A little while ago, I realised I'd been designing systems for twenty years without calling it systems design. Apparently, there are a few more things I've been doing without knowing their names.
I've been looking increasingly at roles outside teaching, particularly around learning, technology and AI. One word that keeps appearing is adoption. Not selling a piece of technology. Not simply training somebody to use it. Getting people from "Why would I use this?" to "Oh. I can see how this could be useful."
The more I read about it, the more familiar it feels.
Four AIs walk into a maths lesson...
This week I ran an experiment with my pupils.
I asked them to choose a random number between 1 and 30. Then we asked four different AIs to do the same thing.
All four chose 17.
There was some eye-rolling when I introduced the lesson. That disappeared remarkably quickly.
"17! Go away now!"
"This is getting silly, it's ALWAYS 17."
And then, eventually:
"Oooh, 23... that's different!"
They were invested.
We came back to the experiment the following day. I still hadn't told them why 17 kept appearing.
Then one of them said:
"17 is prime, right? Has that got something to do with it?"
Yes. That's one of the reasons.
More importantly, they'd started forming their own hypotheses. We'd gone from "Why does it keep saying 17?" to "There must be a reason for this" to trying to work out what that reason might be.
We hadn't started with an explanation of algorithmic bias. I hadn't given them a list of reasons why AI-generated answers might not be as random or neutral as they appear.
They experienced something strange first. Then they wanted to understand it. The starter did more work than any explanation I could have given them.
That's a familiar pattern
I've spent years introducing people to new tools, processes and ways of working.
Sometimes that's been pupils. Sometimes colleagues. Sometimes adults I've been supporting one-to-one. Sometimes it's involved testing something that isn't quite finished yet, figuring out where somebody gets stuck, feeding that back, and changing the explanation or process accordingly.
I've always thought of those things separately.
Teaching.
ICT support.
Training.
Troubleshooting.
Resource design.
Beta testing.
Helping somebody work out why the thing they're trying to use isn't doing what they expected it to do. But viewed from outside education, there's a thread running through all of them.
The technology is rarely the difficult bit. The difficult bit is the human standing in front of it.
"Look what this can do" isn't enough
People have perfectly sensible reasons for resisting new technology.
They might not understand what it does. They might not see how it relates to their work. They might have tried something similar before and found it useless. They might worry that they'll get it wrong. They might simply have a perfectly good existing way of doing the job.
Telling somebody that a tool is brilliant doesn't solve any of those problems, neither does showing them fifty features. You have to understand what matters to the person using it.
Sometimes that means demonstrating something immediately relevant. Sometimes it means letting them play. Sometimes it means removing friction. Sometimes it means listening when they tell you that the supposedly brilliant new process has actually made their job harder.
And sometimes, apparently, it means watching a group of teenagers become increasingly furious because another AI has chosen 17.
Maybe the labels matter after all
I've always been slightly suspicious of professional terminology for things that sound suspiciously like common sense. But I've started to appreciate the usefulness of having names for them.
A name lets you recognise a pattern and once I encountered the language of adoption, I started recognising that pattern throughout my own work.
Understand the person.
Understand the problem.
Introduce the tool in a way that makes sense in their context.
Give them a reason to engage with it.
Watch what happens.
Listen when it doesn't work.
Adapt.
Support them until they don't need you standing beside them anymore.
I've been doing versions of that for years, I just thought I was teaching.