Mar
10
Learning to Learn with AI
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it has been a depressing week in a fairly depressing month. The television screens are full of burly men in suits and red ties verbally abusing smaller men in military fatigues. and then I had this dream, in which President Putin demanded Alaska back, pointing out that the sale price to the USA in 1867 of $7.2 million was far too little, the place had always been intended to be part of Russian imperial sovereignty, and anyway he needed the minerals and rare earth. in my dream I think that I suggested to William Seward that we offer him Greenland instead, but I was told that this was already taken.
The other disturbing part of the week was the continued insistence from all quarters that AI was going to be the universal solvent of all problems, economic, social and climatical. And to listen to the news broadcasts one would believe that AI is the sole property of a group of billionaires who are going to use it as a new way to “monetise“ all of our needs and requirements. Yet in the UK, it did seem that the winter was receding at last, there was real evidence of the arrival of spring, and I want to use this blog to spread hopefulness and optimism, despite the pessimism and gendered by every other news bulletin.
So the hopeful theme of the last month and especially of the last week has been education. In my FutureScapes video interview series for Outsell I had the great pleasure of speaking to Professor Rose Luckin, now just retiring from the role of professor of learner centred design at the Institute of education and University College London. One of the pioneers, Rose has, over 30 years, demonstrated the way in which intelligent machines, and more importantly, intelligently used machines ,can support and enhance the learning process. One of the elements of the interview that I loved was her insistence that learning had to be hard. The object of the machine – quite contrary to what you would expect in the smartphone world of today – cannot be a way of reducing the struggle to accomplish a skill or overcome a body of knowledge and gain complete understanding of it. The intelligent machine at your elbow can make it easier, and we spoke at length about personalisation and the way that machines can learn how an individual best learns, and what are the appropriate resources to place in the way of a learner embarking upon the next steps in a learning journey. but facilitating learning cannot involve removing the struggle: knowledge still needs to be hard won.
I have a vision of a world in which the “teacher“ can step away from standing in front of 30 people front of different learning abilities and chalking things on a blackboard, and return to the roles of guru, guide and mentor, maximising individual time face-to-face with individual pupils throughout the learning week. While the politicians shouted about power and the importance of not being “disrespected“ (whatever that may mean) our infrastructure is metaphorically burning down. I learned this week that here in the UK 30% of pupils taking public examinationss at 16 and 18 are supported by a private tutor. I will return to this below, but I am sure that this is emulated in Europe and the US and says to me that these self same politicians are entirely neglectful of our greatest natural resource – the brains of our people.
The tech industries are manifestly at the front of revolution change, emulating and far surpassing the web revolution of the early years of the century. This week I encountered a set of figures from IMPLAN that indicate that every job created in computer storage and equipment leads to the creation of 12.2 jobs in the supply chain that supports it in the USA. A job in motor manufacturing create 6.7 supply chain roles by comparison. In other words we are a society fully committed to interaction with and support from intelligent machines. Last week was the week when Estonia, one of the most advanced education systems in the world, mandated the integration of Chat GPT into the Estonian school curriculum by September 2025. In other words you have to know it and you have to use it.
A press release at the end of the week came as I learned about Medly AI. This refers back to the tutoring issues already mentioned. Two young men, both graduates from UCL, coincidentally, and both trained and now qualified as medical doctors, launched a start-up which has now received $1.7 million in initial funding.(Many congratulations are due as well to the UCL incubator,BaseKX– the Hatchery). Concentrating on the public examinations, Medly AI has created personalised tutoring systems that are proving very effective in getting students qualified at higher grades. Kavi Shamra and Paul Jung should be congratulated . They charge their students £25 a month, or £240 a year. Human tutors can cost f £400-£500 a month. our society, in North America, as in Europe, depends entirely upon getting the best brains and using them effectively. The late developers, the difficult learners, the children characterised as non-academic at age 11 – these are so often the best minds in society when they reach maturity. Medley AI. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/enterprise/news/2025/feb/ucl-startup-raises-ps17-million-bring-ai-private-tutor-more-students) gives them a leg up.
Of course, personalisation is only at its very beginning. Imagine the world in which every toddler receives an intelligent learning machine in childhood which remains with them throughout their lives. A machine which learns the way in which the individual learns, the preferences and the pace. An intelligent machine which can feedback to the teacher in the classroom, while planning ways of lighting up the subject matter using content and techniques which most appeal to the individual learner. In this world, assessment is continual, and the individual gets the confidence of real lifelong learning – that new skills can be acquired at any time alongside new knowledge to cope with the ever changing requirements of living in our digitally designed and networked world.