The question
Have you ever wanted to learn something, and then someone asked, “Have you asked ChatGPT”?
My thesis is that there’s a very tangible difference between learning some specific thing and learning how to learn. Because the fact is, learning has existed since the beginning of time. We do it without even trying!
We’ve been learning since the day we were born, and we’ll keep learning for the rest of our days, no matter what technology or method of learning happens to be the preferred choice at the time.
But the universal theme around learning is figuring out what makes us curious enough to keep going.
Over history, educators have studied and developed different ways of thinking about how we learn. Pedagogy, for example, is about the general practice of teaching and helping people learn. Meanwhile, andragogy focuses specifically on adult learners, who bring their own experiences and want to understand how to apply things to their everyday lives.
Then there’s heutagogy, or self-determined learning, where the learner takes responsibility for deciding what to learn and how to approach it.
Now, these approaches overlap, but that last one feels especially relevant to what we’re being asked to do with AI right now. We have tools that can explain almost anything, but we’re increasingly responsible for deciding what to even search in the first place. What it is that we want to understand, how to continue prompting, and figuring out what to even do with that information overload.
And that makes me go back to the start - it makes me wonder how we develop the curiosity that keeps us going in the first place. Stated differently, having access to answers doesn’t necessarily make us curious to learn more.
I was listening to an interview with Chris Piech, a Stanford computer science professor who co-created Code in Place to help thousands of people learn programming for free. For him, opening that course was a lesson for him in why motivation is one of the hardest problems in education right now.
The evidence
In one teaching experiment, they found that students were 10% likely to complete the course when they learned using a chatbot. For a class with thousands of enrollments, that’s hundreds of students that drop off.
He also described a prompt offering students 10 minutes with an available teacher right then. found that that students who accepted were 10% more likely to complete the course.
The professor also talked about how, whenever students came into his office hours, talking with them sparked a lot of side conversations. He’d end up going, “Do you want to see something cool?” and go off on a tangent about something he’d discovered or built. The students would feel the passion in what he was sharing and get inspired by what they didn’t even know what possible. And from an educator’s or even a student’s perspective, that light bulb moment is what they’re always looking to recreate at every stage of learning.
I can really relate to that in my own language-learning journey. I probably could learn my target language through a chatbot, but I know for a fact I wouldn’t enjoy it. I’d rather be having a face-to-face conversation and learning about the background of someone I just met, in a language I’m just barely getting to know, because that’s the more fun and motivating part of a language-learning journey to me.
And in a lot of ways, it’s so similar to how we learn at work.
It made me think about how much more effective we are when we pair with someone else to problem-solve. Because talking to a person is a two-way conversation - it develops and expands, goes in different directions and off on tangents, and touches on motivations of both the team and the individuals. And ultimately, it’s a conversation that sparks both connection and curiosity.
Meanwhile in a group or team meeting, I don’t always have to come up with every question myself. Someone else can ask something I hadn’t considered, or get me excited about something I didn’t even know existed, and that gives us all new directions to go pursue.
And that makes me think about how we help kids develop their own curiosity. Their whole life should be filled with light bulb moments, but their curiosity can get so easily stifled when they realize that there are supercomputer phones that adults have access to that can provide the answer to anything with just one search.
But having that access isn’t necessarily going to inspire them to learn more, and more importantly, it’s not going to help them keep going when they’re faced with setbacks, especially with motivation. In school, “Why am I even learning this, am I ever going to use this?” has definitely crossed my mind before.
What to do about it
My takeaway: pairing with AI doesn’t replace everything we get from pairing with a human.
There will always be tradeoffs, and for sure there’s a time and place for each one.
For example, I might pair with an AI in ways that develop my skills - when I want to build prototypes, I can ask it to explain the important concepts and the decisions behind what it’s building.
And on the other hand, I might pair with a human when I need help figuring out why, because motivation is harder to provide than answers. For example in the professor’s teaching experiments, access to an AI tutor didn’t always keep students engaged. But human teachers did - through encouragement, connection, and curiosity.
Build your community
My first challenge is to build your community.
When I think about the people who’ve meant the most to me, what comes up are people who helped me think differently.
They tended to be leaders who excelled at teaching, shared generously about what excited them, and also dug into my own motivations. They inspired me to build my own picture of what’s possible, and push what I’m even capable of. Nowadays, I recognize that’s what I want to make room for with other people, too.
Earlier, I mentioned the word pedagogy, which is actually a combination of the Greek roots “child” and “to lead.” And I like thinking about a community where we take turns in those roles.
Sometimes I’m the curious kid asking why, and sometimes I’m the guide sharing something I’ve figured out. But also, I don’t even need to know everything to help someone figure out something they hadn’t considered.
That’s also what I’d want in a team. A group of people who spark each other’s curiosity, who help each other imagine and do things they wouldn’t have come up with on their own.
Share cool things
Sharing can feel intimidating. Sometimes I hesitate because I don’t think I have anything particularly cool to talk about. And if you’re like me, you might think that other people seem so much more interesting.
But the truth is, you have your own experiences, you have your own stories, and you have your own way of seeing things.
Vinh Giang talks about the value of teaching at the moment before we feel like experts, while we still remember what it was like to struggle with the thing we’re explaining. That resonates with why I’ve been writing so much lately: When I want to explain something to someone else, I want to work through what I actually understand and where I’m still fuzzy, and to me that helps the learning stick.
And again, I don’t need to have mastered the whole subject to share what I’ve figured out so far. Most of what I write is something I want to remember. And if it helps someone else, that’s an added bonus.
So my second challenge is to proactively share what you’ve been up to - specifically, think about what your “Do you want to see something cool?”, and just share it, without people asking!
If you need ideas, think past, present, future. Share what you did, what you’re doing, or what you would like to do. For example, I can share something I learned about learning (like right now). Or I can give you all the details on all the things my team’s working on today, and why that’s impactful. Or I can tell you about my future plans to have a baby.
For me though, what I want to hear is why it matters to you. I want to hear what surprised you, what changed your mind, or what you’re still trying to figure out. That’s the golden nuance that I can’t get from asking ChatGPT.
Ask Why
And my final challenge for the people receiving that “Do you want to see something cool?” moment is to ask questions. And the easiest question of all, if you can’t think of anything else, is “Why?” Why did you choose this and not that? Why does it work that way? Why did you even do this in the first place?
When someone explains why they made a decision, I get to learn how they weighed the options. What mattered most to them, the tradeoffs they accepted, and what might have changed their mind. Over time, that helps me build my own judgment, so I can make a decision like that in my own journey.
And I know for a fact that if you start having conversations like this, and you start asking why, both of your curiosity will expand and multiply as the conversation goes in directions neither of you expected.
We’ll keep learning for the rest of our lives. I want to spend mine around people who make me curious, and help do the same for them.
