University IT
Mairead Pratschke
AI Frontiers:
Dialogues with Tech Pioneers Podcast
Guest: Mairead Pratschke
Transcript
Any views, discussions, or opinions expressed in this podcast do not represent in any way the opinions or positions of Stanford University, its staff, or its employees.
Don Cameron:
Welcome to the AI Frontiers Podcast, A Dialogue with Tech Pioneers hosted by Stanford University Technology Training. I'm Don Cameron. Joining me is my colleague, Dong Liang, also of Technology Training. We are thrilled to have with us today, Mairead Pratschke, an AI strategist and advisor at Mairead Pratschke Limited, visiting professor at the LSE Data Science Institute, Research Fellow and advisory board member at the AI Institute for adult learning and online education. Mairead is the author of Generative AI in Education, offering critical insights into AI's impact on society, work and learning. Mairead, we appreciate you taking the time from your busy schedule to join us today.
Mairead Pratschke:
It's my absolute pleasure. Thanks for inviting me, guys. Great to see you.
Don Cameron:
No problem. We want to start off with talking about your history and working with technology and education with Gen AI now at the center, and what first sparked your interest in AI for learning?
Mairead Pratschke:
Well, I've spent my entire career in digital education. So I actually started back in 1999 creating online courses in Canada. So I was doing digital education before I did anything, before I did a PhD, before I became a professor. So that's always been kind of my starting point anyway, and I suppose my career has been watching us go from web two to now web four. You know, the transition in technology has been a transition that my own career has, I've been part of it, and I've gone through it and witnessed it and taught and done research as part of that. So AI again, of course, as you know, AI itself is not new at all. AI is older than I am, thankfully. But Gen AI, of course, is the newest version of AI that we're all talking about today. And I suppose I jumped into talking about generative AI because I saw how I saw the impact it was having on my colleagues and educators who maybe didn't have the same digital background that I did, and they seemed, a lot of people, seem to be quite unnerved by its affordances and what it could do. And I thought that maybe someone like me with a background in digital pedagogy and learning design might be able to ground some of what we would do as educators in in that background. So that's that's why I jumped into working on Gen AI. But of course, we've also always had AI in our learning systems, and we've been talking about AI for many decades.
