AI in P-12 Education - A reflection

 No discussion on education these days is complete without a reference to AI. Some venerate it, some demonise it, but we just can't seem to stop talking about it. World over individuals, institutions and companies make grandiose claims that AI has either consigned formal education to ignominy or saved it from obsolescence. While neither of these might be true in their entirety, it is true that AI has affected the educational landscape; it is the newest tool on the bench and like any tool, can either help or harm depending on how it is used or abused. Thankfully, conversations around AI are happening at all levels starting from teachers on the ground to national policy and this will help guide the use and put much-needed guardrails to help curb the abuse. 

As a teacher, I would consider myself an early adopter of technological innovation in teaching. I began exploring how to use AI to make my job more efficient and as Head of Department, helped pioneer department policy on how my teachers could leverage AI like ChatGPT (which so many of our students blindly used already) to foster better teaching and learning of critical thinking skills. I was therefore very excited to get an opportunity to attend the Purdue AI in P-12 Education Conference organised on 11 November, 2024. There is considerable research happening in Purdue itself on AI and how it interfaces with education, so I was sure this would be an illuminating and productive conference for me even if my main research interests don't have much to do with AI.

I chose to attend sessions that spanned the full range of themes - AI tools, AI education research, AI curriculum applications and AI ethics and policy - to get a broad overview of the issues. The keynote by Dr. Stephen J Aguilar, a philosopher by training, set the tone with having us consider the potential and also the limitations of AI. Jenna Lane ran a session on using AI to teach 21st century skills like critical thinking corroborated and validated the policy and outlines for use that I had setup at Mallya Aditi International School in 2022. The session on using AI to create personalised learning programs for gifted students did not quite hit the mark for me, with too little focus on the actual AI use and more about the summer program. Presentations by a series of doctoral student presenting diverse research showed the great quality of work being done by researchers at Purdue and similar universities. These consisted of rural teacher PD in AI tools, a systematic review of literature on AI in educational leadership and policy and a study of teachers' perspective on AI integration on education in South Korea. 

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The session I think I most enjoyed was on AI ethics and policy by Wesley Skym, a theatre and communication educator and a doctoral student in educational administration and leadership at UIUC. His session titled, "AI and HI-FIVES" looked at applying an established framework - HI-FIVES - to evaluate the need for the inclusion of any teaching tool into pedagogic practice. 

Wesley took us through a brief history of educational interventions from the past few decades - distance learning, flipped classrooms, asynchronous/synchronous classes, game based learning, Virtual reality and finally AI - discussing the benefits and concerns of each that have been documented in the literature. The large number of common benefits and concerns across all these tools was thought-provoking, but not entirely unsurprising. This led to an elaborate discussion of the HI-FIVES model that was constructed with inputs from both learning theories and computer-mediated communication theories. HI-FIVES essentially is a rubric to check any tool against to evaluate its merit for inclusion in a classroom. It stands for:

H - Hyperpersonal

I- Interactive

F- Foundation

I-Immediacy

V-Versatility

E-Empowerment

S-Support.

Wesley took the session attendees through each of these criteria and how we can understand and apply it. For example, when questioning if the tools is interactive, we see if it supplements and not fully replaces current practices and creates an engaging experience for teachers and students. This deep dive into each of the different criteria was insightful and helped me consider how I'd apply this to different AI tools I've encountered before. In the last few minutes, Wesley did a rough evaluation of Gimkit, a tool he uses abundantly in his classes, using the HI-FIVES framework and justified its use in his lessons. While I'm sure there may be concerns about how one could objectively measure the different metric required for HI-FIVES and how feasible it is to do perform this evaluation rigorously for every tool that may be considered for deployment in a classroom, it was eye-opening to see an established framework for this purpose. I also liked that it drew from diverse theoretical frameworks thereby creating a more robust synthesis.

One of the things I've come to enjoy in my first semester at Purdue is the breadth and variety of learning opportunities available here. This conference, my first in the US but far from the last, was just one more opportunity to broaden my mind's horizons in a long list I've enjoyed within just 3 months here. The diversity of perspectives, the quality and rigour of the content and the passion of the presenters and learners reminds me why I chose to come here and makes me thrilled to be a part of such a vibrant academic ecosystem!