Category: Change

Writing Speculative Fiction

“Jon knew that almost all of the work being submitted by students had in fact been produced by some sort of AI or other. If not the whole thing, then at least it had been co-written with natural language processing assistance.”

Photo by Lucrezia Carnelos on Unsplash

In late 2022 the journal Postdigital Science and Education issued a call for short stories and vignettes in the form of speculative fiction that look at education in the postdigital era.

I took the opportunity to write a short piece and was delighted that it was accepted. I was also really impressed with the editors and the amount of support and help provided with this journal.

Click!

Student Henri Kase sighed as she hit the ‘Submit’ button on the university’s Next Generation Leaning Management System (NGLMS). What a farce, she thought to herself. At least the new GPT-15 natural language processor meant that she did not have to waste too much time on these stupid and ultimately meaningless tasks. When will the education system finally wake up to the world in 2035? Who had the time to possibly read all those boring old eBooks and papers? Why read them anyway when a personal AI could give a neat summary of all the key points?

Henri stretched her back and neck, reaching for her VR headset so that she could get back to the CryptoSouk™ and start trading again. That was, after all, the activity that paid for her university fees and living expenses.

Curcher, M. The Pseudo Uni. Postdigit Sci Educ (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42438-022-00384-3

To continue reading click here.

Having never written in this style before, it was an interesting experience and on I am tempted to explore again. I got the timeline completely wrong, when I drafted the first version ChatGPT had not been launched and I was looking more than 10 years into the future. It now seems as if this is about coming year.

This was written based on my experiences of trying the GPT-3 playground and was written before ChatGPT was launched and then really took off. The mainstream media and education seems to be in something of a frenzy over this, for understandable reasons.

I have been thinking of writing some posts about the impact of ChatGPT and other LLM technologies on education, but already there is probably a surplus of writing on this topic, with everyone and her dog having sort sort of “hot take” on what this might mean for education. For sure we do need to be talking seriously about this and at the same time we want to avoid making badly informed and poorly thought through knee jerk decisions. We teach in interesting times!

Also be sure to check out the many other excellent submissions to this call, including The Levity Bureau by my good friend Chris Smith.

Educational Trends in 2022

Photo by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash

I always have such good intentions for writing and then events seem to get in the way and block the actual process of putting fingers to keyboard.  I have notebooks with all kinds of ideas for posts, but sadly they never seem to get from the notebook to these pages and so it is that months have passed since my last post.

In that period I have moved house and also run the first face to face intensive week for the degree program I co-lead since the fall of 2019.

So, now I am starting off again teaching a course that looks at the trends and innovations taking place in contemporary education.  It is disappointing to note that I also wrote a post on starting to teach this course two years ago in this blog and I did not manage to follow through with further posts!

I am very fortunate to be “teaching” (which is quite the wrong word) this to a diverse group of post-graduate students located across the world.  I am therefore very much looking forward to exploring the trends and innovations that are happening in their own contexts.

I therefore think it timely to reflect a little and comment on what I experience as the trends in my own context and how they impact teachers, students and the process of education. This is quite challenging to do without launching into a polemic rant that would probably do little except release the stress and frustration that has been building up, like the safety valve on a pressure cooker.  I do not want to be a curmudgeonly old man, seemingly complaining about everything.

This then is a serious attempt to write about the situation as I experience it.  The main trend that I have seen emerge over the last decade and then raise to prominence in the last two years is that of educational leaders becoming entirely focussed on finance and budget to the expense of all other aspects of education.

This is not to claim that the financial survival of an educational institution is of no importance, but rather a feeling that senior leadership seem to have lost sight of the actual reason that we exist at all, in other words the question of purpose.  This then gets transmitted down to middle managers by the metrics and KPI’s that are monitored and by which they are judged as successful or not.

Interestingly this then can also lead to contradictions and misalignments between what is tracked and measured and what the institution states are its strategic objectives and values.

This focus on income and costs, mean that staff and leaders lose sight of the actual reason that we exist, and all aspects of education become financialised.  The drivers for this are, in my opinion, political and economic, but also to some extent also just the result of poorly thought through strategies that result in unforeseen consequences.

None of this is new, Gert Biesta wrote an excellent book that touches on this topic in his “Good Education in an Age of Measurement” in 2011 and researchers like Stephen Ball have spent much of their career focussing on this.  Despite this, I am still experiencing this as an ’emerging trend’ because it now seems that we are in a time when education is a commodity, the process transactional and the only focus of those in charge is the spreadsheet of KPI’s.

The knock-on effects of this impact curriculum, pedagogy, processes, support and mental wellbeing and, of course, technology adoption.

In a future post I plan to unwrap this a bit more in terms of specific and concrete examples and how these play out in a contemporary public sector university focussed on professional and vocational education.

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