History is chock full of new technologies developed with good intentions. But if we’ve learned anything over the past few decades, it’s that doing research and designing products has layers of complexity. It isn’t enough to just build tech for others – we have to build it in close partnership and community with those who will use it. In this episode of Future Fluent, Betsy and Jeremy talk with Dr. Elvira Salazar, a life-long educator, passionate devotee of STEM education and NASA, and now the Director of Online Learning & Technology for Latinos for Education. They’ll talk about what the AI community gets right – and gets wrong – in the rush to build the next great thing.

Learn more!

• To explore more of Dr. Salazar’s work, a great place to start is the Latinos for Education website.

• She also contributed this piece, “Learnings from the Front Lines on Redefining Leadership for the Age of AI,” to EdSurge.

• Dr. Salazar described the work of CLEAR, or the Center for Leadership Equity and Research. You can explore the groups work as well as its AI initiative at Clearvoz.com

• This story, “AI Leaves Some Students Lost in Translation,” explores in more detail some of the promise and challenges of AI development for the Latino community. (You can also try out the Playlab app developed by the group, “Elevating your Speaking,” a tool that parents can use to support their students’ language development skills, here.)

• Stanford University professor, Dr. Sanmi Koyejo, discusses his white paper about how AI is leaving non-English speakers behind here. The full report from Dr. Koyejo and his team is here: “Mind the (Language) Gap: Mapping the Challenges of LLM Development in Low-Resource Language Contexts.”

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AI arrived in classrooms at the same time it arrived in businesses and homes. And while it may speed up tasks at work, teachers, students and parents are still in the early and often painful stages of figuring out how or even if it will make learning “more efficient.” In this episode of Future Fluent, Jeremy and Betsy talk with Dr. Justin Reich, an MIT professor and researcher, and cohost of The Homework Machine podcast. Reich’s been studying Chat GPT's role in school since November 2020. Reich and his team listen closely to teachers through their research. He worries that AI is already slowing down learning. “I think we’re going to find that there are millions and millions fewer minutes of homework being done at all secondary grade levels this year,” he warns. Join us for the full conversation.

Learn more!

• Get started by jumping into the podcast that Justin cohosts called The Homework Machine. It explores the art and craft of teaching through interviews with more than 120 teachers and students from across a wide variety of subjects.

• Prefer to read about AI? Browse this downloadable (and free) PDF from Reich and his colleagues called: A Guide to AI in Schools: Perspectives for the Perplexed.

• Justin’s past books are well worth exploring, too. He wrote Iterate: The Secret To Innovation In Schools (published in 2023) and Failure To Disrupt: Why Technology Alone Can't Transform Education (published in 2020).

• Want to understand more about how we teach and learn? Check out the National Tutoring Observatory, a research program aimed at improving teaching and learning at scale by studying great tutors.

• Also seminal: the work of cognitive and learning scientist, Michelene (“Micky”) T.H. Chi. She has built a rich collection of research around how students learn, study and solve problems.

• Verified: How to think straight, get duped less, and make better decisions about what to believe online by Mike Caulfield and Sam Wineburg (2023) explores what we should trust online.

• And when it’s all too much, try a little fiction: Babel - An Arcane History by R.F. Kuang (2022), is a historical fantasy, a sort of Harry Potter meets linguists in a complex world.

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