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| Image Source: Inspire Education Latin America |
Obsolete?
This photo above is from the troublingly titled 2022 article "Will robots replace teachers in the near future?" It is of an English language class in South Korea and it speaks to a unease that educators may be experiencing after the 2022 launch of the tool ChatGPT which uses artificial intelligence to generate human-like texts including essays, songs, poems, and stories. In actuality, artificial intelligence (AI) is at work whether we ignore ChatGPT or not. Anytime our fitness app lets us know to fill our ring, our Google Maps tells us which route to take to work, or TikTok takes us only to like-minded posters on our for you page, that's AI doing its thing.
Nonetheless, I have kept my distance from AI, falling neither in the "Techno-futurism" camp nor the "Lock it & Block it" camp as described in this module's YouTube lesson, "How will schools respond to the AI revolution". My children, one an undergrad and one in law school, have reported that there are attempts by their universities to combat AI cheating. My husband, an engineer by training, is an enthusiastic Techno-futurist and even jokingly contributed an AI generated speech to me (to show what AI could do a couple years ago) when I ran for a position on my local library board (I adamantly turned it down--it sounded nothing like me!). But the picture above reflects a whiff of a worry--in my chosen field as a school librarian (often categorized as teacher librarians)--am I on my way to obsolescence even before I begin my career?
Testing Out Khanmigo for Teachers
The article from which I took the picture above answers its own question with a reassuring "no": teachers will not be replaced in the near future because AI is a tool, not a substitute, for teachers. Keeping this in mind, I decided to look at the Khan Academy's education tool for students and teachers, Khanmigo, and see what it could do with real school library scenarios. Sal Khan, the founder of the online, nonprofit tutoring and school empire (which one of my nieces actually attends instead of traditional school) the Khan Academy, has taken ChatGPT and, according to an opinion piece in the Washington Post, created:
The School Library Journal in 2024 says that Khanmigo guides students and adjusts lessons to their skill levels, customizing learning to an individual's needs and making it a tool that students can use everyday. There is clearly enthusiasm for what this tool can do for students, but I am interested in what it can do for teachers.
Khanmigo For Teachers is free, so I set up an account to give it a try. I approached it with 2 broad library lesson areas: the first is how to teach information literacy to middle school students. I've learned at Dominican that librarians need to consider various literacies as part of their responsibilities including individual literacy (reading/writing/math facts), digital, media, and information literacy. Having spent time teaching research methods to college students, I am interested in information literacy and helping students navigate what are legitimate online sources of data and analysis. The second challenge I posed to Khanmigo comes from coaching Battle of the Books. One of the books for middle schoolers this season is The Lost Year: by Katherine Marsh. This book is set during 2020 in New Jersey, where Matthew is stuck at home at the start of the Covid pandemic with his great grandmother who is a survivor of Ukraine's genocide, the Holodomor. It switches between places (NJ, New York, and Kyiv) and times (2020, 1932-1933) and is a moving, mysterious book my students are currently reading.
What I found is that Khanmigo did a great job answering and providing resources for one of my prompts, and a flawed job with the other.
Challenge 1: Information Literacy
First, I prompted Khanmigo to search for "research skills for middle school". This first go around yielded links to videos, lesson plans, and articles that did not fit what I was looking for. So, I refined the search to "how to teach information literacy to middle school students". Here I hit the jackpot with one of the results, "What is AI?":
Lesson plans start with the age range (grades 6-12 in this case), go on to highlight vocabulary, the resources you'll need, step by step guides for how to run the lesson, how to generate student involvement, and real world examples. I went from not knowing how a teacher librarian might incorporate teaching middle schoolers about AI to feeling confident that I could run a lesson over a course of several weeks that would give myself, and students, a solid grounding in AI as a tool with benefits and drawbacks.
Video Source: Common Sense Education on YouTube
This video is the first of Khanmigo's 8 lessons ranging from "AI explained" to "How AI is trained" to lessons on "AI Bias" and its impact on students and the world. These were not only videos, but included full lesson plans for example on how AI can be biased:
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| Image source: Khanmigo |
Challenge 2: The Lost Year
Thoroughly impressed with Khanmigo, I now turned to asking it a more fine-grained set of questions to see if it could help me teach about Marsh's book The Lost Year. While Battle of the Books does require that students recognize and memorize key elements of 20 books including characters, setting, plot and quotations, my co-coach and I always strive to emphasize the larger lessons of the books as well. Marsh's book is a mystery and also historical fiction, so we've been talking about the Holomodor--or death by starvation--that occurred in the Ukraine after Stalin collectivized agriculture and purposefully tried to kill off the peasant farmers in Ukraine in 1932. This time, instead of a general search bar inquiry, I used one of Khanmigo's teacher tools (of which there are many) and asked it to generate a multiple choice quiz about the Holomodor in the Ukraine. The result was almost instantaneous and stunning--a 10 question quiz including answers. I checked Khanmigo's answers and all were correct.
It was when I went further that Khanmigo let me down. I wondered if it could create a quiz specifically about this book, since that is what I do when helping students prepare for the competition. I was excited because these quizzes take awhile to prepare even after I read the books. I was skeptical, however, since The Lost Year is a recent (2023) book and not a classic title.
Shockingly, Khanmigo created this second quiz as quickly as it did the Holomodor quiz. However, my enthusiasm dwindled a bit as I examined the answers. For example, Khanmigo refers throughout the quiz to Matthew's "grandmother" as being his link to Ukraine, however, she is his great grandmother. While this seems insignificant, students would lose points in competition if they did not know this detail. Secondly, Khanmigo claims the book is set primarily in the Ukraine. This is incorrect as it pays pretty equal attention to Kyiv, New York City, and New Jersey. Third, in its question about what does the title refer to, Khanmigo's answer is the year Ukrainians lost their lives to the famine. While not wholly incorrect, this ignores the fact that the title also refers to the year Matthew and others lost while stuck home during lockdown.
The fact that Khanmigo even knows about Marsh's book and has data on it is impressive. These mistakes may seem small, but in a competition all about details and comprehension, they are decisively bad. Moreover, for anyone who does research, accuracy matters and the lack thereof can put an entire research project into question. To its credit, Khanmigo warns the teacher user about the possibility of inaccuracies from the start:
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| Image Source: Khanmigo |
In the lesson plans the Khan Academy itself has published about AI, it points out that AI is only as good as the data that it finds online. This is known as the "garbage in, garbage out" idea in social science research methods. In other words, the conclusions you draw about your research are spurious if the data (or method) you are using is false or flawed. In the first example when I asked it to help me create lessons about information literacy, the Khanmigo tool was able to pull from a wide variety of sources, synthesize them, and produce detailed, step by step lessons that I can use for middle schoolers. Is all the information entirely accurate? I would need to comb through it to be sure.
However, in the second challenge I gave Khanmigo, the weaknesses of the tool, and AI in general, are revealed. I am not sure what data Khanmigo drew from to create the book quiz, but it seems like an amalgamation of online reviews and information from the publishers. While largely correct, the mistakes do matter and, were I to have given a Khanmigo-generated lesson or quiz to my students, they would not make it in a competition finals. Moreover, they would miss some of the key themes of the book.
AI is a tool for teachers, not a substitute for teachers. It is powerful, fun, and can help us do our jobs better. It will make us rethink how and what we teach. Like us, it can make errors. For my part, after doing this dive into one AI education tool, I am looking forward to learning more about what AI can do for me and my students, while remaining the one at the front of the library classroom.
p.s. after Khanmigo failed to produce accurate answers on the book quiz, I tried another popular AI tool, Perplexity, and asked it to also produce a 10 question multiple choice quiz about The Lost Year. Its results were equally mixed--some good questions but at least 2 wrong answers (about character names).
Sources
Chatgpt, openai.com/chatgpt/. Accessed 13 Oct. 2024.
Marsh, Katherine. The Lost Year. Thorndike Press, a Part of Gale, a Cengage Company, 2024.
“Meet Khanmigo: Khan Academy’s AI-Powered Teaching Assistant & Tutor.” Meet Khanmigo: Khan Academy’s AI-Powered Teaching Assistant & Tutor, www.khanmigo.ai/. Accessed 13 Oct. 2024.
Opinion | Khanmigo by Sal Khan Is an AI I’m Excited for My Kids to Use - The Washington Post, www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/02/22/artificial-intelligence-sal-khan/. Accessed 13 Oct. 2024.
Parrales, Michael. “Would Robots Replace Teachers in the near Future?” Inspire Education Latin America, 5 Dec. 2022, inspire-edu.tech/robot-teachers/.
Perplexity, www.perplexity.ai/. Accessed 13 Oct. 2024.
Wilson, IdaMae Craddock and Kristen. “An AI Toolbox for Librarians.” School Library Journal, www.slj.com/story/an-ai-toolboxlfor-librarians-artificial-intelligence. Accessed 13 Oct. 2024.
YouTube, YouTube, "How Will Schools Respond to the AI Revolution?" John Spencer. www.youtube.com/watch?v=KgygRCdHbmc. Accessed 13 Oct. 2024.
YouTube, YouTube, "What is AI" Common Sense Education. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b0KaGBOU4Ys&t=154s. Accessed 13 October 2024.
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