The best thing about my day job is the boredom. Not my boredom (how could I be bored when I’m literally paid to talk about words and witchcraft all day?), but the boredom on the other side of the desk: the students’.
There is no creature on this Earth more motivated, more inquisitive, more hungry to learn what’s next than the child who’s bored with what they’re doing right now. If you can manage it, bottling that boredom lightning is the best part of being a teacher, and the best way to teach.
It’s in this spirit that we - a few foolhardy Year 11s and I - have launched (probably) the city’s first After-School AI Academy.
Building for us, learning to last🔗
An LLM running on one of our Macbooks
We’re starting small, with a simple question: how can we make this incredible new technology our own?
As a child of Web 2.0 and ICT lessons, the last thing I’d want is to lock another generation into walled gardens. They need to see this technology as something they can play with and make their own, not a pay-to-use, locked-down utility managed by someone else.
No, our Academy is all about building, running, tinkering and tweaking our own AI tools, on our own computers, under our own steam.
Open and free🔗
Our first sessions have been all about learning what models are, how they’re created, and - above all - the value of building and learning out in the open. We couldn’t do what we do without the miraculous open-source free-for-all that is Ollama. Everything we do carries on in that spirit, sharing code as collaborators, not as students led by a teacher.
The group is already buzzing with applications and ideas, from processing nutritional information to virtual tour guides. I’m sure I’ll be showcasing some of their work in the near-future.
If you’d like to join them or share ideas, you can drop us a line and follow along below.
And if you’re reading this, academicians, keep it up. Happy hacking.