Panel presents promise, peril of AI use in education at Cornell

When's the last time you cooked a roast in a microwave?

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the microwave was considered a possible replacement to ovens. Eventually - after untold quantities of doomed beef, rubbery eggs and soggy bacon - we came to understand what microwaves can and can't do.

That may be where we are today with generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools in the teaching and learning environment, according to Steve Jackson, vice provost for Academic Innovation at Cornell and professor of information science.

"I use my microwave every day. It hasn't gone away, but I still have an oven," Jackson told the more than 200 attendees at the panel, "AI + Education: Teaching and Learning in the Age of AI," held Saturday, Oct. 25, in the newly dedicated Computing and Information Science Building during the 75th Trustee-Council Annual Meeting. "I think that's where we're going to land [with AI], and our effort to work through this experimentally, through research and in an evidence-based way, is how we'll get there. I think in five years, we'll be using it more and less, but we'll be using it in the right places."

David Mimno, professor and chair of the Department of Information Science, and Jadon Geathers, a doctoral student in the field of information science, joined Jackson on the panel, which was hosted by Cornell Bowers and moderated by Claire Cardie, the John C. Ford Professor of Engineering in the Departments of Computer Science and Information Science and the Cornell Bowers associate dean for education.

Read the full story on the Cornell Bowers website.