Recently and with the help of other AI tools, I had the pleasure of generating a detailed review of a relevant study on AI in Education published by INTEF. There were certain aspects that I wanted to highlight about the peculiarities, benefits and potential contradictions as well as a personal touch composed of a few suggestions.
Today I wanted to bring here another tool that, due to its human touch, I sense could become a new standard for understanding information, knowledge produced by others, and even by oneself: NotebookLM by Google. This tool mainly allows you to do two main things:
- To generate a podcast (for now only in English) of two people chatting about the sources you provide them, and I must admit, the conversations are quite clear;
- To be able to chat with the AI about those sources to answer questions or build upon them.
Let me tell you about my brief experiment in case it could help you in your personal and professional processes:
The two reports
As an introduction to NotebookLM I have chosen to continue exploring the aforementioned previous guide, that is, Guide on the use of Artificial Intelligence in the Educational Field of INTEF but adding a new guide, in this case a framework, from the Australian government: Australian Framework for Generative Artificial Intelligence in Schools
The first source, that is, the Guide on the use of Artificial Intelligence in the Educational Field, is an analysis as well as a manual for the use of AI in all strata of the educational field, that is, it is VERY complete. The Australian framework for Generative Artificial Intelligence in Schools is, rather, a recommendation closer to ethical, but, let NotebookLM tell us about it in the following 13 min audio podcast, it’s wonderful!:
▶️ Podcast by NotebookLM about both sources (13 min)
NotebookLM’s ability to compare documents makes it a very useful tool.
´The first question
Every restless mind that is considering the possibility of acquiring some product or knowledge will generate the same question that I asked NotebookLM about these two valuable sources: What are the similarities and differences? In fact, What is the result? to compare these sources? You can find NotebookLM’s response below (and allow me to share it in image format so as not to clutter this post with text):
This basic comparison is an excellent introduction to understanding the intrinsic value of both texts, but it also contains numerical references to the pages from which the arguments are being extracted, something that, for both teaching staff and researchers, can mean a significant time savings. I insist that it is a basic comparison, to work on a more in-depth paper or on a systematic review, of course you have to delve deeply into the sources and, virtual or physical marker in hand, start studying but, eh…, in most cases we are not going to need either of the two things.
Although sometimes it rambles around questions that require more processing, his deductive capacity can be surprising
The second question
Some of the things that caught my attention the most in the INTEF report were that, on one hand, it indicated that students needed to be encouraged to develop the #softskill Critical Thinking, but on the other hand, the use of AI by students was limited almost exclusively to the role of consumer or adapter, rather than creator or co-creator, the latter activities being necessary to stimulate, precisely, that skill.
After checking the power of NotebookLM in its ability to compare two sources, I wanted to go a little further and raise this concern about the INTEF guide: Why, if it is indicated that it is necessary to promote Critical Thinking in students, is it then said that the roles of interaction with those students should be the usual ones of, at most, consumers and reviewers and not as co-creators of educational content? Doesn’t that constitute a contradiction in the report? The answer:
It is true that although here the AI magnifies the meaning of the question as a strategy to provide an answer, it highlights and references the elements of the article related to the question to justify the answer, and I understand that in cases like this where the question is intentional, that will be its strategy when responding, BUT, there is something I had thought about when formulating this issue and that surprisingly the Google AI also manages to find, namely, that perhaps this is due to a “concern about the maturity of students (…) and a strict control over the curriculum,” a very good exercise in deducing the reasons related to my question (The experiment was conducted in Spanish, so the outputs in English from NotebookLM may differ – Author’s Note).
NotebookLM opens the door to new norms and standards for introducing complex issues and knowledge in narrative formats that are closer to our way of understanding reality
Discussion-Opinion-Suggestion
In the humble opinion of someone who has tried this tool for the third or fourth time, I believe that Google NotebookLM can serve as an excellent bridge between knowledge, in some cases -even the most academic- and those groups that need to incorporate such knowledge into their daily lives but find barriers in understanding it due to its complexity.
Trying to go beyond analysis and moving to recommendation, I decided to request a small report on the feasibility of applying one of these two AI frameworks in Education; one of the responses from NotebookLM was the following:
That is to say, in addition to analyzing and deducing, it seems that NotebookLM is also capable of recommending by providing arguments in this regard, something that will surely help manage the anxiety levels of those who have to face certain decisions in the classroom.
To conclude, and as one of the most relevant and powerful inputs of NotebookLM, it is worth mentioning that introducing complex or very extensive content in the form of a “fake” podcast, apart from being a stroke of genius, opens the door to new formats for learning content considering that, as many experts say, our brain is more susceptible to learning through storytelling than through abstract mnemonics or cold reading, especially if we have not had any prior more human, practical, or playful introductory contact. This could be the beginning of new standards for understanding complex issues through a music video, an animated fable, a micro mobile video game, etc., generated on the fly by AI.