GSV+ASU Presenters are Right: It's about Process and Engagement, Not Product

And if educators want to still be relevant, they need to shif their focus.

GSV+ASU is known as the best AI Edtech conference of the year.

There are some cool vendors that basically divide into two categores —

(a) Helping schools do what they already do in terms of instruction faster, easier, “better,” etc.

(b) Those that are more forward thinking — approaching how education and society will be redefined by through agentic+ applications.

And I guess I should say —

© Retro — they want to go back in time and help stop kids from “cheating” with AI.

There are also a number of presentations, some with differrent approaches.

These are three thoughts I found to be most important.

(1) Important/influential people are starting to understand that adapting to AI is about shifting instruction and assessment to process. AI can complete papers/products better all or nearly all students, and the trivial percentage of students who can compete against it declines every year.

Similary —

I’ve been saying “process instead of product’ since the spring of 2023, but now that some more important peo-ple are saying it, maybe we’ll get somewhere.

(2) “We should design curriculum and assessments based on how practitiioners (like biologists, engineers, or journalists) are using AI in the real world.”

Yes, this creates student engagement, they can’t “cheat,” and they are ‘more likely to learn the material.”

This is a brilliant idea.

(3) I hosted some student debates on AGI. Debate is about process not product, and you can’t cheat.

Everyone wants facy frameworks and new ideas brought in by paid consultants, but spreading debate accross a school is one of the few things schools could do to actually prepare students for a world where machines are smarter than us.

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I also walked into a presentation where I heard the speaker state that teachers won’t be replaced because of the “human connection.”

I don’t agree with that.

If students wanted an adult human connection at school, we wouldn’t have to take their phones away. And AIs are excelling at building emotional bonds between AIs and people that are strong than human-human bons. We aren’t going to win solely because we are human.

On the other hand, if we shift from product to process, there is a much greater chance of retaining human teachers who can working in HI-AI-HI-AI relationships. If education stays focused on content and products, human teachers will be replaced.

Focusing on process over product also makes it more likely that students will learn the “soft skills” (communication, collaboration, critical thinking, etc) that employers actually want.

Since soft skills are especially important in human-to-human relationships, keeping humans involved matters. Ideally, we won’t just turn that over to the agents, but for that to work, humans have to get involved.

And in a world where AI may be able to do all or nearly all of the intellectual work, what else matters?

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I do still feel that education doesn’t really get the signficance of AI for both education and society, but this year I see cracks emerging.

And I think focusing on process rather than content and product is our best shot.