Start With the Problem, Not the AI Tool with Victoria Lansdown of North Star AI Enablement

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I try to do different things. I try to find a little video that I like on YouTube as a tutorial and just try things out because just find a short one or find one that you're comfortable with and then try it out. You know, embodied practice is the best way to create those long-term myelinated pathways is what Neural Education calls them. And so just, you know, experimenting with the tools and seeing what the limitations are. I think that will just naturally inform future decisions. But at the same time, help encourage that optimism and creativity and excitement.

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Welcome to EdTech Insiders. We have an amazing guest with us today on EdTech Insiders. We're speaking to Victoria Lansdowne, MBA, who is the founder of Northstar AI Enablement, which helps schools, EdTech companies, and nonprofits adopt AI in practical, human-centered ways. She's a former educator. She has built AI for educators programs at Google, and she's contributed to the UNESCO 2024 AI Competency Frameworks Awards. discussions. She also serves on the Pearson's AI Strategic Council. Victoria Lansdowne, welcome to EdTech Insiders.

Thank you so much for having me, Alex. It's a pleasure to be here.

It's a pleasure to speak with you as well. So one of the projects we just mentioned, which is really interesting, is that you led Google's initiative integrating generative AI into computer science courses in specifically for historically Black colleges and universities and Hispanic-serving institutions. Really interesting project. And I want to start by asking you about that project, and then we'll zoom out and talk more about some of what you do with North Star. But what made this project unique? What instigated the project? And what was it really about as you got it out into the world?

Yeah, great question. This was a really fun and unique project. So this project actually originally took place back in 2024. And I was the cross-course program lead as a contractor at Google through Synergist. And we worked with faculty from these HBCUs and HSIs across several North American universities. to create the first round of a series of gen ai integrated computer science courses and these courses are actually available online now for anyone to use at teachcswithai.org and one of our key faculty