In this episode, John and Jason talk with Dr. Brandeis Marshall about making online assignments Un-AIable, understanding data science, concerns & opportunities of using AI in the classroom, and the new digital AI divide. See complete notes and transcripts at www.onlinelearningpodcast.com 

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Dr. Brandeis Marshall Links and Resources:

• Dr. Brandeis Marshall’s Website and LinkedIn


• What’s Un-AIable by Dr. Brandeis Marshall on Medium (Paywall)


• Book by Dr. Marshall - Data Conscience: Algorithmic Siege on our Humanity


• WaPo article on Harriet Tubman and Khan Academy and Dr. Marshall’s article how not to use AI


• Rebel Tech Newsletter

Other Reading / Resources:

• These Women Tried to Warn Us About AI


• On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?

Dr. Brandeis Marshall Bio:

Brandeis Marshall is Founder and CEO of DataedX Group, a data ethics learning and development agency for educators, scholars and practitioners to counteract automated oppression efforts with culturally-responsive instruction and strategies. Trained as a computer scientist and as a former college professor, Brandeis teaches, speaks and writes about the racial, gender, socioeconomic and socio-technical impact of data operations on technology and society. She wrote Data Conscience: Algorithmic Siege on our Humanity (Wiley, 2022) as a counter-argument reference for tech’s move fast and break things philosophy. She pinpoints, guides and recommends paths to moving slower and building more responsible human-centered AI approaches.

Transcript

We use a combination of computer-generated transcriptions and human editing. Please check with the recorded file before quoting anything. Please check with us if you have any questions!

Intro

[00:00:00 ] Jason: Some banter on the front end.

[00:00:02 ] Brandeis: Oh, I'm great at banter.

[00:00:03 ] Jason: Oh, good.

[00:00:04 ] Brandeis: I've been teaching for 23 years, so you have to have that conversation with the students before classes begin.

[00:00:13 ] Jason: If you like banter, then you've come to the right place because This podcast is mostly banter

[00:00:18 ] John: I'm John Nash here with Jason Johnston.

[00:00:21 ] Jason: Hey, John. Hey, everyone. And this is Online Learning in the Second Half, the online learning podcast.

[00:00:27 ] John: Yeah, and we are doing this podcast to let you all in on a conversation we've been having for the last two and a half years about online education. Look, online learning's had its chance to be great, and some of it is, but a lot of it still isn't. So how are we going to get to the next stage, Jason?

[00:00:43 ] Jason: That is a great question. How about we do a podcast and talk about it?

[00:00:47 ] John: I love that idea. What do you want to talk about today?

[00:00:50 ] Jason: um, to talk with you, of like usual,

[00:00:53 ] John: That's overrated, but

that's

[00:00:54 ] Jason: but I would also love

to talk to you. a very special guest with us, Dr. Brandeis Marshall. Welcome.

[00:01:01 ] Brandeis: Thank you both for having me.

[00:01:03 ] Jason: And is it okay if we call you Brandeis?

[00:01:05 ] Brandeis: Yes, feel free to

[00:01:06 ] Jason: Okay. Thank you. It's so great to have you here. And Brandeis, I'd love for you to introduce yourself, but just in, in general she's the founder, CEO of Data edX Group, a data ethics learning and development for educators. scholars and practitioners to counteract automated oppression efforts with culturally responsive instruction and strategies. Not only that, but she has a background in education. And we'd love to talk to you a little bit about that. What would you like to say about yourself here today?

[00:01:40 ] Brandeis: listen. I am an educator, a data person. Like I think everyone is at this point in this age of AI and whatnot what, and what it isn't and what it is. And yeah, I'm also just, I just lead black women in data as well, which is really focused on increasing the number of black women in the data industry.

So that's all I want to say about myself. I have books and I write things and I talk to people, but. thOse are the main things about me.

[00:02:07 ] Jason: You're humble. She writes books. She talks about some things. She has excellent posts. She is continues to be an educator for us and ways in which we have connected with some of her writings that we'll talk about. But yeah, thanks so much for.

being with us.

Un-AIable Assignments

[00:02:23 ] John: I'm just going to get it out of the way. I'm gushing a little bit, but I'm very excited to get to talk to you today, Dr. Marshall. And so there, I just got it out of the way. But yeah, but mostly because, the number one. piece of reading that I've been telling everybody I know, particularly those who are in education circles and worrying about AI, is to read your Medium piece called "What's Un-AIable."

[00:02:47 ] Brandeis: Yes. I keep telling people to just calm down, and I'm now seeing commercials that are like, we're going to be using AI basically as an assistant. I'm thinking I've been saying that since March, but yes. Thank you for sharing the piece and hopefully people get something good out of it. It seems as though it has been very well received and people are yeah, that's right. AI can't do context. AI cannot. AI cannot do conflict resolution. It cannot. What happens? AI will literally get to a place where it has a fork in the road.

And then what does it do? Abort. It just aborts. You can't abort as a human. You gotta decide what you're gonna do. Doing nothing is still a decision.

But AI will be like, it'll just end the program. And you'll be like, what the, what happened? It's like cyber, it's what is that, Cyber Monday? That happens, or, right after the holidays? It's start up, everything's just frozen. That's what it, and just abort.

[00:04:00 ] John: I'm in the business of preparing P 12 school principals and superintendents. And so these are, my students are adult teachers who are going to be leaders of schools.

And so that puts me in circles of people who are talking about. What are students going to do in my classrooms now, and what are they going to create, and what am I going to do to be able to thwart this? And my response was, perhaps don't try to thwart this, but how might you look at things that students can do that are un AIable?

And then I share your piece on that. And you cover three big things, which is that AI does not have contextual awareness, it cannot do conflict resolution, and it cannot do critical thinking. And when I mentioned that, these two, the teachers just they like, lean back a little and their shoulders relax and they go, yeah, you're right.

It can't. And we can still teach that. And we can ask students to demonstrate that to us. Talk a little bit about what drove you to write that piece and why we should always be thinking carefully about what's un AIable.

[00:05:05 ] Brandeis: Yeah. So I wrote the piece because I was having similar conversations because I do teach adults as well. And some of them are instructors, right? Some of them are new instructors. Some of them have been in the education industry for a while at all levels. And I just one day in this conversation just sat back and was like, there are things that this AI cannot do.

And I was in a room with people who were just so enamored with. all of the generative AI new tools that had just come out. Cause this was like April, May, but everything had hit the scene. And I was just like, y'all are excited for no reason. And so I sat down and I just thought about what can't AI do?

And as with many people who are writing pieces, you get your best ideas when you're not trying to get the idea. So I think I was like in the shower or something. And I started just to list like these things in my head. And those, these were the three things that bubbled up. And then saying this needs to be front and center for a lot of instructors and just a lot of people in general, just everybody is trying to adopt AI without understanding its limitations.

And so I wrote the piece as a way to provide like a grounding and a practicality on what you cannot make AI do, nor do we want to, which is the other part of the piece, which is we don't want AI to do any of this stuff.

Understanding Data Science

[00:06:34 ] Jason: Tell me, what does it really mean? I'm not a data scientist. I have a sense of what that means because, as an educator, of course, we work with data, but I realize that I'm not a data scientist. What does that really mean to be a data scientist?

[00:06:49 ] Brandeis: Data scientist as a profession has changed over the last five years or so. Originally, a data scientist was just a big umbrella for anyone who worked in data. If you were working on an Excel spreadsheet, you were coding in a particular language, or you were a journalist talking about different types of visualizations and figures and charts and statistics. And a data