Campus Technology Insider Podcast January 2024
Listen: The State of AI in Education
Rhea Kelly 00:08
Hello and welcome to the Campus Technology Insider podcast. I'm Rhea Kelly, editor in chief of Campus Technology, and your host.
Last November I had the privilege of moderating a panel on the state of AI in education at Tech Tactics in Education 2023, a new conference for education IT leaders produced by Campus Technology and our sister publication THE Journal. We had a wonderful conversation ranging from basic definitions, to concerns, limitations, and opportunities, as well as leadership and culture change. I'm excited to share a recording of the discussion here — it's full of insights for anyone grappling with the impact of AI and generative AI on campus.
Tech Tactics in Education took place November 7-9 in Orlando, Florida. For more information, visit techtacticsineducation.com.
So we are here to talk everything AI in education. And I know it's impossible to do the topic justice in 50 minutes, but we are going to try. So first we have Noble Ackerson, CTO of American Board of Design and Research, Dave Weil VP and CIO for IT and analytics at Ithaca College, and Howard Holton, CTO and analyst at GigaOm. So Noble, maybe we'll start with you. Tell us what, what, where your interest in AI comes from.
Noble Ackerson 01:44
My interest in AI comes from my product background. So for about 25 years, I've been in skunkworks labs and worked in sort of the emergent technology space. And one thing that I've seen over and over is solutions looking for problems to solve. And with my product background, I try to sort of correct the ship in any opportunity that I can. In the case of machine learning, it was mostly because as a product leader, you know, both quantitative and qualitative data, sort of with my superpowers, sort of drove decisions for the business as to what we build and why we should build it and why, you know, what happens if we didn't build it now, or why we should wait, that kind of stuff. And using advanced analytics became a tool that I use over time. It just became, you know, rather than just use leveraged lagging data insights to tell me what to do, we sort, I sort of honed my craft and learned a little bit of, you know, traditional machine learning to, to better understand leading data, predicting, classifying, or, you know, using recommender systems, to help me do my job. And, and that sort of one thing led to another, I am now, you know, my why or my focus is to help organizations sort of deliver some of these tools responsibly. And you know, all of the complexity that that comes with.
Rhea Kelly 03:12
And Dave, how about you?
David Weil 03:15
Thank you. So I oversee IT for, and analytics for the entire institution. We're a very centralized organization. And even though I do have a technical background, I'm really interested in how our technology helps our institutions. How does it help our students succeed? And also as important, how can it help our institutions function more effectively and more efficiently? And so that's always been the driver for everything that I've done in my entire career. And I see AI, it's a, it's an accelerant. It's an opportunity to really enhance and energize, re-energize the work that we do. And so I'm really interested in how we can leverage this to help our institutions work better.
Rhea Kelly 04:03
And Howard?
Howard Holton 04:05
So I come from the private sector, and, and my focus is kind of, kind of two pieces, right? One, I'm a lifelong learner. And so I'm constantly looking for things that will me better, that will make me faster, that will make me more efficient, that will help continue my education. And one of the things that intrigued me about AI and machine learning really early on is, at first it was, "This is fantastic. This is really fast. This has the ability to analyze tremendous amounts of data and stop a lot of the decision-making inside of organizations, and I can be a little bit more authoritative." And then I realized it's just another form of statistics, and you know, there's white lies and big black lies and then there are statistics. And what I realized was the real trick is answering, is asking the question, not the model or the technology. And so helping businesses figure out how do we phrase a question properly so that we get an answer that we can actually take action on and will, will lead us somewhere has kind of become the, the interesting piece for me. And and I mean, this is a force multiplier. And I like the accelerant, right? Because on one hand, properly utilized, an accelerant carries us to space. Improperly utilized, it creates an enormous fire. Right? And so that's really kind of where I'm at with it.