July 15, 2025
Episode 329: Building with Purpose with Eduaide
Ep.329 Building with Purpose with Eduaide
In this episode, I welcome back two familiar voices: Thomas Thompson and Thomas Hummel, the powerhouse team behind Eduaide.AI. This isn’t just another conversation about AI. It’s a grounded, honest discussion on what it means to build tech for teachers, by teachers.
We talk growth, grit, and grounded design. From their classroom beginnings to becoming one of the most trusted teacher-first platforms, we unpack how they’re putting pedagogy over hype, and purpose over buzzwords.
🎧 If you are skeptical, curious, or cautiously optimistic about AI in education, this is a great episode for you.
⏱️ Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction and Context Setting
06:46 EduAid's Growth and Development
14:09 Feedback and Teacher Engagement
20:56 Pedagogy and Technology Integration
22:16 Community Feedback and Its Impact on EduAid
23:38 International Reach and Localized Curriculum
26:29 Access and Equity in Education
28:23 The Ripple Effect of EduAid
32:34 Navigating AI in Education
35:18 The Hype and Reality of AI Tools
39:37 Public Education vs. Private Success
46:24 Revisiting Taxonomy of LLMs in Education
53:20 Challenges of AI Integration in Schools
56:31 Navigating the AI Landscape in Education
01:03:09 Grounding in Reality: The Educator's Perspective
01:11:02 Innovations in EduAid: Enhancing Teaching Tools
01:17:04 Final Thoughts and Reflections on Education and AI
🫶 A huge thanks to our incredible sponsors for supporting this work:
Eduaide.AI, Book Creator, Yellowdig,
🛠️ My EdTech Life is about real conversations that matter. No buzzwords, just honest dialogue with the people building the future of learning.
🙏 Like, comment, and subscribe to keep these conversations going—and as always… Stay Techie, my friends.
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Thank you for watching or listening to our show!
Until Next Time, Stay Techie!
-Fonz
🎙️ Love our content? Sponsor MyEdTechLife Podcast and connect with our passionate edtech audience! Reach out to me at myedtechlife@gmail.com. ✨
00:30 - Welcome and Introduction
05:19 - Meet the EduAid Co-Founders
15:34 - EduAid's Growth and Efficacy Studies
28:49 - Navigating AI Hype in Education
41:54 - The Reality Gap Between Vendors and Schools
53:07 - New EduAid Features and Community Focus
01:13:23 - Final Thoughts and Billboard Wisdom
WEBVTT
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Hello everybody and welcome to another episode of my EdTech Life.
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Thank you so much for joining us on this wonderful day and wherever it is that you're joining us from around the world.
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Thank you, as always, for your support.
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As you know, we appreciate all the likes, the shares, the follows.
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Thank you so much for your support.
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As you know, we appreciate all the likes, the shares, the follows.
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Thank you so much for your comments.
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We take this to heart because we completely want to improve and bring you some amazing conversations, as we always do into our space so we can continue to grow, and today is no different, and I am excited to welcome our very first four-time guest and our third well, I can say fourth, actually third-time guest.
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We have Thomas Thompson and Thomas Hummel from Edu8 joining us today.
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Thomas Thompson, how are you doing today?
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Well, thank you so much for having us today, fonz, for the fourth time, you know I feel like the privileged list of guests.
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You know the Tonight Show.
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They would have the 10 comedians that would get to do repeat appearances.
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So it's an honor.
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Yes, no, fourth time guest for Thomas Thompson and Thomas Hummel.
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You are a three time guest now, so that's a wonderful honor.
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How are you doing today?
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Fonz, I'm doing great, and it's always a pleasure to get to speak with you, so thank you so much for having us.
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No, thank you, and I'm really excited to have you all here and, as all my listeners know, and I always, when I close out the show and thank all my sponsors you are a sponsor of my EdTech life and I want to thank you for believing in our mission and what we're doing to just continue to bring some great conversations into this space and just see where we stand, where we're going, how we're growing, and just kind of take it from there.
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You know, right now, I think that having dialogue is great and just having those conversations continue as the technology continues to grow.
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It's something that's very important.
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So I'm really excited to get into today's conversation.
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However, we may have some first-time listeners or some first people that are learning about EduAid for the very first time.
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As you know, we were just at ISTE and you know a lot of conferences and in the summertime usually a lot of teachers get to dive into a lot of tools.
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So before we get into the meat of the conversation, I'll go ahead and start off with Thomas Thompson.
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Can you give us a little brief introduction and what your context is, not only in the EduAID space, but in the educator space as well?
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Yeah, of course my name is Thomas Thompson, co-founder and CEO at EduAID.
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Prior to and in current with starting EduAID, I was a middle school social studies teacher.
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That's how I met Thomas Hummel, one of the other co-founders of EduAid.
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Taught in rural Maryland on the eastern shore.
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Did that for three years.
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Then I was starting graduate school, said okay, I can't be driving an hour to work every day.
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I started teaching in Glen Burnie, maryland, just north of where I live in Annapolis.
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Did that for another two years.
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We launched EduAid at that time.
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That sort of got out of hand so I had to step away from teaching and focus on EduAid full time and happy to do it.
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We bootstrapped this thing with three people, one of those being Thomas Hubble.
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Excellent, Thomas.
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How about yourself?
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Tell us a little bit of your context within the education space and in the EduAid space as well.
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Yeah.
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So I'm just like really blessed to still be teaching.
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I think that anybody who goes into teaching they do it because they love it, not to get rich or anything like that.
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And so you know, I feel very fortunate to have a great team like teammate, like Thomas here who kind of can take over a little bit more on the edge weight side as far as all things going with the business.
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But you know, just on the teaching side, I think it's great that we have the ability to implement our tool into the daily practice that no other company really can do, because you know, we're just teachers and we're just trying to help teachers.
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So it's awesome to be part of this journey and also remain like committed to my community and to my students.
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So I feel very, I feel very blessed, fonz, excellent no, and that's wonderful and I think that's something that is great about both of you and the work that you're doing from the very beginning, really still kind of your foot in the classroom, foot in EduAid and still being able to see how it is that you can continue to improve your platform, you know, on the daily, on the monthly, on the yearly, and just to continue to help educators.
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And I know that there are many educators out there that are extremely thankful for the work that you're doing and the work that you've done from the very beginning.
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As I know, and personally, in having you all on the show various times and various phases of EduAid, it has been something wonderful to see your growth and really how you continue to enhance the, not only the platform.
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As we know, many people can come up and, you know, have critiques about platforms but the fact that you listen and listen to those even the critiques but also listen to teachers to help improve the platform and really stick to that pedagogy-based learning that is really reliable and can help teachers not necessarily feel that they're doing something completely different or learning something new, but really enhancing what they are already doing, is something that has been great and that's something that I love to catch up on.
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You know, from the last time that you guys were here, back in episode 282, you know, I know that a lot has changed from 282 to this being 328.
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And although the number seems very close, there are definitely months, months and many months going through there and a lot of growth in EduAid.
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So, thomas Thompson, I'll go ahead and start with you as we kind of dive in into the growth of EduAid.
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From the very last time that you were here, as you guys were planning on going and doing some efficacy studies and really diving in deep and hearing from educators to see how you can improve, can you please share with us a little bit of your findings and how that has helped you continue to improve the platform but also improve the learning in the classroom as well?
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Yeah, certainly, I mean from.
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It has been quite a few months.
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We've launched a few like really intensive partnerships with some other organizations that have allowed us to take a really close look at our platform.
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So we worked with a cohort of teachers at Teach for America in a kind of a controlled study over a set number of weeks and we had these kind of meetup calls and they played around on some platforms, implemented them in their class to set a few objectives that they shared with the cohort, and it was just great getting a lot of the feedback from those folks.
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Really, a bright group of teachers, super committed, had a lot of great notes on not only things that we could add some different ways of thinking about how we approach certain subjects but then also like the positive feedback too, hearing from teachers who were new teachers, veteran teachers as well, coming across new and diverse methods of instruction they didn't previously consider or having supplemental resources they wouldn't have previously had access to.
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I mean that's quite rewarding.
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The other piece of this, however, is you want to go beyond making teachers feel as though they're doing something effective or feeling efficient.
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Right, this is just the first step, kind of the tip of the iceberg.
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Really we are looking at the largest bottlenecks being validation, verification of the AI outputs themselves that you're putting into the instructional context, and prompting.
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I mean prompting and verification are really the two large bottlenecks.
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We got a long way to do kind of more of that alignment work on our side.
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So we have a partnership currently where we are looking with CZI, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, using their evaluator tools.
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This allows us to really get in on a very fine level and look at text complexity and sentence structure and ensure that when you're selecting different grade levels on EduA, that's coming through in the outputs from the AI and that we're able to better constrain the AI for those grade level texts and then just continue to expand out our knowledge graph of learning sciences research that we use to make rubrics and kind of grade the responses ourselves while we're testing and developing them.
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That's been a pretty rewarding experience.
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I'm pretty happy with where that knowledge graph is and how these prompts are looking and how things are coming out now.
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So I mean a lot of work there.
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But you know those just streamed wall of text got old pretty fast for most people.
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So it's like we went the way of like really highly structured outputs.
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So graphic organizers, venn diagrams, freya model stuff, marking the text, exercises, really structured games, so like.
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These things are themed, templated, formatted.
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You have total control over all of it.
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You could change the colors, change which pieces are there, add a collaboration activity with one click, take it away, add in a summarization or retrieval questions or whatever.
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It's all very modular, really easy to use and really in a classroom ready package.
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Excellent.
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I love it and, like you mentioned, classroom ready package is something that's great and one of the things that I love and I'm going to bring it up too, because, of course, having you guys on the show is I know that you guys really emphasize that pedagogy first, not just the tech, as being the core to EduAid, because normally it's like, hey, there are are several platforms out there and it's really all about the tech and how I can do this and make this easier for you, which is, you know, in many ways, something that is great.
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You know, as part of my research that I'm doing through my dissertation, I know that that's a major component as far as the ease of use and doing some certain selective tasks a lot quicker, but I love the fact that you focus more on that pedagogy and that practice.
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So, thomas Hummel, I want to ask you, you know, just in continuing kind of with this idea of what I asked Thomas T about you still being in the classroom and being able to use this and work with this in the classroom and get feedback, and you know what has that been like and what are some of the things that you have been excited about since the last time that you were on the show yeah, it's funny fawns like uh, you know, every teacher has their own identity and my identity sort of is like the first teacher in the building kind of guy.
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So I'm up early and I do a lot of my planning for the school day in the morning.
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Just because year 10 coming up, it's just like I don't need to go home and spend tens of hours a week doing this kind of stuff, like I have everything sort of how I want it, but it needs to be adjusted.
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And that's where we're finding, like where we've really made some serious enhancements with edu8 is like when I go in in the morning and I start to adjust my lessons to make them higher quality and things are not working the way that I need them to work as the teacher in the moment, I blow these guys up on the phone and I'm like I'm calling that you know, and the one guy, our buddy Ty, he lives out in Denver like I'm waking him up, you know, three days a week sometimes because we only want to put out the best possible product that we can for teachers.
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And if I'm a teacher and I'm running into snags on our product, what are we doing?
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We're not actually making it easier for people, and so we've really tried to refine out any difficult problems in our product, with working with it.
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But, like Thompson was saying, you know the quality of our outputs.
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We spend a lot of time, you know, running the same thing on multiple sites and checking it and just making sure that what we're providing is of the highest quality that we can get for teachers and not just framed in a way that's like you know, a lesson plan, but framed in a way that it's reaching the certain taxonomy level, it's reaching the certain amount of questions that need to be done and just finding little ways to improve our product to help teachers.
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I think if I create something and it only gave me two questions or three questions and I needed five, most of the time just little things like that make a huge difference for teachers because we need to save them time when time is of the essence and time is valuable for those teachers.
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So excellent.
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No, and that, like you said, you've kind of hit the nail on the head.
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I know that for sure on one of your LinkedIn posts.
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And if you haven't followed Thomas H, or even Thomas Thompson, too, on LinkedIn, please do, because they do provide and share just a lot of wonderful content and they're completely transparent about their app.
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And even, just like Thomas H I know you've put up a lot of posts too you know you still being in the classroom and, like you said, being there early, leaving there late and talking a little bit about you know the way teachers feel at the end of the year and everything that you go through.
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So that's one of the things that I feel is a little unique, actually a lot unique in the fact that you are still in the classroom while still being a lot easier for teachers to use, not just the tool but giving them great pedagogy.
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So, thomas T, I want to come back.
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Can I touch on that real quick?
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Yeah, of course.
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It's not just me at this point.
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Right Like we, we are so lucky with our product to be where we're at that we spend one day a week literally going over feedback from our teachers and we get so much feedback about the quality of what we're doing and what we're putting out there that we spent that Thursday meeting.
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We'll sit there and we'll just go through all this feedback and then we'll go implement these things and then, if it's you know, we try to make sure that we're doing the best from the people that we're trying to serve.
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So it's not just me that's using this, but it's over 800,000 teachers at this point that have used this thing and it's like we really respect their professionalism and we really value their feedback.
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So it's not just a me thing.
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It's like this whole thing with community.
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It's like-.
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Community makes doing the app much easier.
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There's the constant source of inspiration, ideas, and instead of turning away from them, especially at the critical moments, it's important to lean in and understand that they're coming from you.
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Even if the messaging is frustrated, it's coming from a place of professional frustration.
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They have a job they want to do well, and these tools were promised or given to them as a way to do that.
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And if they don't, then we're doing a disservice to a very important enterprise, which is public education.
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Yeah, Well, thomas Hage, kind of going back into this, this is a nice segue as far as getting that feedback, and, just like you mentioned, thomas Hage, I mean, you've got thousands upon thousands of users, not only here in the US, though, but I want to talk a little bit about this internationally, because that was a nice segue, because I was just thinking too.
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You know, there are several people that I have seen and followed that are using EduAID.
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You know, in Africa, they're using it in other countries, so I want to ask you you know and we'll start off with you, thomas T you know, as far as, like you mentioned, the feedback and the evidence that you receive from international users, you know, how have you taken that?
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How has that influenced your product?
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And also, especially, you know, with localized curricula, how has that been for you to adjust to that?
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Yeah, I mean the adjustment period wasn't too difficult, right?
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We keep it pretty open in terms of what our tool was able to do.
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So when we focus on the particular pedagogical aspects of the tool, so whether it's retrieval practice, distributive practice, self-explanation, elaborative interrogation, whatever the specific method might be right, those methods are generalizable regardless of locality, regardless of country of origin.
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The main difference there comes in the particular content of what the instructor is teaching, not the method that they would use to teach it.
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Necessarily, the method should vary, though, depending on the context.
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I'll be clear about that.
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We leave it really open for the user to input that contextual information where they can upload a document with their curricular materials to use as the basis for a generation.
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If there's a particular standards database that they have to work from, we're able to ingest those as well.
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And of course, cedre is offered in multiple different languages.
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Now we have specific standards tools for US-based standards.
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I mean kind of our bias, given that we're developing in the US.
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So common core math, common core English, next generation science, things that we're looking at.
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Bringing in the IB curriculum is definitely an area of interest and importance as we're working with newer international schools.
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But generally I mean the biggest gap is, of course, the ability to access the tool right.
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That in itself is the biggest barrier, not so much barriers within the tool.
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There are linguistic barriers.
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There are barriers in like sampling, for example, like the kind of things the AI will provide, as examples tend to be kind of US-based.
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That's not just an Eduate thing, that's a general AI phenomenon currently, like you know, the same thing would have happened if you were to use a school AI or magic school or any of these other players in foreign countries.
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If you're building on top of the foundation models developed in the US, using mostly English corpa, you'll run into the same issue.
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I mean.
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So the independent testing I think Hummel correct me if I'm wrong, was it Ken Sheldon who does this where he'll test a particular historical topic that, depending on the context, can be either framed in a US basis or framed in a few other different contextual bases as well, and usually the AI will default to the US examples in his prompting.
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So I mean it's definitely a gap, something that you have to continue to work on.
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It is prompting, so I mean it's definitely a gap, something that you have to continue to work on.
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But for us, again focusing on the pedagogical moves, the methods being at that level, that certainly, I think, helps us kind of translate EduAid into other countries and around the world.
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But to the access piece, I mean we have the EduAid scholarship program where we just kind of give access to EduAid away for free to folks who otherwise might be able to get their hands on it or it's prohibitively expensive, whatever it might be, because we're coming from a perspective where we view education as a public good, as a foundational human right, and the methods and materials to support instruction, I mean they should just be as open as and accessible as the instruction itself.
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Like, if you're locking those behind very strict paywalls, yeah, you got to keep the lights on, like that's one thing, but if you make it totally inaccessible, I mean I think it's a crisis that we see in research and science right now.
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A lot of the great papers are locked behind paywalls.
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Independent researchers are basically locked out.
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I mean, who's got $35 to drop on one research article or, you know, thousands of dollars for a collection?
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So I mean those gaps are always top of mind as we're building and trying to expand access to the tool.
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Yeah, no, absolutely Just kind of.
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Before I go back to Thomas H, you know talking about, you know paywalls.
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I mean even just myself having to do research and finding articles, and then all of a sudden it's like, hey, here's the link.
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And then all of a sudden it's like well, you got to pay this and you got to pay that.
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I was like excellent academia.
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You know I'm trying to get information to continue to grow and continue to do the research, and there it is, and but I get it.
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You know.
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You know, within the international schools and even here locally.
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I know that for a fact and I've heard many of my friends too as well say that they're very thankful for the work that you're doing in that.
00:20:24.419 --> 00:20:30.809
And so, thomas H, kind of going back on that too as well, in your experience, you know in the classroom too as well.
00:20:30.809 --> 00:20:36.458
You know being able to get that feedback from just international educators.
00:20:36.458 --> 00:20:38.580
You know what does that feel like.
00:20:38.580 --> 00:20:45.857
You know building something that is now not only in the hands of US teachers but also internationally.
00:20:45.857 --> 00:20:54.323
You know what are some of your big takeaways and how has that helped you continue to grow within EduAid and Edu altogether.
00:20:54.824 --> 00:21:03.480
Yeah, I mean when we first started this Fonz, I think that anybody will be surprised at where this has gone.
00:21:03.480 --> 00:21:16.404
I mean the workspace flow that we've made right you see that almost everywhere now, which is crazy and all kinds of different products, and so we just feel really blessed to be able to bring this to teachers and all over the world.
00:21:16.404 --> 00:21:27.865
And, specifically, something that I'm super proud of is that there's a lot of teachers in the Kenya area of Africa that don't get especially like the rural part.
00:21:27.865 --> 00:21:34.291
They don't have a whole lot of access, and we've been able to tap in through LinkedIn or different places, different venues of social media and stuff.
00:21:34.291 --> 00:21:37.000
But we've been able to tap in through LinkedIn or different places, different venues of social media and stuff, but we've really connected with them.
00:21:37.000 --> 00:21:44.683
And we've guaranteed life subscriptions to the Million Teacher Movement in Africa, which spans across multiple countries.
00:21:44.683 --> 00:22:09.432
We've guaranteed life access to EduAid for that, and so you know, while we've only given away a few thousand accounts already, which is still a lot right, like, if you added up the numbers financially, it would be a ton of money for us but we are just so lucky to be in a spot where we can do the good that we set out to do and that it doesn't like prevent us from also maintaining the business that we have.
00:22:09.432 --> 00:22:36.983
And so, uh, things like the million teacher movement, things like our scholarship program, uh, it just it brings me so much joy to help teachers save time and to create higher quality lessons, because the ripple effect of that doing that good piece is like you don't know where that's gonna go, but you know that the ripple is there and that it's going to expand, and so it just really gets me.
00:22:37.269 --> 00:23:27.676
I have imposter syndrome sometimes because I walk into my school in my cheap, crappy little Volkswagen car and yet my product's being used in Africa or being used in Vietnam you could go down the list In 120 different countries that day it's going to be used and it just it really makes me feel weird about myself in some regards, but it also gives me a sense of pride and, yeah, even more than that, like I now feel responsible, like I don't know if I had to and, thomas, I don't know if you feel that way, but we at least I do I feel responsible for doing the right thing in this space and that when you have teachers who are people that are just trying to do good and you kind of have them using that product.
00:23:27.917 --> 00:23:30.330
There's a huge responsibility there To not.
00:23:30.330 --> 00:23:39.435
You know, we don't want to make them feel any way, but you know better about their job and that's it Like.
00:23:39.435 --> 00:23:51.280
We want them to feel energized, we want them to feel good about teaching and, at the end of the day, if people love teaching even more because of our product, we've done so much good in this world that you can't even wrap your head around pretty much.
00:23:52.590 --> 00:23:58.413
And that's excellent and you know that's something that is great, thomas, and I think that's something that is definitely you should be proud of.
00:23:58.413 --> 00:24:12.016
You know in that and I know imposter syndrome a lot of us deal with it, you know in that sense but just the fact, like I said, it's just a testament of the hard work and consistency that both of you have been able to do and bring since the very beginning.
00:24:12.016 --> 00:25:24.726
So I love that and you know, that's something that I really do appreciate from you all and the work that you're doing, because there's LinkedIn posts upon LinkedIn posts also the international teachers just stating how thankful they are to be able to have access to a tool, a platform like yours to be able to do what they do best and enhance that learning and be able to help their students continue to learn in that so I kind of yeah, go ahead.
00:25:24.767 --> 00:25:40.577
I think that this comes out of the fact that thomas and I started teaching in a really low income, like hurting area, and we didn't you know, we didn't set out to like change the world right off the get-go, but we did set out to make a difference in the areas that need it the most.
00:25:40.577 --> 00:25:58.536
And that's why I think whenever things like that, like the million teacher movement, pops up in africa and we can support that, I think that that just resonates so much more with how we started this thing well, I kind of want to change the conversation over a little bit as and we'll come back to a couple of questions that I do want to ask especially you.
00:25:58.877 --> 00:26:06.159
You know a recent substack that Thomas Thompson pushed or, you know, pushed through I think it was today and so on that really caught my attention.
00:26:06.159 --> 00:26:12.860
But I want to ask you you know I just came back from Misty and I mean, really, it's AI is all the rage.
00:26:12.860 --> 00:26:15.198
You know there's so many platforms.
00:26:15.198 --> 00:26:22.979
I think my biggest takeaway I won't say what the platform platform was, but their spiel was.
00:26:22.979 --> 00:26:25.791
They kind of caught me in an aisle as I was just kind of walking and they're like hey, have you heard of our app?
00:26:25.791 --> 00:26:27.615
And I was like no, I haven't tell me a little bit more.
00:26:27.615 --> 00:26:33.163
And they're like well, you see, these apps over here they help the teachers before the lesson.
00:26:33.163 --> 00:26:37.855
These apps over here help the teachers after the lesson, but we help them during.
00:26:37.855 --> 00:26:40.201
And I'm like like, okay, tell me more.
00:26:40.201 --> 00:27:02.955
And he goes oh well, it's an app that you download and your teacher wears either the phone around their neck or is somehow mic'd to their phone and it really just kind of keeps those notes and again, I guess either offer suggestions or some kind of you know write up afterwards and so on, some kind of you know write up afterwards and so on.
00:27:02.955 --> 00:27:04.139
And to me I was like, well, what about student voice?
00:27:04.139 --> 00:27:05.243
And what, if there's you know that PII?
00:27:05.243 --> 00:27:07.170
Oh well, the teacher wears the mic.
00:27:07.170 --> 00:27:11.872
It shouldn't the students, you know, you shouldn't be able to hear the teacher voice, and so on.
00:27:11.872 --> 00:27:15.639
And so there's a lot, a lot of tools that are out there.
00:27:16.300 --> 00:27:23.436
Now, of course, with that, there's a lot of people that are kind of in the middle and try and be in the middle, like myself.
00:27:23.436 --> 00:27:29.057
There's also, of course, you've got, you know, people that are just really on the AI hype train.
00:27:29.057 --> 00:27:31.682
There's others that are still kind of wait and see.
00:27:31.682 --> 00:27:49.150
So there's people at different levels and, as we even saw, just the advocacy that has come up and the skepticism of AI and education, you know, as we see Microsoft and do this push, you know, with other platforms and, of course, aft, you know, giving this alarm of.
00:27:49.150 --> 00:27:51.173
You know teachers are here.
00:27:51.173 --> 00:27:56.339
We don't have to worry about getting AI being replaced by AI.
00:27:57.240 --> 00:28:11.546
How is that, you know, for you all, both as founders, as educators, as people that are trying to do good, how do you navigate that tension on the day to day?
00:28:11.546 --> 00:28:25.800
Do you just really lean into the hype or do you respond, you know, to that pushback, you know, in not necessarily pushing that pushing people back, but you know and maybe justback, you know, and not necessarily pushing that pushing people back, but you know and maybe just saying, okay, well, this is kind of that pushback that we get.
00:28:25.800 --> 00:28:27.035
How might we adjust?
00:28:27.035 --> 00:28:30.793
So I want to start off with you, thomas H first, and then we'll start.
00:28:30.793 --> 00:28:31.858
We'll go to Thomas T.
00:28:33.671 --> 00:28:35.398
Thomas, maybe he should go first.
00:28:35.398 --> 00:28:36.801
I'm the unhinged one.
00:28:37.110 --> 00:28:38.574
Okay, all right, we'll let him go first.
00:28:38.594 --> 00:28:53.350
First, I'm the unhinged one, okay alright, if I start, who knows where this is gonna end yeah, I'll begin by saying I think hype is the reason why the statement believe half of what you see and none of what you hear probably so salient.
00:28:53.350 --> 00:29:02.912
Ultimately, I worry in that I know teachers have been burned by educational technology on quite a few occasions.
00:29:02.912 --> 00:29:07.604
Historically right, the promise of personalization has been around since like 2008,.
00:29:07.604 --> 00:29:18.234
And it was going to be MOOCs that are going to lead to true personalized learning and supreme access and lack of a need for structured institutions and things like this.
00:29:18.234 --> 00:29:44.019
But ultimately, I worry that too much focus on AI will lose sight of how we should be designing these tools, which is an understanding, or at least a theory of mind, of how people actually learn, of how people actually teach, of how people actually develop, and that if your tool does not in some meaningful way interact with one of these three domains, it's like what's the purpose of the tool at that level?
00:29:44.019 --> 00:29:51.234
It's like the tech being kind of inserted in as a substitution of something you already do.
00:29:51.234 --> 00:29:59.930
It might not be, it's not good enough at that point, like the technology should not just be merely substituting something you could already do, but hey, it's a new platform.
00:29:59.930 --> 00:30:04.267
It should like in some meaningful way interface with what you do on a day-to-day basis.
00:30:04.366 --> 00:30:07.231
So we try to avoid the hype.
00:30:07.231 --> 00:30:18.612
We kind of have a strict rule internally where we try to avoid like using like the buzzwords in conversation, because it's just kind of easy to like hide what you really think behind some of those terms.
00:30:18.612 --> 00:30:23.371
So we just try to speak as simply and precisely as possible.
00:30:23.371 --> 00:30:29.988
I mean just off, pretty thorough and delicate and how you kind of phrase things, but in general it's just like get to the base of the problem.
00:30:29.988 --> 00:30:40.473
And the base of the problem is okay, you want to assist teachers at the level of planning, so maybe they're slightly more efficient, feel less pressure, burnout, these kinds of things, but more.
00:30:40.473 --> 00:30:45.190
Finally, more crucially, we want to bridge that gap between research and practice and education.
00:30:45.190 --> 00:30:55.426
With a high translation cost of trying to be a highly effective teacher, trying to translate kind of just rolls of thumb, like space your practice, bring in new concepts into practice.
00:30:55.426 --> 00:30:56.028
But like when?
00:30:56.028 --> 00:30:56.930
When to space?
00:30:56.930 --> 00:30:58.882
When do I bring in new concepts?
00:30:59.142 --> 00:31:07.752
Generative AI has an incredible amount of promise there, but it's not the everything tool Thinking you can put students in front of AI tutors and it's going to solve education.
00:31:07.752 --> 00:31:12.252
I'm not really sure that's where we should be going.
00:31:12.252 --> 00:31:22.042
One reason is, I think a lot of technologists discount the embodied human factors that are important for teaching and learning.
00:31:22.042 --> 00:31:25.066
I mean, why does a lot of in-person instruction work?
00:31:25.447 --> 00:31:28.510
Humans have a tendency towards conformity, I think, in general.
00:31:29.833 --> 00:31:40.245
So when you're working with a group of other students, your peers and a mentor figure in the classroom, there's this pressure to conform right and our kind of natural hardwiring kind of goes for that right.
00:31:40.265 --> 00:31:54.629
But if you unmoor us from that group environment where we're interacting with our peers and interacting with the authority figure, and I'm just sitting in my room on a computer talking to an AI chatbot, where's that pressure, where's the desire, where's the motivation, where's the engagement?
00:31:54.629 --> 00:32:01.676
I mean, those are all pieces that I think are generally lacking and why we see lackluster returns from AI tutoring systems presently.
00:32:02.298 --> 00:32:10.228
It's really difficult to do that, especially when you can say IDK three times and the AI tutor just gives you the answer and it's like well, okay, so what's the theory of learning there?
00:32:10.228 --> 00:32:13.124
Are we suggesting that it's just exposure to correct answers?
00:32:13.124 --> 00:32:14.167
No, not quite.
00:32:14.167 --> 00:32:17.301
So it's like what's the purpose of the AI intervention?
00:32:17.301 --> 00:32:24.014
What is the purpose of the tool, what are the unique affordances, what are its boundaries and how do you adopt that into your unique context?
00:32:24.014 --> 00:32:29.589
And if you don't have answers to those questions, as a developer, you probably question your motives.
00:32:29.589 --> 00:32:37.322
That might have been strongly worded, but I figured if I come out strong maybe Hummel will help bring it down, or he's just going to keep us climbing here.
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