Stephen Downes

This is an interview with Tom Sayer from Ello about their effort to build what he calls an AI teacher.The premise of the article is that since teaching requires mastering many little things, all of which go into the overall task of personalizing instruction, it follows that an AI teacher won't be the product of a frontier model, but rather an assemblage of more specialist models. I don't know about that, and in the end the difference probably doesn't matter anyway. I do think from reading this article that Ello is informed by very traditionalist pedagogy. For example: "At Ello, we focus more on core skills in reading, math, and language learning. We'd love to nurture creativity alongside these core skills, but right now, we just want to teach a kid to read. That involves drilling phonics, but it also means engaging a readers' comprehension too, and developing their vocabulary; all the parts of the reading rope."