Preparing Students for an AI-Powered Workforce

How should colleges prepare students for an AI-driven world? In this episode of UMBC Mic’d Up, Dennise Cardona, M.A. ’23, sits down with Professor Ron Wilson from UMBC’s Geographic Information Systems Master’s program to explore how artificial intelligence is reshaping education, critical thinking, and the future workforce.

Wilson shares the powerful moment that inspired him to develop a structured AI framework for his students and faculty—one that treats AI as an assistant, consultant, collaborator, and even tutor. Together, Dennise and Ron discuss how educators can responsibly integrate AI into the classroom while still preserving creativity, critical thinking, and authentic human voice.

Listen now and discover how AI can empower—not replace—human potential.

#AIinEducation #ArtificialIntelligence #HigherEducation #CriticalThinking #UMBC #Podcast #EdTech #Learning #AI #GraduateSchool

Transcript

Dennise Cardona  00:00:00  
Hey, thanks for tuning in to this episode of UMBC Mic'd Up Podcast. I am Dennise Cardona, your host. I am here with Professor Ron Wilson from the Geographic Information Systems Master's program at UMBC. Ron, it's so great to have you here with us today on the podcast.

Ron Wilson  00:00:18  
Thanks for having me back. I've been here a few times, and I always enjoy coming back. It's really, really.. and I'm watching the other ones. I just watched the one from Rex, our DPS director, last week, and it was funny. I just asked him a bunch to meet with him, and he says, "Yeah, I just did a podcast with Dennise, and I was like, "What, really? And I listened to him, like, "Oh, I could have spared him. I could have just listened to this podcast. There's all my answers. That's hilarious.

Dennise Cardona  00:00:44  
Yeah, it's wonderful. And I've always enjoyed our conversations, Ron, both on the podcast and even just in our meetings and our interactions. We always delve into the topic of AI, which I just love that kind of that conversation that we always have, and so, surprise, surprise, listeners, we are going to be talking about AI today, and so I've got some questions for you, Ron, and let's see where this conversation takes us. All right, all right. Well, you recently developed a framework around how we should be using AI in education. What led you to start thinking about this as a more structured way.

Ron Wilson  00:01:23  
Well, we had a student in one of our open house sessions that she was kind of quiet at first, and we got around to question and answer time, and some of the other students went, and then she says she raises her hand, like, oh, you know, Liz, what's your question? She goes, "Well, AI is emerging. If I go into your program, how are you going to protect me against it when I go out in the workforce? And both Dylan and I were stunned by that question. We were taken very much off guard, and we really didn't want to cover it up and say, oh, we have all this grandpa, because we did not. We both knew that we were going to integrate it into our classrooms, but for a student to ask a particular poignant question like that, particularly one that says, How is your program going to protect me, was not even in the realm of questions that I've heard before from from anybody thinking about this, and I had just really kind of taken off on that because I was really interested in this topic anyway, because AI is such a, such a, such a help for me, and particularly my personality, in the way that I think, in the way that I work, but this set me off of this can distinguish the program as my role in the assistant director program role to I have to think about shaping the program, and this was a doozy, and that was the catalyst for it, and I've been working towards that direction since, and developing a framework for putting it to the and I've been slowly rolling it out and we could probably, we'll probably talk a little bit more about that down the line, but we've, we're in the process of integrating it into having our faculty start to integrate it into their classrooms in a systematic way, as well as I'm testing some new things in classrooms pretty deeply now that AI has matured.

Dennise Cardona  00:03:24  
Yeah, and you know, I think from a graduate level perspective, there are some people returning to graduate studies from undergrad, maybe decade, two decades, you know. So this heavy reliance on AI, it can scare some people, because when in an adapt in an academic setting, it can become intimidating to switch back to, hey, we got to use our own voices here, and so you know AI is, in short, made us somewhat lazy in some ways, and I was just talking to you before we got on this podcast about how the help of my intern, my student intern, she's a wonderful, wonderful creative soul. We decided to partner up on creating it's going to be a podcast and blog post about how to use AI without you, without losing your voice, because it's such a beautiful thing that we have these human brains to use, but it's also a beautiful tool. AI is a beautiful tool to work with us, not against us, or not in place of us. So, let's get into some, some questions about, you know, at a high level, AI is AI making learning easier, or do you think that it's actually changing, and what it means to learn, how does it? Is it changing how we learn? How what it means to actually be a learner.

Ron Wilson  00:04:46  
It is changing, and it.. I don't think that it's making learning easier, and I believe from my perspective it's becoming more challenging, less so to the students. They have their own challenges, but for faculty and instructors, I'm still encountering a sort of, I won't say unwillingness, but a just interest, and not figuring out quite how to do it. I've been meeting with our faculty to talk about, hey, how are you going to integrate this into our classrooms and into your, into your classes and your material, and we've kind of set a goal of, like, to get started, they have to integrate at least a third of their class, you know, in the AI in related in some way, and I believe learning there is going to be more challenging, I don't want to say difficult, but it's going to shift the challenge to take away from a lot of rote activities that professors have to do and make them start to think more critically in ways of how can I make the learning work with with AI, how do I decide how much of it becomes the tool for for learning and how much of it becomes my burden to make sense of the material to guide students through to be able to check their work to make sure that they are finding that putting their own voice into it, but they're going to have to restructure. I'm really thinking that, scratching my head here, thinking what was the biggest thing that's going to have the impact everybody keeps focusing on the users, but I think the students, in this case, I think it's going to require the instructors to really redo everything, and that's a daunting task, because they have, and I can tell you, I'm the same way, but I'm a little more enthusiastic than most about this, I kind of look at my assignments, and even this semester I have redone entire assignments over a weekend that are completely AI driven, because I'm testing some things from a couple of scholars out there who are doing this in their classrooms, and they've published work about it, and I've had to, like, these assignments are completely different than what I've done before, and I have to figure out, right, how much do I get them to, you know, find their own voice. How do I measure that? How do they? How do I guide them? How do I make sure that it's not too easy for them? How do I shift it from we used to have to spend more time programming or navigating an interface on a software, and we're having to do less and less to do with that, that creates a void of space, where all right, what's what are you going to do on the subject now? Because, because your budget before was tool learning, critical thinking, subject matter, now it's kind of a lot bigger, and Simon, so it's going to be daunting, because, dude, you know, I often thought in my classes, after a while, I was like, okay, every semester they're on autopilot, because of, like, all I have to do is change the dates, maybe update the data sometimes, you know, keep things more modern and more fun, but now I'm like, they're they're they're they're getting into it with, they need the experience, because I'm still encountering students in there that don't know how to use it, and so on the student side, I think it'll be a little, it'll be less challenging for them, because what I'm seeing is the natural progression of they're there to learn anyway, so there's this sort of slow matriculation into using the tool in ways that are just how you learn in any subject, particularly a technical subject that involves ours, and I have done a couple assignments so far, and even had one student this semester, she dropped me a line offline of the course discussion and said, you know, I had no idea how to use this, and I was not sure what to do with it, but now, with the guidance of your couple of classes, I know what to do now. I know how to start this, and how to think about it, and with the structure that I've, I've written some materials that that we're using, that even our geography department is looking to implement because it sets a structure for doing that, and now I'm implementing that, and the students are finding this sort of natural progression, and they're telling me, yeah, I know how to use this now, so I think it's going to be harder for the professors than the students,

Dennise Cardona  00:09:18  
Yeah, and I think that's a very big challenge from a, I would say, an institution point of view, but you know, you can, you can hear the passion that I know from conversations with you, you have great passion on this subject, and you have a desire, and most all of, I would say everybody that I have on the podcast, all the faculty, they have this desire to see their students succeed. I mean, that's why you all are here, is because you want to bring, you want to help them level up, you want to help bring them into the world into a way where they can just, you know, gosh, they can just take off running, even while they're in graduate school. So that's that applied portion, portion of. Our academic standards, that to me, as a graduate student, you know, I graduated in 2023 That was the best part about being a graduate student at UMBC, is that applied version. I can go out there and apply this in the world the next day after class, and it sounds like, you know, with you, your approach to AI, and working it into the curriculum, that you're enabling this with your students as well. You're teaching them how to responsibly and ethically use AI in a workplace environment. 

Ron Wilson  00:10:32  
So far, what I'm hearing, you know, so she's, you said she was able to take it right out and work with it, and they had a client that they were working with. It was a little bit of the AI that helped, but also the subject matter of the course, but she was like, I know what to do with this now. She says she has a long way to go, you know, way to go, like anybody does, but it's, it's, it's hitting the, it's hitting the hit in the ground.

Dennise Cardona  00:10:53  
Yeah, that's fabulous. And you at work, Ron, you describe AI as an assistant, a consultant, or even a collaborator, can you walk us through those roles in a simple way?

Ron Wilson  00:11:06  
Okay, yeah. I mean, I developed this because I was like, I was having to figure, I was like, how am I going to get the student to think about using this, and so I thought about it, and after a while, I started going, oh, how would you, you know, what would you do with this, is, and I started thinking, well, how am I using it? Well, I'm using this thing to assist me, and I'm like, oh, yes, I'm getting this thing to assist me to do something. It's basically saying I need this task done, please do this. A lot of times it's coding, sometimes it's like to give me a base level of knowledge on a topic that I was like, okay, I can start with this, and they've done a lot of the ground, or get me some citations for a topic, and so that I can review them, and say, okay, please fetch me these papers, because I'm doing them therapy coding. I'm like, I did this, I needed to do this probability-based code for me to do this, to do this analysis that I was doing that, would have taken me months to do, because I didn't know the data structures as much as I'd like. I could have used another tool, I'm sure, but I worked with it, and it as an assistant, like, give me the code to do that, and I shifted my brain to, like, checking it, make sure that it worked for my statistical knowledge and cross-referencing. So that's the way I use it as an assistant, so I've written a document about this that's structuring our program, and in that, there's the assistant, the collaborator, and the consultant, and there's a little more to that than since I last talked with you, because I had to figure out what this actually meant with students, because I didn't think it quite mapped completely to that, so the collaborator, or the consultant, is just like you would at work, like I'm not an expert in this topic. I need to hire somebody, or I need to go to somebody and pay them to say, 'Hey, I don't know much about this topic. I need your input, I need your advice, I need your insight, I need your expertise about applying this to this particular problem. So, an interdisciplinary subject like geography and GIS we kind of have that same thing, because we have students coming in from environmental, we have them coming in from physical, we have them coming in from urban conservation, socio-social, criminology, epidemiology, and they can't all know topics and everything, so when I give them tasks to do, they have to consult with the AR, or do their research. Where usually I'd have to have to send them out and say, read these papers on this subject, like housing and crime, or foreclosures, or, you know, rodents in New York, and how they're attracted to certain places. Well, I can get them to work with the AI now to be a consultant to say, hey, you know, here's this, here's some information on this subject, and how might I approach studying this, or what are some, what are some things? I'm not an expert in this, I'm an environmental scientist, I don't know how to approach an urban problem, so it works in the sense of being a consultant to say I'm not an expert in this subject, same way with learning to use the GIS, is like my professor wants me to do this, but I'm not quite sure how to, so that's not quite an assistant, that's somebody saying here's a number of ways that you can do it, and here's why, and how the collaborator then is the one who helps you develop a project materials together, where I think you've done this, you were sort of mentioned I've certainly done it, where I've like, all right, I'm working on this topic. I will give, like, if you look in the notes that I wrote for our podcast here, a lot of that was generated by me, and I will send that into the AI and say, help me write this out, help me iron it out. And I always prompt it with ways to say, please don't sugarcoat everything, I want you to be critiqued. I try not to get it to be negative. I think about the whole line in, like, the movie - I'm forgetting the name of the movie off the top of my head - but it's like always going to be positive, because you'll get better results from being positive than the negative. Don't, don't be like overly critique, or don't be, you know, and. Anything negative, and when it does that, it comes out with more honest and more. I, some, I have to back it off from being too nice sometimes, but I want it to be critical, and it'll help me write, and I'll say I'll work at something, and I'll take what they give, I'll tell it, I want to keep my voice, I want to keep these particular things, but it's still, and it gives me something back. Sometimes I'll have it write paragraphs for me, and I'll edit it, and sometimes I'll write them and have them have it help me reshape that, and so this, so it creates a product together. Same way with the coding, like it'll give me code, but I will have to rework that code to be more long one, what I have to do, and string it together, so it becomes more of a collaborator than it wrote this particular program for me. Now that got me thinking, it was like something was still missing with this, and by the way, just to say it, I had come up with this idea myself, but then I read this. This is Malik, this is a guy in Pennsylvania, where I've got some of my assignment ideas from,

Ron Wilson  00:16:04  
he doesn't put it out there as assistant consultant collaborator, but he does assign these particular roles to think about approaching it in a very similar way. So, I don't want to say this was all my idea, I did come up with my idea independently, and not all of mine are his, and not all his are mine, but it was a good guy, and it was nice to know, is like, okay, I guess I am thinking on the right track here, because if somebody who's a scholar at Penn State University, who's doing this, I'm like, yeah, this is this, I'm on the right track. So I started thinking about, okay, but what does that mean for students, because they're learning, I'm a professional, and I've been thinking about that whole structure in terms of a professional. So then I said, okay, each one of these can shift into what's called I would call tutor mode, where you work with it to be a in a sit, an assistant, a collaborator, consultant, but they are there critiquing you along the way, they are guiding you, they were helping you make decisions about and assessing what you're doing in a critique way. Now you got to guide it to do that. So, shifting into tutor mode is more of you shifting it into tutor mode, or setting up the agent or the AI to be that way, because, as you know, you can set the parameters of how this thing is to interact with you, and that's where you got to think about setting it up in tutor mode, but then the final piece of it is like, in the end, how do you make sure that you get it, you know, the voice in there, and this is where I think about my role as an editor for a journal section that I'd been doing, and with that, what I had done was think about it. Well, I'm a content and copy editor, as that, as that chief editor for that section of the journal. So, being a content editor means you got to get in there and just like you did with a red pen and paper, get in there and say, all right, this isn't quite right. You're kind of doing that when you're shaping it with a collab as a collaborator, or you, because you're making sure the contents right, but then you got to go into copy editor mode, and copy editor mode is reading line by line, making sure that it's flows, it's logical, the grammar is correct, and that's where you're really picking apart things and changing language to really be more of you, so you got to stick to that, and it's not everybody's going to necessarily do that, but that's sort of my ideal framework for implementing this into a program. We can give that to all of our faculty and say this is the way we're going to operate, and then I start working with them to say, okay, how are you going to do each one of these things in your class?

Dennise Cardona  00:18:45  
Yeah, and I firmly believe that the academic institution has a huge responsibility to bring students up to speed on using AI in this, in this responsible manner, because I fear, and I think many people fear, lose, we're losing our voices out there, we're losing that human voice, and everything that it just seems like it's regurgitated stuff that comes out of AI, and as a professor, that's that must be very, oh, that must be very disappointing and discouraging and boring to review papers that are written by AI, and you know it, there's a pattern, there's a cadence to those, to those sentences, to the words used. It just, it's dulling to the mind. I mean, I find myself constantly looking at stuff and going, "Oh, I'm just not even going to watch this, or "I'm not going to read this, because I can tell it's not a human voice, and it's, it, it just turns, it just kind of turns me off from reading it, and so that's why I say academic institutions starting, of course, with professors' willingness to to work with their students in helping them to work with AI in a responsible manner and. I mean, by that, is not losing their voice, continuing to use their creative, beautiful brains to work with AI in the ways that you just described, and if people can learn to do that, we won't, you, we won't lose our human aspect to intellect,

Ron Wilson  00:20:19  
And I think students are going to do that, I think. Once they realize what they're more capable of, they're going to enjoy using it more, because they really can free themselves from the things that are the drudgery work that they can do for analysis. And you know, because I asked my students, I'm like, What are you here for? Are you here for coding, or are you here for analysis? They all raise their hand. We're here for analysis, and I'm like, well, great. We're going to free you up with some of that. You're still gonna have to learn how to code. You're not going to escape that, but you are going to be doing less of, and rely, and not spend as much time on it. So, it frees you up to do the thing you really here to do.

Dennise Cardona  00:20:59  
I love the way you just put that, frees you up, because that's exactly what, for me, that's how I use AI. It frees me up from those tasks that really don't need that human element necessarily. It brings, it allows you to springboard now to more higher level type of assignments and contributions. Now, speaking of assignments, you mentioned seeing an assignment at a conference that really stood out to you, one that focused on building an analytical workflow with AI. What caught your attention about that?

Ron Wilson  00:21:32  
It was basically that this professor, they were using Malik's work and what they had done, and that's where I got in on this, was they basically give students an assignment in class that seems impossible to do where they are at their skill levels, and I've even, so I've implemented this in my class already, I did it in the last couple of classes, where I did a two-parter, because there's two scholars for this, Eden Malik, and another one, Cohen, who's an economist. A lot of my background is economics, so I have a foot in that world a bit. And they do the same thing, but it's a different approach, and the same thing is, is that it's we're going to give you an impossible task, and you're to get it done, and you're going to use AI to help you get it done in one of the ways that I just described. Now, Cohen never laid out the whole thing about it's an assistant, it's a person, it's a consultant, you know, like Malik had done, and like I have done, but he still takes the same approach as, like, we're going to give you an impossible task, you're going to solve it, and you're going to put your own voice in there, and so I, and that's what they

Ron Wilson  00:22:44  
did, and it was like students are like my, I didn't see what their students, they were discussing this at this conference, and so I did, and when I told my students, would they learn how to use the R programming language, and the first two classes were all about, here's our, here's how to navigate it, here's how to set it up, here's how to get data in, here's how you make use of the tools in here, and they'd written a program on their own with some help, some AI, but it was still them doing a lot of the coding, because they had to rewire it, and so they knew kind of how rough that was so. When I told them I like, you're going to write this program, it's going to calculate this statistic, it's going to check the data, it's going to evaluate, it's going to visualize, and it's going to output the data at the end, so that you can bring it into our mapping software, and they're like, what in this class before we leave two hours, yes, and they were just kind of shocked and stunned, and like, how are we going to do this? And so, what I was measuring, so by doing that, what I was measuring was, I have 11 students, and I said, I want you to send me everything you have by the time you get done, and many of them were able to finish the task, and they were like, I didn't believe I could have done this, and they not only had to get the task done, but they had to talk about what was going on in each step. So this is how the learning parts go. They used eight, they were using AI to get each step done, and they were having to document what it was doing, not so much what the code was doing, but what that step was doing. So, what I was looking at was the variation of how many got this far, how many got that far, how many got all the way here, and how many got finished, but and just to see how much they could really do, but they were still even the ones who didn't finish, like I didn't think I'd get that far, and then they had the rest of the weekend to finish it up, and they're like, I did it. The other part, so the second part of the assignment was following Cohen, who basically says, tells the students, now both of these folks give them a framework, it's not like just go and do this, so they give them a framework to work within. So Cohen's model is, it's like I'm going to give you an assignment, you take it home, do it, figure it out, get on your Discord, we use Discord, or contact me, but you're going to use the AI, and you're going to solve this problem, and you're going to demonstrate that you're involved in it, not only by connecting it, like in similar ways that I do, where they have to talk about the subject reference the data, their analytical question, and the geography, but then also it's like, How did you use the AI to solve this? So they have to talk about it too. So again, it was a big assignment, you know. You know, it's like, you really want us to do this by next week? We don't understand, it's like, but that's the point, is to, you know, they do this in, in like police and military training, like, they, they push you beyond a limit that you think I'm not capable of getting past, and you can go really far past it. Same way with sports, or anything, you know, that anything that pushes you to be, you know, an exceptional professional in what you do pushes you beyond your limits. So that was their model, and I did that, and I may have been able to measure how much they've been able to get done, and they've been shocked that they've been able to do it, and they've demonstrated to me that, well, most of them demonstrated to me that they used it like their one. There's a couple that, and this is part of the learning process, you learn the markers of people who are not using it in the ways that that that you'd like, or is the intent, but they all talked about it, like in the end they talked about making a map of this output in their thing, and part of what I did with, like, Cohen was, 'Hey, tell me how you used AI, and they almost all of them were like, 'Well, we use, we consulted with AI about using these mapping patterns, and most of them rejected what the AI said, and they told me why they rejected it and why theirs was was better, and that was it. So that's that's me, that's my implementation in the classroom at this particular point.

Dennise Cardona  00:26:58  
It really does enable critical thinking, and you know, from an instructional point of view, mastery does this change how we define mastery at this point?

Ron Wilson  00:27:08  
Oh, I like that. Yeah, I hadn't thought about that, but that's it. That's what it's going to - is it's like it's giving you that time to, to, to, yes, to.. I can't quite put the words together, but, but to master something, to achieve mastery in a way beyond what we've been able to particularly do, that right? Is that what you're thinking?

Dennise Cardona  00:27:29  
Yeah, absolutely. Something that you said earlier struck me as well. I meant to say, when you were talking about pushing people beyond what they think is they're capable of, there is this segment that I saw from Tony Robbins. He's a motivational speaker. You may have heard of him. Listeners may have heard of him. Anyway, he was doing this exercise with somebody where he asked him to like point their finger and reach as far back as you can into wherever backwards, and he had them do it once, and then what he said was okay, regroup, and now what I want you to do is imagine that you go into the, you know, the three quarters of a way around the room and see if you can do that, and then all of a sudden the person that illustrated it went all the way around and was able to point like almost three quarters or three quarters around because they visualized it, they envisioned it, but they also were pushed beyond what they thought they were capable of, and when we do that, the output is amazing.

Ron Wilson  00:28:30  
I've been really happy with most of the what the students have been producing.

Dennise Cardona  00:28:34  
Yeah, it creates a feeling of empowerment, and as instructors, that's really what the goal is, right, to empower students.

Ron Wilson  00:28:42  
That's the assignment that the student came back and they said, I had no idea how to use it. And from that, that experience, they're they've gone into the workforce now. It's like, okay, I know how to use this better.

Dennise Cardona  00:28:54  
Yeah, that's really, really fascinating. What does strong AI use look like from a student today.

Ron Wilson  00:29:06  
I'm going to start with, so I know there's a two-part question, as a strong and a weak one. I'll start with a strong one, the ones that are doing it as I've been reading about and envisioning, where so back to the assignment, a number of the students, who most of them, they were going, so the assignment in class was here's 20 steps in a method, and they were going one by one by one by one, and they were writing down what they was doing along the way, they were struggling with it, they were not taking anything for granted, and they wanted, they to me, they did what you know, particularly in coding, what a lot of us who have been trained in more formal software development environments is. Do small steps, make sure it works, error check it, and then move on. And that's what they're doing, and they're, and they were assessing it along the way, and they were writing about it, describing what it was doing. And because I've given them the requirements to make sure that their voice is in there, they were taking it very slowly, very critically, they were asking questions, they were interacting with so a strong one is taking on that role, taking on that responsibility of making sure they understand something before they move on, rather than just let the thing spit out, and that's where the weak student is, where they just, I had a couple of students, but one of them did it right with the way that I would, would prefer to be a strong student, and the other one didn't. So the one of them, and I tested this before, and I was, I was surprised, because I did it last year, but one of them just took the whole set of instructions and said write it, and it did, and it was correct in terms of technical, but the one student said fine, that works, I got the output, now they're going back through and writing about what each step was to do, and so I'm okay with that. I really appreciated the, like, you know, the like, look before you leap, and just do it. And they went back and assessed it, because I often will write like that, where I've never had writer's block ever. I've poured so much on paper, and to get back to, and that's why I don't mind AI, although, again, they get back off sometimes. How much it regurgitates out to go back and then clean it all up, so that's what, so, so, that's what this student had done, and I was okay with that, because they, you know, so the assignment was completed, but they were systematically working their way through it. This other student, I gave them the assignment, which they were supposed to do in, you know, two and a half hours. They were done in 20 minutes, submit it, and said, "Is that it? So they really provided an example of the least best way to use it, because the idea was, you know, look at the go get open data, there's a whole bunch of variables in here, find two that are going to work well together to map, do an analysis of them, and they basically took the approach of, okay, got data, I examine these data, this one has the least amount of missing data, this one's clean, this one has no anomalies, this one has all the parameters, this one goes with this one, and it's the AI is doing all this, so, so it was basically check, check, check, check. Okay, this must be the best one to map these, these two data sets. And then they moved on, they did this part, and I said, well, this part of the part of the geography is the best one to look at, because it's check, check, check, check, check. So they just used it in a technical way, that there was no, there wasn't really much thought in there about why am I going to map these. The qualitative part was missing, the analytical human was missing in it, where the other student, who did the full thing, they were going through, they let the machine do it what it does best and spit it out, and they were going back and assessing it to say, okay, is this doing what I wanted to do, and then started modifying it, because it's like, okay, these two data sets may work out, but I'm not sure they're really the most interesting ones to really look at, even though the AI says, hey, these, these two go together, you know, because there's literature out there for that, but you know, there was no, they were picking the analytical objective, the other student was letting the AI pick the analytical objectives, like, oh, these two work out great, so let's just pick those, so that's the difference between a strong and a weak student, there as a concrete recent example,

Dennise Cardona  00:33:58  
That's really powerful, thanks for explaining that, so I'm a writer by trade, marketing writer, and it's, it's so easy to just say, "Hey, just write me a blog post about personal development, you know, how to, whatever, just write me a blog post on personal development, and then it spits out a bunch of stuff that you know it's just regurgitated stuff, and so, but what I love about what you said is you actually are okay with somebody doing that, but then from there putting their own twist to it, think, thinking about why it said a certain thing, and either removing it because it's complete garbage, or adding to it with their own voice, and you know, because a blank page is a real thing for so many people, and it really prevents them from moving forward. It's that procrastination, it keeps people in a procrastination state. So, anything that can avoid that, I think it's great. It's a great tool for that. People do not have to have a blank page anymore, but it's. It's so critical to be able to go in there now, and, and do something with that, with that stuff, whether it's complete garbage, and you have to rewrite the whole thing yourself anyway, but it may offer some kind of foundation from which to grow.

Ron Wilson  00:35:14  
Yeah, and I want to follow up with that other student who just did it, and let it pick everything, you know, that's that's where, as me, as an instructor, I have to grow because I have to say, oh, I need to prevent that. Now that I've seen a student do something like that, I can't really fault them, because if they really, you know, there's a different type of thinking amongst, you know, everybody, and maybe the student was just kind of like, oh, he just wants me to do that, and so this is where I have to take that experience and say, okay, I need to be more clear, where even though that most of the other students got the intent from what I was trying, some people need more explicit do this, this, and this, and so that's where I have to grow and make sure that doesn't happen again, that's where I have to approach the student and say, hey, this isn't quite what I was thinking, and I need you to go back and add these kinds of thoughts to this in this process, because that's really what I'm trying to get you to do. So, for me, it really isn't a knock on the student, and when I say, when I, when I say that there's a weak student, I don't want to say that they're weak-minded or lazy, they just, they just, they just took a different approach that did not meet the intent of the assignment, and where I have to say, okay, I need to prevent that. So this is, this is all back to what I was saying earlier, where there's going to be a lot more of a challenge to the instructors for this, because the other thing, too, you have to do with that is not make them feel like they're cheating or they did wrong, because they don't want the student to feel like they did anything wrong, because that kind of, that's an off-putting thing, and that's not a positive reinforcement for using the technology, whether they, they're embracing it or not, it's just not something that's an educational pillar, if you, if you will. So, this is where you're so next time I do that, you know, I know to put that in my assignments, like, "Here's the intent, don't do this if you do this, here's what you need to do afterwards.

Dennise Cardona  00:37:16  
So, right, what skills do you think are going to matter most in the next few years,

Ron Wilson  00:37:23  
I don't want to default to critical thinking, because I think it's just a big, nebulous sort of abstract contract we all do that, but it's going to be the the ability to interweave AI into your work that is that balances the two that will you learn how to use it as a force multiplier for what you're intellectually capable of, you're going to, it's going to require learning how to expand your thinking and making use of time that you're not normally used to be using, so it's going to be time management with work, it's going to be getting into exploring more, where I don't think we get a lot of time to do that, so I don't necessarily think those are critical thinking skills. I think critical thinking skills are like examining, interrogating everything. I'm talking more about tool and time management. I think that's where we're really going to need to emphasize skills and communication, because you know it's going to take learning to co copy edit, it's going to learn to take communicating with the people you're presenting this to, so communication, time management, tool management, that's really where I think the skills are going to have to grow.

Dennise Cardona  00:38:45  
If you could give one piece of advice to students that are learning in an AI-driven world, what would that be?

Ron Wilson  00:38:54  
I would just say, go for it. I mean, I remember in, I was taking Turkish one time, and our instructor would go regularly have us like put us on the spot and just do it, and those students who are most successful were the ones who just dove in, and they find again they're like when they get into a flow where it just clicks, or enough times that it's really rolls off, and it just really comes out, and I, and she said, I remember, she says, 'You see, sometimes you just got to go for it, and it happens, and you're like, 'Wow, I broke past that barrier. That's my piece of advice. You're not going to escape this. I know there's challenges with it. I know there's concerns with, you know, what it's going to do to the workforce, which I'm not seeing materialize. There is some impact there, but I'm not seeing this overall thing, so, but it's not going to be avoidable. You're going to have to learn how to, you're going to have to learn how to do it. I'm not sure if you know the students that I'm seeing are. Encountered right now are being asked, can they use AI when they're a recent job that I knew of, they're asking that, but many I'm not really hearing that, especially at the local level and everything, but they're going to ask that. So just go for it, go for it, and be ready, because they're going to ask you eventually, and when you get in there, find training for it, and get it.

Dennise Cardona  00:40:27  
Ron, thanks so much for this incredible conversation. As I said earlier, I love talking about AI with you, so thanks for sharing your insights. It's really.. it's just.. it's fun to hear what you have to think and what you have to say. I should say, and students are.. I'm telling you, what students are very, very fortunate to have you as their instructor.

Ron Wilson  00:40:47  
Yeah, I'm fortunate to have them. I've been enjoying it. It's been a challenge coming into the more traditional university, but I'm.. I'm loving it.

Dennise Cardona  00:40:57  
And thanks, everyone, for tuning in to this episode of UMBC Mic'd Up podcast. I hope you enjoyed it. If you'd like to learn more about our offerings, click the link in the show notes. Thank you so much.