I’m just emerging from spending the last 4 months or so with my new son. It’s been fascinating watching him progress with early recognition of language. Every day, we have little conversations, going back and forth with each other. (He’s a pretty good listener!) He watches me intently, trying his best to make different gurgles and coos and mimic my mouth moving.
I have known this for a while as an educator and in all my years in edtech, but conversations are so deeply ingrained and critical to learning. They involve storytelling, which humans are hardwired to respond to, and while we learn the conversation dance early on in life, great conversations are often an art form.
When I was at Eneza in 2012, we developed a tool called “Ask a Teacher” so that our learners could ask questions about the content they were practicing. We didn’t realize what topics kids would actually ask about.
Religion. Their bodies. How to get a love interest to notice them.
They often prompted the tool into a conversation, asking more questions and commenting on the responses. At the time, real human teachers answered these questions, so we allowed the students to go deeper into topics they were fascinated by.
Conversations are natural ways to actively learn. Not only do they provide learners with personalized feedback, but they also enable them to utilize higher level critical thinking skills. To absorb what somebody says about a topic and react to it using your background knowledge, requires much deeper evaluative knowhow than simply clicking on an answer to a question or writing out a one-directional response.
One thing I don’t see AI able to do quite yet is to converse in a way a teacher does -- provoking new ideas, challenging your thinking, using tailored persuasion based on the audience. I think that if we collect a big enough training set for a data model, we just might be able to mimic how a teacher might respond, in an age-appropriate way, to deep questions students ask like the one in the picture. But we’ll see!
(For fun -- ask ChatGPT how it would respond to the question in the pic with this parameter: Answer this question as if you are a 5th grade writing teacher who wants to engage a student in the concept of God: :-)
#edtech #ailearning #conversationalai #chatgpt #supervisedlearning
