AI and education

Ai is still the flavour of the month. There is a plethora of sites on the topic. For example, this one, summarising 6 ways to leverage Gen AI in education which although written in April, is already dated in the tools/platforms presented. Another, written in July, lists 43 examples of AI in education and provides several good resources with examples.

 A working paper, published in August, by Hamilton, William and Hattie (2023), discusses the future of AI in education. The paper posits several future scenarios based on a premise that AI will be ascendant and be able to replace humans in many cognitive activities. They postulate 4 scenarios whereby we ban AI now, work side by side with AI, upgrade our brains using brain-computer interfaces, or provide universal basic income to a populace, largely 'retired'. Each has implications for education with the authors suggesting that accept for the first option, all the other three lead to a reduction in humankind's motivation to be educated! 

An insights report from the US of A provides a less intimidating prediction, taking the perspective of AI as business as usual and making recommendations around trust, equity, fairness and the adoption of guidelines and guardrails. 

My Scholar Alerts for 'artificial intelligence in education' generates around a dozen articles every 2-3 days. So this topic is still very much up front for many. The project we have started in the second semester (June) to study the planning, development and implementation of AI supported learning activities across 6 programmes is starting to reveal the baseline literacies required to be able to work with AI tools. AI literacy is an important foundation before learners are able to embark on using AI in a fruitful manner to inform their learning. As AI tools require good academic literacies as well, we are working with programmes from level 4 (Certificates) to level 7 (degree). It has been interesting observing learners get to grips with the technology, with some quite hesitant and others keen to get stuck in. We start collating data from observations and initial surveys next month, followed by summative focus groups in November. The project has been good learning for everyone involved, including the ethics behind how AI is introduced to learners and the important ethical issues with regards to using AI that have to discussed with learners.