AI For Education (The Good)

Many of our members work in the academic space, whether schools directly, or in the advancement of education and academic goals generally. There is, of course, a lot of a discussion and concern about AI in this space currently.

Let's briefly touch on a few of the beneficial aspects of AI, that academic organizations may want to pursue and leverage:

Infinite Patience

Teachers are people. They are, shockingly enough, allowed to have bad days, to have negative things happening in their lives outside the classroom, to actually have lives outside the classroom at all.

And so sometimes they don't have the patience for the 170th time they're asked if something will be on the test. I really enjoyed working with my students. But they were humans, and I was a human, and not every single moment with them was sunshine and roses. I like to think I was a good example of patience and consistency, but I wasn't perfect.

AI can be. The same lack of emotion (and even empathy) that is a concern in other areas is a benefit here. There's no ego, no strain of repetition, no exasperation for being asked the same question for the Nth time in a day.

Infinite Time

The limit on time is the learner's time, and no longer the teacher. As a teacher, I had to be considerate of my assignments, both respecting my students' time, and my own. I am sure other disciplines have their own struggles, but when an English teacher assigns a 3 page essay to 90 students, they've just given themselves a novel's worth of reading, editing and marking to go through. Which is good for the students, and often engaging for the instructor, but it's not something we always have time for, especially if we're also engaged with our community of learners, our students' lives in extracurriculars, and if we have family and social obligations.

But AI does have this time. At the time of this writing, it isn't empathic. It's not going to understand a student's tone, or slang, or the context of what's been and not been on their assessments or classroom behavior.

So this isn't infinite human time and attention. But it is infinite time for explanation and exposition. An AI can edit 90 assignments in less time than it takes me to edit 1. Maybe not as well (at least accounting for learning about and guiding the students as a human should be), but it can certainly help with grammar markups and tracking.

This means I can have students write more, and still get some feedback, which is just a win.

It means I can spend the time I would have spent marking up to do conferences or deeper dives with students on their ideas, handing of the grammar to my AI "TA" in a separate thread, to track and help improve.

There's a model here we'll talk about more in another entry, and that is the philosophical baseline envisioned in the Academy and the Lyceum. If you had one, or a very small group of pupils under the guidance of a teacher who focussed entirely on them, you might get really good results. You might get Alexander the Great. Regular teachers in classrooms may not be able to focus quite that much, but there's a horizon for AI where that kind of attention and support becomes possible.