AI Goes to School with Micah Miner
Ross Romano: [00:00:00] Welcome in everybody. It's a pleasure to have you here with us. You're listening as always to the Authority Podcast on the BE Podcast Network. And today we have an extra special endeavor here where we are simulcasting with Education Talk Radio.
So we, you might be listening on one feed or the other. In either case, you're going to hear a great conversation here about You know, some of the really critical and also trending topics in education, but really hopefully getting a deeply engaged in some of the discussion about some of the urgent realities of what's happening in our schools, in the workforce, in the economy, and the future of work there's a lot here to dive into.
My guest today is Micah Miner. [00:01:00] Micah is a District Administrator for Instructional Tech and Social Studies in Maywood District 89 in Illinois. He was an Excellence in Equity Award winner from the American Consortium for Equity in Education. He also is a contributing writer for the Consortium's website, an advisor for Rise AI, an ISTE community leader, and he's the author of a new book, which is largely what our conversation is about today, AI Goes to School.
It is now available from Times 10 Publications. Micah, welcome to the show.
Micah Miner: Thanks, Ross. Nice to have you. Thanks for talking AI again. Appreciate it.
Ross Romano: Absolutely. Let's contextualize it a little bit for our listeners because I still think one, we have a lot of folks in education and elsewhere who haven't totally gotten super up to date, up to speed on everything happening in AI. But also I think a lot of folks have probably one view, one kind of narrow picture of what AI means, right?
And it's maybe a little broader or more encompassing. What kinds of [00:02:00] tools are we talking about particularly relevant to schools and classrooms? Are there different categories or a variety of maybe different particular tools that, that people might be familiar with that sort of paints that picture?
Micah Miner: Right. I think it's important to kind of differentiate. There's a lot of tools that have the word AI in them, right? And I'm sure a lot of people who are familiar with this topic and maybe like feeling a little overwhelmed by it is the AI has gone back a long history, right? So artificial intelligence generally is not a new topic.
Of course, the new past couple of years has been generative AI, which means it can generate Text, video, audio, images, etc. So the big goal was using when we talk about AI goes to school, we're talking about how generative AI and how it can create things. And we're talking like the frontier models, like open AI, you have cloud three or cloud three, depending on how you pronounce it.
We have the Gemini models. And then we have our open source counterparts like Lama and Lama 3 is the most [00:03:00] news recent and Mistrals and all these other things. So those are all what we would call frontier models. They're the generative AIs that we're talking about and then a lot of the tools that we talk about in education when it comes to AI, some school AI magic school AI, and those kinds of tools, they're going to use those frontier models in the background, and then they're going to basically customize your user experience, and they're going to customize the prompt.
Some things to be teacher specific. So we want to differentiate between the models, which I like to research the source of how generative AI and its applications are, and then its impact on in roles like mine as a district administrator purchasing, marketing and things like that. But AI goes to school.
The book is going to target the audience of, like, novice or maybe novice to mid users of AI tools who may use it once a month, who want to have a little bit more as teachers, as educators, as potentially curriculum leaders or school leaders, like what are some of the tools and backgrounds and ethics behind this.
So that's kind of what the context for AI is, and we're talking about generative AI. [00:04:00]
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Ross Romano: Excellent. What are some of the key things to understand regarding AI's impact on instruction specifically?
Micah Miner: Yeah, it's really important that we talk about AI's implications when it comes to instruction. There's a lot of people, and I've done about over 40 trainings, and sessions, keynotes, state, local, national levels about this topic over the past year, many podcasts as well. And well, let's talk first about impact.
So what is generative AI's impact on education? By the time you get to the upper grades of high school, you look Looking at potentially 80 to 90 percent of the kids using it on a regular basis to help them complete homework. It's really that large of a percentage. If you're in a, in an area that has good internet access, that kids have access to phones, they're going to be using it quite regularly, right, for a lot of the kinds of things that Kids would use it for especially for text writing.
And we think about our juniors and our seniors, our sophomores, as they learn about writing and reading it. A lot of the kids, I have two high school daughters of my own, one who just graduated from high [00:05:00] school, and you know, the reliance that their friends have on AI tools to help them complete has gone incrementally up over the past couple years because of its access, right?
So teachers think it's cheating. You know, that's what AI's impact on instruction is, it's cheating, and a lot of our advanced placement teachers who are teaching AP classes or IB classes, or even some teachers who just aren't aware of technology and how fast it moves, have an idea, a very rigid set of ideas on like, if kids use it, it's wrong.
And so we, I kind of want to take that assumption, and I want to kind of back it up. Because we are not promoting kids using AI tools to help them do homework and not think, right? So the AI goes to school and along with the other things that I do is try to support how AI impacts instruction, let's talk about with writing.
And so I talk a lot about like, what is one way that we can empower kids to have conversations about how do you use AI well to make you a better student, a better writer? And that requires teachers introducing AI. AI [00:06:00] literacy from the beginning and being able to like, say have conversations.
My wife taught a unit, a two week unit on AI tools in March this year, and her juniors and seniors said, you're the first teacher in the past year and a half that's talked about it. Thank you for being that trusted person that we could talk to on how we can use AI tools and how we can't. We never really thought about it that deep because we never had an AI a teacher talk about how, what is academic plagiarism and those things we don't talk about very regularly in schools.
So the most important thing about its impact on instruction is we can't, as teachers or as leaders, pretend it doesn't exist and that kids aren't using it. And, I was in a 6th grade classroom in the fall, and one of my instructional technology coaches was like, Hey, everyone, how do you do you know what plagiarism is?
And all the 6th graders were like, What? Huh? Hmm? What? You know, we don't use that term very frequently, right? And so I was like, Hey, how many of you have Snap on your phones? And then the whole class raises their hands, right? And then I'm like, How many of you use that Snap AI friend to help you with homework answers?
A third of the class raises their hand. Did you know that could be called plagiarism? Oh, [00:07:00] light bulbs went off. Now we could talk about what AI is. 'cause the kids don't know that. It's called ai. They just know that it's my AI friend that helps me with questions or create songs or whatever. You know, they don't have that language.
But it's important that we as educators introduce that language across the board, K through eight or K through 12. Six through 12 specifically. So you can start having honest conversations about, Hey, remember this is what people say when they use ai. Do you use ai? And then you can build that kind of.
Trusted conversations about its impact on instruction because kids can cheat very easily, right? And many times They're cheating and you don't know it or they're cheating poorly. So you find out so just realize that it's relatively ubiquitous in our kids and that they're using it very frequently And it's our job as educators to have those critical conversations with students along with parents on what AI is and how it can work.
So that's kind of the context
Ross Romano: Yeah. Yeah.
Micah Miner: and then if you want to talk direct impact for instruction, we can talk about approaches in a second.
Ross Romano: But yeah, and you referenced something really important, which is having a [00:08:00] conversation, right? Educating the kids. parents about here's some of the tools that are out there. Here's some of the things to be aware of when you're using them. Here's some questions you may not have asked yourselves or something you may not have realized about how this could be perceived instead of just making a rule, they're banned, they're not banned, they're this, they're that and not really digging into, well, why are we making these decisions or what's the reality?
Or is there some way that we can somehow wish it away and pretend it doesn't exist? And that's why I wanted to ask about you referenced plagiarism and the potential there. You referenced, Right, some of the things that students themselves, like, may not totally be aware of into the purposeful use of course, there's also concerns, I think, around data privacy, right, and related to [00:09:00] any tech tool, but AI in particular kind of wanted to get a sense of, from your perspective, What concerns should we have an address around access and use?
Like, what are maybe reasonable concerns or fears, right? And are there some that you would consider unreasonable or right, there seems to be a lot of fear around this, but it's not. This is not the right thing to be worried about because I I sense there's things that fall into both buckets and it all kind of gets tied together into this storm of confusion.
Are
Micah Miner: Yeah. The first recommendation, and I asked this a lot, and I don't, I usually only get 10 percent of people to raise their hand. Does your school or district have an AI policy? Or a procedure if you want to call it a procedure. My lawyer prefers the word procedure. Fine. So be it. The district lawyer wants to use procedure.
And if that answer is no, then we really need to work on that before the next school year, [00:10:00] August 2024. So, the, you can't have. And an educated conversation about AI and privacy if you don't have a policy or a procedure on how you're supposed to be using AI or not supposed to be using AI as a teacher and as a student.
And that is our job as district educators and as school leaders to create the conversations that are required to get something on the books, so to speak, on your parent and student handbook. And make sure that you have that right. reference to go to when it comes to any conversations about AI tools it's used or it's not used in the classroom.
So that's number one. We have to have a policy. Most districts as of now do not. Let's get on that right away because every time, every day that we go on not having a policy and not having kids conversations about it is another day that those kids are learning how to use it poorly. They're being miseducated because we're not quote unquote educating them correctly and it's harder to.
re educate instead of just provide the context and policy or [00:11:00] procedure for conversation to design around whatever your school mission, vision, whatever your district mission and vision or your grade level mission and vision or content leader or anything specifically. So that's one. Two there are 41 different states, potentially 42 now, I believe, who have student data privacy laws on top of our national federal laws of you know, FERPA, COPA, etc.
So we need to make sure that we are protecting our students. Most of these AI tools, unless they've been put guardrails upon them, should not be used for kids under 13 years old. And in many cases, like OpenAI, it's a 17 year old cutoff. That's their policy. Now there are education specific AI companies that have designed AI tools with guardrails, like Conmigo and School AI and You know, Magic School AI, et cetera, and Divot, and all these other ones that are doing it, but they have proper procedures around their use policies.
So we need to make sure that we're reading them and we're knowing them. From a teacher perspective, we don't want to put kids student specific names privacy information and things like that. And if possible I'm hoping [00:12:00] in the future, there's ways that because I know, Open AI specifically has like a higher education, education and AI team that you can buy for instead of their chat GPT plus it's a chat GPT EDU license in the future starting in August where they're going to be able to exempt that stuff from the training data.
And I think that's really, really important is to make sure that you know your state laws your federal laws the protections that you need to put in place and you have the local policies. In order to protect the info and the student information that could be transferred back and forth because the number one hacking institutions and organizations in the United States are schools because we're easy targets.
We don't have the expertise or necessarily the investment in our infrastructure to be as protected as corporations. So it's really important to have all those things in place and never use an AI tool without. talking to your IT department and your school leaders first. As a school leader, I want to make sure I put those things in place so that if my teachers want to use and figure out how to play it strategically and part of it, that's already in place for them to do so.
Ross Romano: [00:13:00] there particular qualities of generative generative AI tools in particular even apart from maybe some other types of technology that, like, make teachers feel that they're incompatible with the traditional instructional environment, like some the underlying source of resistance that that a lot are Yeah.
Micah Miner: Yes. When we were in school Ross, I don't know your exact age, but I don't mind. When it took time to write an essay, we had to actually, I was, Maybe a little bit older. So I actually had to go and use the cards in the library. Right. And then I had to go to my library for my school or my public school library, and I had to do some research and then I had to read books or articles and I had to find them and most of them, the more hard copies as the internet became more prominent in the late nineties, when I kind of grew up in high school and early two thousands with college, I was able to access things virtually but it took time.
Right. And I think that time. of potentially a four weeks it took me to write, [00:14:00] research, figure out, and do a first draft that can be changed to four seconds now, right? And I think that we need to account for, as education, that that process of the four weeks of my getting all those things in order as You know, a secondary education student or a higher education student or a middle school student is important, and we can't have AI circumvent that process.
We still have to teach students the process in some ways. It's not going to take four weeks or two weeks like it used to, but it's still really important that K5 focus on the foundations of math. writing, reading, critical thinking skills, and all those fun things that are already a part of our schools.
We don't want an AI to think for us, and we don't want to circumvent the learning process without it. That being said, There's a lot of opportunities and differentiation, as we all know, with any kind of generative AI tools, to help teachers be more efficient with their time and invest more in relationships with students, because some of the other things that they've been trying to do with their time are [00:15:00] amplified and more efficient.
But that's kind of what we want to make sure that we're doing, is we don't want to change everything just because of an AI tool that can take eight seconds. They still need to learn and be experts in the areas that we work in. Right. Oh.
Ross Romano: that's a key part of the discussion is again, that conversation, making that case because that's an evolution that's taken place over time, right? You, at one point to do research, you had to go to the library, then those research papers moved online. Then we had Wikipedia to summarize a lot of that.
Then we had YouTube. Where, okay, if I don't know how to change a tire or troubleshoot a computer issue, I can pull up a YouTube video and figure it out, so why do I, I don't really need to know how to do this, right? And and now it can get to the point of being too reliant. To add to the detriment of preparation, right?
To say, okay, well, I can put things [00:16:00] off to the last minute because I can just pull it up on a computer and I it's okay. I'll always have that there. I always have that backstop. And so really identifying, like, what are the things that. are important that we don't do away with or undermine.
And what are the things that what, this is no longer relevant, right? I certainly have a perspective on some of the, I think overemphasis on these are just cheating tools that You know, some of these assignments that they can just be easily plugged into an AI tool and it can do the assignment for them, then it's probably, it's not really such a great assignment anymore because in five years, everybody will do it that way.
And it's just no longer a marketable skill to be able to do that thing. If it can be easily completely replicated by a tool. And yet there's also underlying information and knowledge and pieces of that, that Are [00:17:00] important, right? And that if we just can opt out of. learning something if we can avoid engaging with it so much that I can turn in an assignment that's worthy of a good grade without having absorbed any information, right?
And so it's like the difference between what skills are still valuable skills and what skills are being replaced by technology versus knowledge and what you know what knowledge is and means and that there is a certain truth to the fact that not all knowledge needs to be an economic driver, right?
That there's value to having a wide array of you know, the liberal arts, so to speak knowing a variety of things that you don't have to be selling that knowledge all the time, that just makes you a better person, more well rounded, more adaptable. But yeah, I mean, are there a [00:18:00] couple of those things that, are there a couple of things, especially from your perspective as a technology person, as somebody who wrote a book about A.
I. goes to school, like the things that should stay the same, right? The things that we should be really, really cautious before we allow them to be edged out of our classrooms by technology.
Micah Miner: Yeah, I think that's important. I'll use an analogy before I begin about you know, older generations might have thought in papers, or we might, my age group more thought in like essays, and then the 2010s, it was like you thought in paragraphs, and our kids now Thinking sentences and you know, instant messages and tick talking and WhatsApp and minute or less and all these kinds of, so you've condensed the ability to think and reason critically and deeply over time to much less product.
Now I'm not here saying that we should go back to good old days. Cause I don't believe that. Modern challenges and opportunities are any different than older challenges and opportunities. But like you said, there are some timeless liberal arts [00:19:00] style approaches to education that need to stay the same.
There are also implications for how we counter that really quick soundbite, that really quick consumption. The average students according to a common sense media research was 237 notifications a day. That's how many they get on their phone. That's a lot of notifications, and Ross, you and I, in our different endeavors and all the things that we do, we might have just as many, maybe a little bit less, maybe a little bit more, depending on the demands of our time, and it's just really hard for us to teach that.
We have to make sure that we're still teaching kids critical thinking skills, that realize that just becomes, just because it can be done as an AI tool, that doesn't mean that every, Part of history, for example, as a social studies perspective, that doesn't need to always be recalled, but we don't want to have a tool that can lie to us and manipulate us so that we don't know what basic history was.
And in the future, that's kind of what I'm worried about, is we still have to have some basic knowledge, and each district has their own ideas, and each State level and regional organization and boards of ed, they all have those ideas of like epistemology and knowledge and how it works. And I don't want to lose those things, but I [00:20:00] think it's important that all stakeholders have a conversation about it, including corporate America, including careers and jobs and post opportunities.
So, it's not doom and gloom, but it's, yes, knowledge has shifted. Our knowledge economy does require things that it, that that we can do now, like emailing in seconds is a lot easier to do than it is to spend three hours on an email for a certain occupation. That can easily be replaced as long as you're a good communicator, right?
But those are the things that we want to do. And when it comes to like, let's talk about a basic example of writings and an instructional approach. If you just use a distributive assessment model in a five paragraph essay, where you introduce AI tools at the beginning and at the middle of it on a five part process, and then you I have a visual on this on my website.
And we can talk about it as if like, let's use, let's have the teacher give the opportunity for a school sanctioned AI tool like School AI or Magic School AI, whatever the term is, whatever tool you use, and be like, hey, we're going to explore for the next 10 minutes an AI tool to help us come up with the starting sentences and table of contents for our writing.
And then they have that opportunity to, and then we pull it [00:21:00] back. And then we say, okay. I'm going to grade that 20 percent out of 100, and then I'm going to give the second opportunity, now it's your turn to write. We don't want to use an AI tool for that writing process. And then we give them that time to write for us.
And then we give them another 20 percent of their grade on how well they did. And then we shift to, hey, we're going to put this information in an AI tool to help us on feedback on our construction of our sentences and paragraphs for writing, 20 percent for doing that. And then we can do the peer editing process, and that's another 20%.
And then finally, with the final submission, I give the final 20 percent of the grade. I've avoided Challenges of plagiarism, of academic integrity, I've taught them how to use an AI tool to make them a better writer. So I've not used generative AI, I've used that tool to be instructive AI. And then kids learn, if you do that a few times a year or whatever in your different content areas, kids all of a sudden realize that It's not there to replace my knowledge, it's there to enhance or be a co intelligence.
Ethan Mollick's new book, Co Intelligence, does a really good job of framing it as, artificial intelligence sounds scary and computer y, but if it's a co intelligence, a thought partner with you you can do [00:22:00] things that you couldn't do before with it. And that's the kind of conversation I want to kind of transition from is, yes, generative AI is cool, well what's instructive AI look like?
Okay, what are some of the pedagogical approaches, what are some of the instructional tool sets that I can do to use generative AI as a way to teach kids how it can make them better writers, better thinkers, better learners, better etc. And then I've empowered a new generation to do all kinds of new and amazing things that we didn't have before.
And then I've also leveled the playing field or democratized it because there's a lot of parents who are college educated who were there at home who are able to help that kid. You know, your kid didn't cite you as a resource for their senior paper that they had to use to graduate. But I had two parents who were college educated who happened to be educated.
Some people don't have that opportunity or they speak a different language at home. So it's not because the parents aren't knowing enough, it's just they don't know enough in the right language. And if we can use our 6th to 12th grades to build kids up how to read and write better using AI tools, I think that's the future.
And if we can find that magic sauce or that quick co that combination and balance between [00:23:00] good teacher practice and good tools that help them become better, I think we're gonna have a vastly better view and more optimistic view of how it can impact our schools and our teaching and learning,
Ross Romano: Yeah. Yeah. And then underlying that was. the thought of the purpose, right? Like, what is the purpose of this? What is it actually helping me do? Why? And I I think that ties into part of this book is about how You know, using AI can make teachers better, right? And and for them to really think purposefully about what are the things that are, that I haven't been able to attempt because I haven't had the bandwidth in the past, and how might I now be able to create the bandwidth by saving myself some time and effort by using tools, or what are the things I have attempted, but I haven't been able to, Succeed in because either a mechanism didn't exist for doing it, or I I, again, it was more of a bandwidth issue with [00:24:00] personalization, right?
That, yes, I have I have some expertise to be able to personalize for students, but being able to do it for every student all the time there's not enough time for that. And can this help me with this? Are there particular things that you have in mind? And. You know, certainly this is a good way to make the case to teachers, like, not only you know, is this valuable to you, but it's really something you do need to learn how to use because it's going to help you to improve your ability to succeed in your classroom.
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Micah Miner: It's not quite in my book, but I think it's an interesting analogy that I'm going to try to do when it comes in. My book covers a lot of things, especially the six tenets of post plagiarism by Dr. Eaton from the University of Calgary in Canada. She does a great job of like contextualizing, like in the next five years, our transition from a human intelligence to an AI enhanced human intelligence.
Right. And one of the things that She talks about is we have to get over this definition [00:25:00] of like, Oh you know, because I had an AI tool help me that I committed plagiarism. Because they're that's one conversation we want to have. It's also going to do some amazing things for language translation.
So a lot of us in our school districts are getting beleaguered by what we call newcomers, or English learners in the classroom out of like, Ukraine, Venezuela, or all these other problem challenges. African coming out of, like, Uganda and Sudan, and all these other uprooted students and peoples, right?
And it's our job to, like, uproot them. support and help them and it can do really wonders where it comes from a teacher perspective on it does wonders for planning and translations as long as you know there's some of the did you have to make sure that each tool is good at the specific language that you're doing but it's really good for differentiation for personalization if you have a student on the spectrum you can create a academic and content vocabulary for that specific students obsession of baseball and introduce like mathematical concepts to it or whatever you're doing like there's some amazing you opportunities there, as long as you know your kids to build upon.[00:26:00]
But I just think it's important that we reorient ourselves to realize that this makes me a great teacher because I can differentiate, because I can share readings, because I can translate, because I can create customized visuals that I weren't able to do be before and do all those things efficiently and thoughtfully.
And a lot of us in the AI spaces who've been doing this for a long time, we assume that this is Ross, I found out yesterday when I was at 250 teachers in one of their summer trainings, like a lot of teachers aren't as aware of these tools as I thought, right? Or they're overwhelmed by the ease and access of it.
And a book like mine is designed to help them as a primer to like a basic guidebook to get them started. But from a perspective of Students and the opportunities. I think it's really important that we shift now I have an analogy of like we want to teach kids not to be you know, what's the right word here?
We want to make sure that there's opportunities for them to practice AI tools thoughtfully with an AI literacy standpoint But we are also trying to make sure that we teach them how to use it. Well, so, I used that one [00:27:00] analogy. So let me go back to student tool usage. Let's talk about bias because I think we, you mentioned that in your questions and I didn't address that well.
All of the challenges that our society has when it comes to race, when it comes to gender, when it comes to representation are in, are AI tools, right? And in some ways it amplifies those because they were designed for people who look like me as a white person and didn't have those liberal arts and philosophy majors as a part of the designing process, and they're trained on human nature and human the canon of literature that's on the internet and it's a little challenging to do.
So I think it's just really important that we, as teachers, don't just use an AI tool. and walk away from it and take the output as good, not only for hallucinations, which we've talked a lot about and they've gotten better, but for the fact of there's bias. My wife's African American and I'm white. Let's use a quick example.
You guys, lots of people like Pixar movies, right? So if I put a picture of myself in a chat GPT, custom GPT for [00:28:00] Pixar creator, it creates a picture of me pretty quickly. In a matter of one second or two, I have some really good visuals of a white guy in a Pixar style movie. My wife, who's African American, when I put a picture of that, it took me seven times.
One day I asked permission. Okay. I was like, Hey, let's try and experiment on how it's biased. And so we did that. And my kids are mixed. So I tried my kids, my father in law. I said, Hey, let's try that. And on the average, it took six to nine, sometimes 12 times to create an accurate image of a minority person with that Pixar Chat GPT.
That is a joke and it's kind of funny, but it's a microcosm of the potential challenges that teachers and educators face if they just rely on those tools too much. You have to still interrogate and advocate and understand their limitations. You still have to rely on your 10 15 years of classroom level experience and do that well, if we're going to use them thoughtfully.
I had a student teacher last year who now became a teacher the year after and he was super excited about these AI things and he was like, It's going to help me be a great teacher! And it, it will! But I said, I have 20 years of experience evaluating teachers, creating, [00:29:00] I've, creating curriculum. teaching different grade levels.
You don't have that, so just make sure you're using it with caution. I know what good instructional approaches are and strategies are. You may not know that yet, you may just know it in theory and you want to make sure that you still rely on your experience and your expertise and you don't outsource that veteran status, those experiences that you have, to an AI tool just because it's fun and it's cool and it looks amazing and it sounds great.
You still have to be responsible for those results,
Ross Romano: Right. Yeah. And I, well, that example, or I have the biases and the previous example of plagiarism. What is plagiarism? What might it look like? Is this, or is this not plagiarism? Why is that wrong? You know, and the plagiarism one, which eventually, which does now and will eventually lead to evolving also legal definitions, right.
And all of that, those are, those both seem like good examples of plagiarism. Some of the potential for teaching something that is, I know has been a challenge, [00:30:00] like digital literacy, right? Information literacy. And really not just taking for granted any information we're presented with and saying, okay, this is this is true and factual and really diving deeper into, okay, We asked these tools about these things, and this is what it gave us, and now we need to look into, okay, where did that information come from, where did it we understand, it's synthesizing a lot of information, but it's all coming from somewhere, right, it's not unique, it's not creating anything from whole cloth, it's all coming from somewhere, so it's not dissimilar in that sense from reading an article in a newspaper or some website or watching something on TV and saying, Okay, well, who's the presenter of this?
And what are their biases? And what's the source material? And where's this coming from? And that's, I mean, it's supercharged in a sense. But that's something That students have it's already been something that is kind of existential as far as just the [00:31:00] future of society. Right. And being, getting grappling with that a lot better, but these, it does present some good opportunities and examples to say you need to, in order to confidently move forward and to know that you are creating something That has value that you are not running afoul of anything that that's going to get you into to peril, you need to know what your information is, where it's coming from.
It's coming from a source. You need to properly cite the source and credit it. When you have original work you need to feel confident in that, right? And that's why we don't just outsource this. And there's more. There's more ability to do that now than ever before, but also that makes it more important to do so, right?
Like, an example I think of that's always been kind of an area of ambiguity around plagiarism is something like [00:32:00] joke stealing in comedy, right? Where it's like, You couldn't necessarily prove intent or even consciousness. We may have had, just, we may have each independently had a similar idea, or I may have heard your joke one time, And it was just somewhere in my brain and then one day I had an idea and like it was more me sort of remembering that but I didn't really remember and I just thought it was a new idea or I could have just gone heard exactly what you said and said I'm taking that but you couldn't actually prove it but nowadays you know maybe I would be able to say well I have this idea let me maybe Look online and see if anybody else has done that before or let me check out YouTube or whatever.
But all of these things so even with student, it's a good opportunity for students to encourage them. Hey, try to use these tools. For this assignment, and then [00:33:00] based on what it gives you, then here's some other ways to go about and research that and see one, is it reliable? Because there's been examples of tools like Gemini which is connected
Micah Miner: Oh, let's not even talk about, yeah,
Ross Romano: Which is pulling in. information, some of which it's coming from it's not factual. It's just stuff that's on the internet. Right. And you might say, okay it gave me this answer and this isn't really true because somebody was saying something sarcastically and it didn't understand that.
There might be others where it's like, yeah, this is totally accurate and up to date, but I know where it came from this source or that source. But you know, anyway, I mean, is that, does that kind of. seem like an area of opportunity to you in this this again, digital literacy, information literacy piece which is only be going to become more challenging, but also it is a new opportunity to teach that in a responsible way.
Micah Miner: Yeah, librarians love this because I think it's [00:34:00] important. There are serious information, disinformation, and misinformation campaigns that are always happening across the world, right? And the internet is free, full of those kinds of opportunities and challenges and manipulations. And I think we've already always talked about, like you said, information literacy and critical thinking and media literacy skills.
I think this. magnifies that by 10. Our digital citizenship lessons should be incorporating, and I did this in my district last year, one to two AI literacy lessons and that digital literacy citizenship lessons, right, has to be a part of our process for teaching our kids. The teaching, hey, what's information?
What's misinformation? What's disinformation? That's been my emphasis for my upcoming research this year and some of the workshops that I'm designing for like Illinois ASCD and others. It's like, how do we do really strong information literacy? What are resources and tools I can use? Using generative AI as another, like I said, a thought partner to help explore those opportunities and engagements and do that otherwise.
I'm also just going to give you a little like, a little bit Different, but just a real basic [00:35:00] example. I had a fourth grade teacher from I was in Texas at the time and she was like, I had my fourth graders who were really scared to like pure edit their fourth grade one paragraph little thing.
There are two paragraphs. I don't remember what the assignment was. So she said, Hey, kids, we're going to, here's AI. We're going to have her create a really bad version of a fourth grade Writing and we're going to tear it apart together so that we don't hurt the feelings of our other kids and you realize, hey, a machine did that so I can say you forgot a pair of period you forgot to capitalize and she had this whole little activity where she generally mentioned AI as a way for us to explore.
She had the kids learn how to peer edit and tear apart this AI created bad fourth grade lesson and then the kids were equipped with a common language and knowledge to be like, hey, it's okay. I'm not going to I'm not being mean when I help improve writing. It's a really basic use case, right?
Like, a really simple way to incorporate it as a part of the conversation to a fourth grader's vocabulary, but it was transparent, and this is what I always say, make sure whenever you use AI that it's transparent, that it's moral or ethical, and that you're that it is [00:36:00] clear how and when you're using it, right?
And then it makes everything easier, so you want to teach that because then the Students realize that they don't have to hide it. You know, there was a recent survey by like, that I heard on podcast last month, late May, which was 65 percent of people in workspaces are using AI tools, but most of them won't tell their Supervisors that they're using it because then they don't want to have more stuff or have any challenges to it.
I was at one training last month at one regional office of education near me, and a dean was like, I've been using it for teacher evaluations all year, but I'm embarrassed to talk about it because no one's given me that opportunity to do so. See, when we model good, transparent AI practices as part of our informational literacy and our transparency efforts, as teachers and as school leaders or as district leaders, The kids realize that it's not something that we have to hide.
It is not like, something that is hidden that we're trying to, like, pretend that we don't use. That it opens up that conversation like we kind of started with at the beginning, how important that is. Those are the kinds of things that we want to make sure because as [00:37:00] society moves towards a more what I would call cyborg style approach to teaching and learning and writing and enhancing our intelligences and all those kinds of things, or as a co intelligence we're in a transition phase where we need to make sure we teach how and when to cite and where to cite and make sure that it's always easier.
Just like any other things, we used to have this term, you can't have an AI, a Googleable assessment, like, we can't have an AIable assessment. If it's that easy, maybe it's a bad question. Maybe it's not a good topic to cover. But if I do a Socratic seminar, like my wife did at the end of her artificial intelligence two week unit, and they were able to share their ideas and their thoughts and learning in a transparent way and you have a rubric for that you've not given them the opportunity to cheat, they've learned, and then you use a Socratic Seminar without screen so you know how much they did learn and you have the ability to evaluate.
And that's kind of the assessment shifts that we need to do. Oral exams, performative approaches, things like that where we can still have kids use it. To build knowledge, like that's never a bad thing, but figuring out how and when to use it, always cite it when they use it, and then find [00:38:00] ways that they can show what they've learned in addition to AI and all the things combined with their personal intellect and growth and learning approaches, and then be able to present and share and be managed and assessed by that.
And then we're past that. It's cheating conversations more to how does it make humans lives better. How does it help our lives improve? So,
Ross Romano: What potential excites you most about what we may be able to achieve with some of these tools as they currently exist or as they evolve. Anything that's been out there as a persistent challenge or just something that you've been looking toward that's really interesting to you
Micah Miner: I'm hoping that there's a couple of things. I hope it helps solve some of our climate challenges in the future. It's done a lot with medical research that I think it can be useful. Nuclear fusion, if we can get a cheap and generic energy that's able to be applied equitably across our world to help power this because there are ecological challenges.
Implications to how much for every day that you use an [00:39:00] AI tool for open AI, it can like basically run a 27, 000 person city for one day, right? So like, I'm hoping that in the next five years we can solve some of our climate challenges, some of our power challenges to help the world be more equitable. It can democratize knowledge so that people in India in rural places or in American rural places across the board can have access to basic medical knowledge about things that they don't have to pay for to help their lives become better, despite their economic circumstances.
And I think those are the big human dreams of like, it can actually come up with ways that we may not have using human knowledge. As everything but finding ways to see things from different angles and perspectives that we've never seen before that can help solve some of those big world issues.
And then personally, I hope it results in a three day work week or a four day work week for the general masses and that we can talk about. I don't want to use the word universal basic income because people on different sides of the fence have different challenges, but we need to find a way to realize that like.[00:40:00]
AI can do a lot of really great things. We always have to keep humans in the loop as part of that process, but what are ways that it can amplify our humanity and not on the things that we can do better and do more for community and equality and equity? Those are the areas I'm the most interested in its applications of.
I think all of us are. Where it's detrimental as the manipulation relationships where I'm really worried about having an AI girlfriend or boyfriend or they friend, however you want to use, use and approach that to be able to not be able to be socialized with the human world. I'm kind of worried.
We were worried about that with the whole rise and fall of the Metaverse. You know, human connections was really big. And one of the challenges I see is people potentially losing themselves in their fantasies and losing. The ability to interact well within our society and work with humans and instead prefer their AI friends, so to speak.
Those are the areas that I'm the most worried about. What about you, Ross? I mean, you've talked about this a lot, probably at least a dozen, twelve, fifteen times in [00:41:00] the past year and a half of your podcast. What are your dreams and hopes and, you know?
Ross Romano: You know, I think you named you named some good ones. I mean, one of the things that I've really been thinking about is what are you know, from a, even from an education perspective as and then leading to. Kind of the future of work, like what are some of the persistent gaps in access and equity that can be closed rather than exacerbated, right?
If we take the right approach, and how can we instead of looking at it from the deficit lens of, okay, these technologies are going to replace these type of jobs or these types of skills, like, how are we training our skills to be able to create? the next opportunity instead of being the victim of whatever the technologies are and realistically, I think if the tools continue to evolve the way they are they're just as likely to be able to [00:42:00] replace, like, what are currently considered to be white collar professions, right, versus some of the other I think the assumption has been that it's quote unquote low skill labor or whatever that can be replaced by technologies, but frankly there's a lot of knowledge professions, right, there's a lot of you know, one of the ones that I came up with as an example, and I haven't explored it deeply, but I'm thinking are you telling me that within the next decade, at least there's not going to be AI tools that can much more efficiently, effectively, and accurately you know, handle stock trading than humans, right?
I mean, it's already technology driven, and there's a lot, but there's a lot of capital allocated to human labor on those jobs that aren't aren't value creators, aren't essential necessarily to the future of society, except that we determined that it's an important part of capitalism, right?[00:43:00]
But are you, I mean, of course, AI is going to be able to do that better, right? And so, what does that provide an opportunity for? Maybe it's an opportunity to sort of revisit and reset our values our cultural values, our values around our culture. around education and learning and what it means to have a meaningful variety of experiences and skills and knowledge and what it means as you mentioned to look more equitably and have less of a division about what we consider to be You know, reputable or worthwhile professions or versus others and have a way of looking at that differently and eventually that, that disruption is likely to happen.
I think there's a lot that's happening. Already, not necessarily related to AI, but certainly in terms of the staffing [00:44:00] cycles of high tech companies and staffing up, but then significant rounds of layoffs, right? And some volatility, even in very highly educated, highly paid Roles within those companies you know, and things are just gonna move that much faster.
Right. I was you know, you referenced earlier our relative ages, and I'm slightly younger than you, but not by much, but I was like kind of the very tail end of the last. At least as far as the people that were giving me advice, of the last sort of age cohort where it was not it was not taken for granted as kind of a requirement that you need to learn coding,
Micah Miner: Right.
Ross Romano: Like, everybody who was a little bit younger than me, like, that became more of a part of their core learning, core curriculum, and certainly by the time they went to college it was like, you need to learn this. In five years, I don't know if anybody's going to need to know coding because I think these
Micah Miner: the
Ross Romano: they are, they're going to be able to do it for you.
I mean, you might need to know coding as far as creating AI tools, [00:45:00] but most of the ways that it's being done now, there's, the technology is going to be able to do that, right? A human is not going to be able to do that. So that's an entire significance then that you could. see that as something that you're afraid of, because that's an entire significant swath of the way our economy is currently comprised, right?
That can be really replaced by technology. You can also see it as an opportunity to say, okay, we've created these and made these value judgments around Who is smart for choosing a certain type of career path and who's not smart for choosing something else right and say, Look, our decisions should no longer be made just around okay your number one question Is this going to be lucrative or and we really can ask more questions around purpose and meaning and improving the world and finding a mission that you believe in, [00:46:00] right?
And saying that you can make a good living based on doing meaningful work versus if that, if it's consequential that you end up you know, being able to do something meaningful in addition to making good living, then that's a bonus. So, that's I think there's potential there and I'm hopeful about that, but who knows?
Micah Miner: Well, yeah, because I think of like the lottery of birth, like we talk a lot of, I'm a social science teacher by trade and my wife is also a social science high school teacher. And she was going to be a lawyer and then things changed as we you know, with everything in our early years as we were learning how to marry and everything else.
But like, I think that it's really important to talk about the lottery of birth because I know American that ACE. org is a really big equity focused organization and education specifically, and you Ross and others are really involved in that organization, and of course you have your own endeavors that are all human related that are all about magnifying [00:47:00] impact, purpose, and value.
And the ability to mitigate some of the challenges that our world faces, and it would be great that we could have a generation of entrepreneurs who can focus on that, not on making the billion dollars, and we're always at this precipice of, like, exacerbating our economic gap or Decreasing it and I will be a perpetual optimist and being able to think that we'll be able to use not just this because AI is just this is round one like multimodal and all these things around one, but it's going to be fully integrated into our life and systems.
I think of our kindergartners who are coming. to us next year. They were born in 2019. What is their life at 2036 going to look like? And our education needs to be flexible enough to accommodate the 2036 along with the 2024, right? We need to make value judgments in each local school district and state level and county level.
And this is a conversation across the board. And I think AI breakthroughs have Let us have that opportunity to have that conversation. So to kind of I know it's [00:48:00] getting a little bit late, so to wrap up this conversation, like I find it to be we're on, we, where there are so many opportunities that we wanna take advantage of and that the next few years are gonna be really strategic on how helpful it can be and redesign some of our educational tendencies and how that can be a great thing.
But we all need to be empowering and informing ourselves to make sure that our. futures of our kids and our that are coming to us in our schools, that they feel that, that balance tension between great backgrounds of histories and liberal arts education and knowing a little bit about everything so that you're not duped and able to be critical thinkers while at the same time realizing that it can amplify opportunity like never before.
And that's the goal and hope and dream that we all pursue in this.
Ross Romano: Yeah, I think there's, there certainly is an opportunity for more fluidity and less you know, fewer boundaries between different areas of life. different aspects of one's career, right? Where, and there's already trends toward [00:49:00] this just with the ability for remote work and online business and different skills where there people are more likely to have different endeavors that they're involved in, but I think that can continue to go further where nobody's going to have to feel like they only have to do one thing.
Everybody's going to do more than one thing. You can shift more seamlessly between different areas of having a quote unquote day job versus having some entrepreneurial endeavor versus just having a side project that's not designed to be economic in nature, but that's impact driven and whatever that looks like, and just giving more options for for people to maybe You know, kind of revisit that renaissance mindset of just saying, look, if there's something I'm interested in and I care about, I can explore it, because I no longer have all of my time and knowledge monopolized by having to just focus on one [00:50:00] thing.
And that could. That'd be pretty cool. Micah, so, you're doing a lot of stuff around this. You know, where can listeners learn more? Are there important things in the book that we haven't touched on that you want to point out that people will learn by reading it?
Micah Miner: Honestly the book is wonderful and it was a great opportunity to explore some basic concepts. So if you want any more information, go to micahminer. com, M I C A H M I N E R. com. And then you can explore a lot of the things if you want to like truncate it and shrink it a little bit. A lot of my blog posts and a lot of the other things that I do, you can kind of highlight some of the important things and themes.
But we just need to be prepared and we have to I don't want to. Over. like play and say, Oh, it's so important because I think that we have to know that fundamentally the book, even since it was written and published the AI tools changed so quick, really infrequently, but as a foundation for tech integration for K 12 and AI platforms that can be useful and how to prompt and do all those things that I could do, it's a really good base tool.
So, [00:51:00] go to michaelminer. com and that's the easiest way, or LinkedIn is another place that I'm really active. But just realize that we need to be prepared and we need to be the trusted adults that our kids and our students can have those conversations with. And this is one quick step in that getting there.
So I appreciate the opportunity to share about it and not just the book, but the ideas of what the book plays out. And so thanks Ross for having me. And I look forward to you know, the other things that you're doing with the Authority Podcast and stuff like that to make sure that other people are prepared for a lot of other challenges that are across the board in our world that we can acknowledge.
So thanks for the time and thanks for the effort in letting me connect with you today.
Ross Romano: Excellent. Well, thanks for being here. Listeners we'll put the links below to micahminer. com, to Micah's social media profiles, and also to Times 10 Publications, where you can learn more about this book. You can buy it on Amazon or wherever else you get your books depending on where you're listening.
If you're not already a subscriber of The Authority, please do check out authoritypodcast. net or subscribe on social media. Any platform where you get your [00:52:00] podcast or for education talk ready, you can go to ace ed. org or you can subscribe there, Apple, Spotify wherever you choose. And so there's a lot more content coming down, a lot more author interviews.
I'll be doing a lot more discussion of equity and access. AI technology, leadership strategies, and a lot more. All the things that really help you to have the impact that you want to have to make to be influential in your role. So check all of that out and we'll catch you next time.
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