When Good Intentions Aren’t Good Enough

Apr 12

With guest Elvira Salazar

History is chock full of new technologies developed with good intentions. But if we’ve learned anything over the past few decades, it’s that doing research and designing products has layers of complexity. It isn’t enough to just build tech for others – we have to build it in close partnership and community with those who will use it. In this episode of Future Fluent, Betsy and Jeremy talk with Dr. Elvira Salazar, a life-long educator, passionate devotee of STEM education and NASA, and now the Director of Online Learning & Technology for Latinos for Education. They’ll talk about what the AI community gets right – and gets wrong – in the rush to build the next great thing.

Elvira Salazar

Dr. Elvira Salazar is the National Director of Online Learning and Technology at Latinos for Education, a non-profit dedicated to uniting Latino communities to transform education policy and practice. With over 19 years of experience in education leadership, learning design, and instructional technology, she designs and leads learning experiences that help educators create the learning systems where every child can thrive.

She is a leading practitioner at the intersection of instructional technology and educational leadership. Most recently, Elvira designed and led the AI in Education Leadership Catalyst, a collaborative community of practice that has supported over 200 education leaders with advancing the responsible and effective use of generative AI in education. She also serves on the TeachAI advisory board. Her work reflects a steadfast commitment to equipping education leaders with both the practical skills and the critical mindset to apply generative AI in meaningful ways.

Elvira holds a Certificate in School Management and Leadership from Harvard's Graduate School of Education and Business School. She earned her Ed.D. in Learning and Organizational Change from Baylor University, where her dissertation was recognized as an Outstanding Dissertation for exceptional scholarship, research, and writing. She is an Acosta Institute Inaugural Fellow and a member of Education Leaders of Color and the LeveragEd Foundation's Collective. The daughter of Mexican immigrant parents and a first-generation college graduate, Elvira understands firsthand the transformative power of access to education and has built her career around expanding it.

This story, “AI Leaves Some Students Lost in Translation,” explores in more detail some of the promise and challenges of AI development for the Latino community. (You can also try out the Playlab app developed by the group, “Elevating your Speaking,” a tool that parents can use to support their students’ language development skills, here.)

Stanford University professor, Dr. Sanmi Koyejo, discusses his white paper about how AI is leaving non-English speakers behind here. The full report from Dr. Koyejo and his team is here: “Mind the (Language) Gap: Mapping the Challenges of LLM Development in Low-Resource Language Contexts.”