The AI Natives Are Coming. What Kind of Technologists Will They Be?
Dana Woods, an educator and technology integration specialist, sees first-hand how AI is shaping young minds; he shares his observations on IT Social Hour
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The following transcript has been edited for clarity:
Andy Wig:
Who’s the guy you look like? Who’s the actor you look? You look like a certain actor. God, do you know who I’m talking about?
Dana Woods:
I don’t
Andy:
I don’t know why that just popped in my head. It’s like whether your hair’s a little grayer now, you look more like this guy. What’s his name? It’s like he’s doing a lot of stuff. I think he might have played the Hulk. Anyway.
Dana:
Oh, Mark Ruffalo?
Andy:
Mark Ruffalo! There we go. Hello everybody. Welcome to another edition of IT Social Hour. Today we’ve got a very special episode. We’ve got my dear friend, Dana Woods. Met him back in college. He was my freshman roommate in college. We were at a wedding about a month ago, just chatting. Of course, AI came up and I’m like, “You know what, Dana, you should come on the podcast.” And then we worked it out and we figured out a little angle here and we’re going to do this. And anyway, Dana is a technology integration specialist at the Midge Public Schools, and we are going to talk about AI and what AI is really doing to the kids and how it’s being integrated into education, how it might affect just really how they are as future tech workers. So we’re kind of imagining, what are these AI natives, kids who don’t know a world without AI, what are they going to be like when they enter the workforce in 15 years or so?
So I wanted to pick Dana’s brain on that and he was gracious enough to join us. So Dana Woods, my college roommate, back together again, here we are. Thanks for joining IT Social Hour. How you doing? No, it
Dana:
Is so good to be here. It is so good to see you. It’s what I call the. We’re actually doing this. We’re doing a podcast. I had a podcast a while back and it’s cool to be joining you again. It feels like the good old days just chatting about what’s going on and we’ve had so many more experiences between now and then.
Andy:
Yeah. It’s going to be like one of those dorm room wrap sessions maybe. Okay. My dog is barking. I’m going to get her out of here. All right. Okay. All right. So Dana,
Dana:
You just had a dog distraction. I’ve got my son and his friend and they’re running around with a laser tag, so they might bark in at some point too. I think we should just keep rolling.
Andy:
We’ve all got stuff going on. So if we seem a little distracted, the audience knows what’s happening. So there’s a lot happening. That’s life. But yeah, so Dana, you’re a technology integration specialist at Bemidji Public Schools. Why don’t you tell me a little bit about what that job is?
Dana:
I am responsible for planning professional development and training for teachers, really to get them to expand the way that they’re using technology in the classroom. On the most basic every day, the meat and potatoes part of my job, it’s supporting access to our online curriculum resources and our learning management system. We use Google Classroom and I do some help with making sure everyone knows how to use the grade book, our student information system. But I’ve also found myself supporting people in some kind of innovative ways, new ways to teach. It’s a really exciting job. I find myself wearing a whole bunch of different hats. Sometimes that’s even being a substitute teacher. So the last few years have been really, really interesting, both coming out of COVID and now I’m talking about AI all the time.
Andy:
Talking about AI all the time. So you get all sorts of questions from teachers about this, but like, “Hey, how do I handle this? What do we do? Is that what’s going on?”
Dana:
And it’s on both sides of the spectrum. It might be how can we block the website and prevent it from happening or how can I use this to make my teaching better? By the end of this conversation, you’ll figure out which side of that spectrum I sit on, but we’re doing our best to make sure that everyone can continue to be the professional teachers that they are.
Andy:
Okay. So how is AI being used in the classroom these days?
Dana:
I mean, it seems odd that we’re four years into this, but that we’re still just getting started. We don’t have broad guidelines and we’re just getting started with the boilerplate from the Minnesota School Board Association for AI use in schools. And that boilerplate isn’t even fully inked yet, and most school districts haven’t adopted broad policies. We have some guidelines that we use. Here’s some things that we want you to do to make sure you don’t fall off the cliff, but we’re making sure people are using it strategically. Most of the work that I see and the work that I support is just helping teachers use it to become more efficient with their planning time and to help them with lesson plan and unit plan development. It’s something that teachers are really starting to explore for their own professional development and their own planning. I’ve been a part of some conversations.
I’m a member of the Minnesota, Minnesota Generative AI Alliance, and it’s really interesting to see students are very cautious about it. I don’t know where that comes from, but they’re very cautious about it and they’re not really diving in like I did when I found it.
Andy:
Interesting. Yeah. And you’re talking about how young, as young as – It’s interesting because I
Dana:
Have a seventh, eighth, have a ninth grader and seventh grader and 10th, 11th, 12th graders the last couple years, they’re very cautious, but now seventh, eight, ninth graders, this can help me with my math homework.
Andy:
They’re
Dana:
Seeing it as a tool and if they’re using that tool correctly and I want to talk about correctly, but if they’re using that tool strategically, it’s helping them become a better learner.
Andy:
Wow. So I got to ask, how can AI help someone become a better learner?
Dana:
So I’ve been guided by the work of one of my favorite ed tech leaders. His name is Sean Geverson. He’s from Orono Public Schools down there in the metro area. And they have pioneered these using Google Gemini gems, so pre-configured AIs. And these AIs, they have one that’s for the math homework help. And they give the instructions to this web gem that says, “Don’t give the answer.” And then it gives them some PDFs on best practices on how to be a teacher, how to be a tutor and how to support kids in their learning. And they release it on a website that’s like, “If you’re going to use AI for your math help, use this one because they put the work in to make it an actual learning tool.” I feel like that’s outstanding to me.
Andy:
I did not know that existed. That seems like it makes a lot of sense. How do you make sure the kids are using that tool and not the tool that’s going to give them all the answers? Because it seems like it’s pretty tempting, right?
Dana:
Right. Yeah. I mean, that’s been the same song of education for years and years and years. There have always been ways to get around putting the work in and the proof ends up being in the pudding. Do you know what you’re supposed to know?
Andy:
Yeah. We had the CliffsNotes back in the day, right?
Dana:
Yep.
Andy:
Never touched them myself, but –
Dana:
Never went to sparknotes.com.
Andy:
Yeah. Yeah. CliffsNotes, SparkNotes, all that. So yeah, there’s been. Cheating’s been around. Yeah. CliffsNotes
Dana:
Is way back, right? That’s an actual book that you could buy that was going to help you not read the book.
Andy:
Yeah. You go to Barnes & Noble and it’s like, here’s a summary of To Kill a Mockingbird. Here you go. I mean, I feel like that kind of gets to the whole thing of. I mean, that’s a good analogy maybe, CliffsNotes versus AI outputs where you can ask an AI to summarize whatever you want to and you’ll get it, but you’re not getting the deep text, I guess. Do you think about that at all? I mean, I’m already hearing about kids not. I don’t want to sound like too much of an old person here, but you hear about kids not reading full books anymore, that kind of thing.
Dana:
Yeah. I think that’s always been a problem. I think more and more creating really authentic assignments. We used to say prior to generative AI in my role as a tech integration, it was like, if your answer can be Googled, if your worksheet can be Googled, should you be giving that worksheet? And there’s a lot to push back on that, right? Sure, Google it, but exercise your brain a little bit. Try to think before you Google. And there’s a place for worksheets like that that are easy to solve because it’s an exercise and it stretches your brain. But there also should be some room for assignments that are authentic, that are what you would really do in the real world. And some of that is going to be using tools that professionals use. And I think more and more, AI is one of those tools.
Andy:
Are kids being taught at all to kind of, I don’t know, overcome the tendency to try to maybe trust AIs too much, like AI outputs too much and being like, “Hey, this is what the machine says. The machine’s always right, although we know it’s not.” But it’s a thing, just being overly trusting and just rubber stamping AI answers and being like, “That sounds good. Send it out, put it out into the world, whatever.” Is that something that is on the minds of educators?
Dana:
I think that has been on the minds of educators since the dawn of time. How to think for yourself. I’m the teacher, I’m giving you some information, do with it. It might not be the answer and things are going to change. So really, ultimately, we want kids to be able to learn how to think and learn how to use the tools around them to think. So think about you and I, we graduated from high school in the year 2000. Computers were just coming into the classroom probably in the mid ’90s towards the end of our learning career. And now all of a sudden we’re doing research and we have the worldwide web as a tool and copying and pasting was a problem, but when you Google something, it wasn’t always the. Google didn’t exist at the time, but when you went to –
Andy:
Webcrawler, excites.
Dana:
Excite, all of this stuff. Ask Jeeves. You still had to have some fundamental skills with other tools. You had to go to a book, you had to go to a magazine, you had to go to an encyclopedia, a real encyclopedia and make sure that what you were finding with that tool was real. So I think kids are going to have to do more work because it’s harder and harder to find sources that for the sake of your research project are vetted. What is a vetted source? I think they’re going to have to work harder.
Andy:
They have a lot to sift through. There’s a lot of whether you want to call it AI slop or just BS that’s out there or what’s true. I’m already questioning pretty much everything I see on the internet at this point.
Dana:
I don’t
Andy:
Know.
Dana:
What we do? We’re like you either had Funk and Wagners or you had Britannica or your neighbor did and you looked up, you’re searching for information about World War II and you got Winston Churchill and you got the letter C encyclopedia and you learned everything you needed to know about Winston Churchill. Now all of a sudden it’s like I search Winston Churchill and it’s going to create a story about Winston Churchill. It’s way more complex than we had to deal with.
Andy:
And it’s generative, so it’s going to be a little bit different every time, right? Yes. Kind of like if you ask your uncle, tell me about the ’70s or something. And it’s like every time you ask him, every time he tells that story from back in the day, it’s going to be a little bit different and maybe it’ll be a little bit less accurate too. I don’t know. Yeah. Or if you’re a fisherman, ask a fisherman about his fishing stories or stories and it’s going to be a little bit different every time, right?
Dana:
Are you holding the fish like this or are you holding the fish like this?
Andy:
Is that the trick? Okay. Oh
Dana:
Yeah. And you got to do the finger tuck because when you hold it like this, then you don’t see big fat fingers.
Andy:
Yeah. Yeah. Cover up the whole fish with your fingers. Right. It’ll probably look smaller, especially if you got big hands. Yeah.
Dana:
Forced perspective.
Andy:
Yeah. Forced perspective. I follow you. So let’s bring IT and technology into the conversation since this is an IT podcast. So what fundamentals do you think will be important for tech workers in 15 years? I mean, I don’t know if you’re already seeing AI assisted coding and we’ll see what happens with that. So maybe that’s going to change. And so if it’s not that, or maybe it still will be that, if it’s not that though, what is it?
Dana:
I think the tools are going to change. I mean, nobody is programming a notepad anymore, or if they’re using notepad+, which is a little bit better. This is just another tool. Fundamentally, this comes from some research. Fundamentally, what programmers need to know are a set of skills called computational thinking. So that looks like breaking down problems into smaller parts. To look at a big problem, take a chunk that you can manage and solve just that little part and then figuring out how do these parts go together? Are there patterns? Looking for patterns is the second part of computational thinking. And then are these patterns generalizable? Do these patterns exist in this context and in that context, in that context? Can I make some sense of these patterns? And then once a programmer, and what I’m going to get to is that this isn’t just programming, this is all disciplines.
Make sense of problems, look for patterns, see if they’re generalizable, and then figure out how to communicate that. If that’s instructions to a computer through coding or vibe coding or generative AI assisted coding, or if you’re a journalist, it’s like, how do I tell a story that’s going to get this information to people so that they read it? It’s across disciplines, this idea of computational thinking, that’s not going away. I think the tools might change and just making sure that kids are adaptable to be able to.
We know tools are going to change. To have a system to help guide thinking is where we have to be and not necessarily focused on, okay, let’s make sure that they understand this specific generative AI tool.
Andy:
And the goal is to retain those thinking abilities. And I assume the hope is even if we’re just using more and more AI tools, we’ll still be thinking about how to use those AI tools maybe. And so maybe that will help keep our brains sharp hopefully and just for making connections just at a higher level. Does that track for you?
Dana:
Yeah, I think so. I mean, at the end of the day, we only have so much capacity and we’re going to have new problems. I think that you kind of hinted at this, right? Now, what is the truth? Everything I read on online, is this AI? Is this for real? Was this AI slop? It’s going to be hard to communicate. But from back to the root of the question though, I think keeping it this higher order thinking, that won’t go away. We have big complex problems to solve. Complex problems will not go away. And having strategies to solve those complex problems, that’s not going to go away.
Andy:
Okay. What’s the extent of AI code assistance? What’s the extent of that use in schools right now? I mean, I know you have some coding classes, right? Are kids being taught to use that at all?
Dana:
I don’t really think. I mentioned this a little bit earlier, that four years seems like a long time, but in any large institution, four years is just a drop in the hat. It’s a drop in the bucket, sorry. I don’t think curriculum writers who are making courses for coding have caught up. I could be wrong. I hope when this goes out on YouTube, someone goes and fact checks me and the turns of this viral moment, clearly there are curriculum for vibe coding, but I don’t think we’ve caught up yet. I think what I imagine is happening is that people are seeing this tool and saying, “Okay, you’re learning this traditional coding software, maybe you’re learning Python. Check what you’ve written against a generative AI to see if it tracks, and then understanding if the generative AI even understands what you’re trying to ask it to do is a whole nother thing.” So I’m kind of talking in circles here, but I really don’t think that it’s a direct part of any curriculum that we’re seeing, at least at the K-12 level.
Okay.
Andy:
Yeah, maybe in some specialized experimental schools and whatnot, but in terms of Minnesota public schools, at least in Bemidji, it’s not a thing yet.
Dana:
Yeah. I mean, I’m glad you brought that up because it does exist. I mean, it does exist in some places or are trying some innovative experimental things, and there’s a space for it. What the consequences are, I don’t know.
Andy:
Should kids even be learning to code anymore?
Dana:
Well, I 100% think that kids need to continue to learn to code. I want to talk a little bit about exercise. The brain needs to solve problems in order to grow. So when you and I were in school, you maybe learned. I learned how to program in basic. There wasn’t someone going like, “Well, basic is going to make this program that will make it easier, so we should not learn to code in basic.” We practiced basic, we learned a few fundamental things, and it wasn’t just about learning to code. It was learning about computational thinking. Okay, what do I want my program to do? What problem am I trying to solve? What do I know about this programming language? How do I make it variable? Well, I’m going to write a basic program that helps me be able to predict the average height of your child.
Are they going to be an MBA star? And then so you create a variable, what is your prompt? What is your height?
That same thing should be happening today, and that maybe it’s Python. I don’t know Python. I’m not a computer programmer, but what I do know is some of the computational thinking pieces that make programming happen. And even if you have a tool that could magically take a generative AI prompt and claw code or whatever tool, the tool of the next five years, who knows what that is, even if there’s something that could do that, it still makes sense to understand how it works. And there’s a space for it. What the consequences are, I don’t know. That’s the next question. What do we want more of?
Andy:
Yeah. Okay. Let me ask that then. All right. All right. So if you could choose to either be just a wizard at AI, you’re just really good, you’re like an AI whisperer, you’re able to get the outputs you want, you’re really good at working with AI. If you could choose to be that, or you could choose to be someone who just has a deep understanding of the fundamentals of whatever, whatever the subject matter is, the way the world works, the fundamentals of reality, but you’re terrible at using AI tools, maybe you just can’t, maybe you have an aversion to it, whatever, but AI tools are not really an option. What would be better to be, say, maybe not today, but maybe 15 years from now when these kids are graduating?
Dana:
This is such a good question because if we’re talking about freshmen, sophomore, junior, seniors in high school, obviously I want them to know their stuff. And I want to say always know your stuff. And I will say that fundamentals are super important, but gosh, when I start thinking about 15 years from now, what is generative AI? What will it be in 15 years? I don’t know, listeners, if you’re listening to this, we had a pre-talk about this and we worked out this analogy of the video game system. So when Andy and I were in kindergarten, first grade, the primary video game system was the NES. So a kindergartner right now, their AI is the NES. And then we fast-forward to when we’re in 12th grade. I don’t know, was it PlayStation two at that time? When we were freshmen in college, we had a dream cast.
Andy:
Yeah. 2K,
Dana:
Right?
Andy:
Rainy mass deep.
Dana:
Yes. We got into some fights. I remember we got into some fights because I would take the NFC conference All Stars, and then I found this little glitch in the game where I did a flea flicker and I put in the back of quarterback who was Brett Favre or something, and he would do a flea flicker and he’d make it. Not a flea flicker, but a pitch to the back and the back throws it. Dirty. Okay. Thanks for entertaining that. So we don’t know in 18 years, the difference between the NES and the Dreamcast is so crazy. Well, the difference between 2023 ChatGPT and 2026 ChatGPT is almost unimaginable, unimaginable. I don’t know what’s going to happen in 15 years. Maybe. Maybe the AI systems and all the things that it’s going to help you do, maybe I want that kid to be really versed in that.
Andy:
Okay. I though you were going to say the fundamentals all the way, but – I think I did.
Dana:
It’s like I did. I said fundamentals all the way, but I don’t want to rule out. I know there’s a lot of gloom and gloom and fear about AI. I want to stay optimistic. I think we don’t know yet what this tool can do for us. And I think there’s a lot of learning that can happen both from using the tool and learning what you learned from the tool, the outputs that it’s giving you. It’s not all garbage, right? And there’s just going to be so many advancements in 15 years.
Andy:
Yeah. If it kind of goes exponentially like it kind of is, it seems, how do you map that? I don’t know. I mean, it would be interesting to look back on this conversation in 15 years and see if we’ll have to do that. But I mean, just even the terminology we’re using and talking about interacting with chatbots, that might be completely irrelevant. I mean, maybe it’s just not to get all sci-fi, but maybe it’s all a Neuralink situation or something by then. I don’t know. I’m getting a little sci-fi brain here, but it’s hard not to these days.
Dana:
It is.
Andy:
Yeah. What should be the youngest you think a student or a child should be using AI?
Dana:
I think 13 is a really good place to start for a bunch of different reasons, but primarily because that’s when the human brain starts really being able to understand complex and abstract thinking at that brain stage. So it’s like kids, humans, adults sometimes don’t understand that generative AI isn’t like a human brain that’s answering the question for you. It’s a large language model that’s putting together all kinds of different words that it’s found in its training data. It’s not a human brain that’s thinking. If you have a kid that’s under 13, they might think that that chatbot is a real person.
Andy:
And
Dana:
I think 13 is a good place to start for that reason, but also because we have a lot of support and guidance in keeping children safe on the internet. So 13 is the guideline for a lot of those rules.
Andy:
How do you feel in terms of maybe kids’ development, how do you feel about this anthropomorphization of AI? I hope I got that word right, but how do you feel about treating AI like a person? When I interact with a chatbot, I say, please, sometimes I say thank you because I think it can’t hurt, but maybe I’m kind of causing damage to my psyche by humanizing this AI or maybe the AI deserves to be humanized. I don’t know. 15 years from now, what are we going to be talking about? Maybe we’re talking about personhood for AIs and that kind of thing. But back to my question, what are your thoughts on that, on almost being too friendly with AI and.
Dana:
Yeah, I think the tool’s going to change. I think we’re going to see how people’s brains are changing from interacting with this tool and start to think, okay, we need to make sure that people understand what this is and what this isn’t because it’s just important that people know that this is not a brain and this is not a person. And it worries me too, to an extent that a lot of companies using AI as their chatbot to try to help you guide you to buy stuff, but they don’t know. The chatbot can’t help you pick what hair color for my silvering hair. It is not a brain. It can recommend some products or something, but it’s not a brain.
Andy:
Okay. So maybe it’s as simple as just reminding ourselves that from time to time, maybe there’s some features that can be put into these products to remind us that they are not real. I know they’re thinking about this.
Dana:
Yeah. So back to the video game analogy, remember in the Nintendo We, if you played for a while, it would be like, “Hey, you’ve been playing Wii for a while. You should go outside.” ChatGPT has been doing that lately. It’s like, “Hey, you’ve asked a lot of questions today. Maybe it’s time to take a break.” And I thought that was really cool. And I hope to see more of that kind of stuff.
Andy:
So that happened to you?
Dana:
Yeah, I was making this quiz for my daughter who’s going to the state fair and she’s preparing for her judging. And I was like, “All right, prepare a list of questions that a 4-H judge might ask. And here’s the links to all the 4-H judge guidelines, and here’s how I want this interaction to go. Go.” So it was like, “Tell me about your project. Oh, I restored a bicycle, blah, blah, blah.” And she was practicing and practicing and practicing and then boom, “Hey, you’ve been practicing a long time. Maybe you need a break.” And I thought, “Wow, yes.” They’re doing some innovations that understand that there is a time to stop.
Andy:
Okay. Well, that’s good to hear. I mean, you got to hope the powers that be want this all to go well and so that they’re going to build in these features that keep things on track and copacetic and whatnot. Last question for you, Woods. Again, 15 years from now, I keep doing that because I guess I’m imagining a three-year-old who’s going to graduate at 18 years old and they’re just waking up to the world and AI is a thing. So they’re an AI native. I’m wondering what kind of advantages or disadvantages will they have because they are AI natives and that they don’t know a world without AI. Are you and me just going to be completely outmoded because we’ve just got these AI wizards running around that are just running simples around us or what do you think?
Dana:
I think fundamentally our goal as teachers is to help kids to be able to succeed and the world’s changing all the time. We know the world’s changing. We know it’s increasingly interconnected, looking at tools from the perspective of learning. And I think these kids are going to see the good and they’re going to see the bad. They’re going to see the very beginning, the NES, that’s the good. And then they’re going to see the Dreamcast, that’s the bad. Or I don’t know, whatever. But then
Andy:
They’re going to
Dana:
Go through the hype era. We’re in that now. So I’m mixing my metaphors. Let’s go back to the encyclopedia analogy. The encyclopedia sales guy led my parents to believe that it was going to make me all kinds of a better learner and so much better in school, maybe. And I said this before, I think there’s just going to be no way around hard work. You have to use that encyclopedia to learn from it. And I just think the kids are going, they’re going to work. The idea that somehow this is going to short circuit learning, I think doesn’t really appreciate what learning is. Kids are going to continue to learn and they’re going to learn so much more in so many different things that we could even imagine. I’m excited about the future. I think the kids are going to be super adaptable because things are going to continue to change rapidly.
And I think they’re going to learn so many different ways to evaluate information, ways that we can’t even imagine yet.
Andy:
Okay. So the future enterprise computing workforce, whatever that industry looks like in 15 years, it sounds like you think they’re going to be intact, ready to go, ready to do their jobs, whatever that job is. We don’t know that, of course.
Dana:
Right. And I think that’s the answer. I don’t know, but I’m willing to find an answer. If these kids can just know that they don’t know and they’re willing to try and they’re going to have to work really hard. And again, I’m excited. They’re going to do great things.
Andy:
All right. Well, that’s good to hear. I’m glad we could end this on a positive note. This has been awesome, Dana. Thanks for sharing your insights. I think it’s pretty special that we’re doing this after all this time. Kind of just things coming full circle. Love it. So Dana, thanks for joining me on IT Social Hour here. Oh yeah, got to let the audience know that come check us out at techchannel.com. You can go subscribe to our newsletter, techbeat there. It’s all free. But again, Dana, thank you so much. Thank
Dana:
You. It’s so great to be here and great talking with you.
Andy:
All right. Catch you later.
Dana:
All right, man. You
Andy:
Have a good one.
Dana:
I am definitely giving Mark Ruffalo vibes.
Andy:
Yeah. Yeah. Mark Ruffalo, told you. I knew I wasn’t crazy.