Episode 18: AI...the "Lazy Graduate Assistant"?
Melissa Loble (00:01.186)
Hello, welcome to EduCast 3000. I'm your co-host, Melissa Loble.
Ryan Lufkin (00:06.543)
and I'm your co-host Ryan Lufkin. We're so glad you could join us for another episode of the Educast 3000 podcast. And today we're here with Dr. Lane Freeman, Director of Online Instruction at North Carolina Community College System. Lane and I had the pleasure of presenting at UNC Charlotte a few months ago, and I immediately was like, we gotta have him on the show. So Lane, you are on a mission to help educators understand generative AI and adopt these transformational tools in the classroom, which is something we talk about lot here. So we're so happy to have you on the show.
Dr. Lane Freeman (00:35.728)
Well, it's great to be here and I really enjoyed connecting with you, Ryan. You can almost know immediately who's on the same page just through like maybe a two minute conversation. You're like, yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (00:46.209)
when I was immediately like, need to borrow your slides. Your slides are awesome. I need to almost talking points.
Dr. Lane Freeman (00:48.52)
Yeah
Melissa Loble (00:51.818)
I love that. I love that bond. speaking of that, this is the first time you and I are meeting, Lane. And I would love to just learn a little bit more about you. know so would our listeners. So would you mind just sharing a little bit about your background so we can all get to know you better?
Dr. Lane Freeman (01:08.744)
Sure, I'm from Eastern North Carolina, if you can't tell from the accent. I grew up in Eastern North Carolina. I live in the same edge county, the county I grew up in. I was a North Carolina teaching fellow. And so I went to East Carolina University where you went for four years, they pay for your school and then you taught for four years. But I ended up teaching for 12 years at the high school here. I taught CTE courses, which was like web.
Web design, ed tech tools are always kind of my thing because of that. But business education, accounting, all those types of fields. And we really use active learning strategies in those classes, teaching students how to take notes, all those important skills that students need to be successful in all their courses. And then I transitioned to a community college, Nash Community College, which isn't far from me.
I was there for eight years where I was tasked with running the online program. so taking content from a course and moving it over that was in-person to online, but doing it in a way that wasn't just tech space, but it was active and entertaining and engaging with students. And this is before the TikTok days. now it's gotten really hard to engage students at a higher.
Ryan Lufkin (02:28.516)
Ha ha ha.
Now their expectations are even more so,
Dr. Lane Freeman (02:33.256)
We really are. Yeah. And so that actually led me to be in this role as a director of online learning at the North Carolina Community College System where we have 58 community colleges. We serve about 600,000 students here in North Carolina. And I just enjoy sharing those best practices for engaging students at a high level. And obviously, AI wasn't on our job descriptions when we were hired, but being an EdTech geek, know,
Ryan Lufkin (03:02.084)
Ha
Dr. Lane Freeman (03:02.776)
As soon as you see what ChatGP could do, you go, this is the EdTech tool of a century, right? It's crazy.
Ryan Lufkin (03:10.94)
yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, one of the we always like to ask our guests is for a favorite learning moment, right? Whether that's as an educator or as a student. So it helps our listeners really get to know you a little bit better. What's one of those learning moments for you,
Dr. Lane Freeman (03:28.668)
Well, I can actually can go back as we're talking about generative AI. remember where I was when I first accessed that chat GPT app. And as I'm having these moments, I mean, I was sitting in the back of church, which I was supposed to be paying attention to. But I opened up this app and I remember just asking it to write a limerick and it's a beautiful limerick. I'm like, holy wow, what is this going to do to education? so that was.
My kind of my peak learning moment of like things have changed. Education has to change. This is gonna be disruptive. It's gonna touch every sector. But that's why I like GPT being a generative pre-trained transformers, but also it's a general purpose tool. It's like, what's it not gonna touch? Just like, we know it. How can you imagine going to school without the internet or a computer? I think.
Ryan Lufkin (04:02.264)
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Lane Freeman (04:23.676)
That's where we are. That's where we're gonna be with generative AI. So that was kind of my most recent learning experience was just doing a deep dive and I just got completely lost in it to see what it could do.
Ryan Lufkin (04:24.174)
Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (04:36.354)
I love that you just explained to our audience what the GPT acronym stands for because nobody, like I honestly, I probably could not have pulled that one out if you asked. So that's awesome.
Dr. Lane Freeman (04:47.208)
Yeah, yeah.
Melissa Loble (04:48.94)
And I love that that's such a transformational moment for you and for education. remember my senior year in college was when my institution gave everyone email addresses. It was my first email account. I remember using Pine, the original email service where I went to college. Anyway, I just remember thinking, this is going to change how I just interact in general, let alone learning.
And I feel like that same thing about Chachi BT. Like that is just such a profound moment and relatable moment.
Ryan Lufkin (05:19.217)
yeah.
Dr. Lane Freeman (05:20.917)
yeah.
Yes.
Ryan Lufkin (05:23.874)
Yes, like just like, I mean, ICQ or some of the early instant messenger, right? Like those, those IAM tools that you're sending like, my gosh. think in your IAMing people that are down the hall, you no longer have to get up from your desk and walk down there. You're having a real time conversation.
Melissa Loble (05:26.987)
yeah.
Dr. Lane Freeman (05:35.72)
Well,
Ryan Lufkin (05:44.129)
yeah, you're like...
Ryan Lufkin (05:56.997)
yeah, you slowly saw 20 % of the picture loading across your Some of our younger listeners will actually not understand that. Start downloading the photo and walk away to come back later to see the full photo.
Dr. Lane Freeman (06:07.698)
No.
Dr. Lane Freeman (06:13.544)
But you know, as poor as that was, you knew instinctively, you knew that was a moment, right? The quality wasn't great, it wasn't fast, but it was enough to get everybody's interest. And it's the same thing for kind of chat GPT is, yeah, in the beginning, it hallucinated a lot and made a lot of things up. There were a lot of little, but because of what it could do, even in its infancy, you knew that it was a game changer.
Ryan Lufkin (06:21.804)
yeah.
Dr. Lane Freeman (06:41.892)
I think there's a lot of parallels that could be drawn between knowing even when something's poor in quality at the moment, the potential it has for the future is it's just transformational.
Ryan Lufkin (06:53.903)
Well, and we're gonna talk more about how that changed a little bit, but tell us a little bit about how you went from that moment of kind of experiencing this and going, wow, that was a remarkably good haiku or a limerick or those things that we first experimented with. How did you kind of make that transition into I wanna teach other educators about these tools?
Dr. Lane Freeman (07:12.796)
Yeah, so I mean, at system office, because of getting my background being strongly in education first, it's really content's almost secondary for me. It's about pedagogy, instruction, all that's the primary objective. And so anytime I look at any tool that comes out, it's through the lens of how can I apply this in the classroom. And so once I saw Chat2BT,
First of all, I just started using it on a daily basis. That's the best way to get practice with it. Doing recipes for myself or trying to analyze a situation. And then you start thinking and usually our limitations on how to use it or our own lack of creativity. And so when I'm sitting in front of it, all right, help me with a lesson plan. okay. So now I know how to use inside of a course module. Like I need help.
Melissa Loble (07:45.646)
Hmm.
Ryan Lufkin (07:54.425)
Yeah.
Dr. Lane Freeman (08:05.19)
reframing this discussion form so that all students can understand what I'm saying and then let's change the lexile level. So knowing what questions to pull on and that's when typically when I'm teaching it I'm just introducing these ideas to get people's ideas thinking, this is what I do in my classroom now I can use AI as an assistant to help me do that.
Ryan Lufkin (08:24.504)
Yeah, it's that you don't really know what they're capable of if you haven't used the tools. And so I think that's a lot, you're spot on, think that limits a lot of people's understanding of how they can use them just because they haven't dug into it.
Dr. Lane Freeman (08:33.416)
Well, even the people who designed this system doesn't know what it's capable of, right? The people who designed this weren't lawyers. They weren't teachers. They just knew they were building a large language model. They didn't know that in your specialty and your expertise, the ways you can use it. And that's where we are. We're in that frontier of exploring and sharing with each other on how you can do it.
Ryan Lufkin (08:39.463)
yeah.
Melissa Loble (08:39.725)
Mm-hmm.
Melissa Loble (09:01.134)
Yeah. Implicit in that exploration or exploration of anything is always trust, right? So you have to feel comfortable, willing to have that exploration. What are some of the things that you're doing to help create that trust or that comfort? Because a lot of educators are concerned about using it or hesitant to use it because they're afraid, you know, it'll get used in the wrong way or they'll be using it and it won't actually produce the results that they want it to.
Ryan Lufkin (09:18.212)
Mm-hmm.
Melissa Loble (09:29.452)
So what are the kinds of things you do with educators to build that trust and comfort to experiment?
Dr. Lane Freeman (09:34.44)
So, especially early on when I would go into an AI session, you'd see that faculty member in the back kind of with their arms folded. They're like, yeah. And my approach, and again, I think to be a good educator, you also have to be a good entertainer. And so my goal is to entertain. And if you don't think you're an entertainer as a teacher, then you're not engaging your students in a way, but.
Ryan Lufkin (09:42.052)
I've been in that meeting many times, yeah.
Dr. Lane Freeman (10:00.88)
The way I really get it started off is I get chat to PT. I do community building in the session. They share some data with me through a QR code, and I get it to generate a song. And now it's kind of lifted that load. So it's now generating a song. Then I take the, and they go, can you get it to sing? I'm like, not yet, but let me take it to Suno. And then I get Suno to play the song. then it just lightens the mood completely. When I show them the...
Ryan Lufkin (10:20.656)
No.
Dr. Lane Freeman (10:28.552)
AI pictures of my profile that I've created. Just with me with a cowboy hat on or me from my ancestors or something, they start laughing. And as soon as you can get people start laughing and easing up to it. I also like to demonstrate it in a live setting. So, you know, my presentations are not PowerPoints because I like for them to see when chat GPT makes a mistake. That lets them know, okay, I...
that human still required to be in the room with me when I do this. And I think that also alleviates their concerns. And so I do spend about 30 to 45 minutes just lifting the mode, letting them know everything's gonna be okay. When I do, I actually sometimes get our English faculty to raise their hands because that's a totally different audience. I actually, I think Ryan, you probably read my little post on about the five stages of grief that some people have.
Melissa Loble (11:17.891)
Okay.
Ryan Lufkin (11:23.002)
yes. Yep.
Dr. Lane Freeman (11:24.124)
five stages of grief that you kind of have to go through. is denial. But we've got to get to the part where we're accepting to use this because it's out there and people are going to use it.
Ryan Lufkin (11:28.356)
I
Ryan Lufkin (11:34.329)
Yeah, was gonna say we're gonna pull some resources because I think you've got some great handouts and some things that I think people will find really useful. And it's one of the things when we presented together, I was so impressed by the fact that you were, you know, I've been trained to never do anything live, right? Like the worst thing you can do is have your tech not work, but you actually kind of want the tech not to work in certain instances or you wanna show some of the...
Melissa Loble (11:35.246)
Yeah, we'll make sure to link to that too. That's that. Yeah.
Dr. Lane Freeman (11:51.4)
You
Ryan Lufkin (11:58.851)
the challenges. The other aspect, the thing that I was so impressed that you did is you actually use these tools, different AI tools together. You're like, this one's great at creating an initial image. This one's great at really refining that image and adding detail. was like, I actually haven't used them that way at all. So it was kind of eye opening to me. But for educators who kind of want to start using these, what are some of most impactful ways they can use AI tools in the classroom?
Dr. Lane Freeman (12:15.4)
Yeah.
Dr. Lane Freeman (12:25.576)
One of my recommendations is always keep ChatGBT tab open or whatever large language model you're using, keep that tab open. And any task that comes to your direction, go to it and just ask it. I've been asked to design a lesson plan for building relational capacity. Go to ChatGBT and say, I've been asked to create a lesson plan for relational capacity. It's gonna give you ideas and you brainstorm with it. so I, especially when...
when we have faculty or deans and department heads that are in charge of developing policy. I ask them, please don't develop policy until you've used it for at least 10 hours, because that 10 hours gives you a good understanding of where shortcomings are and how you can use it, and also its possibilities and potential. And so I think that would be the good starting point is just to open it up. You don't have to subscribe right off. A lot of the things that they come right now are free.
experimenting with different large language models because they're in a very competitive market. Open AI one day and then it's clawed the next. think Grok 3 coming out next year is going to be tremendous.
Ryan Lufkin (13:33.57)
Yeah, I just watched a TikTok about how Gemini has, you know, leaped forward from where they were a year ago as well.
Dr. Lane Freeman (13:38.632)
yeah, Jim and I and Google has really, it seems like the past month. As a matter of fact, that's why I typically don't record the presentations I give when I do them virtually. It's because for month to month they change and what they can do is change. One of the shortcomings of ChatGPT was this ability to give you an answer really quickly. So the reason it hallucinates is if I say what's two plus two, everybody immediately thinks four.
But if I say what is 2 by the exponent of 3 times x plus y, if I give you time, you're going to give me an answer. But it takes you time to think. But large language models, they don't think very long. And so they spit out an answer, which is why they hallucinate often. But they're getting better at that. So you're starting to see these large language models actually tell you it's thinking so you know it's not hung.
Melissa Loble (14:13.474)
Thanks.
Melissa Loble (14:26.072)
Mm-hmm.
Ryan Lufkin (14:32.579)
Yeah.
Dr. Lane Freeman (14:33.692)
And so I think that's, again, this is the worst version of AI we'll ever have. It's just only gonna get better.
Ryan Lufkin (14:40.418)
Yeah, the strawberry conundrum, Like forever, chat GB would tell you that there were only two R's in strawberry and you could not convince it otherwise. Now it will tell you there's three, right? It understands the difference.
Dr. Lane Freeman (14:46.002)
Right?
Dr. Lane Freeman (14:49.48)
A perfect example, a perfect example. Yeah, and then I don't know if we get into this later, but you know, when we talk about the biases that are built into it, there are obviously biases because it was trained on human data and there was a bias within human data. But it's the personality that you assign that AI that it can take on that it kind of eliminates those biases, right? So you can say, take a conservative's point of view, take a liberal's point of view, whatever.
Melissa Loble (14:49.772)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Melissa Loble (15:14.04)
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Lane Freeman (15:18.866)
point of view you want to have then it puts on that hat and so you can eliminate some of those biases or you just at least you know you're going into that where it is biased and doing it.
Ryan Lufkin (15:29.316)
Yeah, yeah.
Melissa Loble (15:29.454)
Well, that's a really good lead into my next question for you, which is some of the misconceptions around AI. And I think people assume AI is biased because it's AI. But as you've already described, it's because it's based on human content, and humans are biased. So often, we're so unaware of that. What other misconceptions, perhaps, have you run into with educators? And how do you help them work through those misconceptions?
Dr. Lane Freeman (15:59.132)
Well, I do tap into the bias part and that's why often I talk about what actually generative pre-trained transformers are. So pre-trained means it's been trained and I usually compare this to most of our faculty who have been to university programs and say, look, you've been trained for over four to six years, you were trained on something. And when someone asks you a question, you answer that question based on the training you have. Now, can you cite exactly where you got it from? No, probably not.
But you, and if you're asked that same question later that day, you're gonna get the correct answer still, but it's gonna sound different. And so when AI is pre-trained, it's not pulling exactly from a resource at that time. It's going off its training, just like you did in a university program. And so just, yeah, so just knowing exactly how to ask questions and understand that those biases do exist, but anyone you engage with is gonna have biases. And so,
Ryan Lufkin (16:44.772)
That's great way to describe it.
Dr. Lane Freeman (16:57.796)
It's not that AI is biased, it's the training that it was done on is biased. And so you just have to come in with that lens of, okay, that's not the angle I want. I want this approach. And sometimes you have to actually open up a new chat. I call it my lazy graduate assistant. will fire.
Ryan Lufkin (17:14.692)
That is the I wanted to make sure you got that on the show because I think that's one of the ways you You did a great job of catching that for the audience and calling it your lazy graduate assistant It does just enough. It doesn't like it I loved how you described it because I think it puts it in context for a lot of people
Dr. Lane Freeman (17:17.596)
Yeah.
Dr. Lane Freeman (17:30.876)
Yeah, if you talk to it like a lazy graduate assistant, because lazy is because sometimes it will not do something when you ask it to do. And then you just have to tell it to try harder and then it'll do it. It's really weird. But it's a graduate assistant where you wouldn't give a graduate assistant a project and then walk away and hope it comes out right. You have a conversation with it, checking in back and forth. And sometimes if it gets into that biased lens, when you start a new chat, you're hiring a new graduate assistant.
Ryan Lufkin (17:40.387)
Huh?
Dr. Lane Freeman (17:59.642)
And so you're like, I don't want to talk to you anymore. I want to talk to this grad assistant. You're fired, right? And so that's a good way of thinking about it. Yeah.
Melissa Loble (18:06.446)
Mm-hmm.
Ryan Lufkin (18:06.788)
Ha
Ryan Lufkin (18:10.276)
You also mentioned a thing too that I think is really important, which is kind of giving AI context, right? It's like when you have a conversation with somebody, helping them understand the context of the conversation, right? And I think this is something that I think both you recommended and Dr. Martin Bean recommended, or Martin Bean recommended this as well, which was like, now I start a lot of my chats with, know, hello, do you know who, you know, this is Ryan Lofkin, do you know who I am?
Melissa Loble (18:16.952)
Hmm.
Ryan Lufkin (18:35.972)
And it'll say, well, yes, you're the vice president. So that understands. I said, no, I'm writing based off of your understanding of me. Here's what I'm writing. Could you give me some ideas around? And it's interesting how much that affects the outcome in ways that you wouldn't have thought, right?
Dr. Lane Freeman (18:44.541)
Yes.
Melissa Loble (18:46.574)
you
Dr. Lane Freeman (18:51.004)
Yeah, so I call that priming. I like to prime the chat GPT. So before I get it and to do a deep dive into a prompt, let's say if I want to introduce a instructional strategy in the classroom. So I know I want to do Socratic seminar in one of my classrooms. The first thing I'll do is say, can you explain to me what Socratic seminar is? And what it basically is providing itself context because it's able to bring in, okay, this I'm working with an educator.
we're gonna work on the Socratic seminar, then I'll say, now I need a 10 minute lesson on this topic in Socratic seminar. But the other example is if without context, especially when I'm talking to college faculty, is if you just type in, I wanna help someone with their registration, without context, it may tell you where the DMV is instead of actually the process of applying for college. And so providing that context is so important.
That's why you also can bookmark some of your chats and go back to those chats because once you've trained that graduate assistant in that context window, you don't have to keep priming it and keep providing that context. You can just keep going in that same conversation.
Ryan Lufkin (20:02.116)
Yeah. To that point, one of the areas we talk about is the potential for personalized learning and a more personalized student experience. And we're just kind of scratching the surface of that right now. But what does that look like in the future? What are your, what's your, what's your long-term prognosis around personalized learning?
Dr. Lane Freeman (20:21.874)
Well, I could see us going into any course and maybe it's within a learning management system or within a textbook or resource. And the first thing it does is ask that student about a survey of what are your interests, what are your career goals, what are these things, where do you live? And with that information built into that profile, everything within those modules and designs. So if I know I'm going to go into nursing and I'm taking anatomy and physiology, if that...
large language model knows specifically what my career aspirations are, every time it asks me a question, it's related to the field of nursing. Same thing for, like if you're gonna be a welder, like we get this question all the time, a welder might say, am I going to need to know these mathematical concepts if all I wanna do is a welder? But at the...
Ryan Lufkin (21:12.78)
Yeah, yeah.
Dr. Lane Freeman (21:15.278)
AI knows whether you are, it makes those connections for you. Like why is slope important to a welder? I don't know, I'm not a welder, but AI does. And so it's able to take those concepts of slope and merge them with what a welder might use slope for. And so I think that's going to be the future of it, that individualized instruction for each student right now. The instructors are going to have to, and I think we'll always need this, the build relational capacity with our students to know the questions, to ask it, right? We need to know that that student in my class wants to be a welder or a nurse.
or whatever their career aspiration is. In K through 12, it can be, what is your favorite cartoon character? It could be, what's your favorite Marvel character? So if you love the Marvel series and you want to talk about Thor, well, how's Thor related to the mitochondria? It's gonna create a lesson plan that says Asgard is the mitochondria and his hammer is the energy thing. And so it's...
Melissa Loble (21:53.282)
Mm-hmm.
Melissa Loble (22:02.798)
Thank
Melissa Loble (22:06.688)
I love that.
Dr. Lane Freeman (22:10.36)
able to take the connections of those students who aren't paying attention and really individualize it to bring meaning to the classroom. I think that's where the full potential is going to be.
Ryan Lufkin (22:20.437)
and do it at a scale that's basically impossible with the amount of time most educators have,
Dr. Lane Freeman (22:24.548)
absolutely. Right now in the classroom, we cast a large net, we use examples from our experiences and hope we catch about 60 to 70 percent of our students. We're going to get to the point where every student is going to have a lesson that's geared directly to them. And that's hard to do at this point, but we can see that's probably where the future is going to go.
Melissa Loble (22:47.854)
Well, you've talked a lot here about how to get teachers to experiment to really think about this. You've talked about the impact on students. I think we still see a gap in institutions. Like there's barriers for them to institutionally-wide or even system-wide, like in your case, adopt AI. How do you overcome some of those barriers within the system? And how do institutions navigate this world so that
The faculty can be experimenting and the students can have these kinds of experiences you've talked about.
Dr. Lane Freeman (23:20.722)
Well, I think probably the most important thing is to get the, and that's why I start off my sessions in a really fun way, is to get teachers using it. And once they start to use it and see it increases efficiencies in what they're doing, that actually they don't have to spend all weekend lesson planning, that they can outsource that to AI, then they're gonna be okay. This is a tool I can't live without, so I know we're gonna start using it with students. Now, so I've seen the grassroots effort,
help nudge what the leadership typically wants. you see a lot of times your leadership says, okay, AI is going to be a new employability skill. We want all our teachers to do it. But all the teachers are typically, ugh, this is going to be cheating. This is going to be that. But the more they use it and the more they can make their life a little better by using it and seeing how it can be used, then you start seeing that leadership model with the grassroots effort kind of merge in some sense.
Ryan Lufkin (24:06.382)
Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (24:20.228)
Yeah, I think that's so interesting that I think I told you the story the first time I had a student hand in a paper where they had cut and paste text and images, you know, from the web. I was like, that's cheating. You didn't write it. You didn't hand write it, you know, open the National Geographic and, and write out the quotes, write out the information, right? Like, and if we still clung to that belief, right? Like where would we be now with, you know, everything is done on the internet at this point, right? So
Dr. Lane Freeman (24:35.592)
lol
Dr. Lane Freeman (24:43.932)
Perfect example, yeah, I talk about this all the time. When I got my graduate degree, I had to go to a physical library and go pull out the physical book. When I did my doctoral program, I went to ProQuest and Google Scholar, and they didn't call that cheating, right? It was just a really good resource to use, and I think that's the mindset we've gotta get around. It's just a new way of doing research and figuring out information. It just doesn't take as long, and that's gonna be okay. I think when you see...
Ryan Lufkin (24:51.362)
Yeah. Yep.
Ryan Lufkin (24:57.666)
No, no.
Dr. Lane Freeman (25:10.876)
the tool like Google's recently released, Deep Research, the lit review that it can do and the accuracy with what it can do, it still requires me to review it as the human and say that doesn't apply to my study or this does apply to my study. So I still am calling that. But again, it's like that graduate assistant. Who would turn down a graduate assistant to come help you write a dissertation or help you write a project?
And to that effect as well when I talk to teachers about it, we applaud students who go to the tutoring center and sit down with tutors and sign in and do all these things. But then on the other hand, you're scared to death for them to use AI at home as a tutor. I understand again the stages of grief. I know where people are in that area. But at some point, we're gonna feel comfortable with that. And does it hallucinate? It does.
Ryan Lufkin (25:48.322)
Yeah.
Dr. Lane Freeman (26:06.913)
But if you also talk to a student tutor long enough, they also hallucinate. They'll make stuff up.
Melissa Loble (26:14.03)
Well, and your comment too about research and supporting that, we've also, I think back to my graduate work, we've always been trained to reference other work, but we've always used other work, always. And so there's this like, I started in my class, I talk occasionally on the podcast about the class I teach, and I've started referencing in discussions, you're welcome to reference other work, but please reference it. Like start getting in the habit.
Dr. Lane Freeman (26:40.134)
Right, exactly.
Melissa Loble (26:41.548)
Because I want you to have that moment of thinking about why did you choose that particular piece of work? How did you validate that? But it's been accepted for a long time. It's just a skill, I feel like, that we have to help students and faculty even hone to understand how to be able to do that.
Dr. Lane Freeman (26:48.316)
Yes.
Dr. Lane Freeman (26:56.166)
Yeah. And maybe that's the answer. And as I've talked to faculty, I do not have all the answers. And usually it's the community, what they talk is finding these solutions. Maybe it is a reflection on the prompts that I wrote that got me these things. And the learning comes through the process of reflecting on why did you pick those sources? So I think that's, we have to reframe education completely different.
and see how we do things. Also, if I'm in, I know online is gonna be an issue, but in person, again, letting them do some research outside of class with AI and then come and have classroom conversations about it instead of, you know, just preaching from a PowerPoint or something. And when you go back to referencing it, it's interesting to me, I'm watching this evolution and I can kind of predict where we're going, but I don't wanna, especially on a podcast, I'm afraid to say this a little bit, but you know,
Now, MLA and APA are having all these rules, how you cite AI. And I don't remember having to cite Google Scholar. I don't remember having to cite ProQuest. And I think we're just struggling with how quick we can get this information. And we feel like it's cheating because it's easier. Eventually, we'll be OK with, OK, I just used AI as a tool to help me find my research.
Ryan Lufkin (28:08.706)
Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (28:18.146)
Yeah, but we're doing the same thing with copyright, right? Like you can't protect an image that was generated by AI, even though you may have written an incredibly involved prompt to get that to put it out, right? Like there's so many of those things that are in flux right now that we'll start to see clarity on. Yeah, the one other thing too, and you mentioned this kind of at the beginning of the podcast, but it was something I was fascinated with when we first started talking. Because you have a background in career and technical.
Melissa Loble (28:18.339)
You
Dr. Lane Freeman (28:33.746)
That's right.
Ryan Lufkin (28:44.813)
technical education, CTE, I think you have this kind of clarity on how AI helps bridge that gap in a way that many others don't. And so let's talk a little bit about that. How do you see AI impacting that career, you know, moving towards careers?
Dr. Lane Freeman (29:01.724)
Well, yeah, I did kind of reference it a little earlier is that typically when I taught my CTE students, they would enjoy my class. They loved it because first of all, none of them knew HTML when they came into Clash. So we're all kind of starting out the same base point, right? And so we're learning at that same level. But there are other classes they would struggle in. So.
their math is their English, the humanities classes, because they don't see that connection to why do I need to know psychology if I'm just going to go into business? I could explain it to them a little bit, but now we can go to AI and say, look, you really have to do well in businesses. In psychology, you need to know the ways, like when you're doing an interview, to mirror the person you're talking to, these different ways that you're doing. And so now AI has an opportunity.
Ryan Lufkin (29:34.564)
Yeah.
Dr. Lane Freeman (29:54.44)
to make the connections that usually a CTE faculty member and a general education faculty member couldn't make that connection because we didn't know each other's fields well enough. AI knows those fields well enough. It can make that connection for us. And then it gives us the opportunity to collaborate. So if I go back to the example of if I'm teaching a math class and I'm teaching a concept of slope, I'm asking AI to design a 60 minute lesson plan for slope for a welder.
Melissa Loble (30:05.56)
Mm-hmm.
Ryan Lufkin (30:06.168)
Yeah.
Dr. Lane Freeman (30:24.328)
It could hallucinate about the welding part. That's okay. As long as slope is okay. But the better part of it is, is that student takes that lesson and goes to their welding instructor and say, does this make the sense? And so now we're taking that curriculum that's scattered across the campus and then we're bringing it into one location and that one location is the student, right? So I think that's the potential we have in the career and technical education world.
Melissa Loble (30:38.539)
Hmm?
Ryan Lufkin (30:42.457)
Yeah.
Melissa Loble (30:50.816)
love the relation and the connection to a very specific career both to help students see that path but then also just to engage them. can forever remember in my high school trigonometry class my teacher doing a lesson on playing pool.
and how you could do angles and like just and I will to this day remember that and I can actually close my eyes and visualize if I'm thinking about triangles and things like that. it was geometry. Sorry, geometry. Anyway, I can think about what that looked like and it's that connection even if it's I don't do anything related to that. I am not a professional pool player, but like even that connection helps create that context you were talking about earlier and that is something that I didn't think about it until you mentioned it in this way, but
Ryan Lufkin (31:13.646)
You
Dr. Lane Freeman (31:20.562)
Right.
Dr. Lane Freeman (31:41.031)
Yeah.
Melissa Loble (31:41.762)
Wow, not only can you provide AI context, AI can give you different contexts to then use that to engage your learners. Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (31:46.498)
Yeah. And personalize for your own experiences, right? Yeah, that's amazing.
Dr. Lane Freeman (31:51.34)
And it goes back to your brain research. know, learning a very brand new thing is hard for the brain. The brain doesn't want to do it. But if you can make a connection to something, it's easy to retrieve at a later date because of that. You can remember that specific example because someone made a connection to something you already knew about. And then we have that potential that's available on every student's device.
Melissa Loble (32:05.922)
Yep. Yep.
Ryan Lufkin (32:14.946)
Yeah, that's awesome.
Melissa Loble (32:15.34)
yeah, yeah, I dig that. So I'm gonna take it maybe one step more broadly and even outside of education. Where do you see AI having an impact either on our own personal efficiencies, institutional, organizational company efficiencies, sort of what's AI gonna do for us in the next five years more broadly even outside of education?
Dr. Lane Freeman (32:39.176)
Well, it's obviously going to have an impact on the workforce. I think you'll at the same, it's just like any new technology, we can't see what new jobs are going to be created because of it. But also you're going to see, typically when I do presentations in front of employers, a lot of them still haven't, they just heard about it on the news. They haven't played with it much. But once they start seeing it, they're like, okay, do our community college students know how to use this? Because they need to.
And so I think that's going to be part of our goal, but also you're going to see opportunities for smaller startup companies who come into a company with the intent of using AI to guide them through the entire process. I would say five to 10 people could compete with a 50 people market or a 50 person business because they're using AI as that co-intelligence throughout the entire process. I've seen larger corporations are
Ryan Lufkin (33:08.196)
Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (33:33.549)
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Lane Freeman (33:36.774)
are not really paying attention to it much. get these, and you have these things called, people called secret cyborgs. They're people within the organization who are using it and are afraid to tell people they're using it because they're getting the work done and they're afraid they're gonna get stuff thrown their direction. I think as organizations should embrace AI and tell everyone it's okay to use it. And I promise I'm not gonna give you extra, extra work on top of it. And so,
Ryan Lufkin (33:45.934)
You
Melissa Loble (34:05.4)
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Lane Freeman (34:06.648)
And I don't know if they'll follow up with that promise, but one of the examples, I think, especially in the workforce is you got a couple examples. One is like the app Co-Intell, no, it's Co-Council, which was used to replace paralegals. And so I know of one law firm that had 30 paralegals. They paid upfront fee to train just specifically on law.
Ryan Lufkin (34:26.55)
wow.
Dr. Lane Freeman (34:35.176)
and they let go 23 of their paralegals and they kept seven. And so the message I'm telling to our educators is your students need to know the content well enough so they could be one of the seven that's kept. They also need to know how to interact with AI in a way that's gonna give them the best product. And so I think that's the approach that we need to be thinking about it. see call centers are gonna probably greatly impacted by it. I think by the end of the year, well, almost the end of year.
Ryan Lufkin (34:38.147)
Jeez.
Ryan Lufkin (34:47.449)
Yeah.
Dr. Lane Freeman (35:03.154)
They were saying like 70 % of call centers people are gonna be reduced. If you've ever had an experience with some call center folks, you get passed on from one person to the next person. And so you can see where AI can do all those tier one and tier two answering the questions, but still you're gonna need those tier three people there answering the questions that AI has already analyzed and brought up and able to help out. So I don't see a field where AI doesn't have an impact. Like I mentioned earlier, it's like,
Ryan Lufkin (35:13.314)
Uh-huh.
Melissa Loble (35:13.346)
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Lane Freeman (35:31.816)
Imagine doing work without the internet as much as I got two teenage boys They're 16 and 14 and I'm struggling on telling what career to choose and and my oldest isn't getting into welding and I said that's awesome because Right for right now welding is kind of safe, but you also need to be thinking about Welding outside on a farm somewhere welding somewhere that's remote because you can see where AI could go into a robotics factory
Ryan Lufkin (35:40.759)
Yeah.
Melissa Loble (35:54.54)
Hmm.
Ryan Lufkin (35:59.791)
production line and things like that. Yeah.
Dr. Lane Freeman (36:00.616)
a production line and weld. But again, I'm telling him be the best welder, know all the terms, know all these things. So if the person who that human that's sitting beside that robot is able to know when and your job is going to be a lot easier. You're not going to get burnt. You're not going to do any of these things, but you're going to be the person that makes sure that AI is doing its thing and keeping it trained.
Ryan Lufkin (36:23.236)
Yeah. Yeah. I love the, I kind of love the approach you have around collaboration and this idea that AI is a facilitator for broader collaboration is, I think there's a lot of opportunities that we're just starting to see. also love the term secret cyborg. I'm going to, I'm going to borrow that one from you. I think that one's awesome. But we talked a little bit about how quickly this technology is evolving. And I think that that scares some people. makes it harder for people to feel like, you know,
Dr. Lane Freeman (36:38.29)
Yeah.
Melissa Loble (36:39.438)
I like that too.
Ryan Lufkin (36:51.599)
They feel like they've been left behind as opposed to the fact that they can jump in and get smart quick. I tell a lot of people, don't feel like the train has left the station. Like jump on board because you can make yourself pretty smart about this stuff pretty quickly. as this stuff evolves, what are you most excited about in terms of education? What are you most excited about with AI and this evolution?
Dr. Lane Freeman (37:14.332)
Well, it would go to that, you know, I would love to see my son's in ninth grade. He's in ninth grade because of how old he is, not because he's not ready to move to the next grade level, right? So I would love to see an education where we're not putting students in a classroom based on their age, because, but I believe that our...
Ryan Lufkin (37:26.765)
Yes, yeah.
Melissa Loble (37:28.065)
Hmm?
Ryan Lufkin (37:35.086)
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Lane Freeman (37:39.086)
social well-being is going to need to stay at the same age. So he might be in the classroom with other 14 year olds, but he may be taking math two while they're still taking math one. And AI gives us that capability to move that student at the pace that they're seeing. And so maybe he gets a further education while he's still there. I see that's a place that for so long, our educational system is still kind of built around the World War II system of
Ryan Lufkin (38:06.69)
Yeah.
Melissa Loble (38:06.766)
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Lane Freeman (38:06.874)
assembly lines, right, that work so well for manufacturing. So it should work well for education. We'll put them in rows and we'll teach them all the same thing and they'll get it all.
Ryan Lufkin (38:13.796)
We're not building victory cargo ships anymore.
Dr. Lane Freeman (38:18.024)
Right. We're building students. so I think this is an opportunity to kind of break away from that, where when I do like a study with my teenagers at church in the Bible study, we bring out the phone and we ask questions that we've never been able to ask before, because it just makes that connection that we were talking about earlier. Well, when I, you know,
Melissa Loble (38:21.195)
Mm-hmm.
Melissa Loble (38:24.91)
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Lane Freeman (38:45.596)
The example we used recently is we covered the book of Romans. Where was Paul when he wrote the book of Romans? That's not explicitly written in the Bible, but it's a historical fact that it can help bring context to this. He was in Corinth. Well, why was he in Corinth? Because that was a great trading port. How far is Corinth from Rome? 800 miles. Okay, well, my kids don't know what 800 miles is. If we live in North Carolina, how is that relevant to them? Well, if you were to leave Raleigh,
Melissa Loble (38:59.182)
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Lane Freeman (39:12.57)
and drive down to Orlando, that's 800 miles. And so you're able to make that connection and answer these questions that you're able to pull that you, as a faculty member or a teacher or an instructor, I would have never felt comfortable answering that question or even thought to answer that question because I had too much content to cover. But now we have this device that's in front of us or this AI system that's able to answer these random questions and get students fully engaged with it.
Ryan Lufkin (39:17.272)
Wow, that's cool.
Ryan Lufkin (39:38.798)
That's cool.
Melissa Loble (39:39.566)
Building on that last question for you, that's okay, advice. So what's one piece of advice you'd give educators? Like you've inspired me throughout this entire conversation that we all need to be trying and experimenting and really thinking about how to direct this for students and have that kind of lasting impact. What's the one piece of advice you'd give educators in using AI?
Dr. Lane Freeman (40:04.072)
Well, as Ryan mentioned earlier, some people haven't started yet. And I would just say, open that browser and keep it open at all times and invite it to the conversation. And it doesn't have to be education. It can be, I'm gonna cook a certain meal tonight. I wanna do it for four adults. Create a table that does that. What's the ingredients I need to pick up at the grocery store? Get it to build a list. And so I think just getting it to use it as a tool like that.
Ryan Lufkin (40:20.558)
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Lane Freeman (40:32.476)
brings the, it gives you practice. And honestly, most of where I used it and learned how to use it was in that process of just using it for personal things. Like I take a picture of my lawnmower and say, part right here is broke. How do I fix it? And it walks me step by step and gives me three links on where I can buy those parts. And so it's using it as a co-intelligence in everything you do. Then as a, if you're a good teacher,
Ryan Lufkin (40:51.865)
Wow.
Dr. Lane Freeman (41:01.212)
then you're able to say, now I'm in a classroom setting and those students aren't paying attention. I think we need to do a more of a collaborative session. Let me go to AI and ask, how can I make this lesson, here's the lesson I've done in the past, copy and paste it and put it in there and say, I need to make this a collaborative session with four or five students. What are your ideas? And being very specific, we talk about the frameworks, the constraints you put on it. I need five strategies to...
to pick from, okay? I like number two, help me develop level two and a 30 minute lesson. So just having it, again, talking to it like it's a grad assistant and getting examples of using it in daily life, but also that will come into the classroom and naturally do what we want it to do in the classroom as well.
Melissa Loble (41:30.296)
Mmm.
Ryan Lufkin (41:49.027)
That's awesome. Lane, you are not so secret cyborg. And I honestly love like you share that kind of evangelist mode. But honestly, I think you are more of a power user than just about anybody I know. So you have a lot to teach us all. We'll add links like Melissa said, we'll add some links in the show notes for folks that want to, you know, we'll add your personal website and things like that because I you've got a lot of great info. But thank you so much for joining us today.
Melissa Loble (42:01.848)
I hate creating.
Dr. Lane Freeman (42:16.226)
I appreciate the invitation. always enjoy talking about this. obviously this problem, we could talk for hours, you know that, right? Yeah. One little thing that I saw that I thought was fascinating this past week, you know, is as these AI systems can continue to compete with each other, they keep pushing each other, right? And so now, know, chat GPT can see, but now that Google Astra can see. And so...
Ryan Lufkin (42:22.114)
this could be a multi-part episode for sure, yes.
Melissa Loble (42:23.198)
yeah. Absolutely.
Ryan Lufkin (42:31.277)
Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (42:37.729)
Uh-huh.
Dr. Lane Freeman (42:44.152)
Once that gets put into glasses, so if you're wearing glasses right now, it's gonna have a heads up display. So when you're walking anywhere, it can just translate things for you to tell you what's the rating for that food and not, and I can see an auto mechanic sitting under a car with his glasses on saying, okay, what part number do I need to order for this? I mean, that's.
Ryan Lufkin (42:46.509)
Yeah.
Melissa Loble (42:47.619)
Yeah.
Ryan Lufkin (43:00.43)
Wow. Yeah, it merges that augmented reality piece with just something that can pull up so much. I mean, I need that to remember people's names. I tend to be terrible at that, right? Yeah. Yeah.
Melissa Loble (43:05.678)
Mm-hmm.
Melissa Loble (43:09.622)
and wearables, right? It's going to serve as wearables in a meaningful way.
Dr. Lane Freeman (43:10.672)
Absolutely, if you Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So yeah, I could go down lost rabbit holes. Yeah
Ryan Lufkin (43:16.93)
That's incredible. No, I love that. That's a great one. Actually, that's a really interesting one. And that's something that honestly really is in the last couple of weeks really kind of emerged, right? Amazing. Thank you, Lane. So glad to have you on the show. You will be back. We will talk again soon.
Melissa Loble (43:20.206)
with that.
Dr. Lane Freeman (43:26.12)
Exactly,
Melissa Loble (43:30.274)
Thank you.
Dr. Lane Freeman (43:30.322)
Alright.
Dr. Lane Freeman (43:33.734)
Okay, take care.
