While others ruminate on what may be possible someday,
Ken shows you how he did it—yesterday.
—Gary Stager
The Learner’s Apprentice is an essential resource for using AI in ways that enhance our humanity. The ideas offered by Dr. Kahn are serious, whimsical, practical, useful, and at times, profound.
Generative AI recently exploded in the public’s consciousness, generating a great deal of heat, but very little light. Schools typically respond to new technology with skepticism or apathy, but the reaction to AI chatbots like ChatGPT has been rapturous. Overnight, AI curricula, AI policies, AI “teacher training,” AI in education conferences, and spiffy AI infographics were everywhere. Dozens of AI-related sessions magically appeared on conference programs. AI in education appears supercharged by chutzpah.
Consultant bios spontaneously professed “AI in Education” expertise. Banal policy statements were issued about this embryonic technology. Companies emerged overnight to charge a premium for dumbed-down versions of readily available software. Academics and education reporters surveyed students about their AI habits before most of them had access to the software, then months later reported a drop in usage.
Calls to teach an ill-defined concoction called “AI Literacy” not only denature literacy but also ignore the fool’s errand of the past four decades known as “Computer Literacy” instruction. Such well-intentioned curricular confections might as well be called “AI Appreciation,” often taught without the use of any actual AI.
Thankfully, Ken Kahn is immune to such commotion. When potentially interesting new tools arrived on the scene, he set out to learn what he might be able to do with them. The wisdom, expertise, and imaginative ideas that emerged are here for you to share, shape, and build upon. Readers will undoubtedly draw on Ken’s ideas to create and discover things he never dreamed of.
As for expertise, not only has Ken spent a couple of years developing the provocations in this book, but he is neither a neophyte nor dilettante. In the 1970s, Ken was a student in the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and has spent the ensuing years as a computer scientist and professor interested in learning and computing. You will soon realize that Ken Kahn is a dangerous combination of wicked smart and playful.
A false binary choice of for-or-against AI in education has emerged. Hype and hysteria are flip sides of the same unproductive coin. Those opposed to the use of AI are concerned with student cheating, dehumanization, or apocalyptic dangers. The AI cheerleaders champion the use of AI to perform a teacher’s clerical chores more efficiently, rather than question the need for such tasks in the first place. They cling to the fantasy of machine tutoring, digital flashcards, and endless testing. The most enthusiastic influencers dazzle with cute parlor tricks, regardless of their “nutritional” value.
AI does not require our consent. It exists, and will become an increasingly ubiquitous, invisible force in our daily lives. These are early days for generative AI. Yes, it’s buggy, unreliable, and immature. It’s also indispensable and highly useful. A bit of patience, a sense of humor, and curiosity will go a long way. Chatbots may be the world’s most powerful software and yet there is no manual. You will spend considerable time checking its work and discovering what it can’t do. However, that investment and tinkering will pay great dividends.
In this book, Ken Kahn offers a fresh perspective on generative AI—making it an intellectual partner that not only works for us, but makes us smarter, more productive, and more creative. He is not talking about “intelligent tutors” or other dystopian fantasies of replacing teachers with machines. Rather, he models AI as an apprentice, colleague, co-thinker, collaborator, proofreader, pair coder, brainstorming buddy, illustrator—an intellectual prosthetic that amplifies human potential.
While a chatbot can perform a task or do a job for you, it is at its best when it mediates a conversation with yourself—as a collaborator or learner’s apprentice. It is a mirror of your own thinking. Ken Kahn’s exciting examples illuminate a path to a future of infinite possibilities.
The examples in this book democratize and reimagine a variety of disciplines. There is something here for everyone—affording learners of all ages opportunities to be historians, mathematicians, scientists, and authors, rather than being taught math, science, language, or history. The projects in this book are intended to refresh powerful ideas and make timeless disciplines relevant today.
Some educators fear that chatbots will be used to cheat or write student papers. Leaving aside the merit of such assignments, the learner’s apprentice is essential to becoming a better writer. Every writing expert reminds aspiring scribes that they need a copy editor. No writer is as good as they think they are or catches every mistake. The writing process requires editing and revision. Well, guess what? Chatbots are really good copy editors. You don’t need to feed or pay them, they don’t judge you, and they’re available to work 24/7. It is a much greater sin to deprive fledgling writers of this resource than to embrace it as their apprentice.
Educators need to be capable of answering a simple, yet profound question. What can a student or group of students do? If generative AI and chatbots make simple things easy to do, they also make complexity possible. The use of this wondrous new software should raise our standards and expectations for what learners are capable of doing.
AI does not save time as much as it uses it. Once you receive a desired result, you are inspired to test a larger hypothesis, ask a deeper question, play “what if?”, or embellish the project. If your attempt at collaboration was unsuccessful, then this is an invitation to debug both your thinking and that of the chatbot. Serendipitous interactions encourage wonder and new ideas.
Ken Kahn and I hail from the same intellectual tradition begun by Seymour Papert, one of the pioneers of AI, co-founder of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, and father of educational computing.
“To Papert, projecting out our inner feelings and ideas is a key to learning. Expressing ideas makes them tangible and shareable which, in turn, informs, i.e., shapes and sharpens these ideas, and helps us communicate with others through our expressions.” — Edith Ackermann
While others ruminate on what may be possible someday, Ken shows you how he did it—yesterday. His thinking, chatbot logs, and work product are recorded, annotated, explained, and visible to the world. This gift becomes your provocation to make something even better. You are then free to share your work and the intellectual story of your thinking with others.
In a recent interview, legendary MIT Professor Hal Abelson reminds us that 55 years ago, the unofficial motto of the MIT AI Lab was “Computers are for Children.” Papert, Marvin Minsky, and their colleagues, including Ken Kahn, believed that teaching computers to think benefited from understanding how children think, and that children thinking about thinking while making things with computers would become better thinkers.
Fundamentally, this is a book about learning. Ken Kahn’s stance on generative AI answers Seymour Papert’s question first posed in the 1960s, “Does the computer program the child or the child program the computer?” There is no need to fear AI overlords when you have the power to collaborate with chatbots in a spirit of reciprocity that supercharges your brainpower and enhances your humanity. Embracing another of Papert’s favorite terms, this book is about “kid power”—for kids of all ages.
Gary Stager
Publisher, Constructing Modern Knowledge Press
January 2025