Technolandy

Day 37a (of 2025/26) thank you @westvanschools for hosting @CUEBC

This morning starts with a keynote by SFU’s Dr Greg Sutherland talking about Technology with Purpose – 

Self-Location is a form of truth-telling which helps build … oops, first Microsoft error of the day… 

Self location is a form of truth-telling, establishing Relational accountability and creating ethical space trust.

The crux is based around Standard 9 (of BC Teachers) ~ all teachers (regardless of subject, grade, etc) contribute towards reconciliation and healing. And reminder that this came out of the work of the Truth & Reconciliation Commission with a) curriculum revision, b) teacher education programs, c) indigenous course credit grad requirements 

Disclaimers

•  Love the reminder that we are generalizing some topics – there are no ‘indigenous practices’ because there are over 200 nations just in BC… each unique and sharing the many perspectives on education.
• ❤️ “these are only my understandings today. I love changing my mind. I love conversations, so I’d love to hear your thoughts.”
• Being cautious of how GenAI enters classrooms doesn’t mean that you don’t support educational change
• We need to balance the mainstream narrative of technology of panacea in education with the Indigenous notion of sufficiency…

What is Gen AI

2023 (MIT) In a huge corpus of text, words and sentences appear sequences with certain dependencies… it learns the patterns of these blocks and text and uses this knowledge to propose what might come next..

2025 (McMaster)

Appropriate use = versatile applications to enhance the learning system… AI has the potential to optimize efficiency, enabling everyone working in BC schools to prioritize student-centred activities.

Indigenous education… competing mandates… Brianna Stusiak: GenAI can be seen as a gift to move us away from so many educational practices that we know to be ineffective and towards better practices…

5Rs:

Reciprocity – learning should be an exchange

Respect – recognizing and honouring Indigenous peoples’ identities, cultures, languages, and worldviews

Relevance – means that education must be meaningful to Indigenous students’ lives and communities

Responsibility – teaching and learning foregrounds responsibilities to the world and how we must learn how to live up to our duties to our ecologies

Relationships – Indigenous Education is relational. Honest , respectful, strong relationships between learners and teacher (including family and community) is the core of teaching and learning.

??s

1. IF GenAI can create stories, images, and ideas that are always available for the taking, how do we use it to teach the spirit of reciprocity?

Love the reminder to be mindful of cultural appreciation vs appropriation… https://technolandy.com/2025/10/22/day-35-of-2025-26-tis-the-season-to-talk-about-costumes-dress-code-edition/

1. IF GenAI was trained on materials without consent, and without adherence to protocols, can it be used respectfully?   “Illegal access lawsuit of work of journalists” <— is it illegal access if published? Does this normalize appropriation?
2. IF GenAI helps students write and think, could it impact students “Right to Reach”? – does it prevent users from honoring themselves as participants in knowledge creation (Landy: or can it enhance it by being a collaborator in exploring young peoples pursuing the question “Who am I?” )

Good reminder that GenAI still relies on ‘predicting what ought to be next’ not (yet) creating what word(s) come next…

3. IF GenAI creates text, and images through statistical probability, does it really know what it is saying, and if not… who is responsible for what it says? (Landy: as with any work submission, does the student understand the content being shared…)

4. How can we build strong relationships with students when we don’t know where their voice ends and GenAI’s begins? 

Fundamental risk of hypocrisy if we are using this technology in opaque ways and we expect students not to do the same… first reaction to good content has become: did they create this? 

A different way forward: Strengthened relationships and extending trust

Talk more about academic integrity… keeps the focus on relationships (landy: which is why we have seen students rebel against “only use AI lessons” because of the value of descriptive feedback by teachers on their work and the value of the relationship being about the learning, not the task completion.

Concrete Practice: teaching about protocols: drumming and storytelling

Modelling care and scholarly ethics…

A concrete practice example: I now promise all of my students that I will not submit their work into GenAI for assessment or authentication,

• Models care for intellectual property
• creates a culture of consent
• Truly informed consent cannot be given with GenAI

Inviting students to bring themselves to their scholarship:

• ask/require students to engage in the work of self-location
• This may include territorial acknowledgments, statements of ancestry, comment on relationship to land

In daily work: students learn to handle the ideas of others with care and respect

• attend to permissions of copyright
• Reach out to the creators of content and ask for permission to use their ideas and images
• Spend the time to trace ideas back to their sources so proper attribution can occur (mom, can I share the story _______ ) 
• Make the effort to learn about identities of authors and assess the appropriateness of the resource

Ethics over content (axiology over epistemology)

ethical obligations of teachers… and students… 

Impact of GenAI on eco-systems

NEED for an ethical curriculum – leaders, cultures of anonymitity, rewarding of dishonesty…. What’s OK?

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Folllowup session…. 

Broad reminder of how discussions should always start with the survivors of IRS – without their stories, none of this Reconcilliation work would have been identified as necessary. 

Possible questions for this session:

Can GenAI enhance individual learning journey by being a collaborator in exploring young peoples pursuing the question “Who am I?”

Thoughts on the ecological impact of using more GenAI

Comparing GenAI to calculators – are both ‘predictive machines’ or is there slightly more differentiating?

Scholars who have raised concerns about over sharing sacred knowledge… what about the other side of the coin – langugae revitalization (first voices) hmm (Landy: will AI help with language – and finally translate LinearA and unpack more of the fabulous Minoan civilization!)

How do we teach AI with ethical learning models (thinking). 

From the room: how do we maintain the importance of the critical thinking lens – and have it come first… not last…?

WHEN do we introduce GenAI? (AI: Start early with curiosity, scaffold ethical awareness, and aim for co-agency by graduation.)

Primary (K–3): Curiosity & Exploration

• Introduce GenAI as a thinking partner, not an answer machine.

• Use teacher-mediated prompts like: “Let’s ask our helper to make up a story about salmon,” then discuss how to evaluate or improve the output.

• Focus on communication, curiosity, and digital citizenship, not productivity.

• Ethical framing: “AI can help us imagine — but we decide what’s true and kind.”

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🌿 Intermediate (Grades 4–7): Inquiry & Reflection

• Learners can start co-creating and revising with AI — for example, generating brainstorms, testing hypotheses, or rewriting with feedback.

• Emphasize metacognition: “What did the AI do well? What would you change?”

• Introduce data and bias awareness — connecting to Social Studies and ADST (“Who made this system? What might it not understand?”).

• Ethical focus: transparency — always naming when AI is used, and why.

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🌳 Middle & Secondary (Grades 8–12): Independence & Ethics-in-Action

• By now, students should treat GenAI as a collaborator or mentor, not a crutch — using it for idea generation, design thinking, or test prep while maintaining authorship.

• Explicit links to Curricular Competencies in English, Science, Career Education, and ADST: inquiry, critical evaluation, and iterative design.

• Ethics becomes applied practice: crediting sources, questioning systems, testing bias, and even designing prompts responsibly.

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🧭 Post-Secondary & Adult Learning: Integration & Innovation

• At this level, GenAI becomes part of professional workflow — coding, writing, simulating, analyzing — but also critiquing the socio-technical systems themselves.

• Ethical framing shifts to stewardship and leadership: using AI to enhance, not replace, human insight and empathy.

Essays were the high point of communicating learning in the Enlightenment era… 1700s… pretty sure there are different ways for students to share their ideas and thinkings… 300 years later maybe we should move on and validate others formats/strategies/etc

SO much of our evaluation and assessment is based on Colonial mindsets – how can we apply some unlearning to better communicate that thing we call literacy?

Does all learning ‘need’ to be archived in a physical form?

Yeah – the discussion here is very lively… AI to decolonize education… 

If AI does essays better than what most of us can create… maybe we explore different formats as well?

If AI writing is just making things sound the same… are we just reaping what we sowed when we planted ideas like ‘hamburger paragraphs’ with a focus on structure Topic Sentence/Descriptive/Supportive/etc did we help create the monster of autonomous writing because we value format over voice?

Fun discussion about AI and assessment – still not reliable (same artifact and rubric repeatedly produces different scores/evaluations)

Is using student samples ethical to share beyond AI collaboration? 

“We” have a casual way of using other peoples work(s)… this is being mirrored in AI tools

If BC’s curriculum is about competencies, then how a learner demonstrates those should be as flexible as what they’re demonstrating.

• A podcast can show synthesis and communication.

• A game mod or simulation can show systems thinking.

• A comic or video essay can show narrative understanding and empathy.

• Even an AI-collaborative piece can reveal meta-awareness and ethical reasoning.

When we still insist on essays as the apex of “academic seriousness,” we’re really grading comfort with an 18th-century genre, not necessarily the 21st-century competencies we claim to value.

Confirmation Bias – many of us in education are thinking the same things and asking some of the same questions… 

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Indigenizing Assessment

– Relationships and Consideration of Self

Gsuterhl@sdfu.ca & Briana Stusiak (Fleetwood Park)

How can we do assessment… 

GenAI very good at products colonial systems have traditionally valued…

With that, “assessment has to chain” and then noticed how FPPL lines up a feedback structure that better benefits the teacher/learner relationship. Do the things that are meaningful and should have been doing.

Assessment should invite students to consider why their work is meaningful and how it will help them meet their ethical obligations. 

Why are we doing this? To what end…? For whom….?

If you don’t have an answer for ‘why this is important’… stop and move on!

Is AI being used for the work that is not respected? If so, why not explore more meaningful work!

Consideration of self:  assessment should invite students to consider themselves as learners and how their experiences shape their understanding.

IN computer science – these are not brand-new, unsolved problems… not about the world needing a solution, but to guide conversations about ‘you and you’re learning from/with this’ = this problem is part of the pathway to understanding. The process is what is important, not the product (but the way we emphasize assessing the product systemically emphasizes the importance of ‘that’) 

With AI being so good at the producing, maybe that is even less the point of education… so we can focus on other things that are important… heck, what is the importance/value of ‘things’. 

GOT TO: get to meaningful for all, not just for me(teacher) or them(student)

Briana share:

Verbal>written

Feedback = dialogue

Building trust and understanding

Talk openly about AI use

Model ethical tool use

Authentic voice: own words, not AI’s

Once again, channeling the Dr Phil saying: How’s that working for you?

Valuing process, not getting bogged down by focusing on (and assessing) products… if you are going to AI to respond with ‘your opinion’… that’s a problem!

Story 2: Interview Assessments

Questions on process

Natural accountability for AI misuse

Relationship-based consequence (not punitive, but accountable) 

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So good to hear confirmations of practice and explorations!