My Robot Teacher

myrobotteacher
  • 5.0 (21)
  • Education

What happens when AI crashes into the classroom? When ChatGPT rolled out across the California State University (CSU) system, it sparked a wide range of faculty responses - from panic to full adoption. In My Robot Teacher, CSU professors Taiyo Inoue and Sarah Senk explore how generative AI is disrupting higher education, and what resistance, habituation, and adaptation really look like in real classrooms. My Robot Teacher is a podcast about AI and higher education, hosted by public university professors, produced by editaudio, and sponsored by the California Learning Lab.

  1. 6d ago

    Ep19 - The Math of Thinking Together — with David Spivak

    Applied category theorist and Topos Institute co-founder David Spivak joins Sarah and Taiyo to explore the mathematics of thinking together. They begin with a question that runs through the episode: when does a resemblance between two fields become useful enough to carry knowledge from one into the other? From epidemics and information to the institutional conditions for adopting AI, they explore how recognizing shared structures can open up questions we would not otherwise know to ask. David explains why he helped build an independent research institute around teaching, interdisciplinary work, and practical applications; how “ontology logs,” or Ologs, make our mental models explicit; and why two eyes offer such a useful analogy for collective intelligence. In the closing conversation, Sarah and Taiyo show how they put these ideas to work: recording their discussions, using AI to examine the transcripts, and correcting its interpretations together. A lengthy disagreement about learning becomes a concrete example of how people can hear the same word, mean different things, and gradually learn to understand each other. Also in this episode: What disease transmission and information spread can teach us about borrowing models across disciplines AI adoption as a phase transition: early adopters, connected groups, and institutional conditions When an analogy becomes useful—and why mathematical isomorphism is a more precise idea Why optimizing individual parts can create friction across a system Functors and ologs: translating between mental models and making their structure visible The practical difficulty of turning everyday relationships into formal models What gardening can teach us about abstraction and cultivating learning “Always be recording”: using a conversation archive to trace assumptions and revisit disagreements Why AI mediation becomes useful through shared review, correction, and iteration CHAPTERS 00:00-11:58 - Chapter 1 Introduction: Same Shape, Different Domains 11:59-16:31 - Chapter 2 Topos Institute and a Different Model for Research 16:32-25:01 - Chapter 3 What Is Applied Category Theory? 25:01-28:10 - Chapter 4 Collective Sensemaking and Translating Perspectives 28:11-35:44 - Chapter 5 Ologs: Making Mental Models Explicit 35:45-40:04 - Chapter 6 Seeing Analogies More Easily 40:04-47:31 - Chapter 7 Always Be Recording: Revisiting Conversations and Learning to Think Together My Robot Teacher is hosted by Sarah Senk and Taiyo Inoue, produced by editaudio, and funded by the California Education Learning Lab, incentivizing innovation in teaching and learning in California’s public higher education. 📄 Full transcripts available on Substack: https://calearninglab.substack.com/s/my-robot-teacher-podcast 🌐 More about the show: https://www.myrobotteacher.ai 📨 Email us! myrobotteacherpod@gmail.com 🔔 Subscribe for extras: https://www.youtube.com/@myrobotteacher Follow us: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/myrobotteacher/ X: https://x.com/myrobotteacher Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/myrobotteacher.bsky.social Facebook: https://facebook.com/myrobotteacher Tags/Keywords: David Spivak, category theory, applied category theory, Topos Institute, cross-disciplinary analogies, cross-domain isomorphisms, collective intelligence, AI in education, higher education, AI adoption, diffusion of innovation, phase transitions, abstraction, ontology, ologs, mental models, AI mediation, conversation transcripts, Codex, ChatGPT, Claude, My Robot Teacher, Sarah Senk, Taiyo Inoue, California Education Learning Lab

  2. Sep 2

    Ep18 - What Should Students Still Struggle Through? OpenAI’s Leah Belsky on AI, Agency, and Education’s Future

    What kinds of struggle are essential to learning and what kinds of drudgery should we be happy to hand off to AI? Leah Belsky, who leads education at OpenAI, joins My Robot Teacher to talk about one of the hardest questions facing educators in the age of AI: where to draw the line between productive friction and work that technology can usefully remove. Drawing on her work at OpenAI, her experience at Coursera, and her own life as a parent, Belsky makes the case for preserving the forms of difficulty that actually build understanding while using AI to make learning more accessible, personalized, and manageable. The conversation then widens beyond the individual student to explore what AI might enable at the level of classrooms and groups: collective intelligence, project-based learning, new forms of critique and collaboration, and learning environments in which students become builders rather than spectators. They also discuss age-appropriate guardrails, why secondary education may need to become more interdisciplinary and maker-oriented, what the United States might learn from Estonia’s approach to technology and teacher agency, and why educators who are worried about AI need to engage with it rather than retreat from the conversation. Also in this episode: Where the line falls between productive struggle and educational drudgery Columbia’s CAiSEY project and using AI to make case-based learning more interactive OpenAI’s new tools for study planning, flashcards, quizzes, and other student workflows Why Belsky would not put general-purpose chatbots in the hands of young children The case for teaching high school students to build and create with AI Moving the unit of AI design from the individual learner to the classroom and collective intelligence How AI can make project-based and collaborative learning possible at much greater scale Using AI as a “seminar secretary” to understand how groups think and learn together Why AI may blur traditional professional roles and push education toward greater interdisciplinarity What Estonia’s approach to privacy, teacher empowerment, and student responsibility might teach the United States Why treating AI only as a productivity or cost-cutting tool could undermine education Why educators need firsthand experience with current AI systems before they can meaningfully shape their use CHAPTERS 0:00-6:40 - Chapter 1 Introduction: What Should We Delegate to AI? 6:40-10:23 - Chapter 2 Leah Belsky’s Journey to OpenAI and the Promise of Accessibility 10:23-16:58 - Chapter 3 Drudgery vs. Productive Struggle 16:59-20:35 - Chapter 4 Age-Appropriate AI and Rethinking Secondary Education 20:35-29:59 - Chapter 5 From Individual Agency to Collective Intelligence 30:00-40:05 - Chapter 6 Estonia, the United States, and Two Cultures of Educational Technology 40:07-44:28 - Chapter 7 Risk, Equity, and Why Educators Have to Engage 44:29-50:34 - Chapter 8 Reflections: Codex, Canvas, and the Faculty AI Epiphany My Robot Teacher is hosted by Sarah Senk and Taiyo Inoue, produced by editaudio, and funded by the California Education Learning Lab, incentivizing innovation in teaching and learning in California’s public higher education. 📄 Full transcripts available on Substack: https://calearninglab.substack.com/s/my-robot-teacher-podcast 🌐 More about the show: https://www.myrobotteacher.ai 📨 Email us! myrobotteacherpod@gmail.com 🔔 Subscribe for extras: https://www.youtube.com/@myrobotteacher

  3. Aug 19

    Ep17 - Why UC San Diego Runs Its Own AI: Chancellor Pradeep Khosla on Higher Education’s Future

    UC San Diego Chancellor Pradeep Khosla joins My Robot Teacher to explain why large public universities need to move faster on AI, and why “mandated coordination” may be the wrong way to get there. An internationally renowned electrical and computer engineer and co-chair of the University of California’s AI Steering Committee, Khosla has pushed one of the world’s leading public research universities to build its own AI infrastructure and experiment with new forms of teaching and student support. Khosla takes My Robot Teacher co-hosts Sarah and Taiyo inside UC San Diego’s approach to AI innovation, from building TritonGPT on university-owned computing infrastructure to developing AI tutoring that dramatically reduced failure rates in gateway math courses. He makes the case for shared institutional goals paired with decentralized experimentation: giving faculty, students, and staff the freedom to test ideas, fail quickly, and circulate what they learn. Also in this episode:  Skunkworks,” rapid experimentation, and the value of failing quickly How AI could make personalized education available at a scale universities could never previously afford Why public universities may need to rethink degrees, short-term credentials, and workforce reskilling What residential education still offers when individualized instruction can happen anywhere How AI could become both a great equalizing force and a driver of new inequality 0:00-6:08 - Chapter 1 Introduction 6:09-12:20 - Chapter 2 Triton GPT 12:21-16:43 - Chapter 3 Buy or Rent? 16:48-22:07 - Chapter 4 UCSD’s AI Skunkworks 22:08-24:39 - Chapter 5 Workforce Upskilling 24:40-27:46 -  Chapter 6 Residential Life in Education 27:47-32:48 -  Chapter 7 Elite but Not Elitist Education 32:49-41:31 - Chapter 8 College Preparedness Gaps 41:32-45:33 Chapter 9 Remaining Questions 45:33-55:52 Chapter 10 Reflections on Mandated Coordination  My Robot Teacher is hosted by Sarah Senk and Taiyo Inoue, sponsored by the California Education Learning Lab, and produced by editaudio. 📄 Full transcripts available on Substack: https://calearninglab.substack.com/s/my-robot-teacher-podcast 🌐 More about the show: https://www.myrobotteacher.ai 📨 Email us! myrobotteacherpod@gmail.com 🔔 Subscribe for extras: https://www.youtube.com/@myrobotteacher Follow us: Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/myrobotteacher/ X: https://x.com/myrobotteacher Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/myrobotteacher.bsky.social Facebook: https://facebook.com/myrobotteacher

  4. Aug 5

    Ep16 - Is Learning to Code Still Worth It? John DeNero on Computational Thinking in the Age of AI

    AI can write code, and it writes it well. So what remains worth teaching? UC Berkeley computer scientist John DeNero joins Sarah and Taiyo to make the case for computational thinking — abstraction, decomposition, and the intuition that tells you when an output is wrong — as general education rather than vocational training. Along the way: why programmers get more out of AI coding tools than non-programmers, what an “AI agent” actually is, and why a CS degree is becoming less like a trade and more like a discipline.

  5. Jul 20

    Ep15 - How Can Higher Education Keep Up With AI? C. Edward Watson on Curriculum Reform

    C. Edward Watson, Vice President for Digital Innovation at AAC&U and coauthor of Teaching with AI, joins Sarah and Taiyo to ask how colleges can prepare students for an AI-shaped workplace when both the technology and the workplace itself are still changing. They discuss curricular agility, discipline-specific AI literacy, cognitive sovereignty, and why institutional context should shape how universities teach with AI.

  6. Jun 30

    Ep14 - Why Students Trust ChatGPT: Dr. Julie Carpenter on AI Literacy, Attachment, and Human Learning

    When universities adopt AI at scale, do students learn to treat tools like ChatGPT as authoritative and trustworthy? Dr. Julie Carpenter joins Sarah and Taiyo to unpack AI in education through a sociotechnical lens and ask whether AI literacy can keep up with systems that invite our trust, emotional disclosure, and attachment.

  7. May 29

    Ep13 - How to Talk About AI in Higher Education: April Lawson on Insight Debate & Dialogue

    What are faculty and students actually saying about AI when they are given a structured space to speak honestly? In this episode of My Robot Teacher, Sarah and Taiyo talk with April Lawson, co-founder of Insight Debate & Dialogue, about what she has learned from facilitating structured conversations about AI across colleges and universities. Her work brings faculty, students, staff, and administrators into rooms where the debate can move past pro-AI and anti-AI camps and toward collective sensemaking. Together, they discuss why AI conversations on campuses so often collapse into straw-man versions of “the other side,” how those caricatures make sensible AI policy harder, and what becomes possible when disagreement becomes a source of collective intelligence rather than institutional fracture. My Robot Teacher is hosted by Sarah Senk and Taiyo Inoue, sponsored by the California Education Learning Lab, and produced by editaudio. 📄 Full transcripts available on Substack: https://calearninglab.org/myrobotteacher/ 🌐 More about the show: https://www.myrobotteacher.ai 📨 Email us! myrobotteacherpod@gmail.com 🔔 Subscribe for Extras: https://www.youtube.com/@myrobotteacher

  8. Apr 22

    Ep12 - Querying the Collective Mind - CrowdSmart Co-Founder Kim Polese on Collective Intelligence

    How can AI summon the wisdom of the crowd without the stupidity of the mob? In Episode 12 of My Robot Teacher, Sarah Senk and Taiyo Inoue talk with Kim Polese—co-founder of CrowdSmartAI and Common Good AI—about collective intelligence, deliberative tech, and a different vision of AI: not as a machine for generating answers, but as a facilitator that helps groups think better together. From enterprise strategy and citizen assemblies to seminar pedagogy, the conversation explores what happens when AI stops generating answers and becomes a facilitator for collective intelligence: surfacing tacit knowledge, preserving quieter voices, and helping institutions process forms of disagreement that usually disappear into noise. My Robot Teacher is hosted by Sarah Senk and Taiyo Inoue, sponsored by the California Education Learning Lab, and produced by editaudio. 📄 Full transcripts available on Substack: https://calearninglab.org/myrobotteacher/ 🌐 More about the show: https://www.myrobotteacher.ai 📨 Email us! myrobotteacherpod@gmail.com 🔔 Subscribe for Extras: https://www.youtube.com/@myrobotteacher

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What happens when AI crashes into the classroom? When ChatGPT rolled out across the California State University (CSU) system, it sparked a wide range of faculty responses - from panic to full adoption. In My Robot Teacher, CSU professors Taiyo Inoue and Sarah Senk explore how generative AI is disrupting higher education, and what resistance, habituation, and adaptation really look like in real classrooms. My Robot Teacher is a podcast about AI and higher education, hosted by public university professors, produced by editaudio, and sponsored by the California Learning Lab.

Information

  • Creator
    myrobotteacher
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    20
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © myrobotteacher
  • Show Website
    My Robot Teacher