My Participation in the META Educator Community Summit
Greetings everyone, I wanted to write briefly of my visit and participation in the META Educator Community Summit in Palo Alto, CA last month, from October 17–18. I was invited to attend the forum by a former student who works at META and is one of the fiercest Latinas you can imagine. We had kept in touch after graduation and I knew she worked at META in their education division. Given that we also work on mixed reality technology at Ethnic Studies Changemaker, the posibility to hear from leaders in the industry and educators who deploy mixed reality tech in their classrooms, intrigued me. I was not disappointed.
My invitation to the summit came with all the bells and whistles of a fancy silicon valley conference. META put me up at a nice boutique hotel in Palo Alto for the night. I arrived to a welcoming reception where program managers introduced each other and people were able to mingle and network. I received a good night’s sleep and woke up early to head to META/Facebook’s Palo Alto campus.
Prior to coming, I received emails detailing the agenda for the summit. META planners described security measures upon entering the META campus. It was the first time I have ever visited one of the “FANG” campuses. It was mind-blowing. The campus is what you imagine a tech company to look like. It has huge meeting rooms, quiet areas for people to work or eat snacks, and an amazing roof that feels like a redwood forrest.
The summit was divided between flash talks by invited educators and administrators. These flash talks were several minutes long and described the kind of work that different k-12 and university educators did using META’s mixed reality headsets and AI tech. I enjoyed listening to different fields talk about how they integrated mixed reality in their schools. While we don’t work specifically with Virtual Reality, I could see the possibilities of using the technology, given how prevalent mixed reality is in our everyday lives. At one point, we were able to test the different programs and VR headsets that META and their partners had. My favorite memory was putting on the headset and participating in an AI-virtual reality program that taught you language literacy. It felt real and intuitive to talk to an avatar in Spanish and have the avatar respond as a conversation. I could imagine such a VR program helping with my summer abroad program students, especially those students who want to practice their Spanish.
Finally, one of the most eye-opening and still uneasy presentations was on AI. I listened to educators talk about the use of Artificial Intelligence and META’s AI platform. While it sounded exciting, in terms of potential for Ethnic Studies, I was still uneasy of its use and issues that we still haven’t addressed. One thing that I am thinking through, after the summit, is the normative training of AI and the impact it has on non-normative populations and communities. What role will Ethnic Studies have in this emerging technology? What has its impact had on our communities already? And, if we were to incorporate it in our classrooms, farther than just an elevated search engine, how would that further the mission and project of Ethnic Studies?
I left the summit with ideas and networking connections. I am thankful to my former student Erika Jimenez for inviting me and I hope to continue dialoguing with the educators I met.
Dr. Pablo Gonzalez
