The AI Driver's License in action
A conversation about helping students move from underwater to behind the wheel
I recently joined the Changemaker EDU podcast, hosted by David Richards, to explore the AI Driver’s License framework and what it looks like in practice. (See my last post for more context on the framework.)
It was a great conversation — I hope you enjoy. You can listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts or on David’s site.
Below are some key ideas from our conversation: why the AI metaphors we use matter, how to show students AI is just one arrow in their quiver, and educators’ three core responsibilities in the AI era.
AI as a wave
The metaphors we use have a lot of implications for our students’ experience of this moment in education. And what I mean specifically is sometimes you hear AI talked about as a wave, on the horizon, off in the distance, sometimes a tsunami, there’s this wave coming at us.
And the implication of that is that we have to hunker down, this is going to happen to us, brace for impact. And this is also larger than us. It’s this force of nature that’s out in the world.
We have to be very careful about using metaphors like that in schools because the implication to students is that they’re powerless, that this is happening to them. And that we also don’t have much power over it either. We’re not here to help them through it because we’re underwater too.
AI as cars
The metaphor that I have found to be more fruitful and hopefully more empowering for kids is that AI is cars.
The advent of AI is like the advent of widespread car usage at the turn of the 1900s. In the sense that there are lots of pros and cons, cars are not an always positive thing, of course, but they reshaped daily life pretty quickly and over time more profoundly.
But more important than their impact is their origin. We made cars. Nobody thinks cars happened to us. We made cars. And even more importantly I think, we can drive them and students can drive them.
And that’s how I came at this driver’s license idea was this first step to realize that we have to give them the right conceptual framework to come at this…I think an important shift for all of us in education is to regain our agency by talking about this the right way.
AI is just one arrow in students’ quivers
One of the keys is to show students the right way to use AI. If there’s a vacuum, some other information or practice is going to enter that vacuum. But if we step into that space and take ownership over that, then I think we can help.
For example, for a project they’re doing in my class, we took a picture of an aspiring architect’s stage design, and we uploaded it to the AI bot that I built for the class. Then the AI bot could give us some quick architecture feedback that is beyond my capacity to give.
It gave some great feedback. And the student was like, oh, interesting. And then went back to their drawing board.
And what I’m saying to them individually and collectively as we’re doing this is: “This is one good way to use AI. If you need access to expertise, knowledge, insights that you can’t easily get around you, these are great systems for that, especially if they’re trying to help you do something you want to do.”
But the important caveat there is AI is one of the many arrows in your quiver. This cannot just be what your learning process becomes, going back to AI over and over again.
The world that was, that is, and that could be
I think we have three roles now, especially those of us in the humanities, but also all educators.
We have to adjust to the world that is happening, because our students are leaving us to enter that world, and we’re not fulfilling our ethical obligation as educators if we’re not preparing them for the world they’re entering.
But at the same time, we have a parallel ethical obligation as educators, which is to remind them of how the world was and that the world doesn’t have to be the way it currently is.
In other words:
Here’s the world you’ll graduate into, and I want you to be ready to use AI systems responsibly in college and career.
I also want you to know that this is not the first time there’s been a historical shift with technology. When trains showed up, people had lots of thoughts about that, when cars showed up, when the internet showed up. This is not a totally unique circumstance, and we can learn from the past.
And then third: the world is heading a certain direction, so I want to prepare you to go in that direction. But I also want to prepare you to ask what other directions it could go in and take us there, if that’s where you think we should go instead. You’re not stuck on a track that adults built for you, that you’re just have to now ride out.
In other words, when it comes to AI in education, students have voices to use and choices to make.
So do we.
All of us in schools, educators and students, need to remember we’re only bystanders to the AI era if we let ourselves be.
It’s high time we stopped watching the cars go by — or letting others drive us to their preferred destinations — and instead got behind the wheel ourselves.