Speaker 1: 0:11

Welcome back everyone to another episode of Shift Ed podcast coming to you today, and I think my guest is also in our province of Quebec. Is that true, kate?

Speaker 2: 0:25

I am, yeah, I'm here, I'm in Montreal.

Speaker 1: 0:28

Excellent. So I have Kate Arthur here, who has been around education for a long time ed tech a long time. She's presently co-founder of Combs Global Is that how you say it, combs? Combs, c-o-m-z yeah, and which kind of helps people look at how AI can be accessible for everyone. Kate, you might know also from Kids' Cope, which she started way back. She's now transformed in Digital Moment, offering great services to our educators here in Quebec. So, kate, thanks so much for taking me up on this invite and coming to talk to us.

Speaker 2: 1:12

It's super to be here and Quebec Learn was when I started Kids Code in. Well, the idea was started in 2012 and we established in 2013. And Quebec Learn was one of our first partners to to bring in summer training coding workshops. So it was a long while ago, but still really important.

Speaker 1: 1:33

Yeah, the collaboration goes on. Today we had Digital Moment come and do a couple of AI workshops. Romain came on, who was great, and we shared those out and the attendees, uh, thought it was great because we have to start somewhere right. And um, ai is a new thing. Kate just put out, um, her first book. Is that correct, kate?

Speaker 2: 1:55

your, it is yeah am I literate?

Speaker 1: 1:59

a I literate a little play on words there um, so we're going to talk about her book and also just about AI and its whole infusion into our educational system. So, kate, before we start all of that fun talk, let's get even more knowledge from where it all started for you. All started for you, um, if, if I were to ask you, like, what were some of those poignant, um tipping points in your career that kind of brought you to where you are now? Um, what would some of those be? How did you, how did you kind of make your way into this, into this ai, ed tech field?

Speaker 2: 2:39

yeah, so it feels like it does feel like a long time ago, but I studied English literature. I've always wanted to be a writer. It's what I thought I would become was a writer and a publicist. So I worked in communications as a publicist in London, england. As a writer, loved, loved, loved it. The power of the word for me. I could spend hours, you know, mulling over a sentence, just the power of that to convey a feeling and emotion and stringing it all together. So that's really what I thought I was going to end up doing. And then life happens right.

Speaker 2: 3:21

So I met my now husband in the late 1990s in England and he was in technology. So he's a programmer, a developer, and now actually we run an IT company together. We founded one in the mid 2000s here in Canada and so it was really through being exposed to his work early on where I started to dabble a little bit in what is all of this technology. And this was before social media, before smartphones and before the cloud became became a thing. And you know, I was doing my thing in London and I worked in the entertainment industry, in in theater there, and and he was doing his thing. And then we decided you know, london is a fantastic city, but it's time to take a break. So we sold everything and packed our bags and bought a ticket to around the world ticket. And he said why don't we build a website to communicate with family and friends while we're gone? For me that was a daunting idea and I you know this again my WordPress. None of this stuff existed. And he said you do all the writing and the content and I'll build the backend.

Speaker 2: 4:35

And so that was really my first moment of being exposed to code and it was the first opening to how similar is to the work I had been doing for those years in communications. But how we were communicating was changing and little did we know how much of the disruption. But that was really the early days of this digital world being formed. You know, we had the internet and the worldwide web had come a decade earlier and now we were building our lives in the digital space. So social media was coming along. We were connecting socially. You know gaming actually plays a real fundamental role in the development of AI back since the 1950s. But you know, at this period it was progressing rapidly. 1950s. But you know, at this period it was, it was, it was progressing rapidly, uh, video games and and that, all that development so that I found really, really interesting and and um, we started a tech company.

Speaker 2: 5:34

Uh, in the, we moved to montreal. I had family, my family was here and I had done high school here and I had got a job at cbc, radio canada and in communications, and we decided to start a tech company together and what we were doing was moving primarily not-for-profit companies, helping them move their physical to the digital cloud computing had was. Really. This was like 2007. 2008 was starting to move, so we were seeing, uh, you know, big business models shifting. So Google was developing Google Drive and you know we were seeing this movement happening. Where our data lived on our machines, now they were moving out elsewhere. And so, again, for me, that was another moment of huh. We are now losing control, but able to connect in ways you know. It's like this double edged sword of you know where is our data going, and it was a real concern for clients at the time because you know everything was free or almost free if you moved everything to the cloud, but you were losing your access to your own data and you know the control of it.

Speaker 2: 6:48

So that was another moment, and that's in the early, like 2010,. 2011 is when I really realized our education systems aren't moving as fast as they need to to keep up with the role of communicating and creating. So, not my focus wasn't computer science, it was how are we making sure our kids know how to build this world, that that is happy, that is being built so quickly? And we were living in, right, we were virtually living in this space. So how, how, what do we need to bring to the kids?

Speaker 2: 7:18

So that's when I started kids coaching us and at that time, so that was also like a big moment. And then the last big moment was in 2016 and and I was in ottawa and you know I felt my job. I have a soapbox literally I do it behind me and I see and I get on it a lot um, and one of them was to try and get money to uh, to focus on uh, coding, and you know, bringing this into school systems and and community. So you know, looking at the different types of education so formal, informal and non-formal education structures and how can we bring coding into to youth environments. And it was in 2016 where I heard the first time I heard artificial intelligence and I didn't. I had no idea what it was and I thought couldn't figure it out and then into yeah, because they would.

Speaker 2: 8:11

The government had already had, industry was already putting pressure, um, so which is usually what happens for industries moving very, very quickly and and so the structures start to change. And uh, and so I was in a classroom six months later or so, and one of our teachers who from uh, she was uh, marjolin, she was one of, like our first I would anything that I felt like we needed to pilot. It would go into her classroom, and so we were in her class. I was in her classroom and she started to use um siri and thought I don't think the kids have any idea. Now we have technology responding, so no longer is it just human to human, but now we're in a relationship with human to machines.

Speaker 2: 8:59

And then I went down the rabbit hole of AI. So I think I took my first AI course in 2017. And I really I say this to to her if I can understand it, anyone can understand it. My brain is not a computer science one. Um, and yeah, and so that's sort of like the, the moments in in my journey, of what brought me to where I am today right and now a published.

Speaker 1: 9:23

author.

Speaker 2: 9:23

Yes, yeah, I finally. I finally became a writer.

Speaker 1: 9:27

That literary degree came in handy here in the end, so great. Now I read too that you looked at the AI education frameworks with UNESCO, and those came out not too long ago. What was your role in that and like? Can you kind of give us a little bit of an idea of the framework that they suggested? Or you know the functionings that UNESCO were thinking about when you were working with them?

Speaker 2: 9:57

Yeah, yeah. So that was a highlight of my career in the last decade was working with UNESCO. We had a really strong relationship here in Canada with CC UNESCO, the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, and Sebastian Goupil, who was the secretary general at the time. This is again like 2017. He said, kate, can we speak? And he said I've got something. I have not an urgency as much as there's a pressing need that I'm seeing and some pattern patterns that I'm seeing that I want to talk to you about. So I got on the call with him and if any one of you knows Sébastien, he's full of energy and he's like a doer. You know you speak to him, you know whatever he's going to say, he's going to do. And he said I'm hearing waves around the world about algorithm literacy, this need for our kids to understand what algorithms are and their effect in the world and so we embarked on that journey together and eventually, in the next couple of years, we went into a partnership with UNESCO at the international level. So we had algorithm and data literacy. We brought the two together. And then the role my role was really to help share that and bring that to the 192 member states, and it was. It wasn't a big role, it was more. You know, when they needed me to go and speak on that project, I would, and so we, we had an established relationship and it was. You know these things.

Speaker 2: 11:27

You look back at but you realize like nobody was doing what we were doing, like there was, there was no ai education framework, so there was no, it wasn't on anybody's radar. Uh, so, similar to when we started kids cogeness, it was sort of like trying to figure out what was needed, um, to put the pieces together. And now we have so much uh available and resources, which is fantastic, um, but at the time there wasn't that. Um and unesco took this leadership role in in looking at they had already done the ai ethics, so they had already been very involved in this and, under the, the leadership of feng shong miao, who is uh, who runs the department there, is very, very progressive in in in ai and its impact and what it can and cannot do for education, and he invited me to be an expert on their helping build their frameworks. So it was a very small role.

Speaker 2: 12:20

I went to Paris a few times and we got to. We sat in very small rooms. You know very much. Like you imagine, like you imagine in a school, in like the principal's office that's what it was like and you sit in there and with experts in building frameworks and and so my contribution in in these, in building the framework. So there are two of them, one is for teachers and then one is for students, and I was focusing on the one for students and it was how do we connect the computing world and the computing? You know the journey that we had already been through computing with coding and computational thinking and physical computing with AI. So that was sort of like my lens of, of making sure we were anchoring, and I would say like to the literacy, right to the computing literacy. We were anchoring to that and then also keeping a strong lens on the ethics side of it. So that was also my role.

Speaker 2: 13:21

You know Montreal we're very fortunate to be surrounded by incredible researchers doing great stuff and the Montreal Declaration for for responsible AI had come out by then. The Montreal AI ethics institute was up and running. So there was a lot of stuff happening and I and I was and still am, I still work with the Montreal AI ethics institute just keeping an eye on on that ethical lens. So those were the frameworks and and it's very, very high level because the complexities you realize when you're working at an international level how complicated the world is yes you know, everybody has access different, and especially ai, because cultures are different, values are different, so you can't, you know, enforce or instill anything.

Speaker 2: 14:10

It's more again, very, very uh high level frameworks right, right, and what?

Speaker 1: 14:16

what kind of ai mindset did you get out of doing that interaction? Like, did you start to see ai in a different light? I imagine you would have with, with, with all of that exposure and the conversations and the um, like, how did where where's your mindset at now with ai? Um, if you were to look at it as a a separate thing? Yeah where do you see it?

Speaker 2: 14:41

with with the work with unesco. Um, they were there. You realize, oh my god, there's some some brilliant people in the world. Like to be able to learn from some of the best minds and people with so much experience. Was was for me just like, wow, this is neat, um, and and the the care right. So we were very quick to judge and say, oh, you know these people, passionate care, dedicated to education, um, and I learned, uh, I learned.

Speaker 2: 15:15

So there were two people that I worked really closely with. One was a computer science scientist I believe she was stanford, um, very, very heavy computer science, uh, mind frame. And then the other one was also she studied linguistics and education, so she you know Bloom's Taxonomy and whatnot, so brought that perspective. And so the two together really helped me see how numbers and words are absolutely fundamental to not just reading and writing, not just computing, but to AI. And that's sort of how I you know, I hadn't and it's just coming to me now as we're talking, but I hadn't really like I'd seen the connections for myself and in these being ways of communicating, but an actual literacy when we have skills and tools and knowledge to be able to create and communicate, and it's really with numbers and words. So you know that that's, and then that's why I felt like I felt this need to also put my book together.

Speaker 1: 16:29

Absolutely Well, and mentioning that, so you asked the question. Your title is a question, right? Yes, Am I literate? Yeah, what is literacy in a digital age or an AI age? I guess I mean digital AI. Probably interfused a bit.

Speaker 2: 16:46

Yeah, I would say literacy. So if you're literate today, it has to include AI, because if we're literate, when we can access the data, when we can transform it into knowledge and respond meaningfully. So the one biggest takeaway in literacy today for me is that machines are now literate too, so machines can access the data, transform it into knowledge and respond meaningfully. The gray or the color of what we need to dig into and to be educating our kids around is literacy and data.

Speaker 2: 17:34

So, whether it's the khipunots which I talk about from the Inca time to you know, words, reading and writing, which is really in the Enlightenment and the first Industrial Revolution, reading and writing really plays a strong role in why innovation and becomes how innovation advances very quickly. So that'd be like the first and second industrial revolution and third and fourth industrial revolution. We're going to computing, literacy, so coding, so we need to know how to code, to build, to create and communicate, and then, with AI, how data is working, how algorithms are working. Now, as we're moving forward, we're now in this new environment of literacy where we're not the only ones who are literate. So how do we build relationships to be able to create and communicate responsibly with each other, with machines and also build these machines so that they're responsibly with each other with machines and also build these machines so that they're responsibly communicating with each other. Because now we, you know which is where the worry of losing the control, because we're not involved in that literacy, that relationship anymore.

Speaker 1: 18:41

Right, right, I guess too, the challenge that I see anyway from the educational standpoint is fusing kind of the technology and what it can do with teachers you know professional jobs and what they used to do and how it evolves and like creating that awareness or almost like developing a different kind of mindset around what AI is, because so far what we've seen in the educational world are preoccupations with the negative part of what it brings, without, I don't know, acknowledging enough of for one it's never going away and all the good that it brings. When you look at this, do you talk about some of these things in your book? I know that I've read a few little passages that were available and it's very storytelling. So again you're bringing your English literature into it where you're telling stories about, as you just did. Where do we connect? How do we connect teachers to it better so that they can see that there is a long-term benefit, and how can they start to? In small little pieces so that it's not like brain?

Speaker 2: 19:56

Overwhelming.

Speaker 1: 19:57

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 19:59

And that's why I wrote the book and that's why I wrote it as a story.

Speaker 2: 20:03

So there is enough information and content out there about AI and what it is and, you know, whoever wants to learn about it, you can go and learn about it and access it for free online. But there's something about telling stories and in multi-layered environment of AI as well. But we respond to stories, we connect with stories and we understand through storytelling, and I wanted to weave in the the journey of computing and AI, the journey of literacy and education within a story, and that that's where Anchor is through the generations of my family, and I wanted to highlight the real importance of us owning our data and owning our story, because if we don't own it, then AI will. At a micro level, at a personal level, then AI will. At a micro level, at a personal level, but also at a historical level. You know, and at a you know, we still have almost 3 billion people without access to the internet and AI is now, you know, as I mentioned, literate and able to tell all these stories using data. What was happening to those people, the 3 billion people who don't have access? What's happening to their stories? How are they being recorded. So that's why I I weaved it in and into this storytelling so that it is accessible and and it can go very quickly to.

Speaker 2: 21:40

You know, we can easily our imaginations go quickly to doom, doom and gloom, but if we understand and we are aware of how uh, anything, but in the case of ai, how it works, it really does minimize the, the, the fear, and it gives agency to be able to, to say, to give an opinion. So you still might think robots were going to take over the world, but I'd rather each of us individually had enough knowledge to be able to to have an opinion than have to listen to elon musk or whoever is telling us what's going to happen, right. So when you understand that ai, the machines have been built over decades, the models have been built over decades, the models have been trained and built over decades and improving over time using our data and how the progress of that data, that data journey, came from. You know social media, well, internet starting, you know. So it's young 1990s, right.

Speaker 2: 22:43

And to us now feeding enormous amounts of data that our brains cannot even fathom how much data these models are accessing. When you see that that's how it's working mathematical models, using our data to make predictions, it feels less overwhelming than, oh my God, terminator's coming and our world's done right, and then you're gonna start to see. Oh well, maybe it is the responsibility of governments to put frameworks and laws in place to control the development, because industry's job, their only job, is to make money, and and and they will not stop. You know, like that, that and that's what they're supposed to do. They're not, they're not, they're not supposed to govern and to to self-governance, it's. It goes against, you know, the stock market, basically. So you know when we can each have our soapbox to stand on. I think you know, and we've seen over history in the industrial revolutions when we each have that literacy, we can each contribute to the world that we want to see and how we want to move things forward.

Speaker 1: 23:57

Absolutely. I love that you're mentioning to the humanity of it all that I mean the stories come from us, they come from our history, they come from our families. The stories come from us, they come from our history, they come from our families, our friends, that no machine can take that and claim it as their own Right.

Speaker 1: 24:12

So we do have that. You know that won't ever go away and they learn from what we already know. Yeah, like as you were saying, the input that we put in and more and more so. I mean we should all be being paid by AI, I think, just because of all the help we're giving these machines to learn more, it's coming from people, but I love that perspective on that.

Speaker 2: 24:38

Yeah, I think there was a study I read a number of years ago that if we were each paid a few cents for each data point we put in, we would alleviate poverty.

Speaker 2: 24:49

Right, you know, that's a big change that we can have. Yeah, and you know, when there's the argument that AI can code for us now, ai can write for us now, for sure it can. But nobody, no AI system, will be able to have this relationship you and I have in this conversation that we're having right now, and then I will take my learning and our conversation to another experience, you know. So, we, we are built on stories and and I do talk about this, and it's important that we share our stories because it especially for the generation today and their future generations storytelling gives us a confidence and a foundation. It roots us to able to navigate chaos and uncertainty, and we're definitely, I would say, quite deep into that chaos, uncertainty. Now, when you can have stories either you know from your parents, your grandparents, or you know through books um, they do provide a certain level of comfort, um, to navigate and sort of like a roadmap of sorts absolutely, absolutely.

Speaker 1: 25:55

So the book was just released, not that long ago, right it? Was a couple weeks ago out there. How do you, how do you feel people have responded to it so far?

Speaker 2: 26:05

um, I don't know how many people have read it, because it literally has. Uh, it has just come out and I I did have beta readers, uh, which everyone's gonna say, oh, it's great. So you know, I don't know. My goal with the book was it's not a work of literary genius, that wasn't the purpose of it, and I also felt an urgency. It took me about six months to write. I felt this urgency to bring this forward. I felt this urgency to bring this forward.

Speaker 2: 26:42

It's not talking about, like today's AI as much as again anchoring its journey so that we can all start to engage in what we want our societies to look like.

Speaker 2: 26:55

So I hope, when the goal is to provide enough information so that somebody can talk with a little bit of knowledge about what artificial intelligence is. I get to speak a lot about AI at conferences and whatnot, and I will always start off saying I'm going to assume none of you know what artificial intelligence is, because we talk about it, we talk about it in society so much and I really don't think we know what it is. You know, because it's just moving so quickly. So the goal is, you know, I have a definition of AI and I would say like really, really off the cuff. It's when machines can learn from data and make predictions. There has to be a learning component to it. But everyone should be able to have their definition, and there are many, many, many, many definitions, and I do talk about this like there's no one set definition, but we all, we should each be able to to explain it in our way absolutely.

Speaker 1: 27:56

Yeah, I've noticed too. When we're offering workshops now and ai is in the title, we're sure to get a ton of people to it right as you, as you noted, like it's this figuring it out, like what is it? And like I agree with you, I think a lot of us and and and some that have been dabbling in it, are still trying to get our our minds around it and how we are going to fit inside this or or not fit inside, but coexist with this tipping point. That's happened. What was it? November 2022?

Speaker 1: 28:29

Yeah, yeah, yeah when it all, just the box is opened.

Speaker 2: 28:33

Yeah, which you know, when ChatGPT was released, and that was ChatGPT 3.5. So there was a three, there was a 2.5, there was a two. So it was again like these, these moments of of a building up, and it was only at the point where a generative AI model was able to create new content where we woke up Right, and so that's also that literacy. Prior to that, ai has been around again for decades and we have had, you know, we've been using google translate and you know, maps and all these that that has been using artificial intelligence models, but it was a moment that a general ai was able to create new content for us that we all went, oh, my god what does this mean?

Speaker 1: 29:26

that first like try of generating a, an image from a prompt, you know, and you're just like what did this just do? Yeah, yeah, like it's just. And we see that in teachers too and we're showing, like we'll demo, like how to, how to create a rubric with, with chat gpt for given, you know, grade level, subject and stuff like that, and their eyes popping out with how quickly it can generate stuff like this. That would have taken an hour, you know, or more um and I.

Speaker 1: 29:56

Somebody shared this rule with me. They said 80 20, so ai can take care of like 80 of of this stuff, but the 20% still is you. You've got to go and vet the stuff and tweak and fortify it, and so I love the percentage that we can kind of offload some of this stuff. But we are still required Our literacy and our numeracy is also required to be able to understand and interact with, which I think you shed some cool light on today.

Speaker 2: 30:27

Yeah.

Speaker 1: 30:28

Yeah, very interesting. Well, kate, this has been really fun. I thank you for putting this book out, for being a leader in this field here in our province, and I would love to continue this chat down the road. I think there's so much more to talk about.

Speaker 2: 30:43

Yeah, thanks, it's been a pleasure, great to be here. Thanks, chris. Thanks a lot.