Thank you to Nan Hua High School for inviting me to be their speaker at their Professional Learning Day yesterday. “Pedagogy x Gen AI” is a complex topic to tackle, and I shared my thoughts both as an educator and a Gen AI coach:
🔷 While we should all embrace AI, we need to listen to our gut instincts as teachers and seek out the truth about whether we should really bring AI into a particular subject, or go old-school paper and pen. This demands domain expertise, pedagogical grounding AND AI literacy. One has to master Gen AI to know when to apply it, and when to avoid it.
🔷 A great teacher is valued for their ability to instil the love of a subject in a student. AI cannot possibly do that, since it has no passion or willpower. But AI can accelerate the performance of a person who loves the subject and wants to tap on its vast training data and processing power.
🔷 Deep learning for the long term demands friction (ie. challenging assignments). If you make everything as easy as pressing a button, then there’s no real learning. That’s why you can’t automate every part of teaching. I grade all my assignments manually, taking up to 30min to write my comments for each NTU student. (Now multiply that by 40 students).
🔷 Gen AI is getting better all the time, but again, because it has no heart or soul, it cannot care for our students, nor see the potential in them. And the very fact that we cannot eliminate Gen AI hallucinations means that we must always be cautious when using it.
Thank you to all the Nan Hua teachers for your great questions!