Day 1 ISTE 2024

After a huge Sunday program, Day 1 kicked in for ISTE 2024. With 12,000 attending in person, big conferences like this take a while to find your bearings.? The Colorado Conference Centre is at least three times bigger than Jeff’s Shed back in Melbourne so a lot of the first day at a big conference is spent just trying to get to venues as quick as possible.? Having previously attended BETT in London and NECC with many more delegates, today was a little bit of a letdown.? Inexplicably, connectivity was patchy and the conference app, while being comprehensive, was buggy and insisted on refreshing every time it was opened with too many 30-second waits. ???

If the quality of presentations was the highlight yesterday, today’s presentations were hit and miss. It looked as though if a presenter included “AI” in their presentation topic, they were given a spot. Some curriculum panels, attempting to predict future trends, confessed to having little experience in their schools and districts with AI. Others presenting on prompt writing didn’t quite succeed. And that meant the quality of presentations varied considerably. There’s a degree of frustration when that happens but that’s often the luck of the draw in big conferences.? Any frustration is deepened when you finally arrive at a room only to find a lock out on some of the better presentations.

Fortunately, two sessions were stand outs today.? One, a symposium moderated thoughtfully by Alana Winnick, consisted of a panel of ed tech. heavyweights given two minutes to respond to questions that included intellectual property, culture, anthromorphism and academic integrity:

• If we are not careful, this will become the Degenerative Age
• Cheating will need to redefined because, at the moment, many schools are not giving guidance on AI. We need to be super clear on what is and what isn’t cheating.
• Did AI help you write this or did AI write it for you?
• It’s important to remember you can still teach effectively without AI – at the moment.
• If you think boyfriend/girlfriend bots are not being used in your school, you are wrong. Companies have no morals in creating product that’s designed to dupe young users.?Snapchat AI is particularly insidious.
• Building a chatbot demonstrates to students it’s not difficult to humanize a chatbot to manipulate a user through emotion and feelings.?

?Some other valid points:

• Teachers are most effective when they are internally motivated.?
• 51% of US teachers are motivated by ed tech.? 49% are not.
• AI is a gift wrapped in sandpaper.
• Kids we teach today are not the same as kids we taught pre Covid.

My favourite presentation today was presented by Punya Mishra (one of the creators of TPACK) from Arizona State University and Melissa Warr from New Mexico State University. Entitled “TPACK in the Age of ChatGPT and Generative AI”, this was deep and thoughtful and a wonderful counter to the “Drink the Kool Aid” amusement park excitement of the Microsofts and Googles out there on the Expo floor.?

• AI continues to do things we simply do not understand.? Isn’t that a worry?
• A primary function of GAI is to hallucinate.
• AI is essentially a tool of that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic (WEIRD). As such, its bias is clear and often exclusionary of others.
• The fundamental bias of the five men controlling technology in the world is frightening and evident.?
• Social media supercharges racism, sexism and xenophobia.
• Technology companies too often value profit over human needs and ethics. Technology, therefore, is never neutral.
• Facebook was designed to exploit human vulnerability.
• Education shouldn’t move fast and break things.? That may be good for tech start-ups but we are dealing with the success and the future of children and young men and women. We need to move intentionally and nurture.

#ISTELive

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