Aug
20
SPEEN FESTIVAL 2025
AI in Education – A Village Debates the Issues. As the UK government indicates education as a key area of AI implementation, as teachers deploy AI to create assignments and mark them, and as our children and grandchildren download AI to there smart phones it seems vital the debate the issues and the implications at a local level.
Tuesday 2 September 2025 21:00 hours in the Speen marquee on the playing fields.
Tickets available at. https://www.speenfestival.org/event-details/an-evening-with-david-worlock-and-dr-vinay-patroe
Opening the debate: David Worlock, information industry consultant, and Kate Worlock, Education Market Analyst and Vice President, Outsell Inc, San Francisco.
AI in Education– as the next wave of the digital information revolution sweeps through our lives, will AI in education undermine learning and teaching completely, or will it provide us with a whole new way of educating our children and acquiring the skills that we need – personalised and customised learning?
————————————————————
In many ways the choice is ours. The politicians are largely ignorant, few individuals or institutions have taken up a public stance on the issues. Big Tech tell us that everything will work out fine, but they have an interest in the game – sales! The government are not currently legislating against possible risks or harms – but they have an interest in the game – growth and investment, reduced manpower and cost saving. And we have an interest in the game – seeking the benefits for learners in society without exposing them to undue harm or risks.
—-000—-
It is not hard to find a catalogue of the risks that pervasive AI could bring to young people. The Press are full of stories of auto generated pornography and hate speech, including the ability for technology which can create fake images and videos being installed upon an unrestricted child’s smartphone. In education there is another set of risks. It is very easy to envisage a developing society in which AI is used by government to create syllabus development and curriculum content. Teachers can use AI in conjunction with this content to create their lesson plans. This can be extended into the creation of AI generated assignments, and of course AI can be used easily by pupils to complete their assignments and return them to the teacher. The teacher may then use AI to mark the assignments and grade them. In other words we have a potential for a non-learning environment in which the technology works very successfully but the hard won acquisition of skills and information is completely lost. qualifications become meaningless. This situation is not going to take place overnight but we should perhaps be asking ourselves how we avoid it and whether there is a good side to AI in education which could deliver something better.
AGI AGI AGI AGI
AI in many situations – especially in the workplace – is about doing time-consuming and uninteresting tasks more quickly and more recently. in other words it is machine intelligence not some future projection of artificial human-like intelligence. and in any case, In education it surely must be different – it has to be about helping the learner to learn more effectively, at a pace which suits the learner and in a style of learning which fits the learner’s interests and attributes. The following short story, set sometime in the future and in another place to make it as neutral as possible, is an effort to describe what such learning might be like:
————————————————————
Education after the Book – the state of learning in 2125
Salley spoke softly. The new earclip was so sensitive that you did not need to raise your voice. As he walked down towards the beach, he checked to ensure that he had everything he needed. His digital watch was on his wrist. He was carrying his papyrus, but he had not picked up a stylus. Well, that did not really matter, he thought. Just about any firm twig or even, a stiff piece of grass would do to scratch on the papyrus. If indeed he did need to make an image. Mostly when he unrolled the papyrus it was too show a map or take an image of the scenery around on its camera . Or maybe to receive an image or a visual message notification. he smiled to himself. Imagine what it must’ve been like when people did writing by hand – incredibly, they had actually called it “handwriting“!
On reflection, he thought that the world that he knew was mostly a voice driven world . The tragedy of people who damaged their vocal chords was worse, in his view, than his mother’s failing eyesight. She could still navigate her world with her voice, whereas. Tanka’s father who had cancer of the larynx was completely cut off until they had built him a voice synthesiser operated by his brain. At least, Salley found it hard to imagine. And yet it was no more difficult to imagine than those other words that kept cropping up in his learning . “Typing“, “keyboard”, “examinations“, “manual labour“; all of these were quite alien words and concepts that you had to acquire if you wanted to understand anything about society in the past.
As if on cue, Salley heard a voice notification and, tapping his watch, said hello to Babel. His tutor sounded a little gruff this morning and Salley was tempted to ask him how he had slept, which he thought would be a good joke, considering that computers never slept. Babel might like that. He had a good sense of humour and said that he knew every schoolboy joke that had ever been made. But now his voice seemed urgent and the moment for cracking jokes was over. “I see that you are on your way down to the beach. We are meeting three of your friends there and we are going to do some work on rock pools. I have coordinated it all with their systems. please listen to the safety instructions about environmental hazards that I’m going to send you and give me a voice signature or you will not be able to get onto the beach. After that we are going to look at the cliffs and do some carbon dating on fossils. From what I can see on my monitor, I think you are going to enjoy this.”
That was the thing about tutors. Since they could read chemical changes in your body through your watch, they could always tell whether you found lessons stimulating. Or not. Also, Babel had said recently, the voice analysis features were now so sophisticated that they gave a real picture of whether you were learning or not, as well as a fairly precise estimation of what you had retained.
Salley wondered sometimes about the things that they no longer learned. Today was called an “experiential learning “day. He liked it because he would be with his friends all through the day, and not just in the social activity parts of the day, like sports and painting and his group poetry and free writing clinic. But he realised education for people of his age once took up much more than two hours a day. Apparently, people once learnt languages in a world that did not have automated machine translation. His grandfather had told him that once upon a time, very many years ago, learners were prevented from taking calculators into examinations so that they could learn how to do the mathematics themselves! Salley wondered about people like that: it sounded almost sadistic. Machines could do advanced calculations so much more quickly and easily. by contrast, Salley‘s favourite part of the learning time was the “free expression” work which he did with Babel and which was all about ways of thinking about things and ways of talking about things. Babel;s search bot , Safire, tracked these conversations and built research libraries around the subjects that they covered so that Salley could browse in them at his leisure. Since all of the items were linked and connected to other items of interest and relevance, and since the entire collection automatically updated itself and pointed out where things were in dispute or knowledge incomplete, wandering here on his papyrus had become one of Salleys greatest pleasures..
As he strolled down the lane, Salley recalled asking Babel why these collections were called “libraries“. The explanation, apparently, was that whole rooms were set aside to store something that people had then called books. They spent a wonderful few minutes as Babel explained the lost language of books: words like index, preface, acknowledgements, verso, recto, end pages, prelims. It seemed then that he was learning a whole language about something which had entirely died out. all this intricacy, all this art and knowledge, and yet, Salley thought, these book things did not do the most simple knowledge functions. They did not speak to each other, they could not update each other, and they could not tell you which part of their knowledge had been discredited or replaced. It seemed to Salley that they were more like knowledge morgues than places of learning.
Yet it also had its funny side. They had roared with laughter at a picture of a man reading a “newspaper”. Apparently these were huge sheets of paper all covered with different stories of things that had happened recently. This man was trying to read a story at the bottom of the big sheet, but his arms were not long enough and he was bending forward to peer at the bottom of the paper with his hands high in the air, as high as he could push them. How could anyone invent something so crazy?
He also recalled his father saying how much people had loved their books and their libraries. In his own country, the first great storehouse of knowledge had been the great library of Alexandria. How limiting it must’ve been for those people only to know what you could get into a book or into a library! When he was looking at images of old libraries, Safire had sent him one of the English statesman William Gladstone in his library at Hawarden. From the look on the old man’s face, you could read his pride in his collection, as well as the boast that this was the knowledge that he had and that he owned, and that he had very much more than most people. Salley liked that idea that your knowledge was a part of you. Just as Babel was a part of him, a sort of extension of him. He wondered why people had once spoken of “artificial” intelligence, when all intelligence was intelligence. Babel was machine resident, but also a part, an extension, of Salley. Babel had been with him since his first moments of consciousness. When his father had told his son about Babel, he had said that he was part of an age-old tradition. It stretched back to the earliest times in African life, when the teacher was your guide, your guru, your life coach. Babel was all those things to him, and more. You could buy a search bot like Safire anywhere. But each teaching entity like Babel was unique. Of course there were some standard components, and regular updates and improvements. Since he and Babel had been together, Salley. knew that the technology for responding to signs of learning readiness had improved greatly, and the ways of measuring skills like decision-making and other deductive processes were upgraded regularly. His father was also at pains to tell him that system security was a key issue. In the early days, apparently, some political leaders and governments had wanted to control the knowledge building process. Sometimes they said that this was in the interest of learners, to make sure that nothing was left out, and sometimes in the interest of curriculum development or curriculum change. But the pioneers of the systems had been clear that the driver of the learning process should be the mind of the learner, expressed through needs, curiosity, ambition, and the desire to emulate others. Well, there was always pressure, Salley was glad that no one had yet overturned this founding ideal. The pioneers had insisted that education was not an attainment, measurable by tests or described by time taken to “complete “it or by fatuous certificates or degrees . Babel had always said to him that there was no real definition of “education”. He remembered that voice, a voice that had been talking to him since he was a very small child, telling him that the important thing was curiosity, and satisfying your curiosity. He could see that this was true of his own relationship with Babel: he asked questions and his tutor pointed him to resources where he could find answers. The problem with answers was, however, that they led him to fresh questions and more enquiries, and then they will referred him to more resources. Sometimes he got stuck. When he was annoyed or angry, Babel went off and found other materials to restart his inquiry and explain things in a simpler or different way. But once he got the point, fresh questions came up, either independently or in his conversation with Babel about what he was doing, Babel often talked about “ exploration“. It was as if they were going off on a journey together without quite knowing where they would end up or whether they would ever find out all of the answers. One of the things that Babel liked to say was “it’s the learning journey , not the arrival, that matters“.
When he was a kid, Salley had fallen over on the road while racing his friend. Kahnee home. He had scraped his knee and it had bled until his mother had washed and bandaged it.Babel had reminded him of that a few weeks ago. His curiosity about his blood, said his tutor, was the beginning of a conversation about blood cells and then cells in general which had led to him getting a senior award in cellular biology. This was one of five or six senior awards that he had gained at age 17. He often asked Babel which of these he should study at Open University, but this tutor always gave the same dry chuckle and said “All of them or none of them! awards just mean that you have shown a real interest in a subject, an ability to study it in depth, and that you have a baseline of knowledge upon which you could now develop and learn more. It really does depend more upon what interests you at the time. We think that the things that you study at university and the job that you take on afterwards are not really so closely related as people used to think. The real skill you need is asking questions, and framing the next question so that it takes you further. I’ve tried to work with you on this. In the early days we called this “prompt engineering “ or “prompt design”. As you might imagine, we’ve gone past expecting people to find out using random methods like indexes or search engines, and we’ve gone past expecting them to memorise the answers, or index the answers with a great deal of information that they had committed to memory. Now we are much more concerned with bringing all the addressable information, available in our agent networks, the huge cats cradle of interconnected information points which our bots can examine and index and reference for us, bringing all of that to the point where someone is asking a question.“
Salley always found this reassuring. He had been brought up to the idea but while his natural interest and curiosity had led him to get involved in enquiries in, as an example, areas of life sciences like cellular biology, a university course would not very interesting if it was all about, cramming him full of detailed knowledge about cells and their chemical interactions. His job was to ask the questions and to understand the principles involved, and Babel was there to ensure that he did not miss any of the critical questions, and that he used his questioning to develop better queries. When his query level was at the right level of depth and complexity, then the system judged that he was worthy of a senior award. This opened up more and more resources to help him to ask better questions and get better answers.
So far, Salley had senior awards in cellular biology, neurosciences, the history of revolutions, mid 20th century pop culture and music,Greek science in the classical period, and the mid 19th century English novel. Recently he had got into a whole raft of questions around how the world had moved away from oil and gas and saved the planet. It was a terrific story but it was really hard to understand how, once they had understood how important it was to change, it took so long for concerted action to take place. He thought there were a lot more questions here to be answered in what Babel called “climate science“.
Then there was Mr. Johnson, Mr Noel Johnson. He was Salley‘s teacher. Once a week there was a day in school. Sally liked the journey to and from school, and he loved the company of his fellow learners: they often got together in the evenings anyway. sometimes, however, when he was in enquiry mode, Salley resented school days. It seemed like a day wasted when he was really keen to follow up on some of his researches and talk to Babel about what he was finding out. The whole idea of school days just seemed a bit formal to him. He liked Noel Johnson and they always had an enjoyable hour discussing what he was doing. Babel reported to Mr. Johnson with a breakdown and analysis of what Salley had been learning during the week, and where he was on his progress towards senior awards in his chosen areas of study. Mr Johnson also asked about his parents and his brothers and sisters, and he knew that Babel also provided a health report on his eating, his exercise regime and any health issues. There was a health centre at the school and he had regular checkups there. The school required that he was scheduled to have participation in one individual sport and one team sport. There were specialised training clinics and he regularly went to the basketball team meetings, although he was not very keen. He was at least tall and strong. He wanted to play chess but found it really difficult. On the other hand, there was a very useful clinic on advanced video games. This was useful on two levels: both as entertainment, and also because very often his questions led him to learning resources which were games-based, and some of these were quite sophisticated but really helpful in getting you to useful answers. You could also learn music, play in a band, or join the theatre group. Best of all, for Salley was the traditional cookery school, where you could learn the famous recipes of this part of Africa, some of which were now becoming rare. Egussi soup! He had once brought home his own pepper based preparation and had the whole household. protesting at how hot he had made it!
Some people in the town thought that Mr Johnson must be quite frightening. He was certainly very famous, but so were all the members of the town convocation of teachers.There were only 12 of them and every time one left or died it was a big business, electing a new one. His father said that in the old days there were five schools around the town, but since young people only use the school one day a week these days, everything was concentrated into one place. And since teachers did not do instruction, but only the business of mentoring and guiding and helping that they called “pastoral care” you only needed one central school. Salley was really interested in how communities came to decisions about things like schools or teachers. It was questions around things like this that led him to look at the world’s great revolutions. What had happened in France in the 19th century and then in Russia and China in the 20th century fascinated him: worlds really turned upside down by virtue of asking fundamental questions about who had the authority to take decisions and why. By comparison the American revolution was a mere taxpayers revolt, would lead him to ask questions about the differences between real democracy and the language of democracy, comparing the Declaration of the Rights of Man to the Declaration of Independence. When he began to ask questions about what happened in history as distinct from what historians in each age projected as what happened in history seen through the lens of their own time then Babel said that his senior award was quite close.
Salley was almost at the beach now. several friends greeted him and Kahnee asked him if he was interested in a game of football. Later, he said. One of the great things. about modern learning was that you could do it anywhere. And he had started to get curious when one of the resources that Babel had shown him . It told him that every cell in the human body emits an electric signal. Apparently there are about 23 million cells in the average body and they are talking to each other all the time, that is if their electrical charges are really communications. He tapped his watch and started talking to Babel. After a minute or two, he pulled out the papyrus, unfolded it and switched it on. As soon as it’s bright screen lit up and started recharging in the sunlight, it was showing him videos of cellular motion and cell signalling. He listened to the AI summarisation of the latest thinking and discussed it with Babel. They decided to put down a listing request. Salley found this exciting. Listing was a scheme whereby you could put your name down for a short interview, usually 10 minutes, with a leading experts. University teachers now did less teaching, but they had to set aside some time each month when they answered questions in video interviews posed by students of all ages and all stages of learning. Sometimes these were in groups, and sometimes these were from individuals. Babel booked Salley on the waiting list for a talk with the leading expert on cell signalling at Stanford and one at Cambridge. Salley loved this sort of thing. He could see that it was hard for real experts to explain things to people like himself in simple terms, but he could also see that it was important for them to try to do so. He often asked Babel if the present system of learning was better than the old one. Babel had answered that, when it started, it was certainly worse. But it got better very quickly. “Once our AI got better and better at finding and marking the best resources to help answer learner questions effectively, then we quickly outpaced the textbooks and the talk and chalk learning methods of the old days. But it took time I will admit. However, our ability to rate and specify what people knew properly as understanding, and how reliable and competent their knowledge was very soon outpaced traditional examinations. but the real secret was the most simple one. Our system soon became really good at detecting how people learnt most effectively, and have this varied for each individual. My responses are now thoroughly tuned to the level and type of expectation that you need. you were stimulated at first by short videos, but now you seem to prefer a short textual explanations read to you as a result of your questions. Like every learner you are unique. Your style and pace, and preferred content format are different from anyone else and have changed radically during my life with you. My most valuable information, and my most valuable role in your comes from the fact that I understand how you learn. We probably underestimated at the beginning how much intelligence we would need to have in the central resource, and we certainly underestimated at the beginning how complex it was to model learning systems around the individuality and the learning capacity of an individual. But isn’t that the point of AI: our learning systems learnt all about learning as we developed them.”
it reminded Salley of some of his early conversations with Babel . When he was about six or seven, he started to get really angry with his AI companion. He remembered that his parents were very concerned and talked to the school about the way he shouted at Babel and demanded that the machine just gave him “the next bit“. It didn’t help him at all that Babel kept gently reminding him that it was his job to do the work, and that Babel was there to provide the resources. Mr Johnston had said to him on one occasion “learning has got to be a struggle, and you have to fight to attain knowledge. Babel can put you in touch with the largest learning resources that the world has ever known and can point you in the right direction and save you from wasting too much time, but learning is what you do. It will also help you that Babel can remind you of things that you have forgotten you knew, or relate things together which you have learnt separately, and update things which have changed since you learnt them because of further research or discovery. But Babel is only an associate brain, an associate memory. and an instrument for the expression of your own self directed learning. If Babel has done his job properly, then whatever you do in life, you will have learnt how to learn. And, of course, Babel will always be with you throughout your life, since you will never stop learning how to learn “
But the sun was shining, and just then the football came close to him. Salley put the papyrus down and rushed after the ball. As he did so, his ear clip remained in place. Like all young people of his age all over the world., He was alive in two dimensions. Although he did not think about it in these terms at all, his life in actuality and his life in the Digisphere were both, and in every sense, “reality”.