We are hearing it in the education system. Artificial Intelligence. It’s being added to the software we use. It’s promising to open new doors to educators. New doors for students. But for many of us, we are not even really sure what it is.

In education, what we are encountering the most are LLM’s- Large Language Models. This is A.I that students are using to write their essays for them, or answer their homework questions. The best way I heard this explained was in a podcast called The Grey Area- Should we press pause on AI?¹ It’s like when you write an email these days, and Google or Microsoft predicts a word or two as you are typing. You can hit tab and it adds it into the email for you. Well LLM’s are very similar, except they predict the next 3000 words. Of course, sometimes when you are composing that email, the predicted word or words just don’t make sense in the context you are trying to convey. In similar fashion, sometimes LLM’s also drop out sentences of words that, well, may not be what you are looking for. In fact, they might be completely untrue. People call this A.I. hallucinations, but it’s really just the predicted words that it has provided are not correct. They might sound good in a sentence, but make no sense whatsoever in the context you are writing about.

It has only been a few months since these LLM’s were made available to the general public. There has been quite a hype cycle around it. Below is a Google Trends² search I did quickly to compare searches for three new emerging technologies over the past 5 years.

Cryptocurrency was all the rage in 2021 and part of 2022. It is late 2022 that LLM’s started to be introduced and the hype cycle around the technology continued to grow. And remember 3D printing in the education system a few years back? It seems that after we all made chess pieces and key tag holders, we all collectively forgot about it. In fact, looking at our collective Google searches from the past 5 years around it, perhaps we never really did see the advantages of it.

Yet, A.I seems to be a little different. We are certainly in a hype cycle about it, but the models we are seeing, and the potential that it has to complete tasks in our lives, seem to indicate that we are only in the beginning stages of it. It is going to become part of our world in education whether we want it to or not.

The key for us as educators is to try and build some sort of educational infrastructure around it. An understanding and use case scenarios on how and when it is used in the classroom. How are we as educators going to use it? How are students going to use it?

This is going to take time. In education we take time. We see what works for our students. We explore a new technology and gauge how it benefits learning in the classroom. We learn collectively as a team. One teacher in the school try’s something and if it seems to work, they share that knowledge with their colleagues.

There will be many ed tech companies that will incorporate A.I into their software programs, and they will be actively looking to sell us those tools. They will promise to solve problems for educators and students. Some will, and some will not. Assistive technology for those students that need a little helping hand, is bound to be one area that we will start to see some A.I infusion and that, if added correctly, can potentially provide significant benefits to the student.

It’s not a wait and see thing however. It’s not like we are able to simply ignore A.I. and tell our students to do the same. It’s just to pervasive. Instead we need to do what educators always do, and explore the tools with that keen eye on how it can work in the classroom. It will be disruptive. It will make us think and rethink our lessons and our assessments. It will change the way that we teach.

1. https://www.vox.com/the-gray-area/23873348/stuart-russell-artificial-intelligence-chatgpt-the-gray-area Sean Illing, VOX September 20, 2023 ↩︎
2. Google Trends, October 23, 2023 https://trends.google.ca/trends/explore?date=today%205-y&geo=CA&q=%2Fm%2F0mkz,3D%20Printing,%2Fm%2F0vpj4_b&hl=en ↩︎