In this session, we explored how the rise of consumer-facing AI tools, coupled with a lack of public funding, has pressured schools and colleges to adopt technology as a substitute for essential resources.
How have third-party tech vendors influenced outcomes for students and teachers? Once we move past the hype, what advancements in generative AI could genuinely benefit educational settings? And what safeguards should we implement to protect educational institutions from being exploited by for-profit AI companies?
To help us answer these questions we had:
Dr Michael Veale, Associate Professor at the Faculty of Laws, University College London. His research focusses on how to understand and address challenges of power and justice that digital technologies and their users create and exacerbate, in areas such as privacy-enhancing technologies and machine learning. He tweets at @mikarv.
Alex Kotran, co-founder of the AI Education Project, which is a professional development programme designed to support AI literacy and readiness for educators across school systems in the US.
Ade Adewunmi, a researcher and strategist who shared insights on extensive research done on the UK’s Department for Education and their drive for schools to adopt edtech, looking specifically at outcomes for marginalised children.
Alex Kotran (CEO of The AI Education Project) was unable to join the session due to a last minute emergency — so we recorded a conversation between him and Alix on a private podcast feed, so that it remains exclusive to this list.
Listen now (enter your email to receive your private link), and scroll down for more info 👇
Joining us for this session was Ade Adewunmi, who discussed how government departments, such as the Department for Education in the UK, will embrace the use of educational technology within schools with little consideration for the implications of collecting and holding educational data about children. Her research also explores the ways in which EdTech has increased the digital divide, especially for children within marginalised groups. Ade is happy for any of you to email her to discuss her work further: adeadewunmi@protonmail.com
We were also joined by Dr Michael Veale, who shared insights on how, especially during covid, schools adopted third-party tools from vendors such as Microsoft, Google, and Apple — and were subject to reduced or free rates, and even given free hardware in some cases, thus strengthening general ecosystem lock-in for public schools. Read more from Michael:
AI providers as criminal essay mills? Large language models meet contract cheating law
You can email Michael at m.veale@ucl.ac.uk
🎙️ Finally, you can listen to the discussion between Alex Kotran and Alix by going here and entering your email.
In this conversation, Alex discusses the effect that new AI tools will have (and already have had) on the career paths available to students who will enter the workforce in the next five years. Alex takes a unique perspective that goes beyond the simple assumption that ‘AI will take our jobs’ — rather he lays out how the reliance on AI for output is a symptom of wider economic problems, such as recessions, which have huge effects on the job market.
Listen to learn about how the phrase ‘AI readiness’ actually refers to, in Alex’s case, the urgent need for students to learn how to use AI tools as part of a base-level of skills — in the same way that we learned how to google things, young workers may have to understand how to interface with LLMs in everyday work.