Catching Up: Human Connection, AI Hive Minds, and the Skills Gap

Nate McClennen and Mason Pashia unpack a wide-ranging set of ideas shaping the future of learning, from AI “hive minds” and youth relationships with AI to portraits of a graduate, durable skills, and real-world learning. They explore what it means to prepare students for a non-routine economy where judgment, collaboration, agency, and ownership matter more than ever. Along the way, they highlight innovative school models, reflect on new research and reports, and consider how education systems can better connect technical skills, human development, and future-ready experiences.

Outline

• (0:00) Intro
• (13:13) School Spotlights
• (20:52) Preparing Students for the Non-Routine Economy
• (31:34) Durable Skills & Experience Matters Report
• (37:20) Human Expression
• (40:56) What’s That Song?

Intro

Nate McClennen: Hey Mason, it’s time to catch up.

Mason Pashia: Hey Nate, it’s great to see you.

Nate McClennen: It is good to see you. Hey, what are you talking about today?

Mason Pashia: Today we talk about a lot of different things, and they all kind of converge, which is actually one of the topics of today. We talk a lot about AI relationships and how young people are perceiving those tools within their own lives and relationships. And then we spend a hearty dose talking about what kinds of school environments help to build these really critical skills like agency and other transferable skills.

What do you talk about today?

Nate McClennen: Yeah, I love that. We’re gonna dive into some thinking around portraits of graduates and what those look like as states adopt them. We’re gonna talk about this concept of hive minds, so stay tuned if you have no idea what those are. And we’re gonna walk through a handful of school profiles, some schools that I had heard about over the last week that I just think are worthwhile to share, who are on a journey toward creating better learner experiences for all students.

And then finally, diving into some future thinking around what school should look like and thinking about how do we teach to non-routine tasks? How do we teach to connection and human collaboration? And how do we really think about business and entrepreneurship and running things on our own, which are gonna be all enabled in AI futures?

So excited to catch up today, Mason.

Mason Pashia: Likewise. Let’s jump in.

Nate McClennen: I wanna start with this hive mind research paper, which is some obscure research paper, and I can’t remember where I found it. Maybe you sent it to me, but I have no idea where it came from. But the title was, for all our listeners who like complex titles, “Artificial Hive Mind: The Open-Ended Homogeneity Language Models and Beyond.” And so what this paper did is they, maybe we should just stop the podcast here and just let people mull on that title,

Mason Pashia: The “and beyond” in parentheses is doing a lot of work.

Nate McClennen: Right, right, right.

And beyond. Probably AI-created the title, if I can make a guess. But anyway.

Mason Pashia: Totally.

Nate McClennen: What this did, which I thought was interesting and related to education and why I wanna start with it today, is that the paper shows that the large language models, they fed a bunch of questions to all the major language models, and the answers over time, when they ran many, many iterations, tend to collapse onto the same safe, generic answers, even across different model families. And by models, to be really clear, we’re talking about Gemini or Claude or ChatGPT or whatever the case may be. So these larger big companies that are creating models. And so they built this data set of open-ended user questions, and then they measured, like, what were the responses like and analyzed those.

And they were very, very convergent rather than divergent. And so here’s my take on this, is that we are incorporating AI into many, many educational systems. Those AI platforms all are using one of these major, most of them are using one of these major models that are out there, and the models are convergent.

So what I wonder about is, how does that impact AI’s ability to help with creative thinking, divergent thought, entrepreneurial thinking, et cetera, et cetera, if everything is convergent rather than divergent?

The idea of an artificial hive mind, everyone thinking the same, is concerning. And especially if they’re all built on the same model, which is the written internet and the videos on the internet and audio on the internet. So that’s my opening for our artificial hive mind paper. What are your thoughts on that?

Mason Pashia: I think it’s interesting. It feels like it tested something we all kind of assumed just based on what we were saying in the field anyway. But part of me wonders how different this actually is from what’s always been going on, right? Like if people search, you’re gonna get the top 10 ranking Google results, and those are really hard to change over time.

In schools, we have canons of texts that people read, which is in some ways sort of like this narrowing of everything that’s come before into this kind of generic 10 books of To Kill a Mockingbird, Catcher in the Rye, whatever. I just wonder how, I think the sinister underpinning of this is that these models are messaged under the guise of full personalization.

And so everybody thinks they’re getting a different experience, but they’re not. And I think that that is maybe where it becomes tricky when you’re trying to make creative work, is you’re like, I’ve really worked with this model for years and it knows exactly how I think and what I find interesting, but really it might just be doing the same thing to every person.

And that’s where it feels a little more tricky, but I actually think we humans are pretty resilient to the idea of a hive mind. I think we keep trying weird things, doing strange things, wanting to break out from the norm. So I’m hopeful that we will continue to do that. But these models may just need to be viewed as foundational and not personalized.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. Yeah. No, I think that’s helpful. And I think that’s a better optimistic view of humanity, is that sometimes I’m more cynical of, we’re gonna take the easy way out and say, oh, this thing is personalized just for me. And so the idea is just for me, recognizing that it’s actually hive mind.

Like it will be helpful. So let’s rest on the optimism of humanity, that we have always done weird and strange things to help advance humankind and the world writ large and things like that for the better. We’ll rest on that as an opener here. So what do you have for me?

Mason Pashia: Yes, we’ll try to maintain a thread of optimism through all Catching Up episodes, including this one.

Mason Pashia: I’m talking a little bit also about AI in this, but there’s a great new report from the Rhythm Project, that’s RITHM, on youth and how they’re engaging with AI. And I think it did some important survey work of over 2,000 young people between the ages of 13 and 24.

To try and figure out the following questions, which is one, why are young people turning to AI or why aren’t they, whether it’s impacting their preexisting human connections in some meaningful way, and then whether it affects the choice to use AI if they’re worried it’s going to affect those connections.

So I think the research was really good. It kind of broke the survey group into people who use AI a lot, people who never use it, people who would never use it more morally, and there’s one other category that’s kind of in that middle hybrid ground. Ultimately, it just comes down to AI is really not a technology problem. It’s just fundamentally a mattering problem. And what we really need to solve, if we’re gonna actually get around some of this, is just making sure that everybody feels like they matter in a social group. And the report kind of finds that that’s the key takeaway, is we just, people that have resilient relationships that make them feel like they’re seen and matter are really not susceptible. So that’s the report. It’s worth checking out. What does that make you think, Nate?

Nate McClennen: Yeah, I mean, it feels like it’s reinforcing what we know, and we talk about a lot at Getting Smart in our associated landscape, is that human connection matters.

Mason Pashia: For sure.

Nate McClennen: I don’t think it’s gonna solve the problem of loneliness. There’s still gonna be kids out there that are lonely, and we need

Mason Pashia: Totally.

Nate McClennen: to find those kids and help them feel like they belong. And AI is not gonna be a solution for that, I think is what you’re saying as well.

So.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, totally.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. Interesting. OK. Well

Nate McClennen: I’m gonna pivot on our last sort of short intro piece here of, you know, we’ve been talking a lot about outcomes, and this is related in terms of, hey, connection and collaboration we think are important pieces on any portrait of a graduate. But The 74 Million yesterday or 2 days ago had an article on New York, not New York City, but New York as a state and some changes they’re making to graduation requirements.

And this is happening all over the country. And I think this particular article, which we’ve been tracking this a little bit because we work with a school district in New York about a year and a half ago when they were thinking about these potential changes. And what’s happening is New York is basically saying we’re gonna move away from mandatory exams called the Regents Exams.

Mason Pashia: Hmm.

Nate McClennen: There are about nine states. Virginia’s another state that has end-of-year or end-of-high-school exams, things that you have to pass as a graduation requirement. So not end of year, but end of high school. And in the case of Regents Exams, it is in English, mathematics, science and social studies.

Mason Pashia: Hmm.

Nate McClennen: And that’s typical. Virginia is similar. But there’s only about nine states that have these particular pieces. Most others are looking at credits and the courses that you take and then some other particular requirements that may be specific to that state. But the interesting piece to me was the sort of bifurcation of opinions around this.

And so by 2027, Regents Exams will become optional in New York, and the portrait of a graduate accountability, meaning demonstration of proficiency around a New York portrait of a graduate, will become required. So that’s the pivot that’s happening by 2027. So that’s this coming, not this school year, but 2 school years from now.

But the argument, which always concerns me in education, is that suddenly this is going down into, instead of saying, what are the benefits? So the proponents are saying, hey, employers are seeing deficits in these portrait-of-a-graduate-type skills in new employees coming in. They can teach them the skills they need, the technical skills, the writing, the pieces that they need to do to succeed at their job.

But to teach someone collaboration in a bootcamp is really hard. To teach someone creativity in a bootcamp is really hard. So the proponents of the portrait of a graduate, which we believe in, is that these skills are so critical to success that we have to explicitly teach them in our K-12 systems and

Mason Pashia: Hmm.

Nate McClennen: in postsecondary. Now there’s this emerging backlash saying, well, wait a minute. If you’re getting rid of Regents Exams and you’re replacing it with this more fluffy, larger, durable skill set, as they describe it, then you’re watering down and rigor’s declining, and we’re not gonna have the expectations that we had when we had the expectations of graduation exams.

So I worry when we start making this as an either-or type argument, rather than, hey, you could have a portrait of a graduate with durable skills that’s super important and students should be developing portfolios around, and skills associated with the portrait of a graduate because employers are saying that it’s important, democracy demands that students develop these skills, and at the same time, you can still have really high-quality learning experiences that challenge students across multiple disciplines or interdisciplinary work.

And so I really want to make sure that when we see these big-picture news items come forward is that we as educators are continuing to shape the conversation to say, this is not an either-or situation.

Mason Pashia: Yep.

Nate McClennen: It’s a both-and situation: high-quality learning experiences, high expectations for students and development of durable skills.

So I think it’s something to pay attention to as New York, as a state with a lot of students, starts moving this forward.

Mason Pashia: Well, and I think the best way to learn so many of those durable skills is through activities that first and foremost require a technical skill of some kind, whether that be these kind of hard curricular skills or whatever. So it really needs to be not only both-and, but also simultaneous, interdisciplinary, embedded. It needs to be all these things that are even more, I think, intentionally layered than just saying, like, now is the time for, and we’ve seen this time and time again when SEL becomes a class and not a mindset or an approach to a school day. It really fails to be as powerful. It becomes a siloed, like, oh, now I go and work on this part of myself, when really it’s like this has to be integrated all the time.

So totally agree. We can’t silo them. We can’t.

Nate McClennen: So Mason, what I think the challenge is, is that all, I agree with what you said, and there’s an order of operations here. And so in our framework, we talk about the outcomes.

So that’s the portrait of a graduate. But then in the learning model, the how of our framework, the third element, we start talking about how does that become a reality? And I think there’s an order of operations where you establish a portrait of a graduate as the what, the outcomes. You create a set of progressions still within that what element, and then you have to start thinking about what does that look like in the model? And then it gets trickier. Most districts I see at first are saying, let’s create a portfolio. Students have to create artifacts around the portrait of a graduate. So that might be part of the instructional part of the framework or the curriculum. That’s fine. But if the educators are not designing experiences intentionally to integrate a graduate outcome, say collaboration or communication, with a technical skill, say a science standard or whatever the case may be, then that becomes difficult and more contrived. So I think that there’s some

Mason Pashia: Hmm.

Nate McClennen: work to be done, and we’re definitely seeing some success in those areas. But it’s a stretch to start to integrate the core disciplines with the portrait-of-a-graduate competencies.

And that’s the hard work that districts and systems and schools need to do.

Mason Pashia: Totally. That makes a lot of sense.

Nate McClennen: So we’re gonna do, that’s, those are,

School Spotlights

Nate McClennen: those are our short takes, but those tended to turn into deep dives, so sorry about that. All right. Deep dive. Here’s my first deep dive, is that we don’t often use a list of schools as a deep dive, but today I feel like I wanna just talk about a few schools that were interesting.

So I was in Virginia at ODU, Old Dominion University. They have a center there that is the Center for Innovative Teaching and Learning, and they hosted a conference last week and I was able to go and do some presentations and interact with a bunch of people. And I went to a lot of presentations by schools who are doing interesting things, so I just wanted to list a few from there.

And then one other school that I thought was interesting that emerged. So number one, Louisa County Schools in Virginia, a rural school district. And we’ve been long interested in school-based enterprise, and I think we have a bias toward everybody looks outside their school environment for where could work-based learning happen, where could school-based enterprise happen, et cetera. Louisa County Schools did something really interesting in a rural space where there’s not a huge number of partners, although they have 20 or so partners, is that they said we’re gonna start things inside our school that count as work-based learning. So they have a

Mason Pashia: Hmm.

Nate McClennen: car shop that actually takes care of educators’ and teachers’ and administrators’ and staff vehicles as part of their work-based learning experience. They have an early childhood center where if you’re in a CTE early childhood or education track, you get to go work in that CTE or that early childhood center. And by the way, the children in that early childhood center are the children of those who work for the division or the district. So they have a whole IT department that is run by students. And so all these things are internal, and the idea that we can create things within our district and our school that are work-based learning experiences is really powerful, especially in rural schools. So that’s one. So listeners, pay attention to Louisa County Schools, and they’re doing a bunch of other interesting ideas and things that you can see on their website.

Another one that I thought was interesting is we’ve talked a lot and had some interesting conversations around, again, like I mentioned with New York, around the what, the outcomes and these competencies and how to actualize them. And the Academies of Hampton, so this is in Virginia, Hampton City Schools, they have really built out a K-12 journey map with wall-to-wall academies in high school. And so that means for every year, kindergarten, first, second, third, all the way up through 12th grade, there is some connection to the

portrait of a graduate. If you’re in high school,

And they call it, I think, a profile of a learner in the middle school and elementary school. But they’re all tied together, and they have specific learning experiences and capstones all along the way. And at first it starts with understanding self and then understanding community. And then you start to work about and think about professions and what those look like as you get older. But it was a really beautiful, succinct way to think about not just standalone high school academies, but what’s all the pre-work that happens? And again, you can go and look up Academies of Hampton and find the visuals associated with this. But it’s a great model for those who are looking to try to extend outcome progressions back into kindergarten. And what are the, they call them signature experiences, what are the signature experiences at each grade level that help build real-world experiences over time? So I thought that was super cool.

And then another one I saw that was an intriguing way to think about, again, these outcomes in our framework is Virginia Beach at First Colonial High School. So they have a portrait of a graduate, and in order to get excitement around it, they essentially created an optional volunteer system where students can at any point submit evidence against the portrait and they

Mason Pashia: Hmm.

Nate McClennen: do it on a digital platform. And then they also get a sticker.

And so students are accumulating stickers, and as I was listening to this, I was like, oh, that’s interesting. I wonder how sticky this was. And it turns out that students got excited about it and they like it, and they have about, I think they said, about a third of their students routinely submitting experiences against the portrait of a graduate on a volunteer basis.

So it’s not a top-down, you have to do this.

Mason Pashia: Hmm.

Nate McClennen: It’s, let’s see what happens when we just seed the idea and give it as an option. And I like this idea of learning through sort of the coalition of the willing. And this is a great example of that that I hadn’t heard before, where you start as an option, even though you have a POG, you just see what happens when you say, hey students, this would be helpful for you to have a portfolio built. Here’s a way to do it and be recognized for it.

And then finally, the last one, which is in Fort Wayne, Indiana. So leaving Virginia, is called the Amp Lab and worth looking at. They have a wonderful website so you can really get a sense of it. But the Amp Lab is a bunch of sending districts that will send students here for a half day. Students apply, so somewhat like a regional tech center or something along those lines. And they have a set number of seats where they have the Amp Lab, which is general entrepreneurship. They have an Arts Innovation Institute, which is around music and arts. They have robotics and startups at an industry location. And then they have a banking internship with a handful of seats.

And so they created these different labs and institutes that are a different way to look at what a regional sort of

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Nate McClennen: center used to look like. And I love that it’s embedded in co-work and co-design spaces and really worth looking at.

Since it’s opened in August 2022, 300-plus student business ideas launched according to their website, 500-plus industry mentors and 130-plus community partnerships. So really, really powerful way to think about how do you connect with the community? How do you, we’re often looking for really great entrepreneurship examples, and this is certainly a place that is thinking hard about general entrepreneurship, like 400 seats for general entrepreneurship within a system.

So there’s just four different examples, Louisa, Academies of Hampton, Virginia Beach and Amp Lab, that are all worth looking at for interesting parts of both the learning model and outcome side of our framework.

Mason Pashia: Love it. Four school shoutouts. Let’s go. That’s great.

Nate McClennen: Yeah, our goal, to have more school shoutouts. So there you go. And listeners, if you have a school shoutout you want us to feature, just let us know and send us an email. We’d be happy to talk about it if you give us a description of it.

Mason Pashia: Absolutely. That’s super cool. I’m glad that we’re getting to highlight some of these schools from places that may or may not have been mentioned on the platform or on the podcast before. So that’s really exciting, and good job Fort Wayne. That’s a really cool, really cool program.

Nate McClennen: And I think it also just sort of goes back to our hypothesis, Mason, that you and I have had before, is that there is a lot more innovation out there than is typically talked about in the sort of innovation landscape of education. And I think of us at Getting Smart, but also the broader group of people that we work with and interact with, a lot of intermediaries, of how do we make sure we’re amplifying and elevating more examples of, even if it’s bits and parts of the larger comprehensive sort of H3 model or moving H2 to H3, Horizon 2 to Horizon 3, these transition-to-transformational models. We just need to find more opportunities to amplify these stories so we can learn from one another.

Mason Pashia: I love it. Super cool.

Nate McClennen: What do you, what’s your deep dive for me? What’s next?

Mason Pashia: Hmm. Well, we’ve got a little bit of a report stew, like a report goulash, going next where we’re gonna make reports kind of respond to each other, but I think it’s actually best if you kick us off with that one. I know you’ve been talking a lot, but this essay, I think, sets the,

Nate McClennen: Yeah.

Mason Pashia: the water.

Shorts Content

Preparing Students for the Non-Routine Economy

Nate McClennen: Right, right. The Humanist has emerged, and Humanist is, I think, an investor group, but it’s talking a lot about education. And Allison Salisbury wrote an article titled “Preparing Students for the Wrong Economy.” And I’m just finding their essays provocative, and I like provocative essays. And so it is not unusual, the things that they’re talking about. It’s things that we’re thinking about. But her argument is that schools are preparing students for a disappearing routine-based economy. And I was sort of interested in this routine-based economy, especially as AI is reshaping work.

And so we use the word, they use routine-based, I think we’ve used the word compliance, right? So students who are successful at school often are very good at compliance and they’re very good at, quote, doing school, end quote. They’re used to following the rules and doing the things that get them the grades that they want to achieve, the future that they want. And it doesn’t mean that they’re not learning in that process, but it may not set them up well for the world that’s emerging. And I think that’s what Allison Salisbury is arguing in this essay, is that non-routine work, so work that doesn’t have a clear outcome or a clear procedure associated, requires judgment, initiative, problem finding and problem solving. And that’s a whole different set of skills than, Mason, here’s a particular task and here’s how you need to do it. Go do it and do it over and over again. So number one was non-routine work. So how are we preparing in K-12 for that?

Second is applied relational work.

So what is it? And this goes back to our talk on thinking about the Rhythm Project and AI relationships and the human connection. And so

Mason Pashia: Yep.

Nate McClennen: the second one is, how are we preparing students for work that requires connection? So that’s like nursing, trades, advanced manufacturing, things that happen with real people in real environments.

And I would argue that teaching is one of those as well. So that’s number two. And then the third is, how are we helping prepare people for ownership? So ownership of businesses, ownership of ideas, ownership of relationships. Because if you could own something, AI will be able to amplify that ability. You’ll be able to do way more.

And there was an article sometime this week about the first billion-dollar company that has two employees or whatever the case may be because of their use of AI tools, right? So there’s these three things that set the context for this larger deep dive here. How are schools setting students up for non-routine work, relational work and ownership? And I guess I wanna start with that and get a sense of what does this mean for schools? What learning models best support this? And then what is the role of our core and technical skills in this whole milieu?

Mason Pashia: Yeah. It’s super important. I really like that breakdown of this non-routine economy. And I think that’s a useful way to think about it. Tom wrote a great book recently on this topic as well for Getting Smart about the probabilistic agents and that we basically can no longer teach right-answer work. I think that’s very much what Allison’s saying as well. Like we have to be able to build judgment, agency and decision-making in uncertainty because that is fundamentally the space that we’re entering.

I wanna highlight this report that came out recently from our friend Chris Unger and Michael Crawford with America Succeeds and Northeastern, respectively. They’ve been doing some really interesting looks at the environments that facilitate durable skills and how they measure them. So this is kind of getting back to what we were talking about earlier in the episode, but they’ve just put out part two of this really awesome report where they take a look at some folks that we’ve talked about a lot at Getting Smart, like CAPS and Gibson Ek and Da Vinci, and these different school programs that serve really different student populations, really different sizes of learning environments.

But essentially they dug in to figure out how they develop the durable skills, basically how they feel about it and what the schools are doing to actually build them. And I think this speaks pretty directly to the Allison Salisbury essay. So they basically say that you need to have these three distinct pieces in order to actually build these skills and provide this type of agentic learning. So one is the skills need to be highly visible. I think portraits of graduates are a great way to start that conversation. I think employers actually have a long way to go on this conversation as far as defining skills and competencies in ways that schools can actually leverage rather than Google in 2003 saying, we wanna hire creative people, and everyone just being like, what does that mean? So the skills need to be visible to the schools to design and also for the learners so they can name it and claim it.

We’re gonna talk more about that here in a second. The second is they need to be truly authentic learning experiences, which we’ve talked about all the time. But that might be real-world, that might be highly relevant to a specific local context, that might just be something that kind of comes from the learner. It’s something that they’re authentically curious about. It’s something they’re authentically interested in.

And then the last one is this embedded integration into the curriculum. So sort of what we were talking about earlier, it cannot just be this one thing on the side. It has to be kind of laced within all of the things that happen. And basically what they say is these things have these outcomes where the students actually gain the skills, but more than that, they have this kind of collateral that happens, which is agency. They form agency, they form identity and then they form vision. And I think those are like a really interesting sort of sidecar to the rest of this piece and are essential. So I highly recommend that report for seeing some learning models of this in action.

And we’ve again talked about a number of them before at Getting Smart, but they’re often real-world, they’re often highly agentic and they often are using some sort of competency-based measurement system within the school district to really help students be able to name and claim these experiences.

So I’ll stop there for now.

Nate McClennen: What I mean, so makes total sense. Visible skills, so that’s around our outcomes,

Mason Pashia: Yep.

Nate McClennen: authentic experiences and integration of the curriculum. Those are the learning model pieces, and this is what we’re aiming for, right? This is these

Mason Pashia: Yep.

Nate McClennen: models that we know will increase engagement and outcomes, and I think we’re seeing a lot of progress. Help me understand a little bit more that these three, the agency, identity and vision, are those almost super outcomes that are happening because they develop, or are these part of the process? Tell me a little bit more. Help me understand that a little bit more.

Mason Pashia: Yeah, I think that they were not expected to be, because what they were really measuring was the durable skill formation. And so they were asking a bunch of students basically to kind of walk them through their journey of building collaboration as a skill set or building some of these other kind of core 10 durable skills that are in the center of that durable skills wheel.

But what emerged in all those conversations was students reporting an increasing sense of agency that moved exactly parallel to the development of the skill. Same with identity, same with vision. And so there’s sort of these things that just grow at the same time as you’re growing these fundamental skill sets.

And the report does a really, I think, nice job of walking you through these different scenarios. So it’ll be a student at this school and a student at this school, and their experiences are radically different. Even their approach to durable skills is radically different. And yet they’re kind of talking about the same benefits. So check it out for a really good narrative version of what it looks like to be building, naming and claiming skills alongside these other three outcomes.

Nate McClennen: Yeah. I love that. I love this idea that the outcomes are a means to an end, meaning the outcomes are a set of skills, but really what happens is who is the person, the human, that is developing in that process.

Mason Pashia: Yeah.

Nate McClennen: And the idea of agency, as long as agency is a positive-minded agency, or identity and vision, those are the outcomes of who the human is who will interact with the world.

And you’re using the idea that visible skills and authentic experiences and integration of the curriculum are a vehicle to make this development happen. I love that they’re seeing that. And it makes intuitive sense for sure.

Mason Pashia: For sure. And I’ve got a lot of, I have a lot of, I think, agency hot takes, but we won’t get into those today. Maybe we’ll save that for another deep dive in the future on agency. It is a very interesting word that I’m curious to see the longevity of as we also develop AI agents and Silicon Valley’s very fond of the word agency right now, so it is just, it’s an interesting one, but I do.

Nate McClennen: And what are we going to, will the word shift?

Mason Pashia: Right,

Nate McClennen: I think it’s because it is neutral in its approach. Agency doesn’t necessarily have to be. I mean, you

Mason Pashia: Right.

Nate McClennen: can have agency for bad. And so I think there’s an issue of ethics and morality here that also needs to be addressed.

So all right, we’ll see what, that’ll be a placeholder for a new conversation.

Mason Pashia: Totally.

Nate McClennen: Yeah.

Mason Pashia: But I do think, just to say that it is popping up in all these fields. Our friends Fernando Reimers with History Co:Lab and a bunch of other really great folks with LearnerStudio and beyond have really been investigating this idea of civic thriving. That’s a term that they’ve kind of used to actually talk about this intersection of very similar things to these kind of durable skills, agency, identity and vision.

And for them, civic thriving is a critical thing to both save democracy but also help young people develop identity, agency, belonging and purpose through meaningful contribution in their communities. So I think it, and they’ve got these 12 design tenets that they offer in a report that we’ll put in the show notes, but I do think it’s just like anytime there’s a confluence of this stuff across this wide sweep of technology and democracy and classrooms and the workplace, it is something worth paying attention to as a key leading indicator of what’s important. And we’re just continuing to see this pop up time and time again.

Nate McClennen: Right. Right. And it, and it, I think we maybe have talked about this before, but this need, so the force in the nation right now around portraits of graduates

Mason Pashia: Yep.

Nate McClennen: is what does the workforce need? And I think that the civic thriving report asserts that there is this other piece that’s just as important, right?

Mason Pashia: Yep.

Nate McClennen: Is that if we care about how our communities function, we need to be thinking about that just as much as we need to think and be thinking about, you know, does the student get a job where they’re successful because they have durable skills? So I would, I,

Mason Pashia: A hundred percent.

Nate McClennen: broad view, and there’s a huge overlap. The Venn diagram overlap is significant, but it’s often not talked about as much as the workforce part of it.

Mason Pashia: Yep, I agree. And,

Durable Skills & Experience Matters Report

Mason Pashia: our last part of this deep dive today, so we recently put out a report called Experience Matters with our friends at Education Design Lab, which is kind of the latest contribution to our larger credentialing conversation. And I think this actually really ties in nicely to what we were just talking about, actually throughout kind of the whole episode.

So what we wanted to do was we wanted to figure out a way to try and qualify experiences through quality over time. I think when we started, there’s a huge conversation right now on skills credentialing. So maybe you get a credential for being a good critical thinker, or IRCs are another example of this, the industry-recognized credentials. They signify that you can do something, but oftentimes a skill is kind of an empty promise unless there’s a lot of information attached to it, or it has this really wide appeal of trust. Like a CNA is a great example of both, a nursing certificate. It has evidence of a ton of learned and applied skills. It is very trusted in the industry, and as a result, it is one of the few credentials that really, really works time and time again kind of wherever you are.

And so we wanted to investigate what would this look like in a more nimble context where a learner could have an experience like an internship, a service-learning project, a client-connected project, and start to capture the information to make that thing valuable. So the Education Design Lab team had been working in kind of a similar set of questions around validating skills. And they put together this way to evaluate skills kind of along a framework, which is a framework that has a lot of adoption in the U.K. and Australia, primarily in the computer science sector.

And it’s really an internal mobility framework. So what this is, is it’s a level one through seven along three disciplines or domains, one of them being complexity, one being autonomy and then one being influence. And so along each of those, you have these seven levels. And this would be very useful with a visual. We’re doing a town hall on it this week and we’ll have visuals of it soon. But basically you can move from a level one, which is you’re following, so I think of this a lot as like early career-awareness internship-type experiences, to level seven, you’re setting strategy, inspiring and mobilizing. So that’s kind of like senior leadership, CEO-type behavior.

And so within the organization, you can use these criteria to basically set a job description. So you could say one of our entry-level positions is a level one in autonomy, maybe a level two in complexity and a level one in influence. And that’s how they can start to actually talk about job descriptions. They can talk about readiness, they can talk about all this stuff. So this has some widespread appeal. It is working in a lot of contexts, and so we’ve applied it to internship experiences and trying to figure out a common language for educators, learners and employers to use to describe experience types.

So we chose the first three, levels one through three, which is follow, assist and apply. And we’ve decided, and those are the kind of the criteria that a young person could move through to essentially build increasing levels of transferability and skill with regard to an experience that they’re having.

And so I think one of the interesting parts about this framework is the way that it applies to each of the stakeholders, right? Like you could have, this is really useful for the design of an experience. If you’re thinking, I want my learners to have a level two or an assist-type experience in complexity, that would mean that you design a very specific type of experience. And then the educator could go to the employer and say, hey, we need to provide one of these experience types. And then afterwards the learner actually has a language to talk about the experience they just had in a pretty useful way. So the storytelling layer, as you know I care a lot about, but I think that that is like a really critical part of this, where the whole time they are able to see what they’re doing. They have the language to talk about it again, and then ultimately it builds confidence, which I think time and time again is really what we see credentials do. It builds confidence for the employer that the learner can do something. It builds confidence in the learner that they can talk about the thing that they’ve done, and it builds confidence in the education system that it’s preparing people in the right ways to do things with their lives.

So the report has a lot more examples of what this looks like in practice, some places that are maybe trying it. And ultimately the goal is to tuck this into something like an LER or a digital wallet. This would become the metadata infrastructure for recognizing valuable experiences. Kind of wonky, kind of in the weeds, but I think that this really starts to gesture at ways we can capture some of the stuff we were talking about earlier with regard to agency, identity and vision.

Nate McClennen: I mean, I love this. Obviously, I haven’t had a chance to, I’ve looked at this report, and you all have done a great job of trying to take this idea of real-world learning experiences, which captures a lot of things, work-based learning, internships, et cetera, et cetera, apprenticeships, and putting some structure and framing around it that will help with design, evaluation and storytelling, and I think it’s really powerful. And I’m super excited to see, I think along with EDL and Getting Smart, we’re trying to figure out what’s the next step, thinking about pilots of this and to see how students react to this and educators and those that are providing real-world learning experiences.

But it’s a needed part of the infrastructure of our ecosystem in order for this all to work.

Mason Pashia: Yeah. Yep.

Nate McClennen: Excited to see this come out, excited for the town hall coming up, and I think there’s a lot more that will spin off of this idea. And I’m hoping for some pilots in the near future to test out the idea.

Mason Pashia: Me too. Love it.

Nate McClennen: Yeah.

Mason Pashia: Lots of links in the show notes this week. So if there’s one you’re gonna open the transcript of, do this one and make sure you go check out some of these great resources we mentioned.

Nate McClennen: All right,

Human Expression

Nate McClennen: let’s jump to human expression. We’ve gone long today, so human expression, what do you have for me?

Mason Pashia: OK, we’re gonna do, I’m gonna make this faster than I want it to be. OK. So recently Seattle opened the world’s first light rail train built on a floating bridge, which, there, there, there, it’s a beautiful human endeavor for multiple reasons. One, hundreds of thousands of people came out to ride it, which is super exciting. This has been something they wanted to build for a very long time. They messed it up a few times. Two, it’s an incredible feat of human engineering. If you think about a train rail, a train rail has to remain static. And a bridge that is floating is moving on the water. It’s moving with wind, and if you run a bunch of trains and cars on it, the bridge moves again.

So they had to build, invent a new rail that could ebb and flow with tide, wind, cars, et cetera, all on top of concrete filled with air that is floating on water, which is insane.

Nate McClennen: Oh gosh.

Mason Pashia: And then it just, I think it’s just a feat to human measurement, human hands building things that right now machines really cannot do. Pretty incredible. So I’m just, amazing.

Nate McClennen: Does it, I mean, is it gonna save people in Seattle? Because I know

Mason Pashia: Yeah,

Nate McClennen: traffic can be hard, so is this gonna really save time for everybody?

Mason Pashia: it connects Bellevue and Seattle, which are the two cities on either side of Lake Washington, and that is a really major, major time saver, so it’ll be huge. It’s a big one.

Nate McClennen: All right, human ingenuity. Here’s another one for human ingenuity and human. For my shoutout is I was listening to a podcast and they were interviewing the lead of the lab at Harvard that’s understanding aging. And so I’m sort of fascinated. I’m 55, I’m thinking about aging and just thinking about how our bodies change and things like that. And because I was a biochemistry major in undergrad, so I have this favoritism toward interesting biochemical things.

And so when we think about aging, basically this lab is saying that what happens is our genetics get impacted by epigenetic noise, meaning the environment breaks down the DNA in all of our cells. And over time, that causes the coding to go wonky, which then changes cells to make them grow older or be things that they weren’t when they were younger. But their

Mason Pashia: Hmm.

Nate McClennen: argument is that somewhere in our bodies, in every human body, there’s an exact replica of our DNA as it was when we were born. And if they can tap into that coding of what’s the perfect example of, meaning what were you, the youngest example of you, then you can actually tap in and say, oh yeah, here’s the code for this particular cell. I can go get it, match it and then rebuild the thing that’s been broken down by this epigenetic noise.

So I just thought it was a cool way to think about, you know, this is about big data. Essentially our DNA is big data, right?

Mason Pashia: Hmm.

Nate McClennen: And this is about saying, hey, we have a backup copy of this big data somewhere and we can go use that to reboot our particular cells. And so they’ve been experimenting in mice and various other animals, and they can’t create infinite age, but they can slow down the aging process by tapping into the storage of original source code.

So just something interesting. And again, science is fascinating and curiosity and inquiry are good things.

Mason Pashia: This is, add this to the times that Nate has sounded like Rob Lowe on Parks and Recreation, which is a joke I have made before on this podcast. But it is another one where they say he talks about never dying and living forever and it’s amazing.

What’s That Song?

Mason Pashia: Nate, are you ready for this week’s song?

Nate McClennen: I am ready for this week’s song.

Mason Pashia: I feel like in our year of doing this, we’ve learned so much about how an AI platform changes. Because soon every time I go in there, it’s like a different configuration. You have new controls. It’s very interesting what they’re putting behind the paywall.

Nate McClennen: We’re getting like a monthly updated view of the platform, so it’s good. But I’m excited for the song tonight, so let’s go for it.

Mason Pashia: All right, here we go.

Alarm screams first Thumb scrolls before my eyes. Way headline breakfast, coffee goes cold as. Is on this moment, I’m catching.

All right, we’ll stop it there. What you got?

Nate McClennen: It’s some sort of, I mean, I like the baseline in the beginning. It’s got a little bit of Phish in it as well. A bit of driving backbeat, so I’m not sure I could capture a particular artist in this one.

Mason Pashia: That’s pretty good. I was going for something that would not give me, and so we ended up in just like pop-funk, but it is a deep, funky baseline with breakbeats and a big, big pop vocal in the chorus. So you nailed it, named all three elements.

Nate McClennen: I think we’re seeing convergence in our lyrics. Because as you know, you and I both put in a similar prompt,

Mason Pashia: I had the same thought.

So,

Nate McClennen: all right.

Was awesome.

Mason Pashia: Yeah,

Nate McClennen: We get a lot of complexity. Speaking of autonomy, complexity and influence, this is a detailed, detailed Catching Up, so you might have to

Mason Pashia: We do.

Nate McClennen: listen to this one twice, listeners, and/or look at the show notes and transcription to really get it all.

So thanks everybody for listening.

Mason Pashia: Absolutely. Yeah, it’s great to see you, Nate.

Nate McClennen: Yep. See ya, Mason.

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Links

• Watch the full video here
• Artificial Hivemind: The Open-Ended Homogeneity of Language Models (and Beyond)
• Youth, AI, and the Relationships That Shape Them
• Good Riddance to Regents Exams? Or Will Ending Them Leave a Void for N.Y. Grads?
• The Academies Of Hampton
• Amp Lab at Electric Works
• The Pearl Arts Innovation Institute
• Amp Lab at The Refinery
• 3Rivers Federal Credit Union Banking Internship
• Humanist Essay
• Harvard Medical School