Halifax-based edtech company Shoelace Learning later this month will host a summit of leaders in education, artificial intelligence and diversity to delve into education in the age of AI.
Called Windows and Mirrors: Meeting of the Minds, the summit will take place in Wentworth, NS on Oct. 24 and 25. The proceedings will be filmed by Dave Culligan of Halifax video company threesixfive.
The experts from across the U.S. and Canada will explore how all people involved in education can be co-creators of the datasets that are available for learning. The list of participants now comprises 14 people and could grow. One issue they will grapple with is how to ensure that information gathered for educational material truly reflects the diversity of society and is able to help all children learn more effectively.
“Given the breakneck pace of reinforcement learning and AI, we are obligated as responsible educators and builders of education tools to consider the datasets that inform our models,” said Shoelace Co-Founder Julia Rivard Dexter in a statement. ”Given Shoelace’s vision of building future generations of learners with broadened thinking to help solve some of the world’s complex problems, it’s critical we address the known problems of bias in education, in large part by driving access to curriculum that is inclusive and representative of all learners.”
Shoelace, which was recently accepted into Silicon Valley-based C100’s fellowship program, has developed a platform that it hopes will be the standard for educational games for children. More than 6 million children in the second through eighth grades, across 160 countries, now play Shoelace’s Dreamscape reading game.
The goal of the summit is to assist in a project supported by the National Research Council of Canada’s IRAP program that combines the content curation of an innovative tagging framework with a scalable approach that Shoelace uses to build up its library of learning assignments.