the literacy space. And when we get beyond the phonics and the reading side, writing is a key driver for reading comprehension, helps us drive clarity of thought. Also, one of the things that has not largely Been part of the discussion. When we talk about AI, when we talk about durable skills, we have high level this focus on we need to make sure we're prepared for AI. With AI, we look at our engineering team. Most of the work they're doing right now is in natural language. When we think about future careers and what our students are going to have to be prepared for, if you can't read and you can't write, you're not going to be able to use these models. So a lot of the skill sets and jobs that we're looking at go back to a lot of the foundational skills that we are already teaching now. The opportunity that we look at as well is right now. Typically we look at writing in key literacy blocks, maybe in the ELA classroom. And that's the extent that we're like we're really assessing writing. We look at this as an opportunity because we have AI now that we can have our social studies classrooms, our science classrooms, and all of our other subject matters become opportunities where we're assessing students writing. Those 48 standards that we may be measuring. Well, can we pick up data in other classrooms to be able to get a broader picture of is the student advancing and accomplishing these goals that may not show up in this specific area in this ELA classroom, but they're actually showing knowledge of this in these other spaces that we just aren't measuring today.
- [17:37]
Greg
Okay. You know, it's interesting because when you think about AI and writing, you know, I think most people in the education space would say they're kind of like this dysfunctional marriage. You know, the idea being that so many students, if we read the news, are using AI to just outsource their writing. Right. You know, give me a 200 word or 500 word paper on Romeo and Juliet. Well, you know, just ask Claude, right? Talk about how you are kind of turning over that paradigm and what, like what does the AI actually do for your students? And Maria, you can jump in here too, because as we know, you're using the Lumi story as well in your schools. By the way, anybody who wants to jump in. So let's talk about the AI. What does it do?
- [18:33]
Colin Kaepernick
Yes, great question. So also when we think about AI is for what purpose and how are we using it? So we don't just use general AI models, we're using it and building it for specific use cases. So when we think about writing and writing process, we use an inquiry based model. So AI will not write for our students. It will not just give them the answer but it will prompt them with questions to help them down this train of thought to get to this place where they can write and develop their ideas. Now, as we're doing that, all of that is based upon our district's pacing guides and curriculums and also our teachers lesson plans for that project. So essentially, teachers, close your ears really quick. We don't lead with all of our teachers and say, hey, we're teaching you how to train AI in this process for your specific use case. But that's what we're doing behind the scenes because we know they need specific outcomes. If we go to a general model, you're going to get very general outcomes and students are going to be able to do things that may offload some of the cognitive ability, some of that cognitive process that we want them going through. This is a way that we can be able to harness that to drive the outcomes that we want for our students. In that process, we are also giving full visibility to our teachers. So every question, every prompt, every engagement, they have full visibility into. Here's what our students engaging with, here's what their work is. Also, if students are copy and pasting work in, we are finding that in there. So our teachers know exactly where that is. So we're looking more so at the process of what our students are going through to get to this end outcome, as opposed to just what that final
- [20:18]
Dr. Maria Ortiz
product is, I would say. Also, you know, there was once, I remember Lucy Calkins at TC in Columbia, and she says, you know, Maria, you read to get ideas and you write to give ideas, right? And that was really profound. It was so simple. So the idea of students now reading what they're asking, it's part of the exchange that is happening with students where a teacher, a parent, a staff member can tell how is the student thinking, right? Where has the thinking plateaued? Where are they stuck? Where is it that. And so one of the reasons why we agreed to partner with Lumi was because of that exchange that is happening with where if the student doesn't have a teacher doing a feedback session or reading what the student wrote, then that student is not getting any feedback and that thought is plateaued and that fragmented idea only is spiraling to the next day and the next thought. And when that happens, then what tends to happen is the student has a misunderstanding of what that skill is or misunderstanding of that idea. And so coupled with a lot of that that's happening and that confusion, it's probably why we have a lot of students who cannot reach or exceed what is expected of them. So we need to be very cautious and careful about the AI component. About what. When you. When we are starting to analyze the product that is being exposed in front of us, we have to start thinking about what is the process for the teacher, what is the process for the student. Does that exchange then include where the students at the end of the day and the teachers at the end of the day have a full idea that is. That is, you know, ended. And that's something. That is definitely something that we're looking forward to. Because when you have some programs that leave students and they say, oh, the usage report shows that they started it, but they never ended, that's telling. When you start thinking about what was the end showcase. If you heard Colin say, every year we have a showcase. The students have to show and demonstrate their work to the public. That's accountability. And so AI has an accountability and a responsibility that we all have to be ensure. Like as district leaders, as teacher leaders, as parents, we have to hold that, that accountability as a standard so that we are responsible for the process of learning AI that our students have to go through.
- [23:01]
Kim
What I love about this conversation is we're talking about learning and the cognitive sciences in a way we never used to. We used to just talk about schooling. So that's one powerful way you guys are translating the opportunity with AI. And when you say accountability, true, we're used to accountability with a different capital A. But it's also relevance because those young people are now saying, someone's paying attention to my work and it matters what I can produce. And I wonder. You said we should just jump in, so I wonder if Matt could jump in because. No, but you guys are. There's so much relational stuff built into the way you're thinking about writing. Right? And that's what you're doing. But it's in math, right? So that's powerful.
- [23:38]
Matt Miller
Yeah, it's in math. And I think that the through line is directly from what I love about Lumi is really examining the process of writing and getting insight into what is typically a black box. You know, you get to see maybe a couple drafts. You know, when kids were doing their work on paper or didn't have AI to generate those drafts. And you could. You could examine these discrete moments and you could see thinking evolve, but now, you know, all bets are off. And so being able to see that process of creation is really critical. The through line to what I'm working on right now is really with taking that approach to discourse and collaborative learning that is often thought of as just this thing you're either good at or not, or it's a process that you do. And then we can examine the output of a group project, or a moment where you're having to analyze results on a lab bench in a science class, or how someone's reporting back on how the group works, work through a math problem in a turn and talk. What we're doing, what we're really obsessed with, is illuminating that black box of group work so that we can see the discourse that is happening. We can glean insights from how the team is doing as collaborators. Are they asking questions of one another? Are they explaining why? Getting to the rationale of how they're solving a problem or thinking through a challenge together. And what's really powerful there is, of course, not only getting that information, those insights up to educators to help them better support learners, but also to get that insight into the hands of the learners themselves so they can begin to think of those durable skills and collaboration as things that can actually improve over time. You know, there are actually discrete components of being a great collaborator, and when you illuminate them, you start to see improvements.
- [25:40]
Greg
You know, it's interesting because we're kind of, in the best way, drifting off the topic of the panel. We are.
- [25:52]
Matt Miller
We're so on topic. What are you talking about, Greg?
- [25:55]
Greg
No, I just. I'm thinking, you know, like. Because a lot of what we're talking about here the past few minutes is this idea of, like, AI is sort of shifting the conversation on accountability, which is an. Accountability is mostly a teacher thing. Right. So maybe we should talk a little bit more about that. Does AI make accountability work better, work more efficiently, happen more naturally? Give me a sense of what you guys see in your product or somewhere else.
- [26:32]
Matt Miller
I was going to say, I think we're still at a very early stage there in holding AI accountable for learning gains and for the sort of durable skill gains that we need to see. There's been a whole lot of AI slop, you know, kind of placed into the hands of learners, but we're now starting to get a little better with kind of evaluators, for models that can actually examine whether they're taking a learning sciences back, kind of pedagogically sound approach in the work that they're doing. So I would take that accountability kind of lens and say, yes, we need new ways of holding our education system and the humans within it accountable for. For achieving learning gains, but we also need to hold the tools themselves accountable and ensure that they are of quality
- [27:28]
Kim
And I don't think we're drifting from the agenda around what the human advantage is, because that's what you guys went to immediately when you were talking about what you're doing with AI is the narrative. Owning the narrative, the agency the learners need, and the way you guys describe the writing process. You happen to use writing as your subject, but there was so much agency but built into that. And you're talking about the durable skills and the collaboration. So if you think about what's the human advantage like, having the discernment, owning your narrative, having something to say, being empowered to say that, having the ability to collaborate and connect to other human beings. We answered the question of human advantage around human agency, human connection and human sustainability. And the sustainability piece we didn't get to yet. But that's the. For me, the way we think about it is caring about more than yourself, like feeling like you're relevant to being a problem solver in the community. Your showcase, sharing out being a member of that community and getting feedback from the community, being connected. So I feel like we got to agency, connection and sustainability in all that. You guys already said. So I feel like we are on point.
- [28:28]
Dr. Maria Ortiz
But I agree with Kim and I
- [28:30]
Greg
think appreciate that he's trying to bring us down to earth, but.
- [28:33]
Kim
Okay, yeah, no, but it is concrete what people are doing to achieve those things.
- [28:38]
Dr. Maria Ortiz
I agree with Kim and I just want to push back a little bit about this term of accountability. Right? Not one entity is held to the accountability. Everyone is accountable, from the vendor to the parent to the student to the teacher to the principal, to the industry partner, to the college and university partner, every single one is accountable. I think that when there's a misconception that only the teacher is accountable for the student learning, or only the teacher is responsible for what happens in the AI classroom with this particular student. That's where I think when we talk about the human connection, I think that if anything, we need to have this network where everyone is held accountable so that the learning happens for that one student, knowing that the entire community is responsible for their learning.
- [29:36]
Greg
You know, we're down to about nine minutes left in the session. You know, I wanted to just get back to something Kim said way, way earlier. Kim, you talked about students being inspired and prepared, which I think really wonderful. I would add a third element. You know, whenever I visit, I'm writing a series called Innovative High Schools. And so I get the best job in the country. I just basically just fly around the country and visit really cool high schools. And one of the things that I found at the best ones is that you can walk up to any student in the hallway and you can ask them, why are you here? And they can answer that, which is not a question I think we would have asked maybe 20 years ago or 30 years ago, or even maybe, I don't know, 10 years ago. And I wonder, I think you guys have all been in a way where without using the word, I think you guys have all been talking about purpose. So I wonder, let's just spend a couple of minutes talking about the importance of that if you like to. If not, we can move on.
- [30:44]
Kim
No, I think it speaks directly to the human advantage and the human need. And I do think everyone on the panel has spoken to it already. And most of the things we are all up here talking with you about around the human advantage are they're being presented as if they're new durable skills, purpose, agency, narrative. We all know as parents and humans, this is what we all want to be doing in learning and education from the beginning. These are very old things that we just.
- [31:11]
Greg
2,000 years.
- [31:12]
Kim
Yeah, we just kind of accidentally engineered them out of the system in the name of efficiency. So a lot of things happen to be more efficient, to reach more kids, to be scale, to be faster. Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. What we're all now saying is if we use AI in a smart way to solve some of those efficiency problems, we get to then focus on those things we have always cared the most about. The durable skills, the connection, the narrative, the agency, the purpose. And how can we bring them back explicitly to say. And anyone in this audience who has a teen knows this question of purpose is huge. Right now. Young people are saying out loud through chronic absenteeism, by leaving school, by being disengaged. I don't know if I have a purpose. Like, should I bother voting? Is there any point in trying to fight the climate crisis? There's wars. Like, there are real things happening in the world and they want to be problem solvers. And they are saying to us, how can you actually prepare me to be a problem solver in the real world? Which is what I want to do. But sitting still in my classroom memorizing facts is not helping me to do that. So I think purpose is in everything you guys are doing every day.
- [32:16]
Greg
Let's do this. We have about five and a half minutes left. Let's take a couple of questions. I'm going to come around Oprah style. Just kind of come up to the
- [32:24]
Kim
front of the room while you move the mics. Colin can you speak to purpose? Because you spoke about it before in terms of the way you designed Lumi. And I just want to make sure that gets out there.
- [32:31]
Colin Kaepernick
Yeah, absolutely. So when we think about purpose and also touching on this human component for our students as they're creating, we want them to have agency in that process. We want them sharing who they are. And when we think about the future that they're walking into, we need them to be able to operate independently. We need them to be able to go out and say, this is the problem I need to solve. I'll figure out how to solve it. Here's the steps I'm going to take. Now. Part of what we found in this process, too, is in giving students agency. We see the social, emotional side come through as well. And we saw this in Newark and some phenomenal examples last year. I'll just share one. We had a student that took some of his learnings from his ELA class, from his biology class, and actually merged these into a narrative. Narrative he created was around an inventor create a magic fork allowed him to transport to different times, different places, and was centered around food, family, and community. What he shared after the fact was that magic fork represented his mother. His mother had died five years earlier. He had never shared this with anyone in his classroom. His teachers, his principal. Now, what we saw on the tail end of that is he has better connection with his classmates. He has better connection with his teachers. They understand him better. So the work that's happening in this process, they have voice, they have agency, but it is building better connection. So when we talk about what are we using it for and to what purpose and to what end, like that becomes critically important. And we see this show up in any facet, in many facets. The other part is we are still tracking towards the standards and the outcomes that we need in the process. So those are not lost. But we expand the opportunity for our students to be able to relate to the curriculum, how they want to, and drive that process.
- [34:34]
Dr. Maria Ortiz
And it's ownership, too. That student had ownership, and he was one example of the very many. Throughout the years that we've been working. We are on three years now of working with Lumi in Newark. And the voices of the students and the purpose and the drive, the narratives that they're creating, they really see that. And that's what's driving our attendance, and that's what's driving our enrollment, and that's what's driving engagement with. With, you know, with by default, that kind of ownership in the classroom. And that student voice is what's taking care of all of the important things that everyone else cares about.
- [35:08]
Greg
Okay, thank you. Let's take a couple questions, who you are, where you're from, make it a question.
- [35:14]
Jamie Speed
It will be a question, I promise. My name is Jamie Speed. I'm a professor at a California community college in Orange county and a mother of a 12 year old. And the thing that I have heard repeatedly over the past couple days is that they need to be adaptable and have soft skills and creative and spark and everything else. And we have robbed our teachers of being able to do that with them. We have, we have built a structure where they cannot, they don't have the flexibility. They're working to a metric all the time. And so how are we going to change that so that teachers can do what teachers need to do?
- [35:49]
Dr. Maria Ortiz
I think it's, that's a very important statement and thank you for sharing and voicing on behalf of the teachers that are experiencing this. One thing that we do in Newark and we include the teachers, they're part of the collaboration that happens when we are considering what platform and what software we're using. With Lumi, there's an exchange where the Lumi team works very closely with the teachers and the teachers have feedback. I remember doing a walkthrough and doing a visit. The teachers had feedback. I think it was like nine o' clock at Malcolm X. By that evening the feedback from the teacher was already fixed because immediately Collins team was like, okay, we're on it. The next thing you know, by that evening it was fixed. We needed to hear the voice of the teacher. The inclusivity of the teacher and the practitioner is very important so that they are part of what's expected.
- [36:45]
Greg
Okay, we got time for one more quick question on the other side. Yes. No, this person with the orange glasses,
- [36:53]
Audience Member
I will take my chance. This is a question for Colin and Maria and maybe I misunderstood what you were saying earlier, so apologies if I misunderstood. But like it seemed like you were suggesting that the models or the things you've made at Lumi perhaps prohibit students from getting the output out. Like, much like you could do with the direct cloud access. Isn't that kneecapping students? Because that's not how the world actually works. Right? It's like giving them extra calculator and then removing the plus and minus button. So it seems like this is like a stopgap solution to how education should actually work in the future. So curious on your thoughts there.
- [37:28]
Colin Kaepernick
Yeah, great question. We don't look at that as kneecapping. If we don't learn the foundations of how to be able to write, if we don't learn the foundations of how to think and process, then getting to an end output actually doesn't matter. It's not a differentiator. Now, for all of us in this room, we have gone through that process of having to develop those skills. So when we're engaging with models, we already have that built into how we're thinking about it, how we're approaching it. The best example that I can give right now is when we look at the industry more broadly. Our highest performers right now will use software engineering. The best software engineers are getting the most out of AI right now. Our junior level engineers coming in, they don't understand the processes, they don't understand what questions they should be asking. They can't plan and prompt out what they're trying to solve for, but they have some of the foundations that they can still use it the same way. What we're trying to help build is this process of how do you think through it to be able to get to that expertise? Because from that expertise now you can actually fully utilize the tool. So we think of that as process to get to that end outcome.
- [38:48]
Greg
I would love to keep talking about this, love to take more questions, but we are at time. I want to thank the panel for fabulous discussion.