#229 - on AI and Social Mobility

Sep 1, 2021

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Hello again listeners!

Hello everyone and welcome back to The Edtech Podcast. Our mission is to improve the dialogue between ed and tech for better innovation and impact and it’s great to be back.

What's in this episode?

This week we’ve got Thomas Moule, author of Cracking Social Mobility: how AI and other innovations can help to level the playing field, in conversation with TeacherTapp Co-Founder, Laura McInerney. In this episode, he talks about how technology can help to make education more equitable. For example, Intelligent Tutoring Systems enabling all students to enjoy the benefits of private tuition and AI along with other innovations making teachers more productive and effective, hence improving educational standards equitably across the board.

I loved editing this episode and listening to the various pushbacks and qualifications on both sides as the guests navigate contextual admissions, careers advice, and evading technological determinism. I hope you enjoy too. Don’t forget to drop your comments @podcastedtech on twitter or during our clubhouse session.

Guests:

Thomas Moule, author of Cracking Social Mobility: how AI and other innovations can help to level the playing field. Thomas works at Jisc as Product Lead at the National Centre for AI in Tertiary Education and previously led operations at The Institute for Ethical AI in Education, and worked for a leading EdTech company. He started his career as a science teacher, completing the Teach First Programme in Yorkshire. You can find Thomas at @tommoule8 on twitter. Of the biggest myth or foe in education or technology that he would like to see corrected, Thomas writes of the idea that “social mobility is a divisive agenda, which merely aims to airlift the talented few out of poverty whilst neglecting the needs of the many. This characterisation is not only inaccurate, it is dangerous. Talent and potential are distributed equally and abundantly throughout society. The problem is that opportunity is not. Proponents of social mobility simply want this to be put right.”

Laura McInerney, Co-founder of Teacher Tapp, an app that surveys 8000 teachers every day. "No one was more shocked by my GCSE results than my mum, who seemed to think that teachers telling her I was very clever was just them being polite! Going to a bog-standard comprehensive school (that's now closed) and then to an adult education centre (a weird FE hybrid thing) and then to Oxford does make me think that schools can come in many forms and it call all be okay!"