One of the things I had intended to do was to provide you with some examples of schools using AI well. Unfortunately, the so-called cutting edge ones I've come across all seem to relegate the teacher to a subordinate role, a sort of guide on the side.

I an article I originally wrote when the new Computing curriculum came into force in England, we want teachers, not "facilitators".

I wrote that before generative AI was around, but I believe the same thing holds true today. In a different context, I was reading a Tim Harford article about the dangers of leaving all the crucial decisions to a computer. (That article may be behind a paywall, but it may appear on Harford's own blog soon.

The upshot is that relying on a fully automated system eventually deskills the expert.

According to an article in SchoolsWeek, only around 17% of teachers in England are using AI in their teaching. That's such a shame, because I've experimented with it a lot, especially ChatGPT and Perplexity, for generating course outlines and even creating quite probing assessment tasks. (I prefer ChatGPT.)

Taking one course outline, I tweaked the prompt and then it came up with something almost identical to the one I had written myself. The main difference was that I took over an hour and ChatGPT took a couple of minutes.

Every time there's a new technology we tend, I think, to forget the lessons from older technology. Around twenty years ago there were so-called integrated learning systems that were automated to a degree that would, supposedly, lessen teachers' workloads and be more efficient in creating personalised learning pathways for students. However, putting students on these computers for whole lessons, which is what some schools did, provided no marginal benefits to students after a certain point (15 to 20 minutes).

With AI, rather than implement systems that will put teachers in the role of the person in the factory feeding the dog, we ought to be training teachers to use the AI well. Fortunately, many of the resources cited in my recent Digital Education newsletter (which is free) will prove very useful in that regard.

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Is The computing Curriculum Too Masculine? Revisited 16 years later!

One of the apparently insoluble problems of the age is how do you encourage more girls to take up Computing? I think a lot can be done, and have done so myself, but I wonder how far a lot of the effort fails to get to the heart of the issue, which could be the curriculum itself, the way it is taught, or a combination of the two?