Jethro Jones: Welcome to a Vision for Learning on the Be Podcast Network.
I'm your host, Jethro Jones.
You can find me on all the socials at Jethro Jones.
I'm very excited to have on the podcast today, nick Pot Kki, who is the, writer of
the Substack, that is called Educating ai.
You can find links to that in the show notes at, a vision for learning.com.
He's an AI literacy consultant, a language arts teacher, academic researcher in AI
linguistics rhetoric and Instruction.
And he's worked in both public and private settings with students from
middle school to graduate school.
He is got a wealth of knowledge about these various institutional
spaces and student social, emotional, and academic development across
this age range, as it relates to developing responsive AI systems.
So definitely a very interesting conversation.
Nick, welcome to a Vision for Learning.
So great to have you here.
Nick Potkalitsky: Thanks.
Jethro Jones: So what is the most valuable thing people are gonna
get from our conversation today?
Nick Potkalitsky: I think the take, taking the next steps into this AI
space, that we're creating for students is gonna be forged by building,
greater trust with our students, making our AI practices more, more
transparent and working alongside them.
to show them that this is a useful tool, but it will never
replace their own thinking.
Jethro Jones: Oh, so good.
I'll totally second that.
And I think the thing that people should really hang on for is where we start
talking about the criteria that we can use to evaluate the use of AI tools
and whether or not it's going to be.
An effective and worthwhile thing for them to do.
so on this show, a vision for learning, we talk about the future of
education, what it's gonna look like.
we've been talking a lot about the Apple Vision Pro because that's what has been
released recently, but I'm excited today to talk all about AI and how it works.
And I look forward to you, hearing this conversation, and we'll get to that
conversation with Nick in just a moment.
Nick, I think a good place to start out is talking about the idea of plagiarism.
it's still something that people are worried about and are still feeling stress
about and feeling like it's, that's the thing we need to worry about with ai
and I think it is really down at the bottom of the barrel of things that we.
Actually need to worry about it.
To me right now, plagiarism is no different than plagiarism has always
been, except that it's a lot easier and that's the only difference.
kids are still gonna be motivated to do it.
Kids are still gonna want to do it, to get out of hard work.
that's all the issue.
Where are you coming down on the idea of AI and plagiarism right now?
Nick Potkalitsky: throughout this sort of crisis as it's been, built
up to be, we have to maintain, the human connection with our students.
That has to be held up as priority number one.
That's the criteria that we have to measure any sort of intervention against.
So I must admit, once the AI generated papers started rolling
in last spring, was definitely tempted to resort to ai detectors.
but after, quickly doing research, I realized just how, inefficient
and ineffective they were.
In particular was impressed by a post by Alberto Romero, late in the summer
of 20, when he was talking about how these detectors introduced sort of a
surveillance culture into our classrooms.
And that's where, that was the tipping point for me.
when I decided that I had to really change the way that I was teaching, I had
to start to think about, If I was gonna continue to lean into, into long form
essays as a English teacher, then I had to, start to structure them differently.
I had to collect them more incrementally.
I had to open up, the essays to more AI in integrated processes.
And make that part of the workflow, because, we have to adapt to
the conditions on the ground, I think, as opposed to, just
holding onto the mythical past.
so yeah, I like the way that you have framed it as it's a leveling
that this is, it's all plagiarism.
we need to start with those conversations as.
statistical print printouts, which, if you go down that road, you'll very
quickly, your students will have their own statistical printouts to show you that
what they're doing isn't AI generated.
So it's it's just you're, you go into that Cold war mentality and
then inevitably nobody's learning.
there's no trust.
There's no enthusiasm in the classroom, and you get to the point where you're
just wondering, what are we doing here?
it's definitely not education.
So that's where I'm at.
Jethro Jones: So Nick.
Tell me about, about your idea of how you're changing your teaching as you're
focused on integrating AI more now.
what does that look like?
there, there's the idea that you don't, Have students take home and write essays
solely at home, and that's, that would be like an obvious, easy first response.
But what else does that look like where you're actually integrating
AI work into your kids' work?
Nick Potkalitsky: That's a great question and for me it's, there's a answer to.
Because, as of right now, we realistically don't have a lot of
evidence as to the impact of, fully rolling out AI processes into, in
my case, like a writing curriculum.
So one of the things that I'm interested.
What's really the impact on like basic core, writing and
communicative literacies?
that's my core research question right now.
so we're entering into sort of an experimental space, I am hesitant
to go all in the sense of having a fully integrated AI classroom.
I know that some teachers are doing that and I'm glad that
they are doing it because I'm learning from their experiences.
But I'm running sort of two parallel tracks within my class where.
There are times where, we are still just working, in a very traditional
way, just generating, generating ideas without, using ai, tools, x and E.
Hello, for instance, just coming up with those ideas from scratch.
I think, post pandemic kids really need that.
because like throughout the pandemic, they had so many assistive tools that
were bumping them in terms of here, do this next thing, do this next thing.
particularly those two years when they were mostly on screens.
so we have to, I'm finding that we have to.
Find ways within the curriculum to, to create those x ni, hello skills.
at the same time the, yeah.
Jethro Jones: and Nick, the other part of that is that.
All these kids who were in middle school or beginning high school when the pandemic
hit, I guess middle school and lower now.
'cause it's already 20, 24 time flies.
But we basically told these kids that everything was made up and the school
didn't really matter because we canceled it so fast across the whole country.
and so now they're like, does this really matter?
Do I really need to do my own thinking here or.
Because if something happens, I know you can just freeze my grades and
wipe away everything, and we don't have to take tests this one year.
And like we sent a very strong message to them that we can just
cancel school at the drop of a hat.
and a lot of people don't tear me say that, but that's
the reality of what we did.
Nick Potkalitsky: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right and we're.
We're continuing to see the effects of it in terms of enthusiasm and engagement.
It's almost as if my students are just waiting for the other shoe to drop.
Jethro Jones: The next thing that's gonna cancel it.
Yeah.
Nick Potkalitsky: yeah, and then, AI comes along and it's a tool that.
manifest a lot of these processes that they're working
so hard to, learn and master.
and you, I can imagine they're just wondering, so where are they in the
middle of this, the middle of this on.
not necessarily having the stamina to do things from scratch
and then having technologies that can do them effortlessly.
And we're we're walking a tightrope in the classrooms right now.
and I see, in, in school spaces.
One, one method is to, ignore the, these AI tools, and just kind of, just lean
into the hard work, the, the struggle, make everything as, as hard as possible.
every, brainstorming has to be, just pulling up all of the ideas from yourself.
And, our kids are really struggling with that kind of work.
And so I'm trying to meet them, I'm trying to meet them, in, maybe 20% of
the time with some AI responsive lessons.
so to make it a little bit more concrete.
So we're working on an essay on, west Moore's.
great.
Great book, the other West Moore, and it's a, it's an, eighth or ninth grade classic.
so a ya version of, the, a longer piece that he did.
So he's now governor of Maryland and just a tremendous, story
of, of never giving up and.
So we're going into kind of some thematic questions and like we've already done
what I was talking about is like the one track where we've done some brainstorming
X knee hello, with a different essay, but, so now, we've dipped our toe
into AI a little bit and they have, access to some models and I've, I've.
I laid the groundwork through parent permissions, to get them that access.
And and we've, I've given them some very, carefully structured prompts and, they've
accessed some potential outlines and, and I've also had them use some brainstorming
to create some thesis formula.
so it's.
The idea is to use AI more Socratically.
and I got the idea from, con Conmigo, which is a, it's a commercial
product out there that, con Conna Academy is, has put out and is
rolling out in a number of schools.
And what's distinctive about their product is that it doesn't just like dump answers.
like most AI models it, it will ask more questions.
so I've created, prompts for my students that will.
Not jump out, here's the thesis, but it says, here's like a formula that you have
to then populate with your own ideas.
so we're doing all of that, like on the front end of writing, and then
we shift to a more of a concentrated human space where they're gonna
be doing the writing and drafting.
And then we'll come back after we have the drafting and we'll
get some commentary from ai.
I have this, theory about AI that it's really only effective at the beginning
and at the end of the writing phase.
Like you, you have to, particularly at the end, you have to fill up
the AI bucket, for it to start to do anything interesting.
and I'm hoping, like I'm working with ninth graders now, so the
AI literacy just beginning, but.
I'm hoping as I work with, students that are older, we can start to get a
little bit more sophisticated in the sense of, I would love to show them,
how you can enter in information at a very low level and get a certain kind
of response, but if you really want AI to help you write something super
specific, then it's a much more like.
Involved process and what actually is revealed is like, there's a lot of
specific kind of writing that takes place between you and the model.
And I'm thinking like down the line, like what is writing
instruction gonna look like?
Like a lot of people are fearful that, okay, AI is gonna out mode English, as
a subject, or writing as a discipline.
I, in my conversations with folks, I'm like, no, it's just writing's changing.
it's, we're just gonna be learning how to write more
functionally, and operationally.
Jethro Jones: Nick, I think that's really valuable and very clear
that how we write is changing.
One of the things that I've seen, and the way that I described this
is that it's easy to get AI to do anything, but it's really hard to
get it to do one thing specifically.
And so it's actually not easier for me to write with ai.
It's actually easier to write without ai.
Because I already know how I write and I already have the skills.
And I think that this is a very interesting challenge because
especially as you're talking about these kids who were in school during
the pandemic and probably did not have a ton of writing opportunities
and an opportunity to develop that writing, they don't have a voice.
And so when they ask the AI to write it, then.
It's a really big deal because it produces something better
than what they could write.
As far as they can tell.
When I ask the AI to write something, it is never as good as what I could write
myself, at least in my opinion, right?
and so I think, I wouldn't use that word, I wouldn't write it that way, et cetera.
And so we need to change.
Our perspective about how we are writing things and be aware that is changing.
And I think that piece is the part that's really hard for teachers
to grasp and appreciate because I.
There's this nostalgic way that we used to do it, and then there's this new way
that's scary and we don't understand it, and we don't, nobody really understands
how these, transformers work so that, so that it actually produces the text.
Even the people who are creating the algorithms to make it work,
they don't even understand exactly how it's working and that part.
It's scary for everybody.
I totally get that.
So I like what you're saying about how you're going through that process.
How, the AI is only helpful in the beginning and in the end.
can you talk a little bit about your.
Your writing and how much you use it, and if it is, something that is
helping you or hindering you as you're writing your sub substack posts that
are so good and detail oriented.
what's your experience with your own personal writing as opposed to your
teaching writing to your students?
Nick Potkalitsky: That's a great question.
so AI has changed the way I write because I do use it as, a finishing agent.
and using it as a finishing agent has freed me up, to
just write Torrance of text.
I used to be, a highly, critical, writer.
And what I mean by critical is like critiquing ideas as I was writing
them and, worrying about, okay, how's this gonna look at the end product?
and And that kind of would plant sort of a seed of doubt in me,
about, ultimate purpose and about how it was gonna land with audience.
And, and then I'm not saying that AI is ultimately doing all that
finishing for me, but for some reason kind of me synergizing with ai.
lifted a little bit of those that worry and those concerns.
in to, with, I've done a PhD and I've grappled with my
own writing demons now for I.
20 years.
So I mean like me com compared to how anxious of a writer I was in
undergrad compared to how I am now.
I've just gotten a little bit quicker each year and a little bit less critical.
But now like with AI in tow, it's like something's just happened with me.
I'm truly grateful for it, because now when I like sit down, it's just, I know
that I just, I need to give, these AI systems like the sort of the logical
connections, between my ideas, like those that really is what it needs to do.
A lot of its sort of polishing work.
And so I just go in there and I'm like, I have these connections of the ideas.
Like the ideas were always there for me.
I'm just like slamming the ideas out, right?
and I'm not worrying so much about the articulation.
And then I get into a conversation with AI about the, like.
What it looks like.
And I let it do a first look through, and it will give me some, initial
sort of, here's some things to consider, as you do some editing.
So I'll allow it to give more like a laundry list of things to, to do
as opposed to actually going through and, Kind of going through and
actually revising all of the text.
And then, with those directives in hand, usually I'll get to a
place where it's almost, polished.
I don't know, I've just become much more, more efficient and freer as a writer.
and I'm in with doing the substack now once a week.
I'm just in, in like maximum.
performance zone, as a writer, where it's like I'm just feeding off
the audience and I'm like nestled into like this, like amazing group
of writers right now on Substack.
like Alejandro and, Nat and Michael Rutenberg, like these, we,
I mean we're a small e in terms of the AI community on there.
we've, we're just chopping up ideas and doing guest posts and helping
lift each other and, it's just, it's like social media before social media,
Jethro Jones: I know exactly what you're talking about.
So let me ask you this question.
As you've been using AI for your own work, your own writing, how has that
helped you relate to and s helped students see where the AI is beneficial
or not for what they're doing?
Nick Potkalitsky: with me and my students, it's brought us down on the
same kind of playing field in terms of we're all experimenters in this
new field of, textual generation.
Whereas, early on in January when I was very fearful of AI and was trying
to keep it out of the classroom.
and I'm talking about January of 2023, like that.
To go back to my earlier point about trust, there was fear
and suspicion in the classroom.
now.
We're in, in co-pilot mode, where I'm learning from their use as
much as, they're learning from my experiments up on the board.
so it, it's a much more, collaborative, a collaborative
energy, collaborative atmosphere.
and I think the.
And this is something that I encourage, the teachers that I
encounter is to have a, to have a culture of transparency around use.
if you, as a teacher, if you're using it to generate any classroom materials.
it's, I think it's a good thing to be forthright with students
that you have leaned into, AI to, to generate those materials.
Um, you, we get into sort of a weird space in, in K through 12
where you have some teachers who are prohibiting, student use of AI and
yet using it to make their tests You.
Jethro Jones: don't get me started on that hypocrisy.
That drives me nuts.
Oh my goodness.
one, I wanna share real quick how I'm using ai because I think that it's quite
different than you in my own writing, because what I do is I basically will say,
here's the idea that I have, or here's something that I've already written.
how else would you say this?
Or would you have a different idea for an analogy or something like that.
And then I don't ever copy and paste it, although I have in the past.
I.
But every time I copied and pasted it, I just never felt like it was
any good or that it was worthwhile.
I'm in a doctoral program right now, and the temptation is certainly there,
especially on certain assignments to just have it do it because.
The assignment is basically pointless and like it doesn't really matter.
And on those situations, I definitely want to use AI because when the assignment
is pointless, then it's, it's really difficult to give it time and attention.
And so if the assignment, what I'm doing in those situations where
there's an assignment is I'm trying my hardest to figure out what the
real purpose of the assignment is.
How I can make it worthwhile for me in a different way that matters.
so that's.
That's one thing.
The other part of that is that when I do copy and paste it with one exception,
which is I use an app called audio pen.
Audio pen.ai, and what this tool does is it will take you speaking,
which is something that I'm very comfortable with doing right, and it
will take your speaking and turn that.
Rambling, incoherent thought into something that is clear.
That app, because of how I've set it up, has done the best job of taking my
rambling, incoherent thoughts and turning them into something that is publishable.
Nick Potkalitsky: Yeah.
Jethro Jones: In writing and so that has been the biggest use case for me is being
able to speak what I want to speak and then having the AI turn it into text.
that is readable.
And then I typically clean that up a bit and have it be, a little bit better.
But that tool specifically has been the best one that I've used
so far, and it works really well.
Even better than having an audio conversation with chat GBT, which I am
really amazed at how good that is Also.
Nick Potkalitsky: Yeah, no.
I've seen people have audio pen in their workflows, and I've just
never been able to, there's some.
I'm just more of a type and think kind of person.
But I can see you, the audio is probably something that you're, you would gravitate
to, but yeah, I find the only time that I really copy and paste is like when
I have a particularly gnarly sentence, where I have three or four ideas blocking
out and there's just like a verb that's really giving me some like issue.
And I just need some help.
I've had this problem historically throughout my writing career where
it's just I hit sort of a block in my thinking, like how can I unwork this?
And, when I was writing my dissertation, those sort of blocks would halt
my writing process sometimes for.
Five, six minutes, and now with sort of an AI tool, I can get a
couple different options to, to play around with pretty quickly.
yeah, but mostly it's I like how, I mostly work with, chat GPT, version
four, which has been acting really quite strange the past couple weeks.
But, um.
Jethro Jones: so let's.
Let's stop there for a second because this is something else that is so
fascinating is that it has been acting strange and it's been doing
bizarre things and we don't really understand why it's doing that.
But if you don't have those basic skills already.
That could throw you for a real loop.
I was, I'm in a chat with someone and they said that they, that they
were doing something with getting a, some sort of Japanese flower
folding, thing for their wife.
And they know Japanese so they know what it is, but they didn't
wanna translate it themselves.
They put it into chat, GPT, and it translated into a story about
somebody killing someone else instead of teaching you how to,
how to fold this flower correctly.
and what's so fascinating is that if this goes back to that whole
literacy piece, that if you don't know what you're doing already.
Then you could really be in a lot of trouble with it.
and that's really what learning is all about, right?
That we wanna teach people to know how to do the things that we're doing.
And in, in one of your subsets, I don't remember which one, you linked
something from, AI for education, io that talked about, about one, there was
a flow chart and one of the things said.
If you're skipping the learning, you're doing it wrong, consider
using AI in a different way and like that piece is just so important.
We, we shouldn't be skipping the learning.
any thoughts on that?
On the skipping the learning part, I.
Nick Potkalitsky: the absolute worst outcome of this whole, situation is that,
it becomes a prosthesis for learning.
that, and that we have a whole generation of students that somehow, you know.
Skip over the cognitive, gains that come from having, the sustained critical
engagement with a writing process.
I think a writing process can take a lot of different forms and different shapes.
It can be, multimodal, and it's our job as educators and particularly, writing
and structure instructors to invite students into a deep, critical engagement.
ethical aesthetic, philosophical, Rhetorical, these sort of deep engagements
with texts and whatever form they come.
we, and you can stage that in a number of different ways depending upon where
your students are developmentally.
but if, I think there's gonna be a tipping point, as we think about
implementations and integrations.
where these processes, will start to encroach on some
of that critical thinking.
and that's where we have to be, have that overseeing or that, and that, Also
hold on to a vision, that I think are going to ultimately, like the only way
that we're gonna be able to maintain it is by establishing some principles or,
and some outcomes that we wanna see from these, syner synergistic kind of spaces.
so like in my most recent post, I was starting to plan out some ai.
Learning outcomes, that, that were, that, I wanna continue to think about.
and there are also, there are a lot of like isti, and there's quadruple
a, which is a big a ai, promotion.
Organization, but they have an educational wing, like they're a company or
organizations that are building these like deep, literacy programs, that I
think are gonna help us to structure our practices, and help teachers build up some
sort of watch points or criteria to, to.
think about, is this particular implementation
maintaining critical thinking?
Are we giving away too much?
it's gonna, I think a lot of it will just come down to sort of
like, um, costs and and benefits for particular implementations.
so when I was at a conference out.
Philadelphia.
A couple weeks ago, I did a training with teachers from across the Eastern
seaboard where I walked them through a AI writing process and, we used
AI to do brainstorming, and then initial drafting and then editing.
And I had them go through like a five scale, like a valuation of, How did
AI do you know, and I, the major like criteria that we were working on, was
like, knowledge and skills generation, like was there new knowledge being
generated through the integration of ai?
Were there new skills being generated?
I think we need something like that.
like some sort of like solid criteria that we can use to evaluate use.
Because like right now it's.
It's pretty ambiguous.
I don't know, like the, at the conference there was like, the
value they were throwing out was like, human centered, right?
is our integration?
Is it helping us keep education human centered?
And that's, that's like a good big idea.
But it seems, there's also like other things underneath that,
like what, what exactly does.
so that's gonna be the work I think of the next couple months, maybe
year, of figuring out those criteria, for evaluating implementations.
Jethro Jones: let me ask you this.
what would be your suggestions or advice to, teachers who are resistant
to doing anything with it, and how would you encourage them to?
Um, I don't wanna say speed up the adoption of ai, but at the
same time I wanna say like, don't run fearfully from it.
How, what would be your advice?
Nick Potkalitsky: So I had several people in the room in my training who
were resistant and fearful and, the power, and the willingness comes from
actually just engaging with the tools.
and and I'm working with, A guy, right now in Australia, developing some,
some leadership, training materials because, the major stop gap right now
for AI integration and K through 12, it's, instructional leaders who are
slowing down the process and, they're in a, a position of tremendous, trust.
And they want to get it right.
and I think like part of our vision for this, these training
materials are just kind of.
coaxing leaders just to sit down and use the products, as part
of an acculturation process.
what can these actually do?
I think once you sit down, when you sit down immediately and you ask or right
away and you see it, that it can create a sonnet, like that's, that sort of
blows you away and you're like, oh, wow.
the.
there's no nothing that you know, that these machines can't do.
But, as you prompt away with it for, a half hour, then you start to see
the limitations, the repetitions.
You start to see the hollowness of the text.
you start to ask it questions about the text, and three prompts in that,
the level of understanding just.
Maybe it gets a little bit, blurry.
and I don't know, you, you start to understand the way
it works and, once you get
Jethro Jones: I may be so bold as to say anybody who's still
worried about plagiarism.
Has never used the tool because once you use the tool you realize this really
isn't a worry because it's not there yet.
It's, it cannot mimic a person's voice that well.
And you can tell, and when I read things online, I can tell almost all the
time that is done and generated by ai.
There are little key words and phrases that are like, okay, that a
real person doesn't write that way.
However, I think real people are going to start writing that way 'cause they're
gonna be mimicking what they see.
Just as a little side note, not to get us too off course, but, so as we
close up here, Nick, this was awesome.
in the show notes, if it's okay with you, you put a.
A great outline of your process of how you've gone through learning
about this and a few different links to yours and other substack
that were just really powerful.
I'm gonna leave those in the show notes so that people can check that out.
We didn't have a chance to go into all of those things, but they, I
thought they were really good and really interesting, and so I want
people to be able to check those out.
How can people connect with you and learn more about the stuff that you're doing?
Nick?
Nick Potkalitsky: you can reach out to me on Substack.
you can also find me on LinkedIn.
So you could also set, shoot me an email at, at ky@gmail.com.
So I'm excited to help, schools, make a transition into this AI space.
Uh, and thank you, Jethro for setting up this interview.
It was an amazing time.
I think we really broke some new ground here, You're a good guide on this.
Jethro Jones: thank you very much and I appreciate you being here.
This was a lot of fun.
I hope that this is not our last, conversation together
because I think that l.
Like I said, we barely scratch the surface of what we could have talked about.
And so I think this was a good start, for, for this podcast and definitely
something that, I wanna stay in touch on.
So, uh, links to his, Substack and LinkedIn are in the show notes,
so definitely go, go check that out at a vision for learning.com.