How Today’s Agentic AI Changes What and How We Teach with Teddy Svoronos

Teddy Svoronos describes how today’s agentic AI changes what and how we teach on episode 617 of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast. Quotes from the episode An AI agent is an LLM that runs tools in a loop to achieve a goal. -Teddy quoting Simon Willison’s definition The process of having a task, write a report, use a tool, web search, and do it over and over again until you feel like you’ve gotten the full sort of spectrum of things—that I think is what an agent really is. -Teddy Svoronos These LLMs are now becoming like this intermediary between me and the actual content. And so I’m optimizing in a different way than I used to. -Teddy Svoronos I think there’s an analogy with these tools that I’ve been thinking of as cognitive debt, which is that as you offload to them, there are things that they’ll do that you won’t quite understand. -Teddy Svoronos Resources Agentic Everything: How the latest set of models changes things, by Teddy Svoronos Course Corrections: Redesigning my course for AI, by Teddy Svoronos Pray, Mr. Babbage, by Teddy Svoronos Episode 590: Deep Background – Using AI as a Co-Reasoning Partner with Mike Caulfield Episode 234: A New Lens for Learning Outcomes with Maria Andersen José Antonio Bowen’s AI Detector False Positive Calculator Episode 605: Teaching with AI – The Good, the Bad, the Ugly, and the Future with José Bowen MacWhisper The Checklist Manifesto, by Atul Gawande