Dr. Brandon Zaslow & Sina Azizi

The Potential Contribution of Artificial Intelligence to Equity, Justice, and Sustainability

Keynote Speakers – Day 3 – Monday, July 24th

Brandon Zaslow’s most recent service includes 28 years as Director of the Occidental College Site of the California World Language Project, writer of California’s World Languages Content Standards, one of four writers of California’s World Languages Framework. Brandon has been repeatedly honored by his colleagues receiving California’s Outstanding Teacher Award in 1996, named National Textbook Company Teacher of the Year, and accepting its Award for Leadership in Education in 2000, receiving a Distinguished Service Award for World Language and Culture Educators in 2009, and named the recipient of the Hal Wingard Lifetime Achievement Award for World Language and Culture Educators in 2016. At the national level, Brandon is an author of Entre mundos, a program in Spanish for Spanish speakers, and Invitaciones a parallel program for non-natives. For over three decades, he has presented at state, regional, and national conferences in the following areas: standards-based language and culture education, programs for heritage and native speakers, competency-based assessment, diversity sensitive education, teacher-teaching teacher models of professional development, evidence-based personal and organizational coaching, guided, focused mindfulness practices and personal well-being, and human and organizational development, change, and agency for leadership.

Since elementary school Sina Azizi has strived to learn from disparate disciplines and bring them together in ways that bring about innovation in thinking and action. Transitioning from elementary English Language Development coursework after one year, Since completed  eleven AP courses ranging from English Literature and AP Capstone Research and Writing to Calculus  and Physics,  Environmental Science and World History. At the University of California,  San Diego, Sina  completed a double major  in Molecular Biology and Economics with over 290 units. Study in these areas provided Sina with a  fundamental understanding of all technical disciplines with the ability to derive  cross-disciplinary patterns that are hidden from those who pursue one area of academic study. Most importantly, Sina recognized the undifferentiated nature of learning and teaching particularly  as the complexity of coursework increases. Recognizing this weakness, Sina  taught himself six programming languages in order to create a system that differentiates  for each and every student. His first product was a scrolling technology that enables teachers to utilize  multiple modalities, dynamic visualizations and linguistic support to maximize learning as individual students control their input through the speed that they scroll. With the introduction of chatGPT and Large Language Models, Sina is currently attempting to introduce a myriad of differentiation tools  that are adaptive to each student’s need. He hopes to evolve the education system with an emphasis on making the world a better place instead of supporting the continued diploma/certificate driven practice of decontextualized rote memorization and unapplied learning.

In Sina’s and Brandon’s presentation, they will show the optimal interface between humans and machines to maximize learning by creating opportunities for individualized differentiation of instruction that responds to the needs of students and educators. Moreover, he will show how it can be used by learners to:

• (1) transform academic content into highly comprehensible linguistic and visual materials,

• (2) control interaction with content using analytics to optimize the outcomes of engagement, and

• (3) create products that learners can use in academic and professional endeavors.

Learners’ success will enhance their disposition to engage in further learning. The head-, heart- and hands-based framework of the Seminar is actualized through the use of a wide variety of tools to increase knowledge (the headspace), one’s disposition to engage (the heart space), and taking local action with global effects (the hands space).

As it happens so often at the Summer Seminar, we will be afforded the opportunity to acquire skills that will help us ride a wave of the future! We look forward to Sina and Brandon’s presentation with great expectation!