#225 AI in Education with Dylan Wiliam

Um, and right from the start, I want- I wanted you on it.

So before we get into the nitty-gritty of how AI can play out in assessment and teaching and learning, I'm interested in your personal kind of AI use cases.

And if we go back to when ChatGPT launched, were you super excited? Were you skeptical? And, and how would AI play out in your typical day-to-day, Dylan?

I was skeptical, uh, partly because there'd been so many false dawns previously.

Uh, but I'm think, I think I'm with Craig, uh, with Carl Henrik now, Craig.

Uh, this time is different.

You know, people have always said this time is different, but I really think it is this d- different this time.

We are seeing extraordinary s- uh, leaps, and I've stopped saying AI will never be able to do X because I've said that so many times and been wrong.

So I was in...

I was quite surprised, um, by the initial capabilities.

ChatGPT 3.5 was quite impressive, I thought.

I very quickly discovered, uh, a guy named Ethan Mollick, a professor at The Wharton School at the, at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

And he's done a lot of work to make it really easy to p- for people to, to use AI in productive ways.

And so I never expected to be working on, in AI, uh, personally.

I never expected to be doing workshops on it.

I started using it for my own work.

S- to begin with, very trivial things, like formatting references that came in a non-standard form.

So I'd drop a, a research paper, and I just said, you know, "Give me the, give me the reference in a .ris format.

Um, give me a, an abstract of the paper that, that's different from the paper that's, p- the abstract that the authors wrote." And so I used it for small things like that.

Um, I then started using it for interesting things like, um, uh, looking at student work.

So I- looked at some of this project work I've been doing back in the 1980s on students' logical thinking.

So there's one quite nice task called coloring four sq-squares.

You've got, uh, uh, four squares together, and you give students four colors, and you ask them, "How many different ways are there?" Not counting rotations and reflections are different.

How many ways are there of coloring this shape with four colors? And what I was quite impressed by, this is GPT-4, I think.

It was able to tell me that the two classes had adopted, adopted different approaches.