D.C. Trip
I was very pleased to get to travel to Washington D.C. for the ACCET Leadership Summit earlier this week. ACCET is an accrediting organization for professional and continuing education opportunities like NYCDSA. As part of my work with Articulate.AI, I’ve been thinking about and talking to people from professional schools a lot lately, and it was really gratifying to get close to the action! I hadn’t traveled on a train to anywhere outside New York in several years, so it was fun to get on the Amtrak, get some work done, and take some time to watch the landscape go by my window.
The Summit
The summit was a great time for education leaders to meet and collaborate, and it’s true that they shared many common desires and concerns. Many were concerned with the incoming president and what it would mean for visas and immigration statuses across America. The enrollment cliff, a drop in birth rates after 2008 meaning a coming projected drop in enrollments, loomed as well.
Another thing on everybody’s mind was AI. What parts of their schools’ structures can they automate with AI without losing the personalization and humanity that makes their school what it is? How do you incorporate AI in an educational setting while impressing upon students that using AI can rob you of your own learning experience?
In my experience at Articulate, I’ve been very grateful to advocate for an AI use case that sits well on my mind as an educator. Picture a chatbot capable of human-like conversation at the landing page of your school’s website. This bot can function like a first meeting with an admissions counselor. By training a chatbot on your own school’s materials, you can sidestep difficult discussions of plagiarism. The bot, then, doesn’t automate anyone out of a job, but rather gives staff back time for the more delicate in-person work their offices need to do. Articulate’s bot is unique in that it can ask open-ended questions about students’ preferences and goals. Then, when students actually are in-person with the school’s staff, the staff is already armed with meaningful information about the student to accelerate their admissions process.
Home Again
On the way back on the train, I read Herman Hesse’s 1906 novel Beneath the Wheel. Hesse’s early novel about his boarding school days resonated with me as a former professor and a former student at an all-boy’s high school. While 97 years had passed since the novel was published when I was in high school, some of the descriptions and stories gripped me and echoed with my experiences. As a teacher, I wrestled with Hesse’s assessment that most teachers would “prefer to have a couple of dumbheads in his class than a single genius, and if you regard it objectively, he is of course right.” Here’s another line that stuck with me all week:
The question of who suffers more acutely at the other’s hands–the teacher at the boy’s, or vice versa–who is more of a tyrant, more of a tormentor, and who profanes parts of the other’s soul, student or teacher, is something you cannot examine without remembering your own youth in anger and shame.
As I spend time around a lot of people thinking about the future, I’m energized learning about the past and what it can teach us about being here now.