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Artificial Intelligence is reshaping the field of education — and professors at Harvard are doing their best to chart a course in the uncertain waters.
Attendees packed a forum at the Harvard Graduate School of Education on Wednesday evening to hear from HGSE professor Howard Gardner ’65 and visiting Harvard Law professor Anthea Roberts about how AI will impact education in the coming years.
While both Gardner and Roberts agreed that the technology will fundamentally reshape the field, Roberts was more optimistic about the technology’s impact on student learning.
“My actual reaction was to think, hang on, these large language models are exceptional,” she said. “I think that was around the time I basically put my academic books on the shelf and started building AI tools.”
Roberts built her AI tool, DragonFly Thinking, in 2023 “to help users move beyond one dimensional and linear solutions by surfacing insights from multiple disciplinary perspectives.” The tool is currently being piloted by federal and state governments in Australia.
According to Roberts, the AI tool offers users the ability to examine multidimensional issues from multiple different perspectives — a crucial solution to evaluating “a complex problem.”
“What the system then did was that it suggested a number of different lenses we might want to adopt, thinking from actors and stakeholders perspectives, or thinking about risks and rewards, or thinking about different expert perspectives,” she said.
Gardner was more moderate in his assessment of AI’s potentiality in the classroom. The HGSE professor, who studies different theories of intelligence, said he believes AI will fundamentally reshape both K-12 and higher education.
“I don’t think that everyone should be going to school for 10 more years and learn history and biology and algebra and calculus and chemistry and physics — and you name it,” he said. “I think that those disciplines are going to be handled so much better by large language instruments.”
Gardener went on to say that the role of teachers will also be reshaped as AI is increasingly integrated into classrooms.
“Teachers will become more and more like coaches, because there’s so much available — AI is very, very personally oriented,” he said. “The need to have everybody in the class doing the same thing and being assessed in the same way will seem totally, totally, totally old fashioned.”
—Staff writer Bryce C. Freeman can be reached at bryce.freeman@thecrimson.com
—Staff writer Ava Pakravan can be reached at ava.pakravan@thecrimson.com.
