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[Jenny Toerien Keymaster]

Post above edited to include an MP3 link to the audio of the Deep Dive conversation – the original link only worked if you already had a Notebook LM login.

[Jenny Toerien Keymaster]

Notebook LM

(This is the second of two posts – the first (above) is more generally about how I’m trying to deal with AI in school at the moment, this one is my experience of Notebook LM)

One of my issues with students using AI for revision and research is that AI still tends to hallucinate, and it can be difficult to tell where it gets its information from (although Google Gemini and Bing are better at providing examples of sources containing information similar to  their answers than Chat GPT). If you don’t already know a fair bit about your topic it can be hard to tell whether the answer Is trustworthy – and if you did know a lot about the topic you probably wouldn’t be doing the research in the first place!

So Google’s Notebook LM felt like a bit of a gamechanger in this respect because initial claims suggested that you could upload a source (or several) and it would find answers just from those sources. A number of reviewers I saw enthused about its ability to synthesise sources and to spot patterns and trends. It seemed like it would be a safe bet for students wanting to do some revision by uploading their revision notes, or trying to understand a long, tricky research paper, so I thought I would give it a go.

On first glance it is really impressive. I tried it with some notes from BBC Bitesize on the Norman Conquest for my Y7 son’s History revision. It offers options to produce FAQ, a study guide, table of contents, briefing document, timeline and a deep dive conversation (which is a podcast style conversational walk through of the source). It also generates a summary and suggested questions and you can have a chatbot conversation about your source.  See image below. This was a fairly simple test of its abilities and all of the study notes looked pretty good – the kind of thing a student might produce for themselves but perhaps better (although I would argue that part of the value in producing these kind of revision notes is the work you do to produce them, so I’m not sure how helpful it would be for revision if the computer did it for you).

Where it started to get a little weird was the Deep Dive Conversation option. My 11-year-old son and I initially found it a little creepy how real this sounded, but he was very engaged and it was a new way to get him to interact with this revision material, with two ‘hosts’ having a very chatty conversation about the lead up to the Battle of Hastings. I was starting to feel more comfortable with this as a tool…until suddenly towards the end of the conversation it started to wander off the material I had given it. There was nothing obviously inaccurate (this is a very well-known topic so I wouldn’t expect glaring errors) but it started to mention events that were not in the text I had provided (my text ended with the Battle of Stamford Bridge, but the conversation went on to discuss the Battle of Hastings) and it was very clear that the conversation was not fully generated from that text I had given it alone.

This was a real concern for me, as part of the draw of Notebook LM was originally that I could be sure where the information was coming from, so I tried it on something trickier and fed it our newly revamped school library webpage to see what it made of that: https://www.blanchelande.co.uk/senior/academic/libra/

Again the results were impressive. It produced an accurate summary and briefing notes. The timeline was pretty weird and inaccurate – but it would be because this material is not at all suited for producing a timeline, so that was easy to spot. The 20 minute Deep Dive conversation that it produced caused me some serious concerns though. In some ways this had a certain comedy value, as the hosts became enthusiastic cheerleaders for our school in particular and inquiry in general, it was also weirdly impressive how they appeared to ‘grasp’ the value of inquiry learning in a way that many of our sector colleagues still have not done – and this went beyond just parroting phrases I had used.

What REALLY troubled me though was that, because the page never actually said what FOSIL stood for, the AI completely made it up.

And it did it really well (try listening to the audio below from around about 2 minutes in). If we hadn’t known that it was talking complete nonsense there would have been no way to tell. According to Notebook LM, FOSIL stands for Focus, Organise, Search, Interpret and Learn (actually, as I am sure any regulars on this forum will know, it is Framework of Skills for Inquiry Learning). The AI then proceeded to give a detailed breakdown of this set of bogus FOSIL stages mapped onto the Hero’s Journey (which is mentioned on the site but I don’t give any details so that is also clearly drawn from outside). And it was really plausible – I might almost describe it as ‘thoughtful’ or ‘insightful’. But it was completely made up. Note also, that again, the final quarter of the conversation went way beyond the source I had provided and turned into a chat about how useful inquiry could be in everyday life beyond school. Very well done, and nothing too worrying in the content, but well off track from the original source.

EDIT: Deep Dive Conversation link – https://fosil.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/10/Blanchelande-Library-1.mp3 (original link required users to have a Notebook LM login. This one is just an MP3 file).

It is this blend of reality and highly plausible fantasy that makes AI a really dangerous learning tool. What if a student were using this for revision, and reproduced those made up FOSIL stages on a test? Or if we were using it to summarise, analyse or synthesise research papers? How could we spot the fantasy, unless we already knew the topic so well that we didn’t really need the AI tool anyway?

I tried asking in the chat what FOSIL stood for because with the Norman Conquest source the chat had proved more reliable and wouldn’t answer questions beyond the text. This time though it said :

Which is also subtly wrong but in a different way.

I wanted to love Notebook LM because I thought it had solved the hallucination problem, and the problem of using unreliable secondary sources, but it turns out that it hasn’t.

Caveat emptor.

(Speaking of buyer beware – Google says “NotebookLM is still in the early testing phase, so we are not charging for access at this time.” and I’ve seen articles about a paid version for businesses and universities on the horizon, so I don’t expect it to remain free for too long. It’s just in its testing phase where Google needs lots of willing people to try it out and help them to improve it before they can market it. So, to complete my cliché bundle – “if you aren’t paying for it, you are not the customer but the product”. I’m aware how ironic it is that I am saying this on a free website, but my defence is that we are all volunteers who are part of a community that is building something together, and not a for-profit company! No customers here, only colleagues and friends.)

[Jenny Toerien Keymaster]

Hi everyone, I’ve been meaning to return to this thread for a while. Ruth’s comment about Librarians being part of the conversation on AI is so important, and we do have to keep working to make sure our voices are heard here, with everything moving so fast.

Note that I’ve done so much thinking in the meantime that I’ve ended up with two quite long posts. One day I will learn to drop my thoughts in along the way to facilitate conversation better!

I still find trying to keep up with developments in AI exhausting (and often distracting), and I think part of the problem is that as information professionals we have a responsibility to think through the practicalities and ethics of AI in a way that early adopter classroom colleagues don’t always seem to. It’s relatively easy to throw out a cool new toy for your class to play with, but much more time intensive to work out how trustworthy, ethical and effective that tool actually is (even down to just making sure that the age limits on the tool you are recommending are appropriate for the class you are recommending it to).

I’m also finding the rate at which new tools get monetised frustrating – for example we designed a Psychology inquiry using Elicit last year, but just as the inquiry launched they changed their model and put certain features behind paywalls, which ruined large parts of the inquiry. So I’m a bit wary of recommending or designing anything that uses specific AI tools because the market is still evolving very fast.

So how to deal with AI (which we must – our students are growing up in a world where it has become the norm, so we can’t just ignore it!)? We’ve gone down the route of general principles, teaching healthy scepticism and trying to help students to navigate what it is actually good at and what it appears superficially good at but isn’t.

The image below shows a display I made at the start of term to support our Y12 Interrobang!? (inquiry-based Sixth Form induction) course. This is a six week course intended to prepare students for A-level study, and this year our inquiry focus was on AI and how the worlds of the different subjects they were studying were being impacted (positively and negatively) by AI.

If you zoom in, you’ll see that my advice on using AI tools boils down to:

• Do use AI as a tool for thinking with
• Don’t expect AI to do your thinking for you
• Ask yourself:
  • Is this use of AI making me more or less creative?
  • Is this use of AI helping me to learn or robbing me of a learning opportunity?
  • Would I be comfortable to admit this use of AI (or might it get me into trouble)?

That last one is something I will also say to staff when we run a twilight INSET on AI in the classroom in a couple of weeks. As educators we have a duty to be transparent with students and parents, so if a teacher uses a site like Magic School AI to help them to write a letter about a school trip, or asks ChatGPT to generate some exam style questions then they should publically declare that. If we are embarrassed to admit our own use of AI then that is a clear indicator that we should not be using AI for that task. We cannot tell students that they are cheating if they use AI without declaring it, but then not hold ourselves to the same standard. These are the opportunities we need to be embracing to open up the conversation about how AI works and what it is good for (or not).

One example I would give of a potential positive use of AI is for a student who is making a website as an HPQ artefact. He isn’t particularly artistic, and art is not the focus of the website but he does need some copyright cleared images he can use to make his site more attractive and fit for purpose. I think that an AI image generator might be a good source for those images. The images are important to his product, but he is not being assessed on his ability to produce them himself, and he knows his topic well enough to know whether the images he produces are appropriate, and to adjust them if not. This use of AI would make him more creative than he could be on his own, is part of his learning experience and would be fully acknowledged.

Another example that I really wanted to love, but find myself feeling very ambivalent about is Notebook LM, which I will address in the next post.

[Jenny Toerien Keymaster]

Matt has started a series of posts about his exciting work on FOSIL and the AtL skills in his school in Stuttgart on this thread: https://fosil.org.uk/forums/topic/teachers-and-librarians-working-collaboratively . If you want to be part of that conversation, please continue it there.

[Jenny Toerien Keymaster]

Matt has continued posting about his exciting work on FOSIL and the AtL skills in his school in Stuttgart on this thread: https://fosil.org.uk/forums/topic/teachers-and-librarians-working-collaboratively . If you want to be part of that conversation, please continue it there. For other uses of FOSIL outside a full inquiry, do feel free to continue the conversation here.

[Jenny Toerien Keymaster]

Thanks for the update Matt – there is a great deal of exciting work here to delve into and we look forward to hearing where it goes. For those just joining this thread, there are two other historical threads that may be of interest:

• Integrating FOSIL with the MYP ATLs where Darryl and I documented our original attempt to do this at Oakham School
• Using FOSIL outside a full inquiry where Matt originally mentioned his school’s large-scale project to collaborate with teachers on the AtL skills

The five skill bands you have chosen to focus on are very important, and are clearly very much the province of the library, and I think that chosing to focus on these gives you a very clearly defined scope to your project that both makes it feel more achievable and helps you to track and measure your impact more effectively. The only caution I would give (that I am sure you are fully aware of and don’t need me to tell you!) is that these focus skills don’t exist in isolation. For example, we would always look at the Investigate skill of “Capturing information and thinking/notetaking” alongside Construct skills like “Claims/opinion and point of view” and “Interpretation and synthesis of information”. You’ll see this in the Investigative Journal and Cornell notetaking sheet. What you are doing is very sophisticated, Matt, so I’m sure you are well aware of this – the fact that you are focusing on one skill doesn’t mean you are ignoring the others. I’m really just flagging this for anyone who is reading this who is new to the process.

This is one of the key differences between information literacy and inquiry teaching. Information literacy is very focussed on individual skills, whereas inquiry acknowledges that these skills only really make sense as part of a framework of skills within a process, embedded within units with authentic learning outcomes (which might be subject based or extra-curricular but are never just skills for the sake of skills). This is exactly what you are talking about above, Matt, it’s just that your library is particularly invoved with certain skill sets.

What I am really interested in is your goal of monitoring student progress with these key skills, as up to now our particular focus has been embedding inquiry units within the curriculum all the way up our school, from Primary to Sixth Form, with particular focus on Signature Work inquiries where library staff are involved throughout the design (and sometimes teaching) so that we know that all children in key yeargroups have been exposed to a full inquiry cycle and had the chance to practise age-appropriate skills that can then be used in other subjects. This is quite a ‘top down’ planning approach. I am really interested in your ‘bottom up’ approach of tracking certain skills with individual students and determining who needs intervention, and would love to hear more about how this goes. You might find the New York State Infomation Fluency Continuum Priority Skills assessments helpful for this (although I know there are particular assessment points within the MYP which will also help). FOSIL is based on the NYSIFC, and these priority skills assessments inform our graphic organisers. Part of the difference is that the FOSIL graphic organisers focus on stages of the process, and often combine several skills in one organiser, while the NYSIFC organisers are focused on one skill per organiser, which may be more what you are looking for at the moment.

I definitely agree with your approach of being happy to work with any teacher on any unit where a skill is being addressed rather than waiting for the perfect unit. This has always been our approach, and often leads to wider collaboration further down the line. The more we can get involved with individual teachers in small ways, the more we can spread and support inquiry skills throughout the curriculum. Skills need reinforcement little and often, rather than just the odd big ‘project’ (although full inquiries are really important and we can’t abandon them entirely).

We’re really excited to see where your work goes. If you are looking for tools further down the line to help you to track skills across different units and to track student self-assessment I would recommend having a look at Mondrian Wall and didbook. (This is an entirely personal recommendation – we don’t do sponsored recommendations on this site!). We spent a lot of time working with Kevin Heppell, the director of the the parent company, Sequential Systems, when we were at Oakham and he is someone who is really passionate about education and young people and creating tools to help schools and students to develop and understand their educational identity. You can see a presentation he did to the IFLA School Libraries Section 2022 Midyear meeting here, about creating a dynamic curriculum map. This is a whole school tool, and your school may not want or need something like this yet, but what you are doing is very sophisticated and has huge potential so it is worth being aware at the outset that a tool like this exists so that you can start including it in your conversations with senior management if it might be helpful.

Please do keep us all posted about your progress. Building this sort of evidence-base to demonstrate impact is such important work.

[Jenny Toerien Keymaster]

Lessons vs seminars

My background is in Science teaching and, even since becoming a Librarian, I have been to a lot of teachmeets, so I understand how to structure a lesson – that you need planned changes of activity including ‘led-from-the-front’ discussion, group and paired work and individual work, and transitions between these. Plenty of opportunitues for modelling, discussion, practice, feedback and reflection.

My mistake going into EPQ lessons was that I was coming out of an IB EE system where in total over the course of the whole year I only had three one hour seminars (for the whole cohort at once, which was around 100 students) and two half hour ICT workshops with smaller groups. Of necessity these sessions tended to be lecture-style, pointing students to the resources they needed and hoping they would access them later. For the EPQ I had a one hour ‘lesson’ every week with just 4 or 5 students. However, I think (possibly partly because it was such a small group) I initially treated that as more of a lecture/conversation-based seminar rather than a more structured lesson. This meant we could go over a lot more content (still supported by a LibGuide that they could look back at in their prep time) but I was frustrated by how little of the skills and techniques we had discussed in lessons they seemed to be carrying over into their projects. I think I expected them to be able to apply what we had done in the lesson to their own projects in their prep time, in a way that perhaps I wouldn’t have expected as a Physics teacher if I hadn’t given opportunities to practise in the lesson.

The breakthrough for me in terms of how I view my lessons was starting the HPQ. I had a slightly larger group of younger pupils than the EPQ, and my lessons (for timetable reasons) were structured as two half hour sessions a week rather than a single one-hour session. One was in the Library during tutor time and the second was in a classroom with computers during the lunch hour. For this second session, the students tended to arrive at very different times so it rapidly became clear that it could not be a group teaching session and instead would need to be time for them to apply what we had been learning to their own projects, with me around to support and encourage them. This was the point at which I discovered how hard they found this, and how much individual ‘coaching’ was necessary. It’s important to say at this point that this in no way impacted on the independent nature of the qualification – they still needed to make their own decisions, find their own resources and shape the direction of their own projects, but I was able to play the role of coach and critical friend (note: I supervise all the HPQ students, but the EPQ students have their own supervisors – I am the co-ordinator and deliver the taught course for both groups).

Seeing how well this worked for the HPQ, I also started to scale back the amount of content in my EPQ lessons and tried to make sure there was time in the second half of the lesson for students to work on their own projects. This allowed for more individual conversations and really helped the students to understand how to apply the skills we had been learning to their own projects. It was an important reminder to me of one of the vital principles of inquiry (and good teaching generally) – the students should be working at least as hard as the teacher during the lessons. I also tried to incorporate more group tasks into the first half of the lesson, based on ‘dummy’ projects I had set up. E.g. for a lesson on refining the research question, the group are given the titles of a number of articles relating to a fictional research question and need to work together to group them by topic, put these topics in a logical order and then decide whether the research was really answering the original question or whether the question needed to be refined. Students find this much easier with a fictional topic than with their own, because the emotional investment isn’t there, so they are less attached to the initial question.

A couple of very successful lessons I have had this year have also been entirely self-paced (using a combination of the LibGuide and Teams). In one case this was because my son was ill and I was at home taking care of him, so was running the lesson remotely (flashback to COVID days!), and in another because I knew the students had very different skill levels for that particular topic so I wanted to let them work at different paces. Co-incidentally these lessons were the two that we used to run ICT workshops for for the IB EE students (citing and referencing, and setting up a Word template for the final report). The self-paced lessons were much more sucessful than ‘from the front’ guided workshops and I was much more confident that the students had practised and understood the necessary skills. It also meant they could revisit them at any point. If I ever had to deliver the EE ICT workshops again I would do them like this! I’ll provide more detail in a future post in case that is helpful for anyone.

So, in summary, the first lesson I have learnt is not to try to pack too much into each session, to vary activities and particularly to allow structured and supervised time for students to work out how to apply the lesson to their own projects.

[Jenny Toerien Keymaster]

I have shifted this discussion to the new Topic Extended and Higher Project Qualifications, for reasons explained at the start of that Topic. Please do continue to add to the conversation, but in that Topic not this one.

[Jenny Toerien Keymaster]

I will update this topic when we have created some of the additional resources, and once we see how the inquiry goes. In the meantime, huge thanks to the teacher who kindly allowed me to post this exchange here – and very graciously said she had had a look around the forums for something that would help with this particular inquiry and not found it, so would be happy to provide a thread that might be useful to others in the same boat.

[Jenny Toerien Keymaster]

[Teacher’s reply]

Hi Jenny,

You are an absolute life saver. Thank you so much for taking the time to think this through and come up with YouTube links etc. Sometimes it is very difficult to think outside the box when you have been teaching the same content for a number of years.  The sequence of teaching you have suggested sounds perfect. I didn’t realise that the ‘connect’ part involves taught content, so that will work well. The children don’t need to learn about each one in detail. A mapping activity to locate them is all that is needed. I have some fact file sheets (p46 – 50 in the Volcano resource pack) I usually use for a scavenger hunt activity. I could print those off with some other photographs and information sheets. We do have access to the ICT room for both lessons, but as you say it can take them longer due to distractions. As far as a sheet to gather their ideas goes, it would be great to have a simple one to use. I’ll leave you in peace now. At least I now have a plan of action! Enjoy the rest of the holiday.

[Jenny Toerien Keymaster]

[My reply]

Hi,

You could – but it would be a shame to separate the last little bit from the rest of the topic. An inquiry will often involve a taught element as part of Connect, so there is no need to separate your taught element out from the rest of the inquiry, and the degree to which you provide curated resources for them to work from is up to you. Do they all need to know each volcano in the same detail? Could small groups each do one and then report back to the rest of the class? How about something like this? You could build 10 minutes into the end of each lesson for them to think about what they are going to report back and who is going to do it.Week 1:

• Connect & Wonder (15-20 min): Why do people live near volcanoes? Perhaps show something like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1vOdnDqY8E that gives a contrast for the impact of the Hawaii eruptions (which were inconvenient but to some extent a tourist show) with one in Indonesia, which was more deadly. It’s really short and gives a real sense of the downside of living near a volcano. Could use a volcanic eruption drill video like this one insetad:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-w_z9yobpE
• Discussion: For this age group maybe encourage 5Ws + H questions
  • e.g. What is a volcano? What is the land around volcanoes like?
  • Where do volcanoes form? (will lead into your teaching on plate boundaries)
  • Who lives near volcanoes? Who can tell if a volcano is going to erupt?
  • Why do people live near volcanoes? Why do volcanoes erupt?
  • When do volcanoes erupt? How much warning do we get?
  • How do we know if a volcano is going to erupt?
• Probably quickest to do this as a class exercise and gather class questions on a poster or board to display throughout the topic.
• Connect: Recap taught work on features of volcanoes from before HT and finish your taught element by looking at what happens at the boundaries of the earth’s plates.

Week 2:

• Investigate 1: Key facts about famous volcanoes. Case studies on Mauna Loa, Etna, St Helens, Vesuvius, Popocatepetyl. Could either do this as a taught segment or use videos and print resources for them to work in small groups to gather information in ‘key facts’ tables about a specific volcano. Can each group do a separate volcano and report back at the end?

Week 3: (or could do as part of week 2 if you’re really pushed?)

• Investigate 2: What happens when a volcano erupts? Group teaching about how volcanic eruption happens and the different potential effects, followed by chance to explore own volcano as a group. Look at impacts of the eruptions of your famous volcanoes. What happened physically (lava flow, mud, ash, dangerous gases)? How many people died or were displaced? How long did it take before people could come back?

Week 4:

• Investigate 3: Why do people live near volcanoes? Perhaps introduce with a video resource like this one https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yjswavT5tfQ (Inspire education) or this one (Why live near a volcano? DGS Geography (2013)https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5O9JRDfCGiY). They then need to investigate the advantages of the different volcanoes you have chosen. Depending on ability, you could make a list of the advantages together and then give them some pictures of the different volcanoes and maybe some brief snippets of text or pictures for them to rate the different volcanoes in the different ‘advantages’ areas (e.g. IS there a lot of farming around that volcano? IS there mineral mining? IS it a tourist attraction?).

Week 5:

• Report back to the class about their own group’s volcano. Use the sheets the groups have filled in in previous lessons to feed back – no need to make a poster – but might want to choose some photos as visual aids. Give the whole class a ‘rating’ sheet with different criteria to decide how much they want to live near each volcano and vote on a winner at the end. Be clear that they are rating the features of the volcano not the quality of the presentation!

It may be that you don’t think that will work – it would require some books or fact sheets each lesson on each volcano for them to work from as I’m assuming you aren’t going to be in the IT room (and at this age that would probably be a distraction anyway). If you want help designing some simple FOSIL sheets for them to gather their ideas on at each Investigate stage I could probably help with that. Do you already have some case study material on the different volcanoes (maybe even in their textbooks?) that you were planning to work with? Hope that helps. Ignore me if I am overcomplicating things!

[Jenny Toerien Keymaster]

[Email from primary Geography teacher]

Hi Jenny,

Hope you are enjoying half term and so sorry to e-mail in a holiday. I am stumbling a bit with the masses of information for a Year 5 FOSIL Inquiry. We spoke about the initial question and I have taken time to look through the resources on the website, …[and this is] where I am so far….We have covered about 3 lessons as the first couple of lessons are atlas based.

1. KWL sheet to introduce topic.
2. structure of the earth
3. features of a volcano

I am aware that there are very few lessons left before Christmas and the following still needs to be covered.

1. What happens at the boundaries between the Earth’s plates?
2. Locate a range of famous volcanoes and find out some key facts, including when the volcanoes last erupted.
3. What happens when a volcano erupts?
4. Evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of living near a volcano.

My question to you is, if I teach for another couple of weeks and cover number 1 – 3, could number 4 be a mini inquiry of just two weeks. After finding out about a range of famous volcanos I could ask the question ‘If you had to choose a volcano to live by, which would it be?’ They would only be able to choose from the ones tudies: Mauna Loa, Etna, St Helens, Vesuvius, Popocatepetyl. I was thinking they could feed back their findings verbally as this will save time.  I’m still not convinced there will be enough time to do it properly. I think next year I will have to start the topic at the start of term and give it longer than the usual 6 weeks. Any thoughts or suggestions will be gratefully received.

[Jenny Toerien Keymaster]

I’m working on these inquiries over the weekend because the week has been very busy, with Monday’s Bank Holiday, running whole staff INSET on Tuesday (as well as EPQ supervisor training), an assembly promoting our new HPQ course to Y9 (as they make choices for Y10) on Thursday, finishing preparation for a Y7 English inquiry  and meeting the Y1 teacher to discuss and develop her fantastic interdisciplinary inquiry on “Who would enjoy a holiday on Guernsey?” – alongside more day-to-day Library things like starting to prepare for the Y6-7 transition days and hosting some internal exams in the Library…

The maths teacher has been working on developing the ‘numerals and counting systems circus’ for Y8 while he has been off-island this week and I’m excited to see what he produces. The books he lent me are:

• Crump, Thomas (1990). The anthropology of numbers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Closs, Michael P. (ed.) (1997). Native American Mathematics. Austin: Texas University Press.
• Menninger, K. (1969). Number words and number symbols: A cultural history of numbers. Mineola, NY: Dover.
• Gerdes, Paulus (1999). Geometry from Africa: Mathematical and educational explorations. Washington, DC. The Mathematical Association of America.
• Crossely, J. N. (1987). The emergence of number. Singapore: Word Scientific.
• Powell, Arthur P. & Frankenstein, Marilyn (eds) (1997). Ethnomathematics: Challenging eurocentrism in mathematics education. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.

Definite overkill for a Y8 inquiry (although they take me back to my own university days – my first degree was in maths) but a very interesting foundation, and they serve as a reminder that this is actually a very important area of study in maths and maths education which doesn’t often appear directly on school curricula. This isn’t just a dinky opportunity to play around after exams – it could really open up the whole area of ethnomathematics for some of these students, and rekindle an interest in maths as they begin to understand the social and cultural importance of the subject.

I also had additional inspiration for the Y7 Fibonacci inquiry because, as a direct result of our INSET presentation, we were contacted on Friday by one of our Biology teachers about developing an ecology based inquiry for all of Y7 for this time next year using the school nature trail. Seredipitously this could link directly to the Y7 Fibonacci inquiry, creating another interdisciplinary opportunity.

Now I just need to get on with planning the details…

[Jenny Toerien Keymaster]

Thanks Kay. I absolutely agree with you that school librarians are ideally placed to be at the centre of this discussion – and hopefully that that is happening in Australia. In the UK (where school librarians are not regarded as specialist teachers, there is no consensus on the qualifications they should have and in many schools they are regarded as support staff not teaching staff) it is certainly far from the case at the moment and is something we need to fight for. While I am sure there are many challenges facing of the profession in Australia too, as an international community we are so much stronger because we can learn from (and point to) best practice all over the world.

[Jenny Toerien Keymaster]

Hi Kay, thank you for your thoughtful contribution. It’s a real pleasure to welcome you to the FOSIL Group community. Please do subscribe to our all forums to receive notifications of new posts. We also look forward to meeting you in Rome.

Thanks Kay and Elizabeth for flagging Barbara Fister and Alison J. Head’s excellent article on ChatGPT.

I found myself largely in agreement with most of what they said but it did remind me of something that has been in the back of my mind for a while. In all the comparisons with Wikipedia, we need to be very careful of statements like “Even the most strident critics eventually came around. Wikipedia gained recognition in campus libraries as a tertiary source”, which imply that Wikipdedia was always fine and once we all stopped being so hysterical about it and looked at what it actually was, we realised it was actually pretty good and started to integrate it into teaching and learning. That does ignore the fact that Wikipedia got a lot better over the years.

It’s worth winding back through the ‘history’ of some of the early articles to remind ourselves of this. Even in 2008 there were long articles on important topics with just a few references – as an example, I looked through the President of the United States article history (one of the Wikipedia features I do really like):

• The article was first written in September 2001
• It got its first dedicated ‘References’ section in November 2007 (there had been a variety of iterations of external links, notes, further reading, footnotes and notes and references sections before that but nothing substantial), but it was pretty sparse.
• The first time a “this article needs more citations” banner appeared was on July 19th 2008, at which point the 5,200 word article had just 19 citations (274 words per citation). By comparison today’s article has 195 citations for an article with around 10,600 words (54 words per citation).

As Fister and Head acknowledge, at a certain point scientists and academics also started to actively engage with Wikipedia to help to improve the articles.

My point is that Wikipedia has got a lot better (perhaps closer to the more traditional encyclopaedia), which is why we can now – with caveats and reservations – include it in teaching and learning to an extent that would not have been sensible for about the first ten years. It does still have serious limitations as anything other than a tertiary source. As its founder Jimmy Wales famously said in 2006 “For God [sic] sake, you’re in college; don’t cite the encyclopedia.”. For younger students (for whom citing an encyclopaedia might be appropriate) the content is just not written at an age appropriate level. In making this guide to Britannica School for a Year 7 (11-12 year olds) group this week I was reminded just how flexible and accessible it is for different age groups (click the arrows to scroll through the slides). Wikipedia does have its place, but I’m not sure how often it is actually a student’s most useful first port of call – and never their last.

I agree with Kay 100%. There is little point handwringing about how awful AI is and that it should be banned in educational settings based on how it manifests right now. It is bound to change and get better and objections based purely on how often it is wrong (which at the moment seems to be quite a lot!) will fall away. Equally it would be crazy to jump in and embrace it fully and enthusiastically without criticism, and not just because in its current incarnation it is flawed.

Kay is right that our focus needs to be on the big questions. Under the surface, the rapid evolution and adoption of AI has very serious ethical, moral, social and legal issues (and some particular ones related to largely being a proprietary technology, where corporate vested interests are always going to be an issue) which we as Librarians are ideally equipped to wrestle with. It is also likely to change the educational landscape hugely, just as the growth of the internet did. I left school just as the internet was really getting started in the mid 1990s, and my experience of education was quite different from students’ experiences today – and changes have generally been for the better I think.

I do think that discussions of Wikipedia are a distraction here (and Fister and Head point out that social media was arguably a much bigger influence in society than Wikipedia was). Wikipedia did not cause massive educational shifts because the information it carried was already ‘out there’ on the internet, it was just an (arguably for some) more convenient package. AI has the potential to cause seismic shifts because, while it is still working with information which is publicly available (as far as we know) it has the ability to endlessly synthesise and repackage that information to suit different agendas and voices. It is designed to give us what we want, even if that involves making stuff up. And what we want is not always what we need.

The challenge is going to be that this shift is likely to happen very rapidly. Almost certainly more rapidly than the original impact of the internet on education, in part because the connectivity is already there. Most people have internet enabled devices, and the vast majority of schools in the developed world certainly do. AI is, on the surface, fairly intuitive so everyone can have a go – and children are notoriously good and enthusiastic adopters of new technologies but, as any Librarian teaching search skills and source evaluation will tell you, they are generally not nearly as good as they think they are.

So if we have big questions to address about how AI will impact education and how we need to adapt to prepare children for an increasingly AI integrated world (with all the many complex issues that brings), then we need to act quickly. This is a debate about education and society, not about one particular technology or manifestation of that, and Librarians need to push to get a seat at the table, both as educational leaders plan for the future of education, and as leaders more broadly plan and legislate for the future of society. We absolutely need to be part of those conversations in our schools, with leaders, teachers and students (neither as doomsayers or cheerleaders but as voices of reason!). But we need to think beyond that as well.

I was powerfully reminded of that this morning when I woke up to an article in The Times entitled “AI ‘is clear and present danger to education’: School leaders announce joint response to tech“, which announced that a group of educational leaders led by Dr Anthony Seldon (historian and author, currently head of Epsom College, and formerly Brighton and Wellington Colleges) wrote a letter to The Times stating that:

 “AI is moving far too quickly for the government or parliament alone to provide the real-time advice schools need. We are thus announcing today our own cross-sector body composed of leading teachers in our schools, guided by a panel of independent digital and AI experts. The group will create a website led by heads of science or digital at 15 state and private schools. It will offer guidance on the latest developments in AI and what schools should use and avoid.”

It really struck me that Librarians are not mentioned at all here (school librarians in the UK are not viewed as specialist teachers, so would not be included in the phrase ‘leading teachers’ as they might be overseas), and we need to be pushing for a voice in projects like this. This is the task, and we need to set our sights high. We absolutely need to be part of those conversations in our schools, and I’ve heard some wonderful stories of school librarians using the opportunities provided by a new technology that has unsettled some in their schools to get out into classrooms to offer their expertise. But that is not enough. AI has some serious and disturbing implications (as well as exciting opportunities) for education and for society and we need to explore these fully, take an informed position and make our voices heard as educators AND information professionals before others shape the future for us, and we are left on the sidelines, trying to justify our place in the new educational landscape rather than being part of shaping it.

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