AI in education. It is, as we say in Icelandic “the topic of all topics” at the moment. Whether we like it or not, AI is here and is impinging on education and drastically changing the way people learn. No matter what is happening in schools regarding AI, we can be sure of one thing: students at all school levels are using AI and they are using it in ways that affects how they are learning and how they will learn in the future. So, like it or not, teachers have to deal with AI and probably the best way to deal with it, is to embrace it (anything else is really nothing more than a temporary fix). However, my sense is that a lot of teachers are delaying familiarising themselves with AI – for whatever reasons. I hear a lot of, “Oh, I know. I have to start looking into it. I’ll get around to it soon.” Soon, is probably too late. The rate of development of generative AI has been astonishing, to say the least. Any delays are likely to mean that the technology will have undergone significant changes between whenever “now” is and whenever “soon” will be. And, with each new iteration, the learning curve grows steeper…
I jumped on the generative AI train pretty much as soon as OpenAI started offering subscriptions to their ChatGPT, or early in 2023. I had been following developments in AI fairly closely for quite some time (about a decade!), so what emerged wasn’t too surprising to me. It was pretty much what I expected. What I hadn’t expected was how fast the technology would spread and develop. For us Icelanders, ChatGPT has been particularly significant because early in 2023 the Icelandic government made a special deal with OpenAI about training ChatGPT in Icelandic.
Up til then the Icelandic language had been pretty much ignored by most big tech companies (even though Icelandic researchers were doing a lot of the prep work and were pretty much giving away their products to anyone who wanted it.) Google, for example, still doesn’t support Icelandic in most of their AI driven or connected products. Google Assistant doesn’t do Icelandic, Google Maps doesn’t do Icelandic – and these are products that have been around for well over a decade now. ChatGPT picked up workable Icelandic in a couple of months and has gotten a lot better since then. So, ChatGPT has finally opened up the world of AI for Icelanders (even though we still can’t ask Google Maps to navigate to a grocery store in Icelandic).
Among the experiments that I’ve been conducting have included using ChatGPT as an editing assistant in my writing, preparation of educational materials, etc. But, more recently I’ve been looking at ways to make use of custom GPTs in ChatGPT. This is a feature that was made available to subscribing ChatGPT customers last year. At the time any custom GPTs that were made by individual users could only be accessed by other subscribing members. But, earlier this year, custom GPTs became accessible to ChatGPT users who have the free access. I decided then that it was time to make my move. So, I’ve created custom GPTs to serve as assistants in some of the courses that I’m teaching and for other projects. It’s all very experimental still and I have yet to gather data on the effectiveness of using custom GPTs in this manner. But, so far the reactions that I’ve gotten are mostly positive, for example from students in courses where I’ve provided a custom GPT to serve as an assistant professor to provide information about the course (not on subject matter).
One of my first custom GPTs came about as a result of an Erasmus+ project that I led a few years ago. The project involved studying, promoting and developing usages for the European EntreComp competence framework for entrepreneurial learning. At the end of the project I gathered all of the outputs along with the entire EntreComp framework and some more openly accessible documentation and used them as knowledge sources for a custom GPT that is intended to help Icelandic teachers learn about and implement the framework. It’s been an interesting process and I’ve been pretty much constantly tweaking the GPT since I first created it last year. Among the things that I’ve had to do is to teach it about structure and progression within the Icelandic educational system. That was pretty easy, though. I simply added the entire national curricula guidelines to the GPT’s knowledge base and that was done. The GPT is available to anyone with a ChatGPT account, free or paid. It has been instructed to use Icelandic as it’s default language, but I’m guessing that it would happily speak other languages if asked to: https://chatgpt.com/g/g-Km0vHrrLp-entrecomp-leidbeinandinn.
More recently I’ve been looking at Google’s new NotebookLM (https://notebooklm.google.com/). Google has managed to some remarkably cool stuff there. But, somewhat predictably, I guess, it doesn’t do Icelandic. Nevertheless, I’ve tried various things with it and the most eye-opening feature is its ability to create what is called a “deep dive conversation”. The deep dive conversation feature essentially analyses the sources that have been provided and creates a 10 minute audio file of a casual conversation between two people about whatever topic has been framed for it.
To give the deep dive conversation a real run for the money I downloaded several reports and articles about smartphone bans in schools. A group of us at the University of Iceland’s School of Education have put together a small collection of research articles and reports in light of discussions here in Iceland (and elsewhere) about banning students’ smartphones in schools. The collection includes resources that argue both for and against such bans. The collection is available as a Zotero collection on the web here. I fed almost all of these resources into NotebookLM – a couple couldn’t be added because they weren’t in an accepted format and I didn’t feel like reformatting them. Then I simply clicked on the deep dive conversation button. NotebookLM then instructed me that it would take a little bit of time and that I could go do something else while I waited. When I returned a few minutes later NotebookLM had created this, basically a 10 minute podcast about the pros and cons of banning students’ smartphones in schools:
