In the first short episode of season two, Owen and Libby share their warm takes on two big releases from OpenAI and Google. They reflect on the OpenAI demo video of Sal Khan’s (Khan Academy’s founder) son using their latest model (GPT-4o) as a maths tutor, and Google’s paper describing how they trained and evaluated a fine-tuned version of Gemini for educational purposes. Share your takes on these announcements with us over social media or in the comments!

Links:

• Google paper on LearnLM-Tutor
• Key Excerpts and Owen’s Commentary on Paper
• GPT-4o (Omni) math tutoring demo on Khan Academy

Join us on social media:

• BOLD (@BOLD_insights), Libby Hills (@Libbylhhills) and Owen Henkel (@owen_henkel)
• Listen to all episodes of Ed-Technical here: https://bold.expert/ed-technical
• Subscribe to BOLD’s newsletter: https://bold.expert/newsletter
• Stay up to date with all the latest research on child development and learning: https://bold.expert

Credits: Sarah Myles for production support; Josie Hills for graphic design

This season Libby Hills from the Jacobs Foundation and AI researcher Owen Henkel continue to speak with leading researchers, practitioners and educators on the Ed-Technical podcast series about the cutting edge of AI in education. They will break down complex AI concepts into non-technical insights to better understand what the research says and help educators sift the useful insights from the AI hype.

In the first episode of Season 2, Libby and Owen speak with Peter Foltz about his work at the intersection of cognitive science, AI, and education over the past few decades. Peter discusses his experience building an automated essay scoring system in the late 1990s, which provided students with immediate, formative feedback on their writing. Peter reflects on the potential of large language models to enhance these systems by offering more substantive feedback to help students become better thinkers, not just better writers.

They then discuss the challenges and opportunities of using speech-to-text AI in educational settings. Peter’s team uses AI to analyze student conversations during group work, providing insights into collaboration, respect, and equity within teams that is fed back to the students to reward positive contributions. Despite the technical difficulties of accurately capturing audio in noisy classrooms, Peter highlights the potential of these tools to support teachers in assessing and fostering effective teamwork among students. They also touch on the importance of co-designing these technologies with teachers, students, and parents to ensure their appropriate and acceptable use in the classroom.

Guest and resources

• Peter’s personal webpage, and google scholar page
• NSF Institute for Student-AI Teaming
• Overview of student collaboration tool

Join us on social media:

• BOLD (@BOLD_insights), Libby Hills (@Libbylhhills) and Owen Henkel (@owen_henkel)
• Listen to all episodes of Ed-Technical here: https://bold.expert/ed-technical
• Subscribe to BOLD’s newsletter: https://bold.expert/newsletter
• Stay up to date with all the latest research on child development and learning: https://bold.expert

Credits: Sarah Myles for production support; Josie Hills for graphic design

In this final episode of season 1 Owen and Libby pull out highlights from each episode. They reflect on some of the common themes, and their lingering questions after season 1. They ask, if a model’s not perfect, how good does it have to be before it stops being useful at all? And they share their appreciation for their many guests who are ex-teachers. Owen also shares his personal wish for more adversarial discussions in season 2, which Libby may or may not grant.

We'll be back for season 2 in May! Join for our long promised episodes on voice AI, as well as a possible episode live from Daytona Beach for Spring Break…

Guests and resources

Check out our page on BOLD for all Ed-Technical episodes

Join us on social media:

• BOLD (@BOLD_insights), Libby Hills (@Libbylhhills) and Owen Henkel (@owen_henkel)
• Listen to all episodes of Ed-Technical here: https://bold.expert/ed-technical
• Subscribe to BOLD’s newsletter: https://bold.expert/newsletter
• Stay up to date with all the latest research on child development and learning: https://bold.expert

Credits: Sarah Myles for production support; Josie Hills for graphic design

This week we're doing our third short episode - a chat between Libby and Owen about the more speculative or out-there EdTech ideas they could get behind (or not). Listen to find out who’s into calculators and who’s into roboteachers……

Join us on social media:

• BOLD (@BOLD_insights), Libby Hills (@Libbylhhills) and Owen Henkel (@owen_henkel)
• Listen to all episodes of Ed-Technical here: https://bold.expert/ed-technical
• Subscribe to BOLD’s newsletter: https://bold.expert/newsletter
• Stay up to date with all the latest research on child development and learning: https://bold.expert

Credits: Sarah Myles for production support; Josie Hills for graphic design

Introduction: Join two former teachers - Libby Hills from the Jacobs Foundation and AI researcher Owen Henkel - for the Ed-Technical podcast series about AI in education. Each episode, Libby and Owen will ask experts to help educators sift the useful insights from the AI hype. They’ll be asking questions like - how does this actually help students and teachers? What do we actually know about this technology, and what’s just speculation? And (importantly!) when we say AI, what are we actually talking about?

In the second part of this episode, Libby and Owen talk again to EdTech investors from Rethink Education, Educapital, Achieve Partners, Sparkmind, Brighteye Ventures and Reach Capital.

Our guests spend their days helping founders grapple with the operational realities of building an EdTech business. They discuss where they see some of the challenges and opportunities presented by AI from a business (rather than a product) perspective. They share reflections about the value of less shiny and more operational EdTech, schools’ fatigue with new product pitches that claim to use AI, and how they see the market evolving.

Join us next time for an exciting episode about voice AI!

Guests and resources

• Ebony Brown, Rethink Education
• Jonathan Denais, Educapital
• Daniel Pianko, Achieve Partners
• Kai Talas, Sparkmind
• Ben Wirz, Brighteye Ventures
• Jennifer Wu, Reach Capital

For Buzzsprout only:

Contact

Join us on social media: https://twitter.com/BOLD_insights and Libby Hills, https://twitter.com/libbylhhills and Owen Henkel, https://twitter.com/owen_henkel

Listen to all episodes of Ed-Technical here: https://bold.expert/ed-technical

Subscribe to BOLD’s newsletter: https://bold.expert/newsletter

Stay up to date with all the latest research on child development and learning: https://bold.expert

Credits: Sarah Myles for production support; Josie Hills for graphic design

Join us on social media:

• BOLD (@BOLD_insights), Libby Hills (@Libbylhhills) and Owen Henkel (@owen_henkel)
• Listen to all episodes of Ed-Technical here: https://bold.expert/ed-technical
• Subscribe to BOLD’s newsletter: https://bold.expert/newsletter
• Stay up to date with all the latest research on child development and learning: https://bold.expert

Credits: Sarah Myles for production support; Josie Hills for graphic design

This week we're doing our second short episode - a behind the scenes chat about a recent paper of Owen’s that has been generating some interest online. In the paper Owen and his co-authors present the impact of an AI tutor (Rori) on maths performance of around 1,000 students.

Listen in for a summary of the study, what they found (TL;DR - the results are very promising!) and some probing (but not too probing, as Owen’s still recovering from his trouncing by Libby in their first short episode - a debate about “hallucinations” are in large language models) questions from Libby

Links:

• Owen’s paper on the impact of an AI tutor (Rori) on maths achievement
• More information about Rising Academies

Credits: Sarah Myles for production support; Josie Hills for graphic design

Join us on social media:

• BOLD (@BOLD_insights), Libby Hills (@Libbylhhills) and Owen Henkel (@owen_henkel)
• Listen to all episodes of Ed-Technical here: https://bold.expert/ed-technical
• Subscribe to BOLD’s newsletter: https://bold.expert/newsletter
• Stay up to date with all the latest research on child development and learning: https://bold.expert

Credits: Sarah Myles for production support; Josie Hills for graphic design

In the seventh episode of this series, Libby and Owen talk to six EdTech investors about their views on AI in education. Guests join from Rethink Education, Educapital, Achieve Partners, Sparkmind, Brighteye Ventures and Reach Capital for a two part episode. In this first part, investors tell us what opportunities they see for AI potentially improving the student learning experience.

Join to hear their views about how AI could help develop teacher support tools, as well as longer term possibilities such as delivering personalised learning experiences for students. Fear not, we don’t take an overly simplistic view on personalisation (a term we hear often in connection with AI), but are able to unpack a bit of the nuance here with some of our guests.

Join us next time for part two, which focuses on how AI might disrupt existing EdTech business models.

Guests and resources

• Ebony Brown, Rethink Education
• Jonathan Denais, Educapital
• Daniel Pianko, Achieve Partners
• Kai Talas, Sparkmind
• Ben Wirz, Brighteye Ventures
• Jennifer Wu, Reach Capital

Join us on social media:

• BOLD (@BOLD_insights), Libby Hills (@Libbylhhills) and Owen Henkel (@owen_henkel)
• Listen to all episodes of Ed-Technical here: https://bold.expert/ed-technical
• Subscribe to BOLD’s newsletter: https://bold.expert/newsletter
• Stay up to date with all the latest research on child development and learning: https://bold.expert

Credits: Sarah Myles for production support; Josie Hills for graphic design

This week, we're trying something a bit different and doing a short episode. The gloves come off as Libby and Owen engage in a lively debate about the "hallucinations" in large language models (e.g. unexpected and hard to explain errors) and their impact on building educational products.

They spar on the nuances of model hallucinations, discussing the various forms and potential consequences. Owen presents a "spicy take" on the matter, advocating for the value of engagement and interaction even if it means accepting a certain level of inaccuracy.

Libby, however, expresses concerns about the accuracy of information in educational settings, particularly in K-12 schools. She emphasizes the importance of the high bar set by traditional educational tools in terms of factual correctness.

Who scores an ed-technical knockout? You, the listeners, will decide!

Join us on social media:

• BOLD (@BOLD_insights), Libby Hills (@Libbylhhills) and Owen Henkel (@owen_henkel)
• Listen to all episodes of Ed-Technical here: https://bold.expert/ed-technical
• Subscribe to BOLD’s newsletter: https://bold.expert/newsletter
• Stay up to date with all the latest research on child development and learning: https://bold.expert

Credits: Sarah Myles for production support; Josie Hills for graphic design