Stephen is the Director of Innovation in Teaching and Learning at the Western Academy of Beijing in

Beijing.

And I'm curious to hear how you see that in your work and what you're doing to try and support students in this phase.

And one of the things that I was observing happening quite quickly was quite polarized reactions across the world to it from like reactive bans, which would just push behaviors underground to jumping into the uses with kids in things that might not have been safe because people aren't aware, right? But then what's happened over the last sort of couple of years really is it's taken a while for people to become super comfortable with being able to ask all of the right questions or to realize, okay, it's not going to go away.

What can I do as a teacher or as a learning community? Many teachers will be trying to adapt to say, OK, how do we use these technologies safely and effectively within some sort of boundaries that we have, but also recognizing that more is possible.

And then in a few cases, that innovation stage is where some things are able to happen that have never happened before.

But bringing it all the way back to being kind of human in the age of AI and staying human in the age of AI.

it's it's myopic i think to be thinking about ai from just the how do we train kids how to use this tool that didn't exist three years ago and might be radically different again in three years time into how do we protect really powerful thinking really strong human relationships how do we you know you look at the skills from the world economic forum and the rising competencies that are really important they are still uniquely human competencies But learning how to communicate really well, to interact with other people really well, to make sense of complex ideas or to hold more than one thing in your head at once, that takes a lot of effort.

So in that context, how do we adapt the system and kind of take the opportunities that we have around devolution to make sure that total place actually sticks?

Well, there are five place-based budgets, pilots going on now, which are essentially total place projects.

And I think they're all doing the sensible thing.

I've spoken to them all.

They've picked a, you know, the fashion word is cohort.

So they've picked a cohort they might be able to help.

I'll give you an example.

How do we avoid getting into a big debate about changing legislation whilst also acknowledging that without some changes, it is very much dependent often on the leadership style?

In Jim Donnelly's case, there are more questions than answers, and there continues to be more questions than answers.

He didn't make a meeting.

He just disappeared, and then afterwards, stuff started appearing of his.

His friend Stephen thinks it's foul play.

He disappeared early in the morning.

He didn't make a meeting, which he gets to.

He didn't return a phone call from me, which he does promptly, always.

And he just disappeared, and then afterwards, stuff started appearing of his.

It's got to constantly change, right? Like, are there things we're trying to keep up with that, you know, that maybe we're, if we haven't changed our strategies in the past year or two, that we're maybe behind? Like, what's constantly changing in marketing?

This is a huge topic.

I mean, I'm but I'm very excited to talk about it because like imagine for a minute.

Imagine if a new set of HIPAA guidelines came out every week.

Imagine the scramble in your office or the scramble at insurance companies or, you know, anywhere affected by the by HIPAA.

But that's how fast AI changes are coming out.

It's literally every week, sometimes every day of the week.

What marketing advice can Steve did Steven Taylor? Yeah,

What do you think that's about? I mean, what, what is it th- th- that shapes how people react to this? Uh, d- spe- s- specifically about w- what we have gone through.

Yeah.

There's a, there's a number of things that seem to be going on.

Um, first off, the people who are most, uh, likely to get anxious about an outbreak like this tend to be people who, who have a, a level of high level of health anxiety for, for whatever reason.

It could be they've just been like that for a long time.

They could have health concerns and they have difficulty tolerating uncertainty.

And then you have a situation that, with this outbreak that, uh, as has been mentioned, it superficially resembled the onset of COVID, and you have the characteristics of this dangerous virus.

How much of that do you specifically tie to what we all went through during COVID in terms of h- how that shaped how we respond to something like this?