August 2022

Final Assignment: Meet Your New Instructor

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Suffice it to say, if you have internet access, you have likely been on, or at least heard of YouTube. It is the second most visited website, after Google search (Wikepedia) YouTube has changed the way that educators teach material. Jessica and I are both educators at two different levels, myself an elementary teacher, and Jessica in higher education. We wanted to research a platform that we both use in the classroom to engage our students- YouTube seemed like the obvious choice. The social media and video sharing site covered an enormous amount of content, so we needed to narrow our focus, this is where TED talks came in. We delved into the cultural impact and history of the TEDtalk channel specifically on the platform YouTube and how it has influenced education as a communication technology. We also branched out to other areas of TED including TED-Ed and TEDx briefly. We hope you enjoy our interacting with our infographic below:

 

[12.2] Speculative Futures: Jade

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Linked to the post: https://blogs.ubc.ca/msjadelee/2022/08/05/task-12-speculative-futures/

The suspenseful music makes these movie trailers! Both were entertaining to watch and to imagine a world without writing manually. Honestly, the thought of losing such a skill that feels so natural made it sentimental and had me clinging on to present and past joys of shopping for notebooks and fancy pens to write with. This future does not seem far from reality as I notice in my very own 2.5 year old how intuitive she is with the screens, swiping through the apps and the keyboard compared to having to explicitly teach her how to hold a writing tool as she scribbles on the page to leave her mark. In the utopian scenario, Jade’s script explains “teachers don’t need to waste time teaching students how to write.” Alternatively, educators would need to spend more time teaching students about digital citizenship and authorship at a younger age. If manual writing were to become obsolete and succumb to the digital age, there would be a greater need to protect information and data with the lack of privacy and our every thoughts/ ideas being digitized. 

After watching the videos,  I was left with more questions about the potential outcomes of both scenarios. What impact would the loss of manual writing have on our dexterity? The simple act of holding a pencil takes practice and muscle control, would we see more students struggle with fine motor tasks? Since digital writing is less time consuming than handwriting, would this influence attention? How would this impact art forms that use similar instruments like painting?

 I was taken back to Module 4: The Mechanization of Writing where new technologies have emerged and replaced existing mediums. How might remediation of digital writing occur so that there is a “backup” if there was a worldwide infinite power surge? For example, there are applications now where we can still handwrite using digital tools. I look forward to hearing the podcast interviewing Jade’s children and their opinion on the potential of writing changes, and hearing from the next generation themselves!

[12.2] Speculative Futures

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Retrieved from https://twitter.com/BKergin/status/1552760072576438272

A timely Twitter post about living in the future- someone would have given birth to George Jetson last week! The iconic cartoon show from 1962 shared some fantasies  about what living 100 years from then would be like. I remember scenes from the show of hovercrafts flying around and robot helpers at home- not too far from reality. My two speculative narratives are loosely based on the show with some plausible or even possible events in 30 years. (Dunne & Raby, 2013) 

In the Leading Lines podcast, one of the panelists,  Doug Fisher, references how digital technology could support IEPs for all students. I used this as a guide for my design as well as incorporating the HyperHuman design by IDEO from Core77 as part of the narrative. As an elementary teacher, the future of education and the role of the teacher will be greatly impacted by AI. Educators will need to refine and advance their skill sets to stay relevant in the field. That is the origin of my storyline- how technology can be implemented to enhance the profession in a utopian perspective, but also threaten it from a dystopian viewpoint. As Harari (2017) predicts in her article, “In the twenty-first century, if the masses lose their economic value they might have to struggle against irrelevance rather than exploitation.” This could be the downfall to AI in education replacing human jobs.  If my career plans are in place, I should be retired in 30 years, so I wonder if I would have the opportunity to live this narrative, or at least some parts of it. 

The speculative design itself- the “EdVe”- is a robot EA that uses AI to support the teacher in planning lessons and assessments. Its main feat is the ability to generate Individualized Education Plans for each student that is connected to a personalized augmented reality machine used to transform the learning experience. Please enjoy the video below:

References:

Dunne, A. & Raby, F. (2013). Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Retrieved August 30, 2019, from Project MUSE database.

Hariri, Y. N. (2017). Reboot for the AI revolution. Nature International Weekly Journal of Science, 550(7676), 324-327.

All pictures in the video from https://www.istockphoto.com