Education Innovation, Ethics and the Future of Learning

Paul Spain:
Hey, folks, greetings and welcome along to the New Zealand Tech Podcast. I’m your host, Paul Spain, and this week very pleased to have Dr. Ian Hunter from Writer’s Toolbox joining us on the show. How are you, Ian?

Dr Ian hunter:
Oh, Paul, thanks for having me. It’s great to be here.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, Real privilege to have you joining the show. Before we sort of. We jump in to the full episode. Big thank you to our show partners to One NZ, Spark, 2degrees, HP, Workday and Gorilla Technology. Really appreciate their support of the New Zealand Tech Podcast and I guess the broader tech and innovation ecosystems that they support around New Zealand. Well, today I’m excited to chat to you. We were talking before the show and already lots of fascinating stories and discussion.

Dr Ian hunter:
I’ve forgotten most of them by now.

Paul Spain:
Around innovation, your background, the things that you research for your ph, and obviously the work that you’ve been doing with Riders Toolbox in terms of delving in and helping from an education perspective and using AI, maybe in a perspective that folks might not be expecting. So, yes, maybe we can start with a little bit of your background.

Dr Ian hunter:
Oh, gollies. You know, it’s interesting. You think about what you might want to do in life and some people have a very clear view. I’m sure you always wanted to be a digital podcast host, but I never thought I’d be here. For 20 years of my life, I was a very happy university professor. It’s a great life. The holidays are long, the students don’t answer back much, the library’s very large, it’s wonderful. But I suppose about the mid-90s, I started to get quite concerned about what today we call the global writing gap.

Dr Ian hunter:
And this is students often who can tell you the answer, but then that same person goes to put it on a piece of paper and it just is much poorer quality and you realise the problem they’re facing. It’s not an engagement problem or a motivation problem, it’s fundamentally a writing problem. So I wrote some books to help, used to run lectures at the university and eventually schools started calling me up. They said, ian, you know, our senior students are using your material. Could you come and speak? And I said, no, go away, put the phone down. I was very happy at university. It’s a great life. But look, eventually I caved and I think, gollies.

Dr Ian hunter:
I think one year I spoke to 29,000 students across 60 schools.

Paul Spain:
Wow.

Dr Ian hunter:
And I realized, you know, the same things that my university students were saying. You know, how do you start? How do you analyze something? These school students are facing the same Thing we haven’t taught three generations of teachers how to teach writing. So I left the university, we started an organisation to help. And long story short, today we have about 50, 60 staff working with around 700 schools around the world. And here you and I are.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, look, this is fascinating. So when you first started, when you started Writer’s Toolbox.

Dr Ian hunter:
Yes, yeah.

Paul Spain:
Was technology kind of a key part of it? How have you kind of shaped what you do today?

Dr Ian hunter:
Yeah, I think that, I mean the problem hasn’t altered because it’s fundamentally an education problem. And you and I probably had some great moments in our schooling career or post school career where just an inspired, profound teacher just got goddess right. And you didn’t need tech to pull that off. But the writing problem, if we got time, we could get into it. It’s not just the question of the tech, it’s how best also might you teach writing to that student who’s struggling. And so Toolbox has been, if you like, solving two problems, how might we use technology effectively to deliver this? But also how might we teach writing? And in many of the sort of fields I’ve had the privilege to research or be part of my career, I’ve gone backwards first to look for answers for the future. And I’ve done that in the area of entrepreneurship and innovation as well. And so when I came to the writing problem, I wanted to know what had worked historically.

Dr Ian hunter:
And I went back across 150 years of writing research and there have been four great phases in the teaching of writing globally. The first was from about 1860 to the First World War. And this was an era where countries around the world, Australia, New Zealand, America, the United Kingdom were grasping with this problem of nationalised education. If we’re going to have national education, how can we, you know, what do we teach, when do we teach it? All those sorts of questions. And writing was taught by principles, matters of form, structure, style, the rules of composition. You get to the First World War and from the First World War to about 1960, they’re now called the traditional age. Cause they said enough of the principles, let’s have good old fashioned grammar and the five paragraph essay. And it’s where it came from, this form of writing.

Dr Ian hunter:
And about the 1960s, the world had been through another global conflict and rock and roll was coming in. Many people were questioning the structures of society. Educators were similar and they said, you know what, we’ve taken all the joy out of writing. And they brought in process writing. Donald Murray and Donald Graves in America. Now creativity was elevated and the child, irrespective of the eras or not, was just enjoying the thrill of writing. But by the 1980s, educators went, it’s not very good, is it? And we bought in the takes a while, doesn’t it?

Paul Spain:
Takes a while.

Dr Ian hunter:
And we bought a genre. And now teachers would teach narrative and recount writing and information reports and underneath were the skills of writing. But for the first time in history, we inverted a pyramid because historically the craft of writing was at the top and the forms underneath and genre had inverted that. So when I came to Toolbox and this problem of how are we going to teach someone to write? I said, I really like what they did in the age of composition. I think they’ve got it. So if you said, what is toolbox? I’m going to say toolbox. We have brought back the old fashioned rules of composition for a 21st century audience.

Paul Spain:
That’s great. Now there’s obviously an AI piece that sort of fits in here as well, I must say. I also like the fact that you kind of look, that you look back. Cause that’s part of my futurists toolkit when I’m working with boards and leadership and talking to groups is like, hey, we need to look back to inform how we consider the future. So that’s good. But now there’s, there’s this piece where generative AI is coming in to everything, right? Whether it’s classrooms or you’re walking down the street and you need to figure something out and so on. We’re tending to lean into our generative AI from so many different perspectives and we’re still figuring that out. But do you see that that’s going to create another sort of paradigm and era just by default? Because you know, there’s this nature as technology comes in, it tends to, you know, wash over things and sometimes it washes things away and sometimes it helps make things better.

Paul Spain:
And some of these things come about quite sort of unintentionally, right? It’s just, oh well, this is part of the new era. And I’ve been chatting to some tutors recently who have been sharing some of their challenges with students using generative AI at times that they’re not expecting them to and where clearly it’s maybe an inappropriate shortcut to get a result without necessarily the learning taking place in the middle. They’re getting a result down on the screen or in what gets printed out or what have you, but there’s not a complete understanding, unfortunately.

Dr Ian hunter:
That’s such a good question. And I should say for the Sake of the benefit of the listeners tuning in. I’ve been watching Paul for a while now. No AI was used in the creating of these questions whatsoever.

Paul Spain:
Often it is. We do sometimes use AI.

Dr Ian hunter:
Very helpful. I think that’s really such a good question. You’ve touched on a lot of points. Maybe I could pick up two threads. The first is this. We don’t do generative AI at Toolbox. If you think about the development of AI, our journey into AI started in 2014. So we’ve been doing this now for about a decade.

Dr Ian hunter:
We have our own AI, we have a patent AI. We began this journey before OpenAI actually was even founded as an organisation. And when the rest of the world turned right with generative AI, we turned left with educational AI. Because one of the things that generative AI does brilliantly, and you’ve testified it to yourself, if you want a highly detailed, informative answer to a question, it may not always be right, but it’ll sound authoritative. AI is very helpful. And there are other uses, too. I’m not trivializing. That’s fantastic.

Dr Ian hunter:
But if you want to teach a young person or an old person or an older person, your fundamental duty is to not give them answers, but to teach them. And the journey of education and learning comes with it. That beautiful wrestling where the person wrestles with the problem, the thing they don’t know. And when they discover the answer, part of the cementing of the new understanding, not just the knowledge, but the new understanding is that wonderful, you know, emotional burst, because you’ve discovered it, you know it for yourself, and the learning is sticky. And one of the things we know from research in this area is that, and I’m thinking about some studies that were done in 2024, we know if you get students using AI to write their essays, the essays will be of a higher quality. We know that, but we know in those same studies, when they have tested those same students, they don’t know the actual knowledge underneath that. So what you have created now is a gap, and you have no understanding either. So at Toolbox, our challenge how can you build an AI to teach somebody not given the answers? Does that make sense?

Paul Spain:
Yeah.

Dr Ian hunter:
Yeah, yeah, that’s good.

Paul Spain:
So, well, let’s delve into that a little bit further. So what does that actually look like? What is it that you end up providing to the schools who sign up with writers? Toolbox. What do they get for their money?

Dr Ian hunter:
Well, Toolbox, at one level, yes, it’s an application that you buy, and it’s a whole school writing application. This is not an advertisement, but I’m just trying to explain it. It’s a whole school writing application so the student can write in.

Paul Spain:
Everyone listening who’s involved in a school or has a youngster at school should then be going, hey, why aren’t we using this? And my impressions are pretty positive so far.

Dr Ian hunter:
Well, you know, writing touches everything. You know, today, if traditionally, when you and I were at school, and this is no blight in our age, but if you weren’t good at English, I’m gonna ask Paul in a second what his English was like. If you weren’t good at English, you picked PE because you could. Or music somewhere or art somewhere you could excel and your writing skills weren’t into question. In fact, the person who was the best artist or the best, you know, had the greatest physical prowess would get the highest grades today in New Zealand. If you pick stage three, you know, Year three pe, you made the dumb choice. There is more writing today in PE than there is in senior English. So we now have in New Zealand one of the most literary curriculums in the world.

Dr Ian hunter:
Interesting. The senior student in New Zealand, by the time you have finished your year, year 13, you will have cast in the order of 55 to 60,000 words across all those subjects. And that’s if you pick things like PE and biology and history and English and maybe another science. Average biology report is 3,000 words long. Statistics, now, it’s not about the maths, it’s can you craft that maths in written form and show deep understanding. So Toolbox is about giving writing tools to all of those students and adults because they need them.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. And I guess if I look forward, there’s your school years. But once you get into the workforce, being able to communicate well and clearly is pretty essential. Right. And that probably was for me, when English sort of started to matter because.

Dr Ian hunter:
How did you go at English? You didn’t tell me, by the way, how did you go at English?

Paul Spain:
Did you like it? Well, there’s a little bit of a story. So I have two older brothers and turned out both of them, this is going back a few years. They’re older than me. And the way that they did the exams back then is you’d get an exact percentage.

Dr Ian hunter:
Yeah. Oh, yeah.

Paul Spain:
And anyway, this is not something to boast about. But anyway, both of them got 50% in English and I thought, oh, I wanna be like my big brothers, so I wanna get 50% too. But they changed the way that they scored, that they scored these things. When I was going through what was fifth form in those days? And I was in this bracket, what’s it called? I think they had a one, a two, B one, B two. And then the Cs. I was in the B2 bracket, which was 45 to 55. And so of course I was very curious. Well, did I get exactly the same as them? And you could actually call up or something and get the exact score.

Paul Spain:
But for whatever reasons, they didn’t want people to feel bad if their score was a little bit under 50 and so on. So they put them in these brackets and you got. And it turned out I was at the lower end of that one. So kind of wish I hadn’t have been interested and made the call, but. But, you know, for me, it was when I got into the workplace and communicating became really important that I took an interest in how I wrote at that stage, when I was being thrown Shakespeare or, you know, what have you. That actually didn’t align with my interests as a teenager where I was interested in technology and business and, you know, you know, so on. So those were my areas. But I didn’t see how the dots kind of joined up.

Paul Spain:
Right.

Dr Ian hunter:
But you do now, as an animal, right? Or even you think many of us have to retrain. We pivot mid career. Correct. And then your ability to learn, to absorb information, to articulate that clearly and deeply. But you’ve raised a really interesting point. Cause I actually did want to ask you sidebar, if somebody had taught you the rules of composition, how would that have gone for you?

Paul Spain:
Probably would have been quite helpful.

Dr Ian hunter:
We’ve seen this, especially in boys, the growth rates in boys, the impact of Toolbox, we could talk about that later. But it’s also the resilience to change career. And where this hinges is the connection between writing and thinking. If we just think, for an example, that you think in your brain a beautifully well formed thought and then just write it out on paper, we miss the moment. We miss the moment because the research has shown very clearly over the past 50 years this beautiful connection between the thinking brain and the act of writing. And when we write, we don’t just regurgitate on the page what we think. It’s in the actual act of writing itself that we think. So in the act of writing, our thinking becomes amplified deeper, more insightful, because as the words emerge on the page, the subconscious goes to work and fires up thoughts and insights that we previously could never have articulated that came to the surface as we write.

Paul Spain:
That’s fascinating. Do you think most people recognise that? No.

Dr Ian hunter:
And I don’t think they do.

Paul Spain:
It’s not something we talk about very often, but actually it sounds really important.

Dr Ian hunter:
We need to have this debate because we have, ironically, we have built our education systems on the first premise. We teach writing avidly through primary school and then we stop and we sort of tacitly assume that as you move through your high school years, you’re merely just using writing as the form to regurgitate knowledge or prove it. But there’s been some great researchers now across the past decade in America, Steve Graham and others who said, no, no, no, hold on a second. As the student advances through their high school years and we demand greater output, deeper cognitions, superior thought development. If you don’t in parallel teach more sophisticated writing skills, you. You see a gap. And I think one of the great challenges but opportunities we have in this country is if we could close that, we would see all sorts of benefits. And I’m not trivializing this, we know already that the gap between somebody who’s been post school to university versus somebody who has not, or actually some sort of qualification, it doesn’t have to be University, polytechnic versus somebody who hasn’t, is about $1.5 million across their lifetime to 1.7.

Dr Ian hunter:
That’s the difference between being a homeowner and a renter. That’s a house.

Paul Spain:
This is really significant.

Dr Ian hunter:
This is significant. Right. So if we have the opportunity to actually give the gift of writing to a student in a form that the student can understand it and grasp it, we actually have the opportunity to transform the their entire career trajectory and their contribution to our society. Wow.

Paul Spain:
Do you find that schools get good adoption with writer’s toolbox? Like, you know, how does it actually, you know, play out in terms of them bringing writer’s toolbox into their, you know, into the classroom?

Dr Ian hunter:
Yeah, that’s a good question.

Paul Spain:
And you know, how successful has that kind of been? Cause you’ve said you’ve grown to now what, seven, 700 schools?

Dr Ian hunter:
Yeah, that’s right. We work in about about seven different curriculum systems, from International baccalaureate to Cambridge to the New Zealand curriculum, Australian curriculum and others actually.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, because not everyone clicks with every way of learning, Right?

Dr Ian hunter:
Correct. I think one of the things. So let’s take them one at a time. One of the first things we touched on early on was the teachers haven’t been taught how to teach writing. We have gifted educators in our schools, you know, really well trained professionals, but we haven’t taught them how to teach composition writing for a number of generations. So our first Job with the school actually is building teacher capability. A recent survey of something like 4,000 Australian teachers in New South Wales, 60% said they do not feel confident to teach writing in the classroom. So if the teachers don’t have that sense of authentic confidence, the students are not going to get it.

Dr Ian hunter:
So we have a program of really good adult learning, professional development that goes alongside Toolbox to teach the teachers how to teach writing. And then you deploy the toolbox itself. And one of the things, I suppose because you talked about impact and adoption. So we see several things. Australia has been really good for us in this journey, but because not only from the point of view of growing an organisation, we wouldn’t have survived Covid if it wasn’t having an export market, but also in terms of proof of product, because Australia has a standardized writing test that every student grades 3, 5, 7 and 9 in Australia do every year. 1.4 million Australians sit this test. And whether you like testing or not, from our perspective, it’s a litmus test. If we journeyed with a school and we taught these students a different approach and we switched and the teachers and we switched on the AI.

Dr Ian hunter:
When you turn all that off and that child’s sitting in an examination hall with a pen and a piece of paper, can they do it? And will they get a different outcome? And Australia’s given us the privilege. Now we have a longitudinal study going on which is very hard, difficult to say without a glass of water. And that’s been going on for about six years now. We’ve tracked, we’re tracking about 78,000 students using toolbox in 71 Australian schools. And already at the four year mark, if you teach a year three student this approach and you’ve switched on the AI so they get that personalized, unique, customized feedback in the moment of readiness. The difference between the traditional methods being taught and a school using this is three times the rate of growth. At year five, the data was five times the rate of growth at year seven. They leapfrog like schools.

Dr Ian hunter:
And the same thing happened at year nine. Then we identified the boys only, and the rate of growth in boys was 10 times the state of Queensland. Wow.

Paul Spain:
So.

Dr Ian hunter:
And that study has now been replicated in New South Wales. And we have a pilot program also now going on in Britain with 20 schools. And they’re already saying the same things.

Paul Spain:
And so is this something you’re able to measure within your software or there are other kind of independent ways of measuring it? Cause this sounds like the sort of thing that is gonna make it Pretty easy for you to sell Writer’s Toolbox around the world.

Dr Ian hunter:
The good thing is that it’s external measures. It’s either the school’s own data. We have a diagnostic test in Writer’s Toolbox. So this shows us many of these things. But, you know, for any innovator, part of the definition of innovation. Right. Innovation is only ever defined by the customer, not the creator. It’s not me saying this is innovative, it’s the customer saying, this thing has actually profoundly changed and helped my world.

Dr Ian hunter:
And I have made a decision now, conscious decision, to change how I do what I do, where I purchase, because of what has been done. And look, it’s humbling, but I think that’s been part of the journey the team at Writer’s Toolbox have pulled off. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
Now, tell us a little bit about the business and getting from, you know, working in academia, working in the university. And I was chatting to a friend this morning who’s been on a podcast or two with me, Dr. Paul Woodfield. And you guys have interacted in the education system. And he was saying, oh, it’s pretty impressive because the. The university world is a pretty comfortable one in which to operate in and to step out of that into the world of entrepreneurship and business and tech. These things aren’t guaranteed. So how did you make that call?

Dr Ian hunter:
There are a number of things happening at the same time, Paul. For me, I suppose, as somebody who taught entrepreneurship and innovation, always had a passion for that. You dabble along the way and you try a few things out that actually don’t go well and they fail.

Paul Spain:
You learn the realities, which is part.

Dr Ian hunter:
Of the entrepreneurial story. But writing was always, and it still is my passion. And I wrote some business histories in New Zealand, so the farmers trading company, Briscoes Tatua Dairy company, others. And at that time when schools were asking for assistance with writing, I also was undertaking a lot of commissioned history work. So as a father with a family and Deborah and I and the children, so I made that move out already with contracts in hand. And I would say that absolutely to anybody going out on their own, please don’t stop your day job. Let the innovation overtake the entrepreneurship overtake your day job. So, you know, we already had two years of work banked up ahead of us before we decided to go out.

Dr Ian hunter:
And I took a team with me when I left the university, so it was only about two or three of us in the garage with the dog. But probably the founding story of Toolbox, I suppose, is also instrumental because there’s lots of ways you can start an organisation. You can go out to the bank, you can go and borrow money from friends, you can try and find some VC capital funding. And a lot of that’s popular in the tech world. I did a Fisher and Paykel. Now I’m not alone in this, but I did a Fisher and Paykel and the story. Have I got time for a very short story?

Paul Spain:
Yeah, okay, I want to hear it.

Dr Ian hunter:
The story goes a bit like this. So it was 1938 and two quite ambitious Kiwis, you know, Will Fisher and Maurice Pikel had an importing business they’d started in 1934 and they were importing washing machines from America. The only problem was by 1938, four years on, the New Zealand government hadn’t managed its overseas currency very well. And we ran out of money in England, like there was no money left to pay overseas creditors. And so this is a true story. And so what they did was overnight they said, you can’t get foreign exchange. You have to apply to the government. You’ve got all these checks and balances to get it.

Dr Ian hunter:
And we’d run out of money. There was none to give. So Fisher and Paykel were facing something like in the magnitude, they owed their US suppliers something like US$20,000 and they were staring down the gunwales of bankruptcy. So Wilf said, don’t worry, Maurice got in his car, went round the north island, came back with 300 orders for washing machines and said, off you go, Maurice, make them. And then we had that’s the birth of Fisher and Pike onto manufacturing. Wow. So I said to my, made a promise to my wife, to Deborah that I wouldn’t do Writer’s Toolbox and we wouldn’t go into debt. So if it didn’t prove itself, we wouldn’t do it.

Dr Ian hunter:
So I had a sense of the problem. I understood the problem. I knew it was being faced by schools. I took my pen and paper drawings. Actually it was a little PowerPoint show, to be honest. I still have it today. And I went round to a number of schools and said, I know we have a writing problem. This is how I think we can solve it.

Dr Ian hunter:
And I pre sold writer’s toolbox to three schools in New Zealand. I took that $30,000 and I found a software company who were bold enough and desperate enough for the work and could commissioned the work in about November. And Toolbox was launched January, two months later in New Zealand schools. And those three schools who signed up, those three individuals are still customers today. And We’ve been cash flow positive since day one. So I think for me, as I reflect on that, one of the reasons I did that too, was I had a small part to play in. I was the organizer in a great course that was run at Auckland University for inventors. And about 60 or 70 came.

Dr Ian hunter:
And one of the things that really bothered me was that the stories were so similar. This person had this, they thought was this amazing idea for window washing or a visor or something. They had spent thousands of their life savings on this over years tinkering in the garage. Their wife had never seen them for weeks on end. And they absolutely believed if they could only get 10 minutes in front of Steven Tindall, it would transform their life. And none of them had ever spoken to a customer. And I thought, you gotta talk to your customer first.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yep. Well, it’s good that you did. And so from that start, where you were able to find those initial customers to now where, yeah, you’ve got hundreds of customers around the world. In terms of schools, how did that sort of journey look like? And you alluded to Covid times being challenging, as it was for many businesses. How’s that journey played out?

Dr Ian hunter:
I think, I mean, if we talk about designing a product for a second. I’d already done some sabbaticals at overseas universities, so when I decided we were going to have a writing solution, I wanted to build an international, a global product from day one. And so Toolbox was built. When we did some research across a couple of years, it was aligned before any other country got it already, to the International Baccalaureate, the American Common Core, the British Curriculum, the Australian curriculum, the so forth. Because I knew it was a global challenge. And then I suppose if you thought about pivot points in the life of our organisation, Australia was definitely a pivot point. Our accountants told us not to go to Australia. They did give us some good advice from time to time, but it was like concentrated.

Dr Ian hunter:
No, no, no, no. Concentrate on the home market. Get your home market right first. But I had in the same week in New Zealand, in the Waikato, my phone went twice and both times was a different Australian school in Brisbane who said, we have a writing problem. Can you please come over and talk to us? We’ve heard about Writer’s Toolbox, we’ve heard it can make a difference. Can you come and talk to us? And so we did. I tried earlier, Paul. I dabbled with agents a number of years earlier that hadn’t gone well.

Dr Ian hunter:
So, you know, having a distributor somewhere overseas might work for Some organisations, it didn’t for us, they kind of wanted.

Paul Spain:
To add you to their roster of things.

Dr Ian hunter:
You go way down the list, you know, you become a. Have you tried this, too? And I got another pill. So that didn’t work for us. So I had already determined in my head that our strategy, if we decided to go, was gonna. We’re gonna be bricks and mortar, we’re gonna be all in from day one or we’re not doing it. So that was the decision. We went to Australia, we hired staff, a couple more than we needed, rented premises. We were going to make it work.

Dr Ian hunter:
But why? I said the international bit was, I suppose, and we listened. So Toolbox wasn’t built just to sort of fix a New Zealand challenge, an Aotearo New Zealand challenge. It was built to fix a global challenge. And the Australians very kindly responded to that. They understood it. And Australia has been really good for us, actually, like that. Yeah.

Paul Spain:
And looking at the other markets that you’ve entered, has that sort of happened quite organically, or have you had to do something similar to Australia and say, look, we’re going to put boots on the ground and if we’re going to make this work in this market, we’ve got to be all in. And then you’ve got to find the funds to. To, you know, to make that happen, don’t you?

Dr Ian hunter:
Well, I think you’ve got to be a bit more measured. So even when you think about Australia, Australia, in some sense is actually about seven countries. I’m going to be careful here, I’m not going to get in trouble. But, you know, like, you think I’m going to go to Australia. Well, are you going to Australia or are you going to try New South Wales? So you’ve got to be real about it. I think it’s helpful. It’s a bit the same as someone saying, oh, we’re going to go try the American market. Well, no, pick a state.

Paul Spain:
Yes.

Dr Ian hunter:
See, so Australia for us is a wee bit that same journey, and we’re still on that journey, you know, we’re still learning and still growing. But I suppose the growth piece for Toolbox is we’ve moved from having discussions with schools to discussions with clusters of schools to now working alongside diocese, because Australia’s quite different. 35% of Australian students go to private school now. New Zealand’s about 2 or 3%. So the market structure is very different. Parents are already acclimatised to the belief that education’s important and we’re going to pay for it, you see. So it’s very different market structure for us, but so working from diocese to now, working with regions and now countries. And so for us it’s ever learning on that trajectory, but that’s really happening as that’s the toolbox trajectory.

Dr Ian hunter:
But but probably the underlying ethos, we still want to prove its efficacy. So when I said about the uk, yes, we’re growing the UK and that’s really gratifying and exciting. But we’re very closely watching this initial research group of 20 schools and what the teachers are saying and the impact on the children. And a couple of things if I may. One of the things that keeps coming back is the connection with confidence and engagement and self efficacy. So Toolbox is actually not just writing, it’s about the whole person. Because you ask a child how do they feel about writing? And the child will often say, I don’t like writing. Well, that’s not a cognitive response, it’s an emotional response.

Dr Ian hunter:
So now if you’re going to reach that young person who sometimes has even retreated or a teenager has an emotional aversion to the even act of writing, you’ve got to reach someone a socio emotional level, not just the brain level. And so when we talk about Toolbox and its AI, it’s AI as one curated component inside an immersive journey that’s designed to reach the whole person and take them forward. When they’re not feeling, they can do it to encourage when they’re feeling, they’re, you know, they’ve really got this and they’re better to challenge, but to do it in a way that’s uniquely meeting them. So I think the Singaporean Ministry of Education, the one, the most recent one, Minister Chan, said the challenge we have today and the opening for technology, he talks about education’s trilemma. You can have really personal how do you achieve quality education at an affordable cost at scale? See, it’s those three things. You can have really quality education, but it’s going to come at a really high price. And if you want individualized instruction, you’re gonna have very low student ratios to teachers. You see, those three things are always in.

Dr Ian hunter:
And he said courageously recently, technology, maybe we can solve this problem. We can at scale, release customized learning that might be high quality and reach the individual. Toolbox is on that journey because the controls inside Toolbox enable the teacher to, even if the class has got 40 students in, every child can have a unique customized experience according to their ability level, which is very hard to pull off as an individual teacher.

Paul Spain:
And let’s Talk about sort of the personalized aspect that AI can help facilitate. I mean, how personalised can you get? More than just at an ability level, it’s in other areas.

Dr Ian hunter:
Yeah. Well, the benefit of technology is that it can give really good data back to the teacher. So we have live data going back to that teacher all the time. So now you can make a timely educational decision about this child and interventions and how to help them. But if you think about the child. So in Toolbox and imagine a screen, well, imagine you’re writing away, typing on your computer at night, and then you hit a feedback button. And the moment you hit that button, AI reads that piece of writing. It’s already worked out your 30 greatest strengths as a writer and your 30 weaknesses.

Dr Ian hunter:
It’s already built a profile of you and your journey ahead. But it’s not going to overwhelm you because that would just be cruel. Like, you know, giving you nine things you could do. It’s going to affirm you. First, tell you two things that are really good about that piece of writing, irrespective of how good it may not be. And then it’s going to say, here’s two things to improve your work ons and here’s a goal, and we call goal writing strength and Toolbox, which is a percentage. You’re 50%, 100%. But the two things to work your work ons are not random.

Dr Ian hunter:
Toolbox is already worked out through the AI that if you as a writer, given your profile and things I can see on this page, work on those two things first, that quality of that piece is going to go up fastest. And as you fix those, I’m going to teach you the next two and the next two, I am walking alongside you. Does that make a difference? Yeah. So that’s what Toolbox does. Yeah. Okay. Okay.

Paul Spain:
And I like this element of.

Dr Ian hunter:
The.

Paul Spain:
Teacher’S part of the picture as well.

Dr Ian hunter:
Right.

Paul Spain:
So it’s not just this thing that you go online and do and it’s separate from the school journey.

Dr Ian hunter:
That’s important because there’s lots of debate in educational circles, and you’ve touched on these already, Paul, about cognitive offloading, about digital amnesia. So this is students and even teachers disassociating from actually the learning that’s really meant to be happening. And the teacher’s the agent of change in the classroom. You need to honour that teacher. And I think one of the things that teachers are saying about Toolbox is it’s not replacing them, it’s complementing their role in the classroom. They’re seeing higher quality first drafts, their marking time as halving, and now they’re having learning discussions at a wholly different level with that individual student in the classroom.

Paul Spain:
Now, how do you look at the ethics of, you know, leveraging technology and AI in, in the classroom? And there’s so many possibilities of how you could delve in and, and have AI analyze what somebody writes, and somebody writes something that’s a bit darker, somebody else writes something else and so on. You could have AI sort of extrapolate and, you know, do all sorts of things with that information that are outside of the box and not normally what you expect to maybe happen in a school context. But, yeah, there’s all sorts of positives, but there’s potentially a bunch of risks as well. So is this something you have to spend a lot of time thinking about?

Dr Ian hunter:
Yeah, it’s a really good question you’ve asked, actually, because this is education. If you’re a teacher, if you’re a supplier into education, you have a duty of care. Just because we’re sitting over here does not abdicate us from a duty of care as a supplier, as a private company. And you also mentioned the box. So let’s talk about that for a second. One of the challenges of AI, you can rent, you know, you can buy an enterprise license to ChatGPT or Gemini or whatever you want and craft your own thing and be in the market next week. But what you can’t control is the box. And that was really our dilemma in 20.

Dr Ian hunter:
And it’s expensive, gotta say. And, you know, around 2016, around 2017, we were going deeper into this work, was there were shortcuts, but if you don’t know fundamentally what’s inside that black box and have actually crafted how and why it does particular things, you cannot control the outputs with sufficient responsibility. And so that’s why we went on the journey we did. Because you cannot buy a data set of student writing globally. They do not exist. We’ve curated our own. It’s now 4.9 billion words. It’s bigger than Wikipedia, but we know how the student writes because they don’t write how adults write.

Dr Ian hunter:
And when it comes to the feedback, it’s really good. You raised this. I’ll give you one example. I got shown a piece of feedback by a teacher the other week. It was in Australia, it was a different company. They were giving. It was a mathematics company and they were teaching this young child who was 10 years old multiplication. And the child was obviously getting frustrated with multiplication.

Dr Ian hunter:
And the AI’s trying to teach him multiplication because he clearly didn’t like maths. And after listening for a few times to the AI suggestions, he swore the AI. He typed a swear word at the AI. Well, at this juncture, the AI said to him that he had breached the user policies of the site and it was removing him from the ability to use the AI. And the poor child, we’ll call him Johnny, was so upset at this. I saw the conversation string for the next 10 minutes he was apologizing to the AI, his name was George, and pleading with George, please don’t take him off the system. And he was so sorry and he would never do it again. Now, the child has now descended into a social emotional state.

Dr Ian hunter:
You see, we have a responsibility, so we have gone to great lengths crafting the sorts of carefully, the sorts of responses the student will get because writing is an emotionally charged and thinking act. Yeah. Does that help?

Paul Spain:
Yeah, yeah, I guess the ethics side, when it comes to AI, there are lots of directions that you could go on that. Now another piece for you, I imagine, is the security and privacy around, you know, what somebody puts into their writing. Right. Like, you know, when I think back to primary school for me, before I had access to any sort of a screen, you know, everything would be pen and paper and it would never get very far. Right. But imagine there, you know, from time to time there will be things that end up, you know, end up written down that, yeah, you want to maybe make sure that those things don’t go too far. Whether it’s just somebody being embarrassed by their work versus somebody else’s and you know, I guess, you know, this is probably an ongoing part of the dilemma in a world where we have, we have regular cyber security incidents and data privacy types of incidents and you don’t want people sort of snooping in on what’s not designed for their eyes.

Dr Ian hunter:
I think there’s probably two elements to that for us as a company. And you go on these journeys and the initial stage is really exciting because it’s a creative stage and you’re building this thing and you’re going to take on the world. Actually the first journey is can we make this work? So it’s quite organic and it’s really exciting, but then it does take hold and then you’ve got to work out, okay, so how can I build systems around this and manage it well and all the rest of it? And then eventually you get to another stage where you’re facing enterprise type decisions and there’s all these new security protocols you have to adhere to. And this is a rapidly moving. As some of your talks have engaged with. This is changing, Right. The rules that existed two years ago, there’s a whole new set of rules and policies and more stringency today. So you have to have teams of people looking at this, which we do, and you’ve got to be really responsive because the different educational jurisdictions are changing the rules all the time.

Dr Ian hunter:
New South Wales, even in the past three weeks, brought out a whole new set of. So I suppose in part, the vigilance never ceases. And you have to. That was one for me because I didn’t realize the scale of the investment we would need five years ago. I never could have envisaged the scale of the investment we would need in this area of our business. And you have to. You need to. I suppose the other piece stems from the relationship because you’ve mentioned somebody writing something which for all sorts of reasons could be detrimental or of a concern, let’s just say of a concern.

Dr Ian hunter:
One of the things we do, Paul, is we’ve got some really great diagnostic testing software that again, we’ve had in the market for 10 years, that a child of any age can test their writing skills and then give the school back a report, but also say, here’s what you need to do next to grow this child’s skills. But we have really good relationships. So if a student. With the schools we serve. So if a student writes something that actually flags because we don’t take people out of it, you know, there’s still humans involved. I think it’s important, Right. So if somebody writes something that is of a concern, Toolbox will be on the phone to you. And then, you know, the teacher and the school who are really well placed in that relationship to make those calls, can.

Dr Ian hunter:
So we’re trying to do two things. To play our part well, but also still honor and uphold the school to do their part well. Yeah, yeah, that’s good.

Paul Spain:
Yeah. I mean, it’s an evolving, evolving area. And I can imagine that we will see more and more change in that area as we start to lean in more on technology, as society gets a deeper understanding of where AI should be, where it shouldn’t be. And as we get more and more digital in terms of our schools now, looking at, I guess, looking at your overall journey, from what I can gather, you’ve invested, I think you were telling me before the show, sort of, I think, in the tens of millions.

Dr Ian hunter:
Yeah, it was 20 million.

Paul Spain:
I said, yeah, yeah. In terms of. Into developing, you know, your AI, which as you Say sort of tacks in a different direction to, you know, probably what most people are used to in terms of the Gen AI direction. How do you see that looking in the years ahead? And, you know, what’s the potential from a scaling perspective? Is it that you, you know, double down on what you’re doing and get this thing signed up at a, you know, at a national level or a state, state type of level? Do you pivot into maths and other sorts of things? Cause you’ve worked out a way that actually possibly could apply in other areas. How do you make these decisions? Cause I’m sure you know a lot more than what I’m suggesting crosses your mind and you have to think about it.

Dr Ian hunter:
I think that’s a really good question. Let me take a couple of those things. I think one of the areas is, if you decide that innovation is going to be your strategy as a company or as an individual, what does that really mean? And for me at Toolbox, as a student of innovation, I suppose I wanted from the get go to build an innovation culture. Well, what does that actually mean? Think about that. That means that you’re going to shorten the decision lines and you’re going to bring people together who’ve never worked before. So at Toolbox, we have illustrators, designers, artists sitting next door to programmers, to content writers, to educationalists. We don’t use agencies for those things. We have people in house.

Dr Ian hunter:
Now, that’s not common, but it’s part of what you sign up for. When you say, no, we want to actually build this innovation hub, does that make sense? And I suppose in the other aspect is you’ve sort of signalled at what next? Well, if you’re genuinely going to be innovation company, one of the measures is that, well, this is true of toolbox. 80% of our income today comes from products and services that did not exist five years ago. 80% of our income. And we have quite a long innovation roadmap in place. We’re already the workers, we’re several years into generation. Three of the AI hasn’t been released yet. So, you know, you have to have a vision and chart for the future as well.

Dr Ian hunter:
And the schools have been part of that journey for us. They’ve been fantastic. We’ve had terrific feedback from educators and school leaders and teachers along this journey. We’ve learnt from them, they’ve learnt from us. And then also there’s the part, I suppose, the responsibility of the innovator. Sometimes you also have to envision the future. Correct. You actually have to Articulate in a way that your customers can’t yet articulate or see what you have the privilege to try and do.

Dr Ian hunter:
And at Toolbox today, that’s not an individual’s thing, that’s a team thing. And I’m very privileged to walk alongside and to work with some really talented people who are a lot smarter than I am in many areas. So, yeah.

Paul Spain:
Now I think there’ll be some people will be listening in and thinking, well, I’m not sure if my school has access to Writer’s Toolbox or, you know, this is sort of some of the thinking that went through my mind looking at schools was, oh, what technology do these different schools, you know, use? And, you know, what do I think would be, you know, most appropriate for my own child? So are there ways that people can sort of look up and find out the schools that actually have your technology? Are there ways, you know, there are ways that parents can maybe nudge and encourage their schools to take a look. What do you recommend for people that have listened in and thought, this would be great for my daughter, my son, you know, etc.

Dr Ian hunter:
Oh, that’s something. So writerstoolbox.com is obviously the web address. So go on there. There’s some great case studies on there from New Zealand schools, Australian schools, British, all over the world. And I think if you. There’s an inquiry form there, if you want to get in touch, if you’re a parent, if you want a board of trustees, please talk to your school. Because I think this is a global issue. It’s one that impacts New Zealand greatly.

Dr Ian hunter:
The past decade of writing results in New Zealand haven’t been great. The recent use of the Common Assessment activity in writing. 50% of the children in the trials were failing. But I think the lovely encouraging message is we can actually do something about this in our lifetime. We could solve this for our country, for our nation, and the outcome would be extraordinary.

Paul Spain:
Yeah, I think, you know, you get things right from an educational perspective and that flows on to, you know, addressing challenges of poverty and all sorts of other things across the country. Country, right?

Dr Ian hunter:
100%, yeah.

Paul Spain:
Oh, absolutely. Fascinating discussion. Thank you so much, Ian.

Dr Ian hunter:
Thanks for having me.

Paul Spain:
Really, really appreciate you coming in. I can imagine there’ll be some other topics we could delve into another time, so. But we’ll leave it there for today. So, yeah. Thanks very much for joining us on the New Zealand Tech Podcast.

Dr Ian hunter:
It’s my pleasure. Thanks, Paul.

Paul Spain:
And of course, a big thank you to our show partners as well. 2degrees Spark workday. HP, One NZ and Gorilla Technology. Thanks, everyone, for listening in. We’ll catch you on the next episode. See ya.