An Interview with Rose Luckin: Using Artificial Intelligence to Support Human Intelligence and Learning
Rose Luckin is a Professor of Learner Centered Design at the UCL Knowledge Lab in London. She researches how educational technology is designed and how it is evaluated. Professor Luckin is particularly interested in using AI to show teachers and students how people learn and how learning is cognitively, socially and emotionally shaped. She is also the Director of EDUCATE, a hub for Ed-Tech startups in London. In 2017, Rose was named on the Seldon List as one of the 20 most influential people in Education.
She recently sat down with Iridescent CEO Tara Chklovski to discuss her work with education technology, the elements of a good problem, and her advice to staying motivated in the face of setbacks.
Rose Luckin. Source: UCL
Tara Chklovski:Thank you so much for talking to me today. Tell me about the problems you work on and why you chose them.
Rose Luckin: My work is really about trying to help individual learners understand more about themselves and develop a more sophisticated understanding of where knowledge comes from, what evidence is and why they should believe something or not. And then, beyond understanding themselves in terms of their knowledge, also understanding themselves in terms of their emotions, social intelligence and awareness of their physicality in the world.
Most of what I do is trying to understand human intelligence and see how we can use artificial intelligence to help support our own intelligence. I find this increasingly involves talking to broad audiences to help people understand what AI is and what it’s good for.
That’s about half of my time. The other half of my time I spend working with startups and small and medium enterprises, some of whom are using AI to develop tools, techniques or methods that can support teaching and learning. I have a program called EDUCATE, which links startups and SMEs to researchers who are working in an area that’s relevant to them and to educators and learners for whom they are trying to develop — trying to raise the quality of the conversation around evidence and how we know if something works.