A (2:28)

World.

B (2:29)

World liver. You've lived in Canada, you lived in Ireland. You're in France now. In a beautiful part of France, by the way.

A (2:37)

Yeah. For anyone interested.

B (2:41)

The big question is I. I'm assuming you speak fluent French.

A (2:46)

No, no. The problem was I've. I fell in love with a French woman before I spoke enough French to truly do it. So she's bilingual, which means I just keep cheating and having her translate things, explain things. Every time we go out, you find that one person who speaks fluent English and you can kind of just get by. It's getting better. Slow but surely. But I already see my 2 year old knowing more words than me, which is not a good thing.

B (3:18)

Well, you know, soon, soon, Kevin, they're going to have the universal translator for your ear. You just wear an earpiece and you're set, you're, you're done. You don't have to worry.

A (3:26)

We got meta Ray Ban glasses plus whatever Meta had for earpieces. And then I can have translations and text and my ear be all set.

B (3:33)

Yeah, you'll be all set. All right, so, so there's AI. AI is going to improve our lives. It'll improve communications, more interlingual marriages. Is that a, is that a thing? I've never heard of it, but we just made it up, right? Inter, Inter lingual marriages. There you go.

A (3:50)

Yeah, I think people, I think people talk about is bilingual or triangle relationships or multinational relationships because I've met quite a few people here in the old. The area we're at is, is very family focused and so we meet a lot of other international families and so they kind of say they're international or bilingual, trilingual. I have not met a quadlingual household, but I bet a few buying tries.

B (4:11)

That's, that's crazy. That's, that's, that's crazy. So let's talk about education. I mean this is, this is square in, in you develop curriculum, you teach, you do all these things. What are you seeing the big changes that are happening?

A (4:31)

It's like everybody trying to keep up with AI. The big changes are every week in some way. But the interesting part on the education part, on the education angle, I should say is people are trying to take on a lot of research is now coming out because generative AI has been around since again, you know, October, November 2022, ChatGPT hit. We've actually had time to do some research. Plenty of people have been doing, you know, pilots for using AI in the classroom, also AI in the front, but also in the background of classroom for administrators or teachers, for context, for everybody listening. I work with Intel Digital Readiness for AI for workforce in the us I'm the lead trainer there. So I'm working with community colleges to actually design and implement their AI programs based on our AI curriculum. I'm currently working with Darren on that, as you mentioned before, to try to build an eugenic AI course. And with that I'm talking to people for the front, the background, how to use it. We've where all up here network sessions to share Ideas. But what simulated our conversation last time was how I recently just got back from the UNESCO Digital Learning Week which was basically a session, a week long event that's very much just focused on, you know, stimulating reflection, starting discourse, having debates and just sharing ideas around the central topic of AI and the future education, which is how this all has snowballed for us and had a fantastic call and that was very illuminating for seeing what's out there on the global scale besides just me and my work in the US because there's a lot of things going on for you know, again pilots in the classroom, but also innovation in regards to how they act. People are designing courses, designing how they actually deliver content. And that a shift, it seems potentially just experimental, but a potential shift in how people approach content delivery, education as a whole and building have communities around education besides just taking information regurgitated out, which if you go to literature of education doesn't work.

B (6:36)

It doesn't. Well and that's where we've been for a hundred years, right? I mean we've been hey, here's your date, here's your information. I'll test you on what you memorized and how to. And some classes were problem solving classes, but most of it's regurgitation of, of information you were either supposed to read. It always seemed like that when I was in college. Well, you were supposed to read this, this paper or this book and I'm going to test you on what was in the book. That's how we've, that's how we've done education for a while now, right?

A (7:11)

Yep, that's exactly that. And it comes down to kind of the fact that how the history of education in higher education, especially universities was that it was tough to get to. Right? Education was valuable, it was precious, it was stored in books. And slowly but surely since you know the Internet, information is becoming more and more and more and more and more available to everybody. To the point now you can actually have a kind of a self guided tutor as a generative AI model that can have that personalized element for content delivery which does then lead the question which is why what that big topic was for the disruption of AI is what does education as institutions, what they actually practice and they do. What does it mean if it's not just content delivery? Because AI can do that for us. That being said, I will kind of put in a caveat here. Although I do agree that AI can do it for us. I do actually think there's a lot of gaps or weaknesses, I should say in the current model of what we think is generative AI would not think that this is the final form of what generative AI is, especially regards to education. Again, it only really hit the. Hit the world.

B (8:22)

It's really a content distribution, Right. I mean, that's really what it's given us, right?

A (8:27)

Yeah. So just basically. But it is in the content distribution. It's just out there. It's giving it to you how you want it. Sure. But you know, in regards to guiding conversation, making it truly tutoring this idea of personalization. It can personalize because you can ask your own questions, but is it personalized? And because it knows, you know, what point it could get you and how to kind of lead you along that journey. I think there's a lot of gaps in regards to how those conversations and how students can engage with generative AI to get the most out of it for themselves, especially at K12. Because a lot of the research that I keep seeing out is all kind of university bachelor's math in general. Who is great, right? Like it's. I. I'm so glad to see a lot of work done there. But the problem with that is you're already pretty educated, you know, have something you get there. Self learning. Yeah. You're not a beginner once you're already in post secondary, but when you're forming your education habits, you're forming your engagement with, you know, your own learning and knowledge acquisition and problem solving, analytical skills, et cetera. What does it mean there?

B (9:45)

You know, the thing that's popping in my head, Kevin, is a quote by Socrates about technology how many thousands of years ago. Right. And that was, he felt like the written word would be the destruction of human thought. I didn't know that he did because he felt like if I wrote something down, there was no more need to think critically about things because the knowledge was now captured in a book no longer in your head. And of course Plato, his number one student, wrote it down and that's why we have it today, which I think is ironic, but when you were talking about that, it made me think about maybe generative AI is bringing us to the point where now, instead of relying on books, the content is there, so now teachers can focus more. Like what Socrates would do, which would get to know the student really well and teach them the way that they could learn. And for Plato, if you remember the story of Plato, he took Plato out to the ocean and held him under the water until he couldn't breathe. Right. He almost died and let him up and did that three or four times and said, when you want air as much as you want knowledge, for me come back. Which for Plato was important for him to. Because he was just going through the paces. Socrates knew that, right? Well, maybe teachers, I don't, I'm not espousing teachers go drown their students.

A (11:19)

But maybe first everybody ethic, first teaching, best practices.

B (11:24)

Yeah, yeah, exactly. But maybe teachers don't need to focus so much on content delivery like they have in the past and now switch that up to learning more about the student, more about how I can coach the student into learning instead of standing in front of a classroom of 30 kids five times a day, which is 150, 180 students and not. And being somewhat disconnected.

A (11:55)

Yeah, I do hope that's the direction we go because there's much more fun things to do in education than just take in content and regurgitate it out. But the question is, if we are going to shift it to teachers are being more mentors, more coaches in their role model classroom, or these kind of these communities of learning, whatever it becomes in the future, what are the students doing? How are they acquiring the information? What's the actual structure? I feel a lot of people, especially the people that work for community colleges, they're actually kind of curious about that because the mechanism, the structure is what's kind of becoming a big question mark, especially when it comes to evaluation. So if you were saying, well, the content, who delivered here, great. But then if that's changing how I get information and what I'm testing them on, then that also then changes what I'm trying to value a hundred percent.

B (12:49)

So that, and, and I'm, I'm struggling with this myself. In the class that I'm teaching right now, I teach at Vanderbilt, I'm teaching cloud computing this semester. And I completely changed it up. I don't lecture in class anymore. I record my lectures ahead of time. I give them written, verbal, video examples. I give them all of that. And the lecture time that I normally have are discussions and it's unformatted. It's whatever they want to discuss. They know they've got deadlines on projects that are coming up. And I think it's going well to evaluate how they're doing and whether they learn the material. Because ultimately my job is to help them to become experts in this specific subject matter. Right. So, yeah, how do I do that? Right now it's an interview at the end of the semester and I'm hoping this goes okay. I'm like, oh no, what Have I done? Luckily my class is not huge. It's 10 students. Right. If I had a hundred students, how in the world am I going to interview a hundred students? It's just not going to happen. Right, right. Because even with a half hour interview, that's still 50 hours of interviews and. Right. So with 10 I can easily do it. And, and I think the interviews will go well because I'm working, I'm working with these guys every week and I'm. We're discussing things and we're learning together. So it's a different approach to what I did previous semesters where I lectured every Thursday I gave a test once a month. I know they cheated using ChatGPT on the test.

A (14:40)

I'm like, yeah, but so like that right there, that mechanism of how you're running your class, the fact that you can have all the information ahead of time in different modalities. Awesome. Go classes discussion. And at the end of it you have the interviews and that's the main assignment, the main deliverable for evaluation. That's. That's awesome. I think it's really exciting to be in that kind of classroom. But the key thing as well is a master level and it's a small classroom as we said.

B (15:09)

It's a master level and small classroom. You're right.

A (15:11)

Yeah. So for people like in the K12 because one thing I find quite interesting, my, my dad, we mentioned this before, my dad is a philosophy teacher and he experimented this idea called the Harkness Circle which is basically what you're doing there. If you get people, students into a group and you have student led conversation where the teacher, the educator, the professor, whoever it might be, what the title is is facilitating that conversation to ensure that it's, it's kind of covers the basics that they want that they're. You're guiding but you're still trying to have it completely student led. Uh, and it worked really well all the time but it kind of fell off a bit at the time that he was teaching grade 1112 and after kind of doing that for quite a few years we were discussing that and he thinks the problem is that well one, it's still K12. Right. It's not K, but it's the end group of that for those philosophy. Is there a lot of these guys are they're doing their first philosophy course in the first place. So there's so much new information to come in. There's no new ways of thinking and perspectives. There's new format of kind of engaging with philosophy. It's another kind of topic to get into. And I've always had the kind of feel, I have no data to support this kind of thing, but Harkness circles or these kind of mentor discussion approaches are fantastic when students have their own thoughts or something similar enough to their own thoughts to drive that the grade five kindergarten students, like, where is that? And again, functionally, in the classroom, you've 30 crazy little rugrats running around. How do you have a semblance of structure to kind of sort it out? And that's what I'm really excited to see. What will happen down the line.

B (17:04)

Well, there's a school. There's a school movement happening in the United States. Alpha schools. I've been really impressed with what I've seen so far in that the students are AI learned. They learn through AI. Kind of like Alex. Alex is a AI program that teaches people math. And I'm seeing more and more schools use it because it works with the student and learns how the student learns and then progresses them along. But they need a coach, which is a teacher that encourages, helps them when they get stuck. They've taken that concept in Alpha schools and says, two hours a day with your AI learning mentor. I don't know what the right word is, but they're tutor. Yeah, learning tutor. And you learn the. You learn the way that you learn instead of in a big classroom in where it's just lectures, where some of the kids learn that way, but not all of the kids this way it's personalized for you. And that's only two hours a day. That's it. The rest of the day, they're doing projects either individually or in groups. Because not everyone is a group worker. Yeah, we want to think that they are, but that's not true. Right. Some people, like, do a lot better individually. Go and do my thing and then show it later. And that's what they've kind of adjusted to with this. And I'm very fascinated to see how these schools will continue to evolve and adopt this new way of thinking. To me, the system is broken today and we need a change, which I think is very obvious as we start seeing teachers teaching to tests, because that's how they're evaluated. We're evaluating. The system just creates. Creates a bad education for children overall, I think.

A (19:07)

And so I do agree there's some issues in the education system that I hope are getting kind of smoothed out. But come back to Alpha School. One thing I think is for anyone listening to hear two hours of actual content delivery. What are Students doing for the rest of their time, the rest of that time is that project based work, but it's long term project. And this is the kind of thing that I'm really excited about because project based learning is not new. I'm working with community colleges. That's the main thing applicable. Build a portfolio, build projects that are relatable to the workforce. So you come in, do a course to assert, do a degree and move out right to the workforce. That's the whole goal for vocational schools globally. Community colleges in the US but this idea of having a long term projects I think is very enriching for what could be kind of the future of the way education is delivered. Because if content is just one aspect, it's like, well then you should have time. But if you're doing long term products, you're me researching like mad some other things to answer some problem. So there's two hours for content. Just kind of keep that kind of path of this information you're being provided. But then to go through a long journey over a long period of time, like a full year, right, to battle with a project which is going to have one main problem because that's what you're trying to solve with the problem that project's for. But there's a myriad of problems underneath. It is incredible. And you know, it makes me think of Zen and artist motorcycle maintenance. Oh yeah, yeah. But you know, for those who haven't listened to Reddit, it's a, it's a, it's an older book. Fantastic, very accessible book that's very philosophical but follows quite a good story. And it's centered on this question of like what is quality? And he kind of, he, he talks through the idea of, you know, maintaining a motorcycle and you know, how to fix it, having the knowledge, enjoying the kind of quality of that. As also talking about his philosophy teacher at his time, like discussing this question and you know, the. Anyways, the idea of quality I think comes is a weird intangible thing that we also can know when it's there or not there. For instance, we watch a movie and let's say on paper it looks exactly this other movie in other cinema. But people come out of the movies kind of go and it's missing something and it's that little je ne sais quoi which is hard to pinpoint, hard to articulate, but when people kind of know it's there. Yeah, yeah. And I think that's one of those things that comes with kind of mastery. People talk about, you know, musicians having A voice through their instrument. It's like, how do you have a voice through your instruments, an instrument like you don't. Your voice isn't there. They're not singers, they're. It's a saxophonist, it's a trumpeter. So what's the difference? And I do think that the ability to have individual sway and have a voice and have your own stamp on the world comes from hours, years of that kind of mastery of a subject matter as a whole in the classroom. If that can come down to one long year long project, you are engaging with it in such a deep way because you have to know how to solve this more complex problem that's. But beyond you. And that's where I think there's a lot of potential in the education system to get students engaging with like long reaching goals, long term plans, long term projects are beyond themselves. Right. But that they can achieve in some way. That's the role of the mentor, that's that role of that educator as a coach, which I find quite invigorating as an idea.

B (22:33)

In fact, this, this what? This one of the office schools, they're middle schoolers, run a food truck.

A (22:40)

That's so cool. That's awesome.

B (22:41)

Isn't that cool? They had to figure out health. They all had to get health licenses and food handler permits. They have a marketing people. They've got all, all these different things that, that they're doing and everyone plays a role. They've got people that are cooking, they have people that are advertising. They've got everything. I'm like, wow. They're learning all the important aspects of running a business in middle school, right? Instead of let's read about, let's read about it.

A (23:28)

One thing I love is like there is a very, you know, the American thing, like we're running a business. That's awesome. One thing I love to think about though is the fact that you have to have skills and knowledge and communication and critical thinking, problem solving to run that business. So it's like, yeah, running business is a great, it's a great model for education because it's just so dynamic. But the fact that they have to go get licenses means that to apply that course is that they read, pay attention, they have to know how to communicate effectively to get licensed up to organization things. That's very pretty basic. But then marketing, all the communications, budgeting on finances. Oh, there's math again. And one kind of fun topic. You know, I don't know if this will be really be the future, but in the kind of after hours Time I was chatting with a very interesting man at UNESCO and he was talking about he's wonder if he should write a piece about there might be a return to medieval core curriculum. Right. Because if you think that if you think about ChatGPT and generative AI and all these different models as kind of the core content delivery method, then what subjects do you teach? What's the core content people should engage with? Well, it doesn't matter if you're doing marketing or you're doing woodworking or you're doing philosophy. Which, which philosophy do you want to do? English? What books do you want to read? Science, is it chemistry, is it physics, is it biology? Computer science? Coding? What language? Like the actual subject matter doesn't really matter because the educator does not need to get everybody on the same page to like every single thing is truly personalized learning. So what's the core competencies? Well, I'm not sure if you're familiar with medieval education, but it's basically grammar, rhetoric and logic. That was like phase one as you get older. After that it'd be arithmetic, geometry and for them music and astronomy. The basic idea is can you communicate very much back to tie it back to Socrates before. Right. Grammar and rhetoric, can you communicate and formulate your thoughts and express them effectively while be able to convince people and be logically sound in your arguments so you both can follow what people are saying, but then you know, strike right back and so can you actually talk and write effectively to communicate ideas effectively? Then after that, arithmetic and geometry, can you understand our physical world at the most fundamental level, which is the universal language of math. Right. And then because the medieval education was very tied to Catholic Church actually at least Western, you know. Right. It'd be very tied to music and astronomy because a big practice in the church, the kind of connection to the cosmos and then God and us in our place kind of thing. But the first five of grammar, rhetoric, logic, arithmetic, geometry, I find quite compelling because there is kind of your core competencies for especially K12 level, which is I'm kind of, I think is a big question mark the long term of Gen AI because I do wonder, are we doing a big experiment with gen in the classroom on the K12 students, you know, especially K5K to 9 even, you know.

B (26:31)

Yeah, no, no, I think you're hitting something here that hopefully we can see some fundamental changes. We're already seeing some in the United States, but I also think this could have a potential huge impact on underdeveloped countries, undereducated countries, where now the accessibility to information and content is through the roof. Where before it was restricted because of cost or political or whatever the case may be, now we've opened this up to far more people. So I always thought that it would be a leveling, it would level out the playing field for a lot of people. But the opposite is what I'm seeing.

A (27:20)

So we talked about before. I do agree the greasy is the opposite we've seen. And I think the phrase you said was it's more of a magnifier than it is a leveling age.

B (27:28)

Yeah.

A (27:29)

Like in regards to your first point about kind of global communities and underserved communities that are educated regions sort of thing. That's why I do think that it'd be extremely beneficial. Because although yes, there's a lot of problems, this is where, you know, if you think it through and like they're just a matter of getting information in people's hands and having to have thought through pedagogy, course design and thinking about how to actually enable people to have the digital, digital literacy to engage with these tools, but then also turn that into educational opportunities. The biggest thing that we keep seeing for generative AI in general, what people teachers are scared of is just cheating.

B (28:11)

Right.

A (28:11)

So they use it and they, they kind of copy and paste. But in regions where people are thirsty and have real world problems like just trying to make their communities run effectively, there is that thirst right there. So I think it's a bit. It's two different kind of topics. Right. How do I keep my kids in this part of the world engaged and not cheating? Right. But that's really just highlighting the fact that your course was cheap.

B (28:46)

I, I would go back to the definition of cheating.

A (28:49)

Oh, yeah, I know, I agree. It doesn't really apply. That's why they get air quotes with all the listeners. I didn't.

B (28:55)

Yeah. Because my students that I have right now, they can't cheat. I've eliminated it. And they go, well, no, they can use ChatGPT. No, I told them they have to use generative AI to get these assignments done. And I expect to see their prompts, I expect to see how they interacted with the generative AI to come up with the solution together. Because I'm trying to build subject matter experts that are AI augmented so they can't cheat using generative AI. I took that off the table, which is a very strange thing for a professor to say because I'm talking to other professors and they're saying, I only allow handwritten essays or Only handwritten exam questions. I'm like, why? That's not gonna happen in the real world. It's just not.

A (29:49)

I kind of look at it as it's the biggest open book assignment, right? Oh, yeah, open book. I remember going to open book exam, like my first one in university. I was like, this is gonna be a breeze. Like, I have the book. Oh, no, you are screwed if you. If you think you have time to search the book. It's there because it's so hard that, sure, make your notes, know your subject matter, but how does making you engage with the. The book before the exam? Because you need to make your notes, you need to annotate it. You need to know how to search it effectively. You can only search it effectively if you know how it's organized. And so it comes to ChatGPT, it's like, well, how do you make it open? You make the mechanism of how you're teaching, how you're engaging with the content, is one, you have to talk to me. Blocks can't talk for you. Well, they can, but in person makes it much harder. But then also, you have to know your subject matter so well that it's actually necessary to use that open book because you can't keep up otherwise. So I applaud you for that. I think that's a great way to go about it.

B (30:49)

Well, and I'm glad you brought that open book thing up, because I remember one professor, I took his course three times so I could finally pass it. He was an incredible mathematician. It was a vector calculus class. And I remember the first time he goes, hey, open books, open notes, open calculator. Because we all had scientific smart calculators at the time. And he said, 10 questions. I was, oh, no, 10, 10 questions, no problem. And he. And then he says, it took me three hours to take the test. You, you should plan for the whole day in the testing center. And we all just went, oh, no, what am I doing?

A (31:27)

That was it. Yeah, I don't. I don't be critical, but I do, I do think a scary part, as you said, generative AI is kind of a magnifier. A scary part for a lot of people is the fact that it is a magnifier. And in order to do that, as you said, you said this guy had a course you had to take. You didn't see the university, you didn't see the department. The key thing that made it so challenging was this professor knew his stuff so darn well. And he was like, this is what I expect from you. So he had created bar was super high. Yep. Yeah. And he, and he could probably, he probably met that bar. He said that on purpose because he's above and beyond it. And that's incredible. But that's kind of, I think the call to action that general AIs hit for educators is like, well, you need to kind of raise up here because you can't just hear the slide decks from last year. I'm going to go regurgitate this. It just doesn't, it just doesn't work. You need to have some mechanisms. You need to have some way to kind of take it above and beyond what people. One thing people ask me a lot is how do I have, you know, gen proof assignments? And like what, as I said before, what's like, why are you trying to proof it against gen AI? Like you're, you're tr. The way you're framing it is, this is cheating. I need to get away from it. I need to avoid it, I need to prevent it. It's like, well, no gen AI proof assignments actually is just something so difficult but achievable. And that's the thing you have to know because you're the educator teaching your own class. You know your class, you know your students that they can only do with generative AI because then it's actually engaging. And that's to come. Tie back why I think long term projects is so interesting because there's no way to achieve the outcome without the support and time. And that's where learning can truly happen. One thing I kind of joked my wife about was we're kind of like, oh, we don't really want our kids to have phones too young. They're only 2 4.

B (33:13)

Yeah, we were the same way.

A (33:14)

Yep. Yeah, but I was kind of joking. Like I, I would let them have a phone at any age if they could build it. And she was like, they're not gonna build it. Like, exactly. But if they show up to me and said, I built my phone, I'd be like, you get it, you deserve that. Yeah, it's fine.

B (33:26)

I'm laughing, Kevin, because one of my sons is the same. He's an electrical engineer and he's like, my kids can have a phone as long as they build one. And I'm like, okay, son, if you're.

A (33:39)

That if you're using your technology so effectively because you're just curious as heck, you want to build things, you want to understand, go for it. A coding, electrical engineering, but also design, like to actually make it, you know, enjoyable to hold. And not just some crazy steampunk like Frankenstein phone. That's so valuable for you to go through that process. You've earned that phone. I'd be so happy for you to have that.

B (34:02)

That is.

A (34:03)

I don't think they can do it at five.

B (34:04)

You and my son should get together and have these conversations. He's got one child and one on the way, so he's catching up to you.

A (34:13)

Yeah, well, I have the event for now. We could talk at that. At the key ages. When are they getting into electrical engineering and we can see if they're sniffing around the spare part shop.

B (34:24)

That's awesome. Hey, Kevin, this has been so enjoyable. I love talking to you, but we're out of time, which really stinks. But thanks for coming on the show. I really appreciate if people want to reach out to you and have discussions with you, find out more about what you do. Where do they go?

A (34:40)

Kevin, easy place would be LinkedIn right as we all there. Kevin Rush. Pretty simple name but you can find me no problem. Look, I'm the big, big bald guy with a beard.

B (34:51)

Big bald guy with a beard. There you go. There's your moniker. The big bald guy with the beard in living in France, not speaking French there. There's another thing.

A (35:00)

I think some French just not fluent. You said fluent. You set me. I said fluent.

B (35:04)

You're right. I said fluent. I said fluent. All right. Thanks again, Kevin for coming on the show.

A (35:09)

Thanks for having me on, Darren. Appreciate it.

B (35:16)

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