“Jay, why did you scream?”
“I don’t know.”
“Think about it.”
“I thought that was your job.”
“What was happening before you screamed?”
“Well, B screamed first so I decided to too.”
“If B jumped off a bridge, would you do that too?
“You sound like my teacher. This is really annoying; why do you have to go over everything I do?”
“Because you don’t.”
Dunne and Raby (2013) state that conceptual designs are more than just ideas, they’re ideals as well. Moral philosopher Susan Neiman elaborates on this, “Ideals are not measured by whether they conform to reality; reality is judged by whether it lives up to ideals” (cited in Dunne & Raby 2013, p. 12). An only child with busy career-oriented parents, their parents have become concerned about Jay’s emotional maturity. They have invested in a SmartWatch app that uses sensors to detect Jay’s emotional state and behaviour to prompt them to reflect and regulate his emotions and actions. Dunne and Raby (2013) note that designers’ creations are made with the best intentions, often neglecting people’s worst tendencies. Their solution to this design flaw is to change “our values, beliefs, attitudes, and behavior” (Dunne & Raby, 2013, p.2). The app’s algorithms used to determine behaviours and emotions are user-dependant, meaning Jay will be prompted by the app to input their emotions and causes.
Meanwhile, Jay’s teacher is talking to herself, or is she? She’s having a discussion with her teaching app. The app goes through the curriculum and student data. From the time students enter the school, their learning progress has been input into a database. This data plus lesson plans taken from several online resources are input into the app which then uses this information to plan lessons around the teacher’s learning objectives. Initially, teachers were concerned that their jobs and/or pay would be cut, but as Dr Shannon Vallor (2018) observed, “AI is not ready for solo flight” so “we [people] are still the responsible agents.” The purpose of this app is to free up time for teachers to have non-contact hours for evaluating student work during school hours, focusing on presentation rather than creation, mentoring and coaching new teachers, and of course, inputting students’ learning progress into the database. Teachers are still involved and engaged in the lesson planning progress since the lessons will use the data teachers input into the database to determine if the class should move on to the next learning objectives. Different activities and lesson formats are suggested by the app for teachers to choose from with the option to make modifications. The role of teaching is moving from lesson planner to evaluator and mentor. Dr. Vallor (2018) points out that the “future of human-AI partnership, one that serves and enriches human lives, won’t happen organically; it will need to be a choice we make, to improve our machines by improving ourselves.”
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.
Vallor, S. (2018, Nov 6). Lessons from the AI mirror Shannon Vallor [Video]. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40UbpSoYN4k&t=872s
The section which stood out to me the most was the part about what teaching could look like in the future. This has an obvious connection as I am an educator myself.
“Meanwhile, Jay’s teacher is talking to herself, or is she? She’s having a discussion with her teaching app. The app goes through the curriculum and student data. From the time students enter the school, their learning progress has been input into a database. This data plus lesson plans taken from several online resources are input into the app which then uses this information to plan lessons around the teacher’s learning objectives.”
The idea of having an app which has a bank of lesson plans doesn’t seem too far off, as the current BC curriculum is online, and does have examples of lesson plans. What struck me the most was the idea of collection of student data and how educators will collect it and use it in the future. This idea takes me back to a previous MET course, where I explored the idea of the ethical collection of student data for educational analytics.
When considering the use of data collection and educational analytics, educational leadership and educators needs to consider a variety of issues including ownership; stewardship; access; transparency & consent; security and privacy; and interoperability.
Although all the other aspects are important to data collection, I believe interoperability is the one of the most important aspects. To ensure the adoption of the learning analytics program by educators, a School District would have to be proactive that the collection, use, and access to learning data would sync well between the District and supplier software systems (Fritz, John et al., 2017). I believe interoperability to be vital to the success of any data collection program overall as I feel not many educators would go through a process to obtain data that proved to be confusing, time-consuming, and cumbersome to acquire.
Future technologies can be complex in their design, but they will still need to be user-friendly otherwise they simply won’t be adopted by the masses.
References
Fritz, John et al., (2017, May 1). IMS Global Learning Data & Analytics Key Principles. IMS Global Learning Consortium. https://www.imsglobal.org/learning-data-analytics-key-principles
Hi Michael,
Thanks for your well-thought-out response. My second speculative future is based on my current experiences. My school started using O Track this year with the intention of collecting data from all year groups to help teachers tailor their classes to the students’ needs and to see which areas the school as a whole could focus on. This is useful because there is a high EAL population, so many year groups are performing at a writing/reading level 2 years below year level. It’s interesting because the KPIs were input by the school’s department heads and we have run into glitches and frustrations, but it’s customizable and most people think it’ll be easier after the first year. Will I still be so optimistic this time next year about O Track? I hope so, but who knows? This is my first year working with the English National Curriculum, so it’s really interesting seeing what a centralized curriculum looks like because there are tons of resources, both paid and free. I still spend a lot of time adapting the lessons to my students and going over the terminology and methodology, but it’s nice to not have to start from scratch. Anyway, I just thought it’d be nice if these two components could be combined so I could spend more time on other teaching-related tasks such as assessment and further fine-tuning of lessons/scaffolding to suit my students’ needs.