This is Busted Pencils, fully-ledded education talk.
Here are your hosts, Dr. Tim Slecker and Dr. Johnny Lupinacci,
educated educators talking education.
Welcome to Busted Pencils, fully-ledded education talk,
educated educators talking education.
Just me today, Johnny Lupinacci, you know, he has work to do on campus,
and he's really busy, but just how are you, my friend?
Oh, I'm doing great.
Week is full of promise.
Let's take it on.
Let's take it on.
Let's move this on.
I tell you what though,
love our classes and session sessions segments that we're recording.
Great guests we've been having and have one today.
He is the assistant director of innovation at the University of Mississippi
and a leader in AI literacy for educators.
He's been ahead of the curve of helping educators navigate the rapidly evolving
world of artificial intelligence with a thoughtful, balanced approach.
Welcome to Busted Pencils, Mark Watkins, Mark.
How are you?
I'm doing well.
Thank you so much for that introduction, Tim.
I hope to be behind the curve at some point because I think you guys know
this has been quite a bit to deal with, but how do you sit down talk?
And hopefully get some more insights about, well, just how AI is
currently evolving right before our eyes.
It's really evolving.
In fact, you made me just think now of a new first question,
which is I feel though behind all the time when it's when we're talking
about AI and education.
I know when people talk to me, they're like, Tim, you got to understand
where you're at, what you're talking about.
You're way ahead of the, you know, the main population.
And I'm kind of like, well, then wow, people must be really behind
because there's something happening every day.
And I feel woefully unprepared in already what's already been happening
and that I feel like I'm always playing catch up.
Mark wonder if you can counsel me out of my despair.
I share your despair and your challenges too.
I think everyone does.
What's happened with the deployment of these tools is that they're
outpacing even experts' attentions.
So we had an update from Google recently with notebook LM,
where, which is a standalone product within Google Labs.
It's been on the market for about a year, but they did a very small
update where you take any document and turn it into a podcast,
which changed the sort of like dynamic too.
I've made people like the situation where we're going down to it.
Well, wait, are people still going to be listening to live human
podcasts or having AI generating voices?
And you know, something as small as simple as that because Google
has tons of these different projects going on live in Google Labs
right now.
And they just added it from another project called Aluminate
into notebook LM, change that dynamic.
And now everyone's kind of reacting to this.
And there are probably three or four dozens of those different
types of things happening every month or two months.
Right.
So it's completely outpaced our attention.
I think that we just want to focus on small areas if we can,
too, to sort of digest what's happening to and put it into
greater context.
Yeah.
But yeah, there's no way anyone can keep track of all this.
There's just not.
Okay, so I'm, you know, so I'm normal.
Okay, I mean, sort of, I know Jess has got the look going.
Well, Tim, I mean, that depends.
It's debatable.
It's a little debatable.
I mean, there's nothing wrong with you, Tim.
We love you.
And you know, normal, it's overrated.
Well, hey, if you want to weigh in on that 6085578577,
that's our mail bag number so that you can comment.
Yeah, I mean, I guess if you want to comment on my mental
stability, go for it.
But talk about Mark Watkins and artificial intelligence.
Are you feeling behind what are you doing to keep pace with
this so that we are moving in this?
If you're an educator, your students are using it.
Are you using it?
How are they using it?
Do you wish you could use it differently?
These are all the questions around artificial intelligence
for educators that keep coming up.
Mark, in fact, you're your latest piece on sub on the
sub-stack, you bring together this combination of something
that a lot of people remember, which is I remember when
the calculator made the scene and that changed things.
But you are talking about going like this might not really
be a calculator moment as much as this might be a culture
moment.
Give me a sense of the listener.
What do you mean?
Yeah, I think when Chad GPT publicly was released,
good, it's only been 22 months since that happened.
Can you believe that?
It's just been 22 months since that occurred.
A lot of people were sort of grasping to analogies for two.
One of them they picked up on was this is a lot like a calculator.
And that was a very comforting sort of comparison to it too.
But junior to VAI is so far beyond Chad GPT.
It's going into audio multimodal facets too.
And it's really impacting our sort of daily lives in many
different ways.
We just haven't really had time to process it.
John Warner who also writes on sub-stack is author of many
different books too.
He had a really great post here about how there is a private
company that is using AI voice to take a person's collective
knowledge and organize that after they die so that can then
interact with their relatives.
It's called being called grief tech.
And it's just like mind boggling that we've gone from a
text generating software to using the genitive AI tools to
theoretically create a sort of virtual avatar of yourself to
see that your loved ones can interact with them.
So I think this technology is so far beyond a calculator.
It really is becoming a cultural technology like Google
did for search and also have Wikipedia and maybe even how
writing actually impacted human condition and communication.
Yeah, thinking about that though too, the way you just said
that is to make me wonder in John Warner, we love him.
He's been on the show quite a few times talking about this
and again, his very cautionary, if not somewhat frightened
sense of going like, wait a minute, people, you're jumping on
board too quickly and making some pretty bold assumptions
about what it can do and what it can't.
And especially in the realm of writing, and we always talk
about that, but I kind of I see this too like you do though
Mark and it isn't a calculator.
It's just not.
And I remember when I realized that was when I was showing
students on the campus where I was working at this and one
of the students made to me a really profound leap that said
this is different.
She said, it's not like Google.
It's like I have an assistant and that was that moment
was like, yeah, wait, this is different.
I this isn't an information retrieval machine.
This is way different.
And so according to that student, it's an assistant.
In fact, now all my work with with AI professional
and development that I'm giving myself says too.
And if you want the best use of it, don't treat it like Google
because you already got Google to do that.
Treat it as your intern, your assistant, your friend.
And that kind of creeps people out though.
It does creep people out.
I think for a good reason.
And I actually am very aligned with the John's thoughts
about this happening way too quickly.
I just want us to be more cautious about how we quickly
adopt these things.
Open AI demo their voice assistant, which is now available
on all the different pro plans for chat GPT
where you can talk to in real time.
And not only can you talk to it,
but you can change the tone of it too.
You can make it speak softly to the whole idea
is that this can become incredibly persuasive to you.
Obviously, if this is good use for good,
this could be incredibly helpful for people
that need assistance with mental health
at any point in time of the day too,
with students needing tutoring.
But if you imagine a conservative or liberal legislature
getting a hold of this technology
and just sensory and information based off
of that political instance,
you can kiss book bands goodbye
because then you were just going to basically say,
well, here's this wonderful app
that is connected to the world that's your personal assistant
but it's programmed with our values.
And to me, that's what makes this so daunting
that's just happened
and we haven't even really had time to process it.
We certainly haven't had any time for legislation
to catch up with this in any way, shape, or form.
And we haven't just really had time to talk about
to our students about what's the best way
we could use this to actually help you learn
versus offloading those skills.
So it's just massive changes that are happening now
because all the infrastructure of our world
exists through the clouds.
And these changes can now be shipped in a few hours
and updating to existing apps
and we already have on our phones and our laptops.
All right, so we know all this.
We wish it would slow down.
We know, you know, even quote, we're behind
but it is going forward.
And you did say something there that recognized this though.
And I'm with this too.
I see real potential benefits
in what you really just said,
this ability to potentially create better learning
conditions and or how students,
again, way beyond like it's not a copy plagiarism machine.
It's like if that's what you're worried about,
sorry, you've missed the conversation.
The ability to potentially have a student,
you know, and my background is in teaching and education
and some of the quote adaptive technologies
we've had out there to help students
with learning difficulties, right?
That I can really see this as you just said
the multimodal aspect more and more to the ability
for it AI to see to then talk about what it sees.
You're just thinking about that going boy
from an adaptive technology's position.
This is going to really be profoundly helpful
for certain learners to really engage
when they in places and times
that they never could in the past.
Oh, absolutely.
And we've been testing these different features
of the University of Mississippi since about six months
before CHEDGPT was publicly released.
We started back in May of 2022 with GPT-3
that precursor to AI's big chatbot.
And some of the things we've been testing on too
are AI for media assistance,
for note-taking, for tutoring.
And we've noticed too that those are some profound
potential changes that this happens.
When you give a student who has who is newer diverse
or who is working on their second or third language
and AI-ready assistant
that can take any digital document
and change the actual phrasing to summarize it
at their reading level, at their language,
that can be absolutely game-changing.
The sort of sweet spot for education, though,
is how do we keep this for being,
how do you keep this being a tool that helps those students
versus the ability for my students.
They're like, thank you so much, Mr. Watkins.
You just gave me a tool that's going to turn my world
into cliff notes on demand.
And I said, well, no, your close reading skills
are actually pretty valuable.
We'd like to keep that.
So we're going to balance this.
And one way I could do that
and one way I talk about this to educators too
is that it's not just students using this technology
and what you said before is completely true.
This is not about a cheating tool anymore.
This is about a transformative tool
and it can absolutely transform that experience
in that relationship between a teacher and a learner.
So we want to be thoughtful about this, obviously,
and be open about it.
So I think one thing that we are trying here
at the University of Mississippi for the first time,
this is hopefully this is going to work.
Figures crossed is that we're advocating
for open disclosure from all parties.
So if students use open AI
or any other sort of generative AI feature,
we want them to disclose that.
But we also want teachers to do that too
if they're doing this instructional design.
Because we think being open about this
is going to be the way we want to go forward.
Because we really would like to avoid
a lot of the really bad situations
with surveillance capital through AI detectors
that are not reliable.
And if you really want to focus on this stuff,
the old AI detectors, they call them old now,
they are really getting to the point
where there's a lot more long-term tracking software
that's coming online now too, that's pretty conservative.
Thinking about that so back to that kind of cheating
and whether we can catch it or not,
I know some of the professional develop
I've been involved in is just, you know,
and this was always the issue
when you're talking about, you know,
potentially telling a student
that they broke the academic dishonesty policy
on campus and the ramifications
that can have and the ability to be, you know,
it's truly factual on that.
And, you know, these AI detection software
that are out there, you know,
they're, they're quote false positives
or sometimes to the point where you can't really rely on them.
And, you know, I think Ethan Molick
has really put forward this kind of idea of saying like,
like, you know, look,
there's really not good AI detection.
Once somebody knows how to use AI,
it really does become different.
I do that.
I mean, I've now created,
guess what, I'm not wealthy.
I don't have the ability to hire a high paid editor,
but I've really worked hard with my chat GPT,
the one that I'm paying for the pro plan,
to create, you know, my own kind of personal editor
for the stuff I write.
And I think I like that.
And I don't feel like I'm cheating
when I use it to help help me like any editor would
that I could pay a lot of money for.
But, you know, and that just made me think
so too about this.
Think about now how that kind of leveled me up
where I never had access to an editor
by having a skill set of learning how to use GPT
or any of the generatives AIs,
I can now potentially have, you know, my own editor.
And so how many people who are really thinking
about producing quality writing
could have the benefit of having
their own personal AI editor?
I think you're absolutely right.
And the challenges that we face in education
are getting more faculty on board with this.
Because right now what we're seeing is the deep siloing
different sort of like perspectives on it.
We see early adopters,
but we also see people who are just having
a visceral reaction and wanting to be off the sidelines.
And the other version of this is,
of course, we have people who are just still
on the sidelines and not coming off with them.
So I think what we have to do is give them
more professional development opportunities.
I was gonna say, I mean, the more I do this,
the more I'm convinced that particularly
in higher education, let's just really focus on this.
I know, you know, I've worked in K12 too.
And I've seen, I think I see better adoption rates
with actually some teachers right now
who are sometimes more adopting it,
just for the simple fact that their students
are using it already.
And so they need to adopt it.
But in higher ed, faculty, in fact,
at a campus, I was associated with,
there was a very, you know, kind of like this hysterical
banning reaction, which was, you know,
look, just ban it and make it go away.
And it's something I don't ever want to have to deal with.
And why can't we all just get on board with a ban?
It's like, sorry, you can't ban it.
What we can do though is develop our own professional
dispositions, our own professional knowledge as educators
about realizing that we've got something now in our hands
that can potentially radically transform education.
I as a faculty member, I'm scared.
I don't know what to do necessarily,
but I know I need to do something.
If we can get people in that realm
to kind of drop the banning the skepticism,
but say, how do we help you recognize
all this tool and say this cultural tool?
And maybe that's even part of it is to help right away
and going like, look, this isn't a calculator.
This is a big change.
And we know it.
We see you, we understand the fear,
the hesitation, the trepidation you're bringing.
Let's talk about this in ways though to say,
did you know or is it possible?
Can you think of this?
And for me, one of the first things I thought about
is just having faculty potentially look at one assignment
they do in their syllabus and say,
can we take one of your assignments
and just start to imagine how we might change it with AI?
And that kind of using that is the stepping stone
into AI professional development.
I wonder if you had some thoughts on that, Mark?
Oh, yeah.
I think that's a great idea too.
We do multiple institutes each year
that sometimes are half day workshops,
but for winter institutes,
a three day long workshop with faculty
where they bring their own assignments,
their own material to,
and they get exposed to different AI tools.
But it's important for us to both keep early adopters
and skeptics in the same room together
so they can talk about this and iron it out.
And I think that's really the pathway forward too
and I would hope other institutions would adopt
some rethinking of professional development too,
not as just one-off activities,
but look at this as a continuum now.
Because if you do a week-long professional development
situation for AI in the summer,
you're gonna have to redo that again
at some point in time during the year.
It's gonna at least for the foreseeable future.
Man, he is the assistant director
of academic innovation at the University
of Mississippi.
Mark Watkins is our guest.
Mark, if people want to find you
or find any of the your professional development
and writing that you're doing, where should they go?
So I have a sub-stag called rhetorica.
It's free to read and will always be free.
You can also follow me on Blue Sky and Twitter
at Mark Watkins.
And I'm happy to connect with people too.
Just shoot me an email.
You can also go to my University of Mississippi homepage
for that and see what we're doing
with academic innovations, groups of events
and our institute.
Mark Watkins, man, he is our guest.
Hey, you know what, tune.
If you have a question for Mark,
we'll get it to him.
Put it in our mailbag, 608-557-857-7608-557-857-857-7.
That's the mailbag number for any questions and comments
that you have.
Mark, thank you for busting pencils.
And now for your moment of zin.
I had always insisted that a good education
was a synthesis of book learning
and involvement in social action
that each enriched the other.
I wanted my students to know
that the accumulation of knowledge while fascinating
in itself is not sufficient
as long as so many people in the world
have no opportunity to experience that fascination.
Catch us on Friday for first downs
in Friday night lights
with in-house civic media hosts, chat homes
and keep busting pencils with us.