Listened to: Learning Conversations Artificial Intelligence with Ollie Bray | Education Scotland podcast

This is the first Education Scotland podcast episode I’ve listened to. Solid food for thought. I’ve not developed any really solid ideas around AI in education but this helped me think of some questions. Ollie compared the uptake and development to AI to other technologies:

So the take up rate of generative AI, like ChatGTP, has been far quicker than people signing up to Facebook, you know, people adopting the internet, people getting a television, people getting radio, etc.

There was discussion of some ways that AI is already being used in schools including what Ollie described as lots of schools doing really, really good work around the ethics of AI.

I wonder what aspects of ethics are being discussed? The one I’ve thought of most is already out of the stable. All the material scraped by AI before we got a chance to choose. I’m not particularly worried about anything I put online being gobbled up by AI, but I imagine it would be more of concern for artists and writers who earn a living from content?

I think we also need to consider the ethics of all application & services we use in education. Especially when application make educational design decisions or have unethical behaviour¹.

An interesting point was around developing AI to recreate traditional methods of education, but arguably in more efficient way. Ollie thinks that is probably missing how do we use the technology to do things that were unimaginable before?

I’ve read a bit about using AI in schools for report writing, analysing pupil data and the like and seen a few educational AI startups offering that sort of service. Most of the teachers I’ve talked to, like myself, have used it in a very basic way, cutting down some time in making a quiz or other classroom resources. We are just using ChartGPT, Copilot. etc in as fairly simplistic way.

The podcast talked about the need to update the Scottish Government’s technologies for learning strategy mentioning that it would take 10 years to bring this to publication. I can see a bit of a mismatch with the speed that technology is developing, especially AI. Can we plan that far ahead?

I used the AI application Aiko to generate the transcript to get the quotes.

1. Thinking about X/Twitter, see Can democracy survive now the world’s richest man has it in his sights? | George Monbiot | The Guardian should we be using X with learners or at all given Mr Musk’s reinstatement of horrors & obliging censorship of government critics? ↩︎