Future students will be wired differently, thanks to AI

Teachers were urged to stop asking children what they want to be when they grow up and focus on building creative, self-directed and critical thinkers at Manitoba’s AI in Education Summit.

“How do we prepare kids for a future we can’t yet see, but we know it’s going to be radically transformed by technology?” futurist Sinead Bovell asked a crowd of educators at a first-of-its-kind conference Friday.

“That is the moment that we are in.”

The province invited Bovell, founder of tech education company WAYE, to share her predictions about artificial intelligence and related advice for schools.

She kicked off a day-long event organized for superintendents, information technology consultants, principals, university administrators and school board officials.

Nearly 600 people showed up to exchange tips on integrating AI into schools in a productive and ethical manner.

Bovell talked about how AI is on track to become a general purpose technology, meaning it’ll be in the company of electricity, the internet and the printing press.

The world is built “on top of” and reconfigured in response to these technologies, she said, noting that chatbots are simply scratching the surface of AI’s potential.

She said modern-day concern about AI echoes panic about past inventions — such as books — that changed how humans acquire knowledge.

Teachers are going to need to leverage these tools, much like they’ve done with books, to teach students to “think beyond a supercomputer,” she said.

“If we get this right, it means AI is not going to eliminate thinking the way books didn’t, it’s actually going to raise the bar on what counts as thinking in the first place,” Bovell said.

History classes today call on students to interpret past events and contextualize them so they learn both what happened and why it mattered, she said.

She suggested that, in the future, students will be able to use AI to create interactive simulations that replicate historical events and consider how they could have unfolded differently.

High school teacher Jessica Threadkell said that example made her feel more comfortable about the future.

“We can’t expect kids to demonstrate their learning in the ways that we did growing up,” the French and history teacher said.

Threadkell left the session with questions about whether assigning research essays will become irrelevant and what could replace them to deepen learning.

What stuck with middle years teacher, Louis Burg, was the keynote speaker’s warnings that students need to know AI isn’t a replacement for a “friend.”

Burg said he has a newfound understanding about the urgency of talking to his Grade 7 and 8 students and their parents, as well as his colleagues, about ethical AI usage.

“I’ve started to use it a little bit, with lesson planning,” he said. “I use (MagicSchool) for generating ideas: ‘Here’s what I want to teach, how can I make this more interesting?’”

Principal Osaed Khan noted his school has been using OpenAI for basic scheduling and planning purposes.

Khan said the conference has furthered his interest in developing an introductory course on AI for high schoolers. Ultimately, he said he wants to frame this technology as a “thought partner” for students.

“The cat’s out of the bag and we have to engage with AI and not shy away from it,” he added.

Bovell spoke at length about her prediction that the workforce is going to be skills-based in the future rather than job-based.

Students need to be prepared with interdisciplinary skills so they can hop from project to project — or, in her words participate in, “the Hollywood model.”

At the same time, Bovell stressed that instruction in the humanities and opportunities to engage in free play in offline settings is critical to foster students’ imagination.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca