Is the point to educate people to help them navigate their lives and develop personal growth or are we really just going to double down on training students to understand increasingly complex commercial systems so they can work jobs that AI might take anyway? I think that ideas about future classrooms may have underestimated the impact new AI technology is really going to have. As a high school teacher, I have already seen AI create a huge challenge for teachers wanting to continue a traditional educational experience. In the readings, Selwyn et al. (2020) wrote that future technology could increasingly control educational experiences and decisions, but really it seems that generative AI introduces a much deeper change and problem. AI may actually change why we choose to educate students, and for what reasons we do. AI can answer any questions and will increasingly be asked to do many tasks in the workplace. Moreover, it seems that AI not only can accurately produce student work, which has traditionally been a benchmark to evaluate student learning, but it can also think for students as well. I feel somewhat pessimistic about the future of education because I think it is going through an identity crisis. I think we are looking at the commercialization of education because these new technologies are not designed with education in mind, but packaged to schools as educational systems. (Selwyn et al., 2020) One thing is for sure, AI is exposing a flaw in the education to job market model that needed to be addressed years ago.
References
Selwyn, N., Pangrazio, L., Nemorin, S., & Perrotta, C. (2020). What might the school of 2030 be like? An exercise in social science fiction. Learning, Media and Technology, 45(1), 90–106. https://doi.org/10.1080/17439884.2020.1694944
Hi Vince,
I think this is a really topical and interesting area for exploration. I just recently had a conversation with my colleagues around critical thinking and how difficult it already is to have students engage in critical thinking. As you mention AI can replace student thought and effort, if we can’t get students to challenge themselves and if they circumvent effort and use AI how can we have them critically think. AI also makes me very pessimistic for the future; I wonder though if it is just a growing pain while we integrate and adopt this new technology. For the purposes of the assignment, I would narrow the focus to how AI will impact education in K-12 at your school, which as you mentioned is a private school so maybe the impacts will be different?
Thanks for your reply! Yes, I think I will refine it, specifically in the area looking at how AI might actually be exposing an already existing flaw in education. Students in K-12 have been in a system that traditionally focused on employment preparation and technological efficiency. Perhaps AI is demonstrating the existing problem with that increasingly outdated model of learning.