Consider this picture from the perspective of a sentient horse. You are that sentient horse.

State Change

Some thoughts on how common-use AI is about to shift education.

Let’s start with a level-set: I’m a pretty with-it educator on the technology front. I operate well within the types of TPACK-type educational technology approaches that would generally classify me as highly fluent in that aspect of the work. I’m not writing scripts, but I can certainly bootstrap myself into doing such a thing if I ever need to.

I say all of this to ground the point of this piece. Which is this: AI is absolutely about to fundamentally change how humans access and use knowledge. If schools aren’t thinking about this yet, they absolutely need to start doing so now. If not, they’re going to be replaced.

I promise you I am not overstating this

I appreciate that the above likely reads as the typical, “<X> will revolutionize education”-type discourse that has come to dominate discussions about educational technology. But unlike pretty much all of those prior conversations, the tool being discussed here (easy to use, and increasingly general artificial intelligence) is a fundamentally different sort of technology. It’s not a thing that lets you do some pre-existing thing faster or with a different platform. It’s a whole new way of accessing and processing information. In this way, it will have tectonic…