So what the heck should kids be studying today!?
That's my opening question to Khan Academy's Chief Learning Officer, Kristen DiCerbo, a learning and AI expert who is back for her second appearance on the show.
We discuss:
- Kristen's advice for what to study today: fundamentals, AI literacy, and critical thinking
- How helpful should AI be?
- Why the productive struggle is critical to learning, but also why we shouldn't "fetishize" struggle
- When should AI be Socratic — "and why do you think that?" — and when should it just give you the answer?
- The "5% problem" — why edtech that's proven to work still barely gets used
- How Khan Academy overhauled its classroom platform and evolved Khanmigo from a standalone chatbot into something woven into the whole learning experience
- Personalization that actually works
- How Khan Academy uses LLMs as judges to evaluate 20,000 student interactions a day
- The scenario planning report that imagines deepfakes of school principals and AI going underground in schools
- What parents should be asking their kids' schools about AI right now
- What it looks like when a school implements AI well — and what it looks like when they don't
Chapters:
- (01:44) - What the heck should kids be studying right now?
(03:55) - Teaching critical thinking in the age of AI(06:37) - What successful schools are doing differently(08:37) - The real risk: not that kids use AI too much, but that they don't use it enough(10:52) - My 13-year-old has to check five apps just to find his homework(11:52) - "Beyond the AI inflection point" — three scenarios, none of them great(16:30) - Should we just make every school a trade school?(19:41) - What should parents be asking their kids' schools?(22:27) - Khan Academy's Winchester Mystery House problem(26:28) - Personalized learning — what works and what surprisingly doesn't(29:32) - Kids are bad at asking questions and that's actually the point(32:01) - "I DON'T KNOW" in all capital letters — the Socratic method's breaking point(34:26) - Should an AI tutor give tough love?(37:01) - Why Khanmigo is fundamentally different from ChatGPT(40:11) - Don't fetishize struggle — but your kid still needs it(42:39) - Khan Academy's productive struggle: building evals from scratch(45:41) - What gives Kristen optimismSupport Future Around & Find Out- Follow Dan on LinkedIn
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Music by Jonathan Zalben