Possibly too many things to read on AI and tech in schools

 

It's a lovely time of year in Massachusetts. 
Do get out and enjoy it.
My photo of a former schoolhouse in Belchertown yesterday.

The tabs I have open: 

• The Boston Globe had a piece yesterday about Boston Public Schools insisting on AI while the two largest school districts in the country, LA and New York City, are much more skeptical. Something I had not previously caught is that this came from a donation: 
  

  Boston’s AI educator ambassadors are being funded by a $1 million donation from English, the cofounder of travel booking site Kayak.

  This sort of thing is why donations to public school districts in Massachusetts have to be accepted by vote of the school committee, as donations never are just donations. 
  And the next line: 
  

  Employers expect their employees are going to be using AI, English said in an interview, and cities that impose moratoriums on AI in schools risk their children falling behind.

  is quite something; we are or should not be training our elementary school students to be the employee-ready at Kayak. It's also false that this requires some sort of "training."
  
  

• The Wall Street Journal--yes, the actual Wall Street Journal--has a lengthy piece this week looking quite critically at the use of AI that Google, which is very much the tech giant in the K-12 education universe, has pushed into the classroom:  
  

  No tech giant has been more aggressive in putting AI in front of schoolchildren than Google. The search engine juggernaut’s ubiquitous presence in American classrooms through Chromebooks and its software partnerships with schools have provided a critical launchpad for its AI tools to reach kids. But the rollout has helped push many students to become academically and emotionally dependent on AI, according to interviews with more than 60 teachers, school officials, parents, children and clinicians.

  Google’s own researchers have written that the technology can pose elevated risks to children, who struggle to distinguish chatbots from human interaction, and has potential for cognitive and emotional harm, according to interviews with current and former Google employees and a review of more than a dozen Google research papers.

  “We’re doing this experiment on an entire generation on cognitive development, with no control group,” said Mikel Rodriguez, a former Google research scientist who left last year. He said people inside Google privately worried among themselves about how their AI use was affecting their own cognitive skills. “It’s really uncertain what that’s going to lead to in terms of learning.” 

  Give that one a read and share it.
  
  

• I particularly appreciated Emma Silver's piece for Coyote on her own experience as a parent in the San Francisco schools,  more or less stumbling across that her daughter in early elementary school was interacting with Amira, an AI-generated (for lack of a better word) "tutor" that is recording the interactions and doing...who knows what with it.
  I'll note here as I have elsewhere that I do not know who has what contracts, but, as Massachusetts among other states now requires testing for dyslexia, it is possible that programs like this are being used. 
  Here's the rundown on that:
  

  Founded in 2018, Amira Learning is a San Francisco company that uses an AI-powered “interactive tutor” to teach elementary school kids to read. Amira claims to “accelerate literacy” through a suite of gamified programs in which kids read aloud to said cartoon, as “she” corrects, guides, and records them. 

  What it does with these recordings is a matter of some dispute. Up until early July, the company’s privacy policy acknowledged that it used recordings to improve its AI models — a red flag for anyone following news about rampant data breaches and voice-cloning scams, or those who simply don’t want their children doing unpaid labor for a tech company. But Amira Learning has modified this policy over the last three months following scrutiny in Portland and Santa Fe, softening it to the current claim that “student voice recording and analysis are used strictly for instructional purposes and to aid the teacher.” My request for comment from Amira Learning about why the language changed went unanswered.

  What’s not in dispute: The company has grown rapidly, in large part thanks to venture capital from Amazon and Google. Amira contracts with school districts in all 50 states as well as in Mexico, Canada, India, Northern Ireland, South Africa, and the Philippines. 

• And focusing us back on what we should be doing: Ben Riley has a guest post on focusing on the human in schooling.