Askwith Education Forum Dives Deep into AI In Education

The Harvard Graduate School of Education’s first Askwith Education Forum of the fall semester featured a wide-ranging discussion about the seismic impact of artificial intelligence on education.

“Thinking in an AI-Augmented World” featured Professor Howard Gardner in conversation with award-winning international law scholar and founder of Dragonfly Thinking Anthea Roberts, who shared how she uses AI in her work and how views on cognition and education have shifted amid the rise of generative AI and large language models (LLM).

Professor Martin West introduced the event on Wednesday evening, citing new research from Harvard College Dean and HGSE Professor David Deming which showed more than 10% of conversations Chat GPT users have with the LLM are best categorized as tutoring or teaching, which indicates education is one of the tool’s largest use cases.

“Some of us react to that number with a sense of alarm. We worry about students cheating, being exposed to biased or hallucinated content, or simply using AI tools as a substitute for the kind of deep thought that we know is essential to learning,” said West. “Others may acknowledge those risks but look past them to the opportunities that AI provides to personalize instruction and support both educators and students in new ways.”

The overview of concerns and enthusiasm for AI set the stage for a theoretical conversation about how the education system might be transformed by technology as models and AI-powered tools grow more powerful and ubiquitous in classrooms of the future.

Gardner posed a bold proposal to fundamentally rethink the education system by letting large language models replace the teaching of several different subjects in school. Roberts’ Dragonfly Thinking AI model then took an essay Gardner wrote on the topic, synthesized its information, and applied some critical thinking to his words based on criticism it was fed from other notable scholars. Roberts then asked questions her model formed based on that criticism, which Gardner then answered on stage.

Gardner asserted that his proposal, while dramatic, is worth exploring as a thought experiment that highlights how much the rise of generative AI has already shifted the academic and civic landscape.

“This historical time may be as dramatic as the invention of writing a few thousand years ago or the invention of printing and mass production of written material five or six hundred years ago,” said Gardner. “If the world exists in 150 to 200 years and people look back at this time, what will be the huge changes that will have been made? Or what changes won’t have been made, or maybe should not have been made?”

Gardner described the need for students and educators to preserve “meta knowledge” as AI tools replace expertise in some fields, predicting that while drastic changes to education may not happen immediately, continuing conversations about how and why we think and synthesize information will always be important.

Roberts, meanwhile, described the “two poles” of conversations she’s seen about artificial intelligence in recent years, one group using AI but in an often “uncritical” way, with another group refusing to use the technology but remaining skeptical and critical of its flaws. She hopes conversations like the one she had in Askwith Hall on Wednesday can help forge a new path forward.

“As we think about education moving forward, how do we find a middle ground which is about cultivating critical use?” asked Roberts. “It’s really made me reflect on my own practice in dealing with these models because I think it’s an indication of where these things will go.”

You can watch the full Askwith Education Forum, including a lively Q&A period at the end of the evening, above.