Why AI Needs Your Learning Degree
Happy Wednesday!
Consider Star Wars: A New Hope: Luke starts with tech in the beginning, but the real magic, the mastery, comes from within. It’s a classic reminder that tools amplify, but don’t replace, our innate abilities. At the end of the movie, he dismisses the targeting computer and relies on his skills. This is Google DeepMind’s prompt guide for instructional work flows based on learning science. This is one of the key differentiators of instructional designers and trainers with a formal learning background. You need to understand the learning theory enough to prompt AI to give you the right kind of results. It recommends a “PARTS” framework. Persona, Act, Recipient, Theme, Structure. But you can’t begin to use that well if you are unfamiliar with what kinds of structures elicit better results in learning to begin with. Your deep expertise in learning means more in the age of AI.
By now there are a million different prompt guides out on the internet. Here’s another one. What I like about Connie Malamed’s here is that instead of giving you a mega prompt meant to cover every angle, eventuality or flub that your LLM sends your way it gives you some very specific use cases and a general strategy. I’ve created several of my own personal GPTs and Gemini Gems for my work that only focus on Flesch-Kincaid grade level, editing specific to my task at hand and research. I like that better than just asking for general writing guidance because for learning content writing I have a particular purpose in mind and I don’t want AI to over-fit based on how I’m writing my emails, proposals or other writing styles that don’t lend themselves to learning.
For AI adoption Google is arguing for a dual model. You think strategy and tactics at the same time, like in chess. I think most AI forward companies are doing the obvious, you equip everyone with AI tools. Google is arguing that in addition to merely optimizing what employees did before you have to simultaneously translate how work is carried out. That’s actually a harder and more worth training and change management problem then merely teaching people good prompting. The conversation right now is very much about eliminating jobs but it could be about how you could transform to become more than you were before.
This comic humorously tackles the philosophical ennui of AI adoption through the lens of radical freedom. It brings to mind the feeling of when I got a TI-82 calculator and realized it’s not about avoiding math problems, but about understanding what’s possible when the every day part of math was automated.
Affiliate Link: Artificial Intelligence for Learning
Donald Clark was working in AI for learning before it was cool. I personally valued this book because it wasn’t all just hype. There are case studies of how people applied AI in real life with hard lessons in each.
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