GenAI stuff you need to know now (part 1)

Learning about GenAI? Phil and I talk about the first four (of ten) knowledge areas and skills language teachers should aim to have now: prompting, ethics, chatbots, and translation. Combining practical examples with theoretical insights, we discuss these knowledge areas and skills in more detail than we could give in our position paper: AI and the future of language teaching: Motivating Sustained Integrated Professional Development (SIPD). This is the second episode of the OAILL podcast series and also the second discussion of the position paper on SIPD; episode 1 looked at the technical underpinnings of GenAI. Listen right here:

With the rapid development of GenAI technology, I find it interesting to revisit facts and ideas. Phil and I wrote this position paper in early 2025, it was published on May 1, 2025. About the ten knowledge and skill areas, I posted here in this blog on January 22, 2026. And things kept changing, just think about prompting, one of the skills: when we wrote the paper, some people made the argument that prompt engineer would be a job in the future. Because the large language models got bigger and were tweaked with additional rules, even a quick and short prompt often yields the result one was hoping for.

I believe that this is just a tiny – yet relevant – example for the ongoing changes. That is why Phil and find it important to keep learning and talking about GenAI in the context of language education.

women reading in a library
Photo by Tima Miroshnichenko on Pexels.com

These are publications mentioned in this conversation:


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Author: Mat Schulze

professor, linguist, writer, blogger, manifestor Reflecting on change and complexity. Thinking about learning – learning to think. Smithing words and professing. Personal on texterium.org (creative writing), professional on pantarhei.press (language and learning, complexity and change)

One thought on “GenAI stuff you need to know now (part 1)”

  1. The Ten Commandments (So Far)

    We wrote ten things you need to know— by print, already, numbers glow. The model grew, the rules increased. The shortest prompt gets the feast.

    So here’s the eleventh rule: Don’t write the book. Stay in the school. The bank that’s yours: a questioning mind. Everything else you can find.

    — to Phil and the beautiful instability of “necessary skills”

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