🎒 The Kids Are(n't) Alright

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👀 Today’s Thing: The Kids Are(n't) Alright

🤖 The other day, a LinkedIn post celebrating the launch of a new AI-powered educational technology company caught my eye. But when I dug in, the platform didn’t look like much more than an AI cheating detector. Can AI really help education? If so, how?

🎧 What does AI-powered education look like? Listen to my conversation with UF Provost Joe Glover on Building a Leading AI University.

📖 Backstory

☞ Test scores are by no means the only, or even best, measure of learning. But by most any measure, test scores included, American kids are not alright when it comes to their education. The pandemic threw a major wrench into an already troubled system, to put it lightly, causing students of all ages to fall behind, with the vulnerable suffering most of all.

☞ Ed Tech darling (and I don’t mean that snarkily!) Khan Academy is testing an education-tuned version of GPT-4 called Khanmigo that aims to leverage generative AI for personalized tutoring.

☞ Meanwhile, a professor at Texas A&M flunked a group of students after wrongly accusing them of using AI to cheat on their final assignments.

🔑 Keys to Understanding

🥇 Educators have been scrambling to adapt to generative AI since the launch of ChatGPT last November. The list of K-12 and higher ed. institutions who’ve outright banned the technology is headlined by New York City Public Schools.

🥈 Teachers and administrators seem to be most vocally worried about students attempting to pass off GenAI-written essays as their own work. But some are saying now is the time to embrace AI’s potential as a learning tool, let alone the need to prepare children for the potential of a near-term job market — and world — driven by artificial technology.

🥉 u/AhmedHassam01 on reddit: “ChatGPT is the greatest learning tool of all time.”

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Until the next thing,

- Noah

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