Amelia:

Hello and welcome to this very timely discussion on AI in the Classroom, Enhancing Teaching and Learning Experiences hosted by hundo. My name is Amelia Loveday, I'm Head of Partnerships at hundo and today I have the pleasure of interviewing the fantastic Dan Fitzpatrick. Welcome Dan and thank you for lending us your time and extensive expertise today. A very, very quick intro. Dan is the AI educator on a mission to empower teachers and business leaders to gain value from artificial intelligence. He is the bestselling author of the AI Classroom, founder of Third Box and director of Edgy Futurists. So Dan, your portfolio really speaks for itself there, but why don't you kick us off by telling us a little bit more about you and about Edgy Futurists and your journey into AI and education.

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Dan :

Absolutely. Well, thanks for having me, Amelia. And it's great to be able to speak to everybody at CareerCon. The yeah, my whole kind of my career has been around trying to push the boundaries of education, I guess. So I'm a trained teacher. So I try to be a teacher taught in a secondary school and really very quickly understood actually where we're going technologically as the power not just to enhance what we're doing, but to absolutely transform what we do in terms of education. And just to give you a quick example of that, people learn from the internet now. So a lot of people who will be watching this will know that you, when you want to know something, you'll quickly pull up your phone, maybe go to YouTube or another website and you'll quickly watch your tutorial on it. And it's, it's really easy to do that. And I did a very, I recently moved into my house. And I wanted to, this very boring example, but I wanted to change the switches and the light plugs and all the light plugs. Is that even a thing? The plugs on the walls. And I watched a YouTube video to show me how to do it, where the different colored wires go and everything. I do not recommend that you do that. Get a trained electrician in. But I taught myself how to do it. And that's how we kind of, we live our lives now. And. I give that example because I think in recent years, technology doesn't just kind of sit alongside education. And in a lot of respect, technology has become the primary driver of education and is transforming how we educate kind of the younger people in our society and how we educate ourselves as well as we get older. And really important to say that education is going to last out our whole lives, we're going to need to know things. I think the difference is once we kind of leave formal education, school, college, university, we kind of shift into a mentality of just in time education rather than just in case education. And I'm sure a lot of people who are watching this right now can relate to the just in case education system that we have where it's kind of like, right, four years old, get into the classroom. We're going to, we're going to teach you things. We're going to show you things. We're going to, hopefully you're going to learn some things. And then when you're 18, you come out the other end and it's just kind of being a, well, here's all this stuff. Do some exams because you might need to know this someday. Now, does that work personally? I think we can probably do, do a lot better. We can do a lot better than that. And I think the key is, is what we do when we do. Leave the formal education system and we move to that just in time education system where we learn something and then we put it into practice straight away and it becomes valuable, it becomes something we want to do because we know we're going to apply it straight away and we're going to solve a real world problem straight away. In fact when I was 15, so back in the early 2000s, I remember teaching myself how to play guitar. There was a lad in my year at school who could play guitar and I thought he was really cool. And I was like, I really want to do that. So I asked my parents for a guitar for Christmas. And then I just taught myself how to play it. And I was getting the immediate value from that straight away because I was learning the song was, I could hear it. I could hear myself learning in real time. And I think there's a lot of value in that type of education. I think we've got a lot to learn from that kind of just in time education. Um, so the, yeah, um, I just remember I was supposed to be given an introduction to myself and I'm, I'm on my hobby horse already, but, uh, I really think that, uh, that yeah, my, my career is kind of, it's kind of being focused around and thinking, I think we can do this better. I, when I became a teacher, it was pretty much the same as when I was in school myself, I was like, surely in those. What, 10-15 years that I’ve, since I was in school myself, things have moved on, but they hadn't really. So I really got into educational technology and trying to transform whatever school I was in. I became a senior leader in a secondary school where I was at, really tried to move things technologically. And then I moved into further education. So a group of colleges in the Northeast of England where I was the director of digital strategy. And then kind of in my own time, I think it's always good to have a side project going. Myself and a couple of other teachers who thought very similar to me set up an organization called EduFuturist where we explored the future of education. So it wasn't just us going, this could be done better. It was us actually going out and talking to people around the world who were doing it better and trying to make people aware, especially in England, that this can be done better. There is innovation out there. There is different ways to do this thing we call education, that might be more attractive to our young people. So yeah, that's what we did. And then that kind of being in that environment, did a lot of work with experimental technologies, new technologies, artificial intelligence, virtual reality. And then over the last six months or so, I've really been able to focus in on artificial intelligence because it's... It's kind of, it's what everyone's talking about at the moment with, with tools like chat GPT and coming out just before Christmas last year. So I've really kind of moved into that arena, started my own business around artificial intelligence, wrote a book, like you said, on artificial intelligence, and that's kind of where, where my life's at the moment.

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Amelia:

Fantastic. Well, first of all, congratulations on the house move. Not a boring story at all. I'm glad to hear that just in case you do want to become a musician, you can play the guitar. We at hundo are also very keen on talking about how technology can be used to create particularly more engaging learning experiences. So, you know, on that, onto our first question, which is how can AI specifically be integrated into the classroom to enhance teaching and learning experience?

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Dan :

Yeah, I mean, it's still early days on this, isn't it? And, and, and let's be honest, artificial intelligence has been in our classrooms for a long time. We just might not have known it. So a lot of the tools that we use, a lot of the technology that, that you use, if you've got a, if you've got a phone in your pocket and you sat in a lesson as a student, you've got artificial intelligence in your pocket. So whenever you pull it out and use your mobile phone or use other apps, there's artificial intelligence, it's just companies for a long time, didn't really shout about it. They didn't really say. Look, we've got artificial intelligence baked into these products. They just put them in there. Um, now that we've kind of got this new wave of artificial intelligence, generally referred to as generative artificial intelligence, because it generates content, um, generates data. So if you, I'm sure most people listening to this, it will be familiar with chat GPT and maybe even had a go of it. You'll know that you ask it a question or you tell it to do something and it will generate some content, some writing. There's also image tools, so you'll generate some like a great tool that I use all the time is a tool called mid journey, where you type in the type of image you want to see created and it creates a very photorealistic image. There's video versions. There's so many versions. There's even there's like it goes into sci fi territory. So there's a couple of months ago at a university in Osaka in Japan published a report, where they were using brain scans or MRI brain scans, which kind of you think is something like electrical activity happens in the brain, an MRI scan kind of maps that. And let's a doctor see what that is. They were able to get participants to think of certain types of images and then train in the AI machine behind it. They were, it was able to recreate the images that the people were thinking. So this technology is going into kind of mind reading territory at the moment. So we've got some of the most powerful technology ever created. Looks a bit boring at the minute, especially if you just using chat GPT. She would say it looks like a WhatsApp conversation that's got out control. it's not the most thrilling. I think it's in. It's in Snapchat. I don't use Snapchat, but from, from what I hear, it's, it's in Snapchat. Now you can talk to it almost like it's a, an AI friend. Um, how is it going to be used in the classroom? Well, I think there's two answers to that. There's, there's the, the nice, let's go with the nice answer. So the nice answer, the easy answer is, is that, well, think of the teacher. The teacher is going to be able to create content to help the students. Um, a lot of, a lot of the pressures that are on teachers is time. Teachers have to deal with a lot. In 2019, there was a report came out that said teachers spend just as much time marking, producing resources for classes and designing the actual lessons as they do, teaching classes. Now, if you're at college, school, and you're watching this, You might not realize, but your teacher, after they've taught your classes, then going on to teach another class and another class, and they pretty much spend all day teaching every day. So when are they spending their time doing the other things that takes just as much time as the actual teaching? They're doing it in their own time. They do it on weekends, they do it in holidays, they do it on an evening, they do it at lunch. So this technology being able to assist teachers to create content, to create, to mark work, to give feedback to students. And it might not be that the teachers even doing that, the students can do that. Like why not, if you're a student and you're creating work, why not put it into ChatGBT and ask it for some feedback? Ask it for recommendations. I do that all the time. I write a blog every week that goes out in a newsletter for teachers about AI. And when I wrote it, I put it in ChatGPT and I just say, can you give me any recommendations? What's the grammar like? What's the... Is it easy to read, things like that. So use it as an assistant for, for learning, I think is a, is a, there's, there's a huge example there of, of how it's, how it can make, make things more efficient. And then if the teacher is, is more refreshed, they're going to be more creative, they're going to be more personable, going to be able to, to help, to help their students and the students as well are going to have access to, to amazing. amazing resource with this AI to be able to build their own knowledge. Now, that's the nice answer. And I think we'll see that straight away. Well, if it's not happening in your in your class, if you if you if you're in a class straight away, it'll be happening very, very soon, I'm sure. I think the scary answer or exciting answer, if you mean, is actually, this has the potential over the next few years to completely change the education system. So. If you think and teachers, if you put your fingers in the ears for this bit, but if you think what a teacher, the value that a teacher gives. Okay, so a teacher is there primarily to pass on knowledge so that students can learn it, assess that knowledge. And then decide whether the student has progressed enough to then at the end of the course to be able to take an exam or do some kind of assessed piece of work. Now, I know many of you might be thinking there's a lot more value that a teacher brings and of course they do. Of course, but we'll get onto that in a second. Let's just go for this primary, narrow focus of what a teacher is and what society thinks a teacher is. Now, artificial intelligence can kind of do this now and we're gonna see a progress massively over the next year or so. So... Greg Brockman, who is the co-founder of OpenAI who created ChatGPT said that this time next year, the artificial intelligence we've got now is going to be outdated. Okay. We've got the most advanced technology we've ever had available at our finger, fingertips. So this time next year, it's going to be outdated. What are we going to have? And why is he saying that? He's saying that because he knows that they're already tested this, the technology that we're using in ChatGPT was actually created three, three and a half years ago. back in early, early 2000, back end of 2019, early 2020, they already know what's coming next and what we're gonna be working on it. And it's really, really impressive stuff. And if the power of AI is that it can hold a lot of information and access a lot of information, a lot more than a human brain can. So it can hold information about us. So if I struggle to learn things in a certain way, if I... If I only learn things, if they're, if they're kind of put in a certain context, like it's made attractive to what the kind of things I'm into. Um, if I need, really need something to catch my attention so that I can learn. If I've got special educational needs where I need a bit more attention in certain areas, it's quite difficult for a teacher to do that, especially if a teacher has got 30 students in their class to really tailor the learning to each student. Chat GPT will be able to know your struggles, will be able to know kind of your progress and then be able to chunk that information, be able to move on as well and go, actually let's leave that, let's go to something else first and then come back to that. It will really be to be a personal learning assistant. And I think once we're at that level, now this is where teachers might wanna put their fingers in their ears, we'll start getting some students saying, well, why do I need to go to college? Why do I need to go to school? Now, to get onto the other dimension of what teachers bring, they bring the fact that they're a human being, the fact that they care, the fact that they... can sympathize, can empathize, have, take you on a journey of learning if they're a really good teacher. I think those things are still absolutely valuable. And we learn probably the best we learn. And I think there's a lot of science gone into this. When we're learning the most, it tends to be an emotional experience rather than a head experience. So... where it's because there's an emotional attachment to the information or to the person that's giving us the information. So I still think that that's absolutely vital. We're not gonna have that emotional connection with an artificial intelligence app, of course we're not. So there's still room for kind of that human interaction there, but a lot of the core elements of what it means to learn will be provided by technology. And I think that'll mean that, our colleges, our schools, our universities will start to look different. They'll not be the need for a traditional classroom. They'll not be the need for certain things that uphold the current system. We'll have to rethink what that looks like so that AI is playing a part, but also that the human teachers, whatever they're going to be, we might not even call them teachers, whatever they're going to be, will be also be able to have an influence on us.

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Amelia:

And I think that the potential for personalisation that comes with AI is so important to hold on to because you've touched on how it's making things more efficient and often the connotation that comes along with that is that that's less valuable work because it's been aided by an AI tool. But actually getting that out there for the needs of each student could be really, really beneficial. You touched on the elephant in the room here, which is the concerns that people have around AI. There's a lot of apprehension about its use, particularly in education, because of how it will disrupt our existing systems. What specific concerns have you heard from educators around the use of AI? What challenges should they be aware of and how can they address them?

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Dan :

Yeah, I mean, there's some big concerns. I think probably the two biggest that I come across. I'm quite privileged that I get to go into schools, colleges, universities on a daily basis and speak to educators and students. I think number one is, what's generally referred to as academic integrity. So actually, if I'm gonna be submitting a piece of work, is it my own or is it not my own? And obviously artificial intelligence as we're seeing, gives you the tool, the power of the tools to produce work that you can pass off as your own. And it's really difficult for a teacher or somebody who's assessing your work to be able to know the difference. Obviously that's a problem that's been around for a while. I remember when I was doing my GCSE biology, I was in secondary school back in 2002. All right. So 2002, we're talking here. Google still in its early days. I remember downloading a biology experiment, like the whole write-up of it, the hypothesis, the, all of it. I remember downloading it and you passing that off as my own. Um, actually I was on a good morning in Britain a few months ago, and I actually told that story. I don't know why I told it, but, uh, so yeah. I'm just waiting for AQA to knock on the door and take my biology certificate off me. Yeah, the, I think there's, it's not, it's not an old, it's not a new problem. But the technology is there where you can do it in a way where it's a lot more difficult to detect. So that's one concern. I think another concern is, is data privacy. So, it might not mean a lot to a lot of people. But everything, obviously everything you put into the internet can be, unless, unless you're following really good data privacy procedures can be accessed by other people or the companies can be used, um, in different ways. If you're talking to an AI, especially at this moment in time, the chances are that data is being used to train the artificial intelligence. Um, the chat GPT, open AI, don't put chat GPT out for free. Just just for the hell of it, just to go right, have a go of it and see what you see what you make of it. They're doing it because they're training the AI model. So every conversation it has, everything you write into it, it's getting better and better and better and learning from you. So a lot of people have some lot of issues with that. And we will see regulation on that coming from a governmental level. The European Union's already gearing up to release their regulatory paper on it soon because data privacy matters data belongs to you and if you don't give them permission for somebody else to use it in certain ways and they are then and we've got a problem there. That can be an issue.

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Amelia:

Just on the data point, I'm going to interrupt there, Dan. I think, particularly with minors, data privacy is an issue. But globally, data privacy policy has historically failed to keep up with big tech for starters. So what is it about AI specifically? Is it just the speed at which it's developing? And do you think regulators have any chance of staying on top of it?

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Dan :

Yeah, I think it's, I think the speed is one thing. I think, um, to, to not get too technical, the, um, data, a lot, a lot of data regulation means the data has to be stored, uh, locally. The problem with a lot of these artificial intelligence machines is that it needs to go back to the main database. So that the AI can learn. Cause it's like for some, for a company like open AI, just to keep the data in Europe is they're not going to be getting any use out of it because they need to bring it into where their main servers are, where they, where they keep their, their AI, the brain for want of a better term of their AI, which is in California. So there's, there's problems there with where data is located. A lot of people are saying actually GDPR data security needs to be and regulation needs to take this into account and be updated in a realistic way. Some people say actually, no, we need to double down on this. And I think over the coming years, we're gonna see that kind of be battled out really. Yeah, I think the other one is copyright. So a lot of these, if you've used an image generation, like Mid Journey or if you use Canva, there's one in there. There's one called Dall-E, D-A-L-L. dash E, which is made by open AI. It works a bit like chat GPT where you type in a command or a prompt. Instead of text though, you get an image out. So I could, I could type in, um, I dunno, Boris Johnson on a motorbike, riding through Paris into mid journey and I would get, um, Hey, I mean, I'm not, I wouldn't want it, but, uh, what I'd get is, um, a photo realistic image. And I'm talking like, high definition photo realistic image of Boris Johnson on a motorbike driving through Paris. So where's it getting this information from? So what it does is a bit like how ChatGPT works. It is kind of fed hundreds and hundreds of millions of different images and it learns what the different components, what all the different bits are and images. And so then when I ask for something, it's able to generate a version based on its learning of all those different images. Now, the problem is a lot of people think it's copying those images. Every industry around the world is gonna be disrupted by this. And we're starting to see that already. We're starting to see the job market changing. So a lot of people listening or watching this might be going into work soon in the next year or so. And actually what the job market will look like when they go into work will drastically be different to what it looked like two years ago, a year ago. Because a lot of jobs can be done by AI now. So where, what do we do as humans? And we have to discover that. And that sounds scary, but it happens with any major technological disruption, like early 2000s with the internet, a lot of jobs just weren't needed anymore. And then, but so many more jobs came about because of it, millions and millions of new jobs came about. And that's quite exciting, because actually those who were going into the world of work for the first time will actually get to discover new jobs that nobody knew even needed this time last year and we'll get to make it their own we'll get to kind of shape that job and because there might be a lot of demand for it be able to demand a higher wage for it as well

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Amelia:

We like we like to see the future of work as exciting as well. I expect that all those challenges that you talked about sort of add another layer of difficulties for teachers specifically around teaching students sort of safe and responsible use of AI when it's changing so quickly and they may not know. And also educating students on a future job market that is shifting all the time. I'm going to go back to the positives though, because I feel like that will pick us up a little bit. So we talk a lot about essential skills at Hundo, and those are skills like critical thinking, creative problem solving, agility, communication, the skills which are critical across industries and really make the candidates stand out. How can you see AI helping students to develop these skills in the classroom? How can it help to give them those essential skills that they might need across industries.

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Dan :

I think working with AI is very much like working with any resource. And if you, if you're going to work with AI, you need to, for example, critically assess what it's coming out with. But I think what it does is it outlines the fact that we, although we might be relying on AI, and I rely on AI every day as an assistant with what I do, we are still the people responsible for using the information. And if you're responsible for it, you're gonna wanna check it, you're gonna wanna critically assess it. I think in a school setting, I think the emergence of AI will do wonders for essential skills and build in essential skills. Because if I'm a teacher and I'm in a classroom, now just think how learning in the education system in school, college, university, is always about, right, here's some new information, practice it, learn it, and then as a teacher, I'm gonna see how much you know so we can then move on to the next thing. How do teachers assess that learning? Well, traditionally, it's all about writing, isn't it? Like write an essay, write some questions, write some answers to questions. Teacher reads it, does that student know it, do they not know it? Now, if ChatGP, ChatGPT, Google Bard now exists, it's very difficult for a teacher to know whether that student actually knows and has progressed in their learning, or if they've just used AI to come up with the answers for them, very difficult. So actually the education system and teachers need to become more imaginative with how they assess students. They... Assessment needs to become more dynamic and that pushes us into the area of those essential skills because now, I mean, if I was, I've been out of the classroom for a couple of years, but if I was a teacher now, I'd be asking students to go away, use ChatGPT, use Google Bard, figure things out, write things down, but I'm not going to assess what you're writing down. What I'm going to do is I'm going to have a conversation with you. Can you communicate what you've learned to me? So getting them to practice communication. Kind of do a presentation where they present that information and can demonstrate that they've actually understood that information and not just got an AI chatbot to do it for them. Can they collaborate with their peers, with a group in their class? And as a teacher, can I observe and witness that they're using newly learned information to collaborate with and to problem solve with? Can they solve real world problems with their new information? So I think teachers are going to have to start. I mean, we do, teachers do that quite a lot anyway, but I think it's going to have to become more of a mainstream way of assessing students and what they've learnt and their knowledge. And if that happens, students are going to have to learn how to collaborate with their peers, they're going to have to learn how to communicate, problem solve, critically assess, and we'll be building and helping them build those skills for industry, for their workplace. Now, there's another question here as well about actually how important will those skills be in the workplace. Now, at the minute, and the World Economic Forum has been telling us for about five years now that these skills are vital for students in work. The education system hasn't... always kept up with that and hasn't offered those, the development of those skills. But I see, I see it probably changing a little bit. 

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Amelia:

Absolutely. I mean, yeah, excitement, not fear is what we want to hear. We're running out of time here, so I'm going to ask you very quickly if you can, in 30 seconds, if there's one thing that you're excited about for the future of AI in education, what is it?

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Dan :

I think I'm really, really excited about the future of education because I think it has the power to completely upend a two, 300 year old system that we found difficult to shake off over the last few decades. Even amongst all the digital disruption that's going on in the world, the education system just hasn't been able to kind of let go to what we've already done, what we've always done. Um, and I think this will help transform it. I think. I think we've got so much more to offer our students in terms of preparing them for success. We just need to break out of those shackles of what we've always done. And I think AI will give us those opportunities. It will help us to robustly help students prepare for the future, as well as, and I think this is probably even more exciting, as well as the teachers, the people who work in education can be more human. So a lot of people get worried saying that AI is actually going to take the teacher's job. Actually, I don't think it will. What it will do, it will take away the teacher's job that turns the teacher into a robot. So the admin, the constant putting numbers into spreadsheets, the stuff that shackles them to a computer and makes them into robots. Actually, if AI can pick that up, then it will help them be more human. And as students, We need teachers to be more human. We need to connect with them on a human level. We need to share their, we need to see them enthusiastic. We need to see them passionate so that we can share in that and be inspired by that. And I think that will make, make us better learners and more enthusiastic and passionate for the world.

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Amelia:

Absolutely. I mean, that's a great message to go out on really. And in the hope that the teachers watching this don't have their fingers in their ears after what you said earlier. It's time to embrace change. You've got people like Dan to help you along the way. We couldn't wish for better. So with that, thank you, Dan again for joining us and to everybody watching. Dan, please will you tell your new audience where they can find you online on socials everywhere.

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Dan :

Yeah, my website is the AI educator dot I.O. There's lots of information on there you can access. I have a newsletter that goes out every Sunday where I kind of mull over the future of education and artificial intelligence. I do most of my kind of interaction on Twitter and LinkedIn. So on Twitter, I'm at Dan Fitz tweets and on LinkedIn forward slash the AI educator. So, yeah, get in contact.

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Amelia:

Fantastic, and you'll be able to find those links on hundo. So everybody get following, get liking, get learning. Thank you to hundo for hosting us today. Give us a follow as well, hundo.xyz across social media to keep up with CareerCon, our monthly series where we are discussing the industries and topics like AI that are shaping the future of learning and work. So that's it from Dan and I for today. Thanks so much for watching everyone. And Dan, thank you again.

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Dan :

Thanks, Amelia.

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Amelia:

Looking forward to doing it again soon.

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