Reading about the purported death of PBL, I stumbled across this definition of traditional time in schools:

Education operates on what I call Traditional Time: linear, predictable, hierarchical. Everything moves in straight lines—four-year degrees, semester-long courses, 45-minute periods, annual reviews.

Skills are supposed to last decades. Learning happens once, then you apply it forever.

Of course, as much as this relates to PBL, it also does to implementing Gen AI in schools. It appears that Gen AI destroys the idea that “skills last forever,” the idea that learning happens once and you apply it forever.

Of course, we still learn new skills and apply them. But GenAI is getting better at receiving new skills that compete with our human applications of skills learned.

To add new skills in AI, you update the markdown files, the knowledge bank that an AI has access to. If you have modularized the knowledge an AI relies on, you can swap in new content or topic libraries.

It is sobering to realize that claims like the one below are doomed to failure. The structure of schools prevent any initiative that doesn’t advance the hidden agenda of schools inherent in their design.

With the right approach, AI can bridge educational gaps and empower students to achieve their full potential, helping educators pave the way for a new era of learning. (Source)

This claim is as old as time and quite familiar. First, you have to use AI in the right way…but there is little consensus on what the right way is.

One must adjust their expectations…a new era indeed, but not without flaws and issues.

As a longtime educator, I confess that I am no longer enthused about changing or reforming schools, teaching, learning, and leading with technology. That ship sank for so many at port, and the fevered dreams of ed tech reformers are just that. It may be that’s why Instructional Technology funding has dried up…it failed to yield results that impacted long-term student learning and information retention. And that may really be all that matters.

This insight in mind, we may finally be ready to get to the real work of education that casts aside distracting tech for learning to collaborative or productive tech that simply gets the work done.

What would classrooms look like if we decoupled Big Tech solutions from education today? How much more funding would we have? How much more time?

Learning need not rely on Ed Tech at all to be effective, only to be in step with society or appear innovative or futuristic.

This truth hammers home…if students aren’t doing the work, they aren’t doing-learning what they need for long-term information retention, critical thinking skills.

Maybe we should say…

Learning happens continuously, and you apply it in new ways forever.

It may involve technology or not, but tools like AI can be easily misused. Should educators really spend all their time policing and trying to stop students from misusing the tools Big Tech has irresponsibly made available?

Becoming a “collaborator” has seldom been good but it seems foolish to not learn how to leverage AI and know how to wield it. It’s like learning to handle a weapon…you have to use one, best to learn it as well as you can so you never have to.

Since I began using GenAI every day, I notice it’s gotten easier to get the desired results…to get AI to create predictable products that align to my goals.

Critical thinking remains as hard as ever….