This episode replays a dynamic panel from the 2025 ATLIS Annual Conference, exploring the future of education with experts in AI, quantum computing, and extended reality (XR). Dr. Jacob Farinholt of Booz Allen, Vriti Saraf of Ed3 DAO, and Patrick Schuermann of Optima XR, along with students Jalen and Maggie, discuss how emerging technologies will reshape learning, the skills students will need, and why human-centered pedagogy remains critical.

Resources

Booz Allen: https://www.boozallen.com

Ed3 DAO: https://www.ed3dao.com/

Optima Ed: https://optimaxr.ai/

The Mount Vernon School: https://mountvernonschool.org/

X Prize: https://www.xprize.org/

ASU+GSV Summit: https://www.asugsvsummit.com/

World Economic Forum: https://www.weforum.org/

OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development): https://www.oecd.org/

UNESCO: https://www.unesco.org/en

Pine Crest School: https://www.pinecrest.edu/

Woodward Academy: https://www.woodward.edu/

"The Perfect Match" by Ken Liu: https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-perfect-match/

Ed, welcome to Talking technology with Atlas,

the show that plugs you into the important topics and trends for

technology leaders all through a unique Independent School lens.

We'll hear stories from technology directors and other

special guests from the Independent School community,

and provide you with focused learning and deep dive topics.

And now please welcome your host. Kristina llewellen,

hello everyone, and welcome back to

talking technology with Atlas. I'm Kristina llewellen, the

president and CEO of the Association of technology

leaders and independent schools.

And I am Bill Stites, the Director of

Technology at Montclair Kimberly Academy in Montclair, New

Jersey. And

I'm Hiram Cuevas, the Director of Information

Systems and Academic Technology at St Christopher school in

Richmond, Virginia.

Good morning, gentlemen. It's so

great to be here with you. How are you guys doing? Doing? Well,

wonderful. Thank you. I'm so happy that we get to, once

again, relive something very special from the 2025 Atlas

annual conference. On the second day that we all gathered in

Atlanta, we did a general session with a panel. And this

was a really impressive group of people. And I loved how we were

able to pick their brains for all of the new things coming

down our path, even beyond the immediate issues of AI. So this

is going to be a really cool one. We're going to replay for

all of our listeners the general session that we recorded when we

were together in Atlanta. And before I just ask you guys if

you had any recollections or memories of this particular

conversation, I will say that the folks that came to this

panel, I'm just so impressed that our team was able to bring

these thought leaders together. One is Dr Jacob farenholt. He's

the chief scientist and quantum technology lead for Booz Allen,

a leading provider of AI and cybersecurity services to the

federal government. We also had VD sarof. She's the CEO and

founder of Ed three. Dao and our final panelist, rounding out

this powerhouse team was Patrick Sherman, and he is the lead of

Optima XR and a longtime contributor to the independent

school space. So when we brought these folks together, we were

able to talk about some of these web 3.0 the metaverse, virtual

reality, quantum computing, and AI, all of those things. But

what was super cool about it is that we also had students

involved in this conversation, and some of the speakers were

diving into these incredible ways that schools can anticipate

and adapt to these innovations. You know, certainly, they wanted

to highlight the opportunities for enriched learning and

practical steps for the seamless integration of these emerging

technologies. But it was also really cool. We had a couple of

students from an independent school hanging out with us, and

I thought that that was pretty cool. Up on stage with quantum

scientists and CEOs, they definitely held their own,

didn't they,

absolutely I mean, it's, it was already a high IQ

event, and then these kids, they actually rose to the occasion

and probably surpassed, you know, definitely bill. So it's

all good,

I was gonna say, because it was a high IQ event.

That's why I wasn't involved. I was off scheduled elsewhere. So

I'm, I'm actually really eager to listen to this myself and to

learn from the panel, because knowing who was involved and

catching pieces of it, I'm really eager to hear what

everyone has to say, and I think our audience will

as well. Yeah, it was the kind of

experience where in the room my brain was almost like a couple

steps behind, right incredible, like nuggets of wisdom would get

dropped about the future of all this and where it's going, and

then I would still be thinking about that, and somebody else

would say something incredible. So it was really great to

experience it live, but I'm really excited to present it as

a replay for our podcast audience. Are you guys ready to

go? Let's

go. Let's do it.

So this is going to be a really fun panel. We've

got some awesome people gathered here with us today, and we are

going to use strategic foresight. If you are not

familiar with this concept, the point of this is that we are

scanning the horizon. It's so easy y'all, to just put our

heads down and look at the put out the fires that are in front

of us, right? Oh my gosh, all of these vendor vetting contracts,

I've got to deal with AI, what, what is going on. But if we can

take the time to also look up and scan our horizon, it can set

our schools in such an amazing place. And so that is what I

invite you to do with us today. I just wanted to point out an

example of this. You know, we've been talking about AI for years

here at Atlas, but it was a very abstract concept, right? We've

been having these AI meetups way before Chat GPT came on the

scene, but the schools that were really poised to take advantage

of that are now the ones that are the most ahead. They're the

leaders. When Felix said, Hey, stand. Up if you're doing really

well, and you've got that AI policy, and you guys are doing

okay, and those schools that stood up, they use strategic

foresight to kind of get ahead. And so I hope that this panel

this morning will be very enlightening for you as we again

look ahead maybe 510, years out, what are some of the things that

could be on the horizon? So without further ado, I'd like to

introduce our panel to you. We've got Dr Jacob fahrenholt,

y'all. He is the chief scientist and quantum technologies lead at

Booz Allen. He's got over 15 years of experience with the US

government, and he has been doing all kinds of things as a

research scientist for the US Navy, where he leads teams in

quantum computing, cryptography and cybersecurity. So we're

going to talk about the implications of that. Would you

wave at us so we can Yes, all right, thank you. All right,

we've got Brad saraph. She is the co founder and CEO of the ED

three Dow. It's a nonprofit. She does amazing things with

upskilling educators on emerging technologies through research

based pedagogy. And she's the founder of K 20 educators. She's

got a design studio, a consultancy, just doing all

around amazing work. She's had experience in higher education K

12 as a professor, a dean, a director, and she now serves as

an advisor for X Prize, full stream forward, and then me

prime Bitcoin, so she's doing amazing stuff, and y'all I was

just at ASU GSB, and she was recognized as one of the leading

women in AI. So really, would you give us a wave? All right,

also on our panel, we have Patrick Sherman. He is the chief

academic officer for Optima Ed, a former Vanderbilt University

Professor of Educational Leadership, and his leadership

really focuses at the intersection of learning theory

and technology, and he's here at the panel today from his role in

Optima pioneering Virtual Reality curriculum solutions for

Modern learners. Patrick, would you give us a wave? You? So we

have all of these amazing adults, but you will also notice

we have some students on our panel today. I am so excited to

introduce you to Jalen and Maggie. They are coming from the

Mount Vernon school, and they're going to talk about their first

hand experiences of emerging tech in their learning

environments and help give us a vision of what schools could

look like. So, Jalen, would you give us a wave and Maggie,

excellent. All right, so, Jake, I'm going to start with you. All

right. Dr fahrehold, here, we're going to start with quantum

computing, because y'all we've had a late night. So, Dr

fahrenholt, can you help us unpack this a little bit, what

is quantum computing and how might it impact independent

schools in the future?

Dr. Jacob Farinholt: Yeah, for sure. Thank you. Yeah, if you

don't understand what quantum is, I'll say you're in good

company. Richard Feynman, a famous Nobel physicist, famously

said nobody understands quantum Einstein, one of the founders of

quantum mechanics, adamantly hated it, and actually went out

of his way to try and show that it was wrong. And ended up

discovering some really interesting phenomena in quantum

so if you don't understand it, you are an excellent company.

You can say, hey, so do Nobel physicists, so you're good

there. But at a high level, quantum mechanics is just the

physics of small things. So when you get down to the really small

levels, at the atomic subatomic levels, all the physics,

Newtonian physics that we know and love starts to fall apart

and it gets replaced by another new laws of physics that are

captured under the name quantum mechanics. So quantum mechanics

does some really, really weird, non intuitive things, and to

most of us, that's, you know, when you hear about these

properties, you say That's strange. If you're a physicist,

you call it a feature. And so the area of quantum technologies

is focused on exploiting those features to give you some sort

of advantage in either computing, sensing or

communications. So when you hear about quantum technologies, it's

really multiple different areas. Most people, though, are

referring to quantum computing, because that's what we hear

about in the news all the time. Quantum Computing really is a

fundamentally different model of computing where the basic

principles, instead of classically, we have bits and

transistors at the core, and that's how we actually do all of

our computing. With quantum computing, you use instead of

bits, you have quantum bits, which physicists don't like

saying that long word, so we call it qubits. And then you

have gates, these operations that you can do with these

qubits. And once you do that, you can build out a model of

computing that enables you to do different types of operations

that we can't do normally and occasionally. Using those

operations, you can develop new algorithms that are faster and

more simple than what we can do using conventional computers. So

that's fundamental difference there. Why do we care? It turns

out, in the mid 90s, a physicist actually showed that if you had

a full scale quantum computer, you could do this really cool

thing called factoring. So taking. Of numbers and finding

their prime factors, which me, as a mathematician, I thought

that's really cool. I love it. You can do this neat math

problem. But why do we care about that? It turns out, all of

our currently used public key encryption. So how do we

actually encrypt information and talk securely over the phone,

text messages and so forth, all rely on the assumption that

factoring numbers is really hard, that's actually the basic

premise of the entire security and so now we find out, hey, if

you can build one of these quantum computers, you can break

all of our currently used public key encryption. That might be a

problem. So that really started driving forward this whole field

of quantum computing, either to take advantage of it and see

what else can we do that's interesting, or find ways to

defend against it, doing cryptography on new types of

encryption and so forth. And so that is the world that I live

in, day in and day out, and it's really fascinating time in this

space.

Thank you, Vritti, did you have a question for

him? We were talking at the table, and he

started describing quantum computing. And I think my

biggest question was, you know, AI has recently become very

accessible to us, but AI has been around for a very long

time. When will quantum computing become as accessible

as AI?

Dr. Jacob Farinholt: If I knew that question, I would be

putting tons of money in the stock market to predict this,

and knowing that I'll be extremely rich down the road, we

don't know. So one of the fascinating things that it has

been in fun in the quantum space is that we've been able to do a

lot of lessons learned from Ai. We saw AI really take off in the

80s and 90s, really a lot of excitement around these new

algorithms and capabilities that you could potentially do with

them. And then we saw, as people started implementing them, they

said, Wait, this is really hard, and our current CPUs can't quite

handle the processing power. So you saw this kind of dip down.

And then GPUs came out, and suddenly you can run AI

algorithms extremely efficiently and more affordably. Someone at

home could actually develop and implement AI technologies. And

so you saw this, this huge boom, and then you've been seeing

these waves go on and on over the past few decades. Quantum

Computing is more where AI was in the 90s. There was a lot of

excitement around the potential, but the technology wasn't there.

The underlying hardware wasn't there. And so what we're seeing

now is the technology advancing at remarkable rates. And so most

of the focus when you hear about quantum computing, you always

hear people talk about qubits and error correction and the

hardware and what it looks like, and trapped ions and

superconducting and all this focus on the hardware. But you

don't really hear much about well, how do we use it? There's

so much focus on advancing the hardware that that sometimes

gets overlooked. And so I think right now, we're starting to see

people kind of step back and say, Hey, maybe we should be

developing that framework, developing the ability to

actually access these devices. And as people are developing

programming languages and so forth to actually start running

it, they're realizing, hey, you know, there's only so many PhD

physicists and mathematicians out there, and those aren't the

ones that are going to be using it day in and day in and day

out. How do we make this more accessible? And that's really

where we are today. Is a lot of the communities trying to figure

that out right now.

Thank you. All right, so Patrick, I'm going to

direct this next one at you. So when you look at how fast

technology is evolving, where do you see the biggest gaps between

what schools are currently teaching and what skills that

the students will need in the future.

Dr. Patrick Schuermann: If it's all right with you. In the

spirit of improv, I think my colleague really has great

insight into the what, right? And I was gonna build on the

what and talk a little bit more about the how. Sounds good. If

you're okay with that, my friend,

totally. Yeah. So let's talk about AI, because

that seems to be the most you know sexy technology right now

that everybody's into. What I'm seeing with AI and other

technology is that we often approach it from the school

level on a very superficial way and on very app based way. We

say, how can we teach our faculty members to use x and y?

App, mad, school, school, AI, whatever it is. And the truth is

that if we're always focusing on the app level, and we're

focusing on the just the way that we're able to use AI and

not the way that we're able to think with AI, then we're always

going to just be on the superficial level. Do you guys

remember when Apple iPads were being implemented in schools all

over the state, all over the country? What ended up happening

was educators knew how to use apple, but didn't know how to

use any other technology, and that's somewhat what's happening

with AI right now. We're really focusing on a superficial layer

here, and so when we think about how technology is being

implemented, or AI being implemented, we really want to

look at what is the underlying mechanism that AI operates on,

what are the strengths, the weaknesses of how it can

operate, and then also, how can we really use it to push forward

those skills that we know students are gonna need

regardless of what technology it is, whether it's spatial

computing or AI, which is really critical thinking, right? How do

we ensure that educators and students alike can really build

their critical. Thinking skills using this technology, rather

than just off putting or letting the technology do the critical

thinking for them. Does that set you up?

Dr. Patrick Schuermann: Absolutely. Thank you, my friend. Yes. So

the World Economic Forum, OECD UNESCO have come out with lists

of kind of the skills of the future. So we have a good idea

of what students right, like Jalen and Maggie are going to

need to know and to be able to do in the future. So then it

comes back to us as educators to say, how are we creating the

experiences that are going to ensure that not just that

knowledge, but the skills and the attributes are being

developed? And I think it comes down to creating

transformational experiences for students. And transformation

occurs kind of through a three step process, and I think

technology can be a great catalyst to the first step,

which is creating discomfort zone experiences, so helping

students think just the next layer out from their current

habits or awareness or understandings, but where I

think educators are going to be invaluable, and even more so

over the next 10 and 20 years, is in kind of the second and

third steps of the process, which is the second is kind of

what we call narrative translation. When we go through

challenging situations, how do we go about doing the sense

making and creating meaning and Maggie and Jalen, I'm sure you

can think about teachers who are so good at that, who know you,

care about you, and can help you say, Okay, what is this about?

How do I make sense of this? And then the third piece is all

about identity construction, right? And this is where

sometimes we fall short. I think, in the field of

education, we leave a lot of money on the table, so to speak.

But unless we take the conversation to the place of,

how does this fundamentally change what you think about

yourself, what your capacity is, how you're capable, how you can

be a collaborator or communicator, then we haven't

closed the loop. But again, I think technology can put us into

these spaces, let us embody and experience them in ways that we

couldn't by just watching and hearing about things. But now,

when we can walk a mile in someone's shoes, then we've got

an experience that we really need to kind of create the

narrative, and then it can have a deep identity impact. And I

think that's one of the beauties of this intersection of

technology and leadership in our schools today.

And can I just add to that, what you named is just

super, super important, super critical, because the qualities

that he named are the qualities that AI cannot do and will not

be able to do. Anyone familiar with Bloom's Taxonomy here?

Anyone? I think they've heard of it? Yeah. So a few years ago, I

actually mapped AI to Bloom's to understand what cognitive

capacities AI has compared to humans, and what I found was

that most of the capacities AI is actually quite good at. The

only one that AI cannot surpass humans on is the understanding

piece, which is pretty low on blooms, right? But making

meaning is not something AI does very well, because AI is only

basing its understanding on algorithms and the data it has,

and the data is often biased, and the algorithms are also

biased based on whoever's developing it, right? And so the

making meaning part is uniquely human. I gave a talk a few years

ago to some superintendents in California, and one of them

raised their hand after I mentioned this Bloom's Taxonomy

thing, and they said, You know, I have an example of that, I

asked my son to work with Chat GPT to work on his assignment.

The assignment was write a goodbye letter to racism. And

Chat GPT came out with a response that said, you know,

here's a great way to start that letter, dear racism, such great

times we've had. Oh, yikes. And it's because what AI was doing,

especially at that time, this was in 2023 was it was taking

the algorithms and the data that it had from the internet and

basically creating a template for what a good letter sounds

like. But it didn't actually make meaning of the topic

itself, right? AI, obviously, you know, llms have advanced

quite a bit since then, but it still isn't able to make as much

meaning as humans can, because humans have a unique ability to

understand the world through perspective, through emotions,

through your life experiences, through the way that we're able

to experience pain and love, the way that AI can never. So if

you're thinking about what is that key difference? What is the

thing that humans will always do better than AI. It's what he

talked about, and it's about making meaning. Thank

you so much. So now I'm really excited to bring

our student panelists into this conversation, to give you a

little bit of an idea about how they got here and why they're

here. They are part of this amazing course taught by I bet

you know this guy. Right? Jared Cole, Jared, would you give us a

wave? Yes, there you go. So jared's course is philosophy in

the age of artificial intelligence. I would just like

to note this is a humanities course. This is not a computer

science curriculum, and these guys are part of this class, and

it's really fascinating too, because the work that they do in

this course, it is directly tied to the school's mission. So the

school's mission is built on inquiry, innovation and impact,

and your class has these weekly activities that directly relate

to that. So can you tell us a little bit about some of the

work that you do in the class, about innovating experimentally

with these AI technologies each week,

yes. So it almost felt shocking that we were being

directed to use something that is kind of correlating with like

cheating and everything like that. So it felt kind of

interesting that we were supposed to experiment with

that, and it ended up being super beneficial the times where

we got to explore on our own and come up with our own ideas on

AI, for example, we were prompted to co create something

with Chat GPT, and I chose something very simple, and it

was just coming up with a movie script. And this is where I

learned about ethics of AI. And when Chat GPT gave me a movie

that had already been made, I was a little concerned, but

that's the point that I could come up with that on my own, and

that will help me in the future and be more cautious. And I know

that now that AI is just telling me what I want to hear, but it

took me having like mistakes and doing that on my own to

understand that, and I think that's like the whole point of

the class

piggybacking off of Maggie for the first week. I

also chose the movie script idea. And the way that that

specific assignment was given to us was we would have like a

choice board, and so we would choose any like prompt that we

want to do, and then we would go about and do it. But the thing

that he had honed in on is that at the end, we will always get

the same four questions, and they are basically coming from

and a resource that we use at the school called four corners.

So it's like things I like, things I didn't like, things I

don't understand, and then things to consider. And so for

him to like, Hone like in on those four questions. I was

like, um, how does that connect with me making a movie script

with, like, AI, but piggybacking off of Miss Vritti, I think that

the making meaning part, it's exactly why he chose for us to

answer those four questions every time we did a prompt.

Because, had I not answered those four questions and, like,

actually, consider, hey, AI is kind of like, currently, at

least Chat GPT is like, our Yes, man, if that makes sense. Like,

as I was, like, going about creating the script. I was like,

how about we have this in it? And they were like, it's

amazing. Like, that's so good. Like, that's an awesome idea.

And I was like, Okay, I don't have a big ego, but you're

raising me right now. And so it was like getting to understand

that even though AI is a wonderful and a helpful source.

It's still a matter of, what about creating AI or having AI

that's like, not seen as like a servant or a yes man that's

like, able to openly give feedback. I don't have to

physically say, hey, I want feedback for the like language

model to give me the feedback.

Thank you. I did mention this when I was

introducing them, but their class actually nominated these

two to be here with us today. So you were chosen by your peers.

So we're really excited to have your voices on the panel. So my

next question, I'm just opening it up to anybody. Okay, so we're

going to talk about what shift in pedagogy or curriculum design

will schools need to consider in the next five to 10 years?

So a big thing that we learned about within philosophy

in the age of emerging technology is this concept of a

central relationship between us and AI, which is essentially AI

serving as an extension of us. So when I think of like a

possible shift, I would definitely think about we

learned in that class how to create bots that could from

tutoring assistants to helping us with like diets and meals

depending on what part of the choice board that you chose, we

basically learned that there are ais that we can create

specifically for a category of life that we need help on, and

they will taking all the information that you gave them,

will try their very best to assist you. I think that the

shift that needs to happen is, I feel like teachers, or just like

schools in general, should promote that more. Because, for

example, tutoring that changes the whole aspect of tutoring

completely. Because now, instead of wholly relying on a person

who we know, we all get sick. Sometimes. We all are like, Oh,

I might not be able to do this, but you have an AI assistant

that is your extension. So it's like you might not be able to

come to me directly, but how about you work with this Flint

bot assistant or this Chat GPT assistant, and so learning how

to create your own bots, not only that, but especially in the

age of adolescent. Since we all like to be independent, so

knowing that we can create bots that can help us learn on our

own time, I feel like that will definitely promote the

independence and the I guess working outside of like the

classroom,

I don't think we need to be here. I think John

and I think this entire panel that was amazing. I'll add a

little bit of flair to that. AI agents right now. They're not

super usable at this very moment, but they are going to

become super usable. Can I

interrupt here for people in the audience who may

have heard this AI agent buzz word but they don't quite

understand Can you unpack it just a little bit

for us? Yeah, an AI agent is basically an autonomous

bot that will take data and make decisions on your behalf and

execute it. So, for example, if you want to create a website and

set up an entire marketplace, you don't actually have to,

like, set up every portion of it. You can just say to an LM,

this is what I want to create. And it will create the website.

It will set up the marketplace. It'll start sourcing, you know,

products. It'll do the entire thing for you, from start to

finish, without you actually having to intervene. Now, if you

think about that from a education perspective, what

might you do there? Let's think about from start to finish,

lesson planning or start to finish, maybe creating an IP or

start to finish, generating materials for your classroom

even more advanced than that. You know, there's a lot of like,

autonomous functions that can happen in your classroom. Now,

what Jalen said is really relevant, because AI agents can

fill in the gaps for a human in ways that are much more dynamic

than we can do right now with, you know, sitting at a computer

and talking to an LLM, a large language model with AI agents.

The thing that we need to think about is, if every human teacher

and student alike has an agent, somebody who can act

autonomously on your behalf and has the skills and maybe even

some of the abilities that you don't necessarily have, but are

filling the gaps in with the agent, will you then, as let's

say, a professional start applying to jobs where you are

recognized, not only as yourself, but you plus agent,

right? So your abilities and your skills and your

capabilities are actually then amplified because you have this

agent. Same thing with students. If a student is coming into a

classroom, it's not just them, but it's them plus their agent,

could their learning and their ability to be able to comprehend

things and be able to learn autonomously, increase because

they have an agent. So that really changes the dialog for

how we actually engage with students in the classroom and

how we actually as educators, what we can do. One of the

things that is really incredible about Mount Vernon is they're

doing all of this project based learning and student centered

learning and inquiry based learning. Those things are

really hard to do and quite expensive. Oftentimes, most of

you guys are in independent schools, and so it's easier for

you guys to access those opportunities. But for public

schools, it's quite hard to access things like that, because

PD is harder. Getting access to materials are harder. Usually

need smaller classroom sizes, but if you bring AI into the

equation, especially agents, can we actually enable these student

centered pedagogies to proliferate much faster? Because

we're not going to need as many materials and it won't be as

expensive. So that's something to think about, and then I'll

pass it to you, but I do want to put the idea of portfolio based

assessment and performance based assessments into the ether as

well. But we could talk about that next time.

Dr. Patrick Schuermann: There we go. Love it. You know, as I

think about the future and continuing to adapt and what

does it look pedagogically and curricularly in the next few

years? Maybe it's the former professor in me. I think back

actually 100 years. I think Dewey right, as we launched the

Progressive Era of education, right? That was about moving

from this teacher as the sage on the stage, kind of the

authoritarian model, to really democratize classrooms. And I

think some of these emergent technologies have the capacity

to further catalyze that. If we fast forward to the 80s, right?

We came up with this kind of wave of experiential learning

theory, right? So Cole Rogers, right? These guys said, we don't

learn really by listening. We don't even learn so much just by

thinking. We learn by doing, right? And so then again, we

think about how these emerging technologies can help us create

experiences for our students to actively engage. And then, most

recently, the National Academy of Sciences came up with the how

people learn framework, a distillation of all of the

cognitive science literature and research to date. And it says we

know now how to construct learning environments to most

efficiently and effectively move students from novice to expert

learners, which is defined as taking knowledge and skills and

applying them in new situations. So as we then think about

pedagogically, curricularly, where. We need to go right then

it is really moving away from kind of these content, siloed

conversations around a domain expertise, to these

interdisciplinary, active experiments where you embody

things, you do the sense making right, and you think about how

we can apply what we're learning to real world solutions.

I love that so much. All right, so we've talked

a little bit about the skills. Now I want to think about the

tools just a little bit, and let's make some predictions. So

go with me here, and what developments in some of these

emerging technologies could change how we are learning in

schools, and what should schools start think about like their

path to get there, exploring them the next 510, years. What

are your predictions there?

Dr. Jacob Farinholt: I'll start, yeah. So we don't really know

when quantum computers will be available. What we do know now

is that me and folks like me are very focused on building the

hardware, but it's these students who are going to be the

first to use it. And for me, I think it's fascinating to be

thinking about now, we don't quite know the art of the

possible with these computers when they're available. We know

a handful of things that they'll be good at, we know a lot of

things that they'll be bad at, but we don't really understand

the full scope of what it will enable. I think that it's an

awesome opportunity now to give students that opportunity to

discover, along with everyone else, it's a huge white space.

You know, never discount the innovation that comes from these

students. There are countless examples in history of, you

know, famous mathematicians or physicists that did something

impossible. They discovered some new result that no one thought

could be done. And when they asked them, they were some no

name person beforehand. When they asked them and said, How

did you succeed when so many others failed, their answers

were no one was there to tell me I couldn't do it. And I see

quantum computing and applications of quantum

computing as that beautiful white space to start doing the

same thing. And I think enabling students opportunities to start

exploring what you can do with these devices today, and what

you might be able to do if you have larger systems, more robust

systems, and as they mature, and coupling that with other

technologies and other use cases that I would never think of to

start seeing what the art of the possible could be. For me,

enabling that for students right now would just be incredible.

I think one of the biggest concerns that I'm sure

everybody in this room has is privacy and data protection. I

think with using these systems, whether it's AI or XR or

whatever we're talking about here, we don't often know where

the data goes, especially when we're having students use these

systems, it's essentially a black box. Also, you know, AI,

there's so much unknown about it. Even the CEOs of these, you

know, large organizations, anthropic, you know, open AI,

say they actually don't know what is happening to the data

sometimes, and they don't know what the AI algorithm is

actually doing with it, because the systems are becoming so

advanced and so potentially autonomous. And so, I think one

of the biggest things that we have to figure out, and I do

think this is something we will be able to figure out, is how do

we create more reliability in terms of where the data is going

and how we can further protect our students and anybody that's

using it. And then I think another thing that will have to

change with the technology is accessibility. We as a

nonprofit, really do believe that AI should be a public

utility, much like the internet, not that the internet is a

public utility, yet it should be, but AI should also be. And

we know that innovation most often occurs when technology is

more available to more people, because there's brilliant people

all over the world, and if they're able to access an open

source model, they'll be able to innovate with it from many

different contexts. And so making AI a public utility,

which is what we're advocating for, could really change a lot

of things, but in terms of how you all can prepare for what's

coming, I think it's going back to what I said before, which is

really try to move past the app usage of AI and really try to

look into the fundamentals about how you can think with AI. Not

just have your students or teachers or whatever be users of

AI, but thinkers

with AI. Can I jump in really fast for a super

quick plug. Kristina mentioned our AI summer workshop. What

Vritti just said there is pretty much the premise of what we're

doing. It is not about let's generate a worksheet and let's

do our email more efficiently. We are talking about how

teachers and students can co create with AI, how to build

models, simulations, interactive web apps with no coding

experience. So I'm absolutely with you there. All right, sorry

to interrupt, Patrick. Go ahead.

Dr. Patrick Schuermann: No, that's awesome. And just one

kind of, like specific way of thinking about this at the

intersection of these language models, and then as we look at

kind of this XR space, hang

on, Patrick, jargon alert here, that term has

been around for a little while, but tell us, what does extended

reality? Can you unpack that for us, just really

Dr. Patrick Schuermann: quickly? Sure, sure. So there's VR,

right? Virtual reality, and this is kind of bringing students

into these computer generated spaces. These that are kind of,

they look like, but they're not actually right, the photo

realistic, right? And then there's AR right, augmented

reality, where you might have a device on, but you're seeing

through it, interacting with people, kind of in the real

space or holographic assets, right? And so kind of this mixed

reality or extended reality is kind of the umbrella term that

encompasses virtual and augmented reality, and again, at

that intersection, what we're seeing some really exciting

possibilities, right? I think about the work that Chris

Swanson and his incredible team at Pine Crest is doing in AR and

VR, and they're really kind of pushing the envelope there every

day, from third, kind of through 12th grade, exploring that

intersection, right? And then I think about Connie white and

what she's doing at Woodward and her team, pushing things forward

and getting students from both schools to create a small

language model, making decisions right based on kind of a set of

guidelines or insights or ethical standards for historical

avatar. And at Pinecrest, and then at Woodward, they do the

same thing, same historical character, but maybe a different

set of decisions. Those two school groups interview each

other's AI avatar, and they might get very different

responses, right? And so that brings up all sorts of

opportunities for understanding and learning, and gets us into

those deeper thinking questions around ethical dilemmas that I

think we want to expose our students to in this emerging

tech space. Thank

you. All right, so Jalen and Maggie, I want to go

back to you guys for a minute. So if we think about our

audience here, they're representing schools from all

across the nation. What do you wish? What is a message that you

would like to get out? What do you wish that teachers knew, not

just your teachers, but all teachers. What do you wish that

they knew when they're thinking about all of these emerging

technologies and bringing in these new tools. I

just want to speak for. I think a vast majority when I

say that students not only want to know how to use AI, but like

they want to know when they don't need to use it. And I feel

like that there's like an unclear line there on what

skills that we can do by ourselves. And it gets kind of

confusing. I can say that I don't really use AI for busy

work. I use it for tackling big projects and problems and

breaking down things. And I also think that administrators at my

school, at least, are not on the same page all the time, and that

there's a gap there, and it can get really confusing when some

teachers are policing chat GP while others are implementing it

and using it. And I think that for some of my classes, teachers

use it, and they allow us to, like, use it as a prompt and use

a Chat GPT prompt to help us in our assignment. And this is

really helpful, because that's how I know the teacher knows I

can do the rest by myself. And I think that's just, like, where

it gets really confusing on what we should be doing by ourselves

and what we shouldn't and I don't want to lose those skills.

And I get worried about that.

One thing that you said that I'm gonna, like, hone in

on, is when you were talking about how there are certain

traits, or, like, certain things that teachers don't really know

that we don't really need Chat GPT for because I remember in

our class, in Mr. Cole's class, we were talking about how there

will be like, for top writing students, for example, like Chat

GPT or like other forms of like emergent technology, might

actually hinder them when it comes to writing. If they're

like, already strong by themselves, but if you're like,

less strong in that subject, and you're like, relying on Chat

GPT, that's how you get boosted. Just to add on to also, when

you're talking about like, how there's kind of, like, a lack of

a universal idea of like, this is what we want AI to mean for

students, and this is how we're going to implement AI to

students for all different classes, all different like

programs that you might be in. One thing that in particular I

was thinking about is I didn't know before, like, going to like

Mr. Cole his class, that even like the way that you seek Chat

GPT, like prompt wise, it's like you have to be, like, really

specific on it if you want the best of the best results. And

this is coming from I was tasked with, like, using Chat GPT for

most of the school year, for like, helping me with like

essays, or like, helping me with tackling big projects and

bringing them down to smaller levels. So for me to, like, only

have learned that just last quarter that was mean I was

missing, and I'm a sophomore, so I was missing all of like, the

full potential of Chat GPT in freshman year and all three

quarters of my sophomore year. So just going forward, one of

the things that I think teachers should know is that, first off,

make sure everyone knows the fullest capacity, or at least

most of like, what Chat GPT can do, and then working on

implementing it universally to like all students.

Yeah. Thank you. So when we were talking about

what all they're doing in this class, y'all, I found something

really interesting. So they did one of the same assignments that

I did in my course. This is working on my doctorate. They

did that exact same assignment in high school, and that's

looking at science fiction. And science fiction authors have

been giving us warnings and also making predictions for many,

many years. What are some of those lessons, or some of the

things that you guys pulled out that you'd like to share with

our audience today?

So one of the biggest things was actually from the

last science fiction story that we read, which is the best one,

in my opinion, and that is the perfect match by Ken Liu. The

story basically talks about how there is the main character, I

think his name was Psy, and the AI in this setting has evolved

into super intelligence. Basically means that it has a

mind of its own, or like it's able to think on its own. And so

Tilly is able to basically create the perfect life fore in

exchange for giving up all of his privacy to Tilly. And so

what I was seeing was that how AI throughout the whole entire

like, course, we were seeing in these science fiction novels,

how the AI, at first started with, like, the professional.

I'm going to help you with your work. I'm gonna help you with

job, just helping you execute so that you can have more time to

like, be at home, be with your family, chill out, whatever. But

then as you keep on going with these novels, it evolved to now

this AI is like focusing on your personal life. And so how I kind

of see that even now, is that just the other day, one of my

friends was like, joking around about, like, how there are

people who are teenagers who are seeking, like, Chat GPT for

like, venting, or like, telling them about, like, stuff that's

going on personally and so with that, it's like, because, as

Miss reedy was saying earlier, how it's like, the one thing

that, like aI cannot do as well as humans, is make meaning out

of things. So with that being said, teenagers are currently

feeling comfortable enough with AI rather than, let's say, a

school counselor, let's say with a mental health resource, to the

point that they are willing to let an AI make meaning out of

very, very, very emotionally like, very emotionally full,

like, situations. And so what that had me think is like, when

we think about AI, and we think about like, AI evolving and

being implemented into schools and just emergent technology

period, I still think that at the very forefront we should

prioritize mental health. Because if these Amen Right, can

we like, yes daily. Because at the baseline, it's like if we

are not as trustworthy of our mental health resources to the

point that we see teenagers willing to share very

emotionally heavy subjects to AI, then that is something that

we need to call into question when it comes to just schools

across the country and the mental health resource across

the country.

Dr. Patrick Schuermann: Thank all

right panel, so we are coming to our closing

question here, and so in the past, we have gotten some things

wrong. Do you have any insights on how we could learn from some

of those mistakes with our technology in the past, as we

think about our youth, even some of how this has been applied to

schools, and what we might learn from those mistakes and do right

this time,

Dr. Patrick Schuermann: I would say not focusing on one

particular thing right. But I think that the pattern where we

get it wrong might be where we don't keep the focus always,

kind of mission aligned, student focused always the tools, right

are only as powerful as the learning and the experiences

that they catalyze. And everything needs to be focused

on helping to generate creative, compassionate leaders of the

future, right, the jalens and the Maggies of the future. And

whenever we take the eye off of that, and don't understand the

tremendous capacity building that is a part of kind of

leveraging any new technology. That's where we go wrong. But I

know there are plenty of great examples of that

totally agree with that, and I would say, Let's

lean more heavily on the pedagogy we know works really

well. So project based learning, Universal Design for Learning,

inquiry based learning, design thinking, all of these things we

know are really effective strategies, and we've been using

them for decades, for very long time. Let's not move away from

those. Those actually work really, really well. Let's

integrate technology into those and not think of technology as

the next version of that. It's the version that will enhance

what we're already doing. Really, really well, of course,

with the caveat that you are doing those things well, right?

You do want to focus on the student centered pedagogies

rather than the didactic ones and the teacher centered ones.

So you know definitely what Patrick said. But also really

think about the. Pedagogies. And if you think about the teachers

that already know these pedagogies and are very reticent

to implement technology, you're going to find it a lot easier to

approach them and for them to be much more open to technology if

you're coming at the technology through the lens of pedagogy.

And that's really, I think, one of the biggest takeaways that I

have with the changing of technology over the last, you

know, 2030, years is we often look at technology as like the

next thing, rather than the thing that we can enhance what

we're doing really well now.

Dr. Jacob Farinholt: So AI is here now, and so we have the

technology available. And now that it's here, we're looking

at, okay, now, how do we use this responsibly? How do we

develop standardized pedagogy? How do we do all of these things

to enable accessibility and so forth? But we're doing that

after it's been built. We have an opportunity now with quantum

to start doing that ahead of the technology and so really, I

would just advocate for everything that we are trying to

address now with AI, do it for quantum two and do it now so

that when it is available and accessible and useful, we're

doing it right.

Okay, so I want to thank our panel. Y'all did an

amazing job. Jalen for president, like y'all are

fantastic. Let's give them a round of applause. You.

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