(AI) Party On.

How would you know if you were living through some kind of ‘end times’? You might look for signs of some kind of degradation: perhaps people lose trust in one another and the idea of the social contract, maybe the economy collapses and everyone reverts to a pre-commerce state … or maybe it’s something less obvious that’s almost impossible to perceive in real time? Additionally, something that makes whatever come next seem ‘lesser than’ earlier times might be imperceptible, or instead perceived as a leap forward by others – without the benefit of hindsight, who can say which is true?

Public education is a nebulous thing: it’s an agreed-upon set of objectives with the goal, usually, or creating a ‘productive human’ by instilling useful skills and attitudes. Who, though, decides what is ‘useful’ for a person to know? In Teaching in a Digital Age A.W. Bates relates the story of Socrates’ disappointment with his charge Phaedrus, because the understudy had the temerity to learn from the written word instead of by careful listening and mimicry; this implies a society that heavily favours a skillset that Phaedrus was trying to work around laterally by (Zeus’ beard!) reading. Today we value textual literacy in our young people to a degree that might make Socrates didactically gasp, and assume us lost to a degree: a burden to others. We might be in his version of the ‘end times’ right now, pedagogically.

Even if Socrates could come to offer a Grecian nod after seeing our technological and scientific progress based on the written word, one wonders what he’d make of artificial intelligence’s rise in recent years and its applicability to education. Given his disdain for creating knowledge with a genesis outside one’s own brain, it’s not a stretch to guess that he’d rail against the part where answers are spit out and ‘passively’ accepted by a … looks down marble nose … reader. Then of course there’d be the internet to explain, and to someone whose method of copy and pasting involved rather more chisels than that of many students today.

The documentary Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, however, proved him a flexible sort, who might understand that expecting research and work to be done online isn’t truly the passive task poor Phaedrus was accused of. A simple select and retrieve activity might skew that way, but a more considered design of activity can change the outcome drastically – in her article The Landscape of Merging Modalities from our weekly readings Valerie Irvine says that the activity/passivity of an activity “depends on the pedagogy applied in the modality” which puts the onus/βάρος back on the instructor to use the resource correctly.  Despite the cognatic links to ancient Greek inherent in the sentence, though, it might be hard for someone who views reading as a ‘cheat code’ of sorts (can’t exactly get him to read Google translate off your phone, after all) to get behind a computer agglomerating previous written works to provide you an answer. He might even need a bit of a lay-down… or a retsina.

When the current educational arms race around AI begun, I went through the stages Socrates might have – disconnection, disdain… even some disgust. As maintaining an online wing to my classes at work became de rigueur, and doubly so in the wake of the pandemic, I couldn’t help but wonder: can I guarantee that any work I’m not seeing happen with my myopic eyes is actually happening? Beyond that, was what I was doing transferring at all well into some kind of asynchronous space? In our weekly reading Bates mentions that “[transferring] the same teaching to a different medium [will] fail to exploit the unique characteristics of the medium” … which I certainly was doing. I don’t think that AI is going to become less impactful in education as time goes on, so should I just ‘love the bomb’ and accept that some people will misuse it?

Literacy is a tool, AI is a tool… am I also a tool if I refuse to engage reality on reality’s terms around AI’s potential in education? AI is just another potentially overpowered resource – as with the calculator – that the abacus-crowd will groan about, while watching rockets use computer-calculated trajectories on high-definition screens and struggling to work out Ea-naşir’s copper pricing scheme.  It’s new in its degree to act as a nigh-upon complete substitute for functional literacy, perhaps, but insisting upon nothing but sweatily hand-written work is pedantic at best and ableist at worst. I’d wager (on an assignment, say) that as with each new exploitable technology AI will find its niche, and that those who over rely upon it will be discarded… but so too might those who never learn its uses. Phaedrus wasn’t wrong to read, just as a data analyst isn’t wrong to use a power AI tool. Things will fall into their proper places with time. In the interim, we’d do well to simply be excellent to one another as we party on (Herek, 1989).

Works Cited:

Bates, A.W. (2015). Chapter 6: understanding technology in education. In Teaching in a Digital Age: Guidelines for designing teaching and learning. https://opentextbc.ca/teachinginadigitalage/part/chapter-8-understanding-technology/

Herek, S. (1989). Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure [Film]. Orion Pictures.

Irvine, V. (2020). The Landscape of Merging Modalities. Educause Review. https://er.educause.edu/-/media/files/articles/2020/10/er20_4103.pdf