Just a tool?

Is AI just a tool?

Pondering the TLWAI Europe panel session

I recently spent an excellent two days at the first Teaching and Learning with AI in Europe conference, organised by Breda University of Applied Sciences and the University of Central Florida, so first I want to say a big thank you to everyone who helped organize the event, those who presented and also to all those who talked with me, thank you for the interactions and thinking. There were a few things that were raised in the panel session that we did not have time to really explore and that I have been pondering since the event and so I have decided to write that up as a way of thinking these things through.

Why I do not agree that AI is “just a tool”

In the response to the very first question to the panel it was said that AI was ‘just a tool’ and that position was shared pretty well by the rest of the panel except me, so I would like in this post to explain more fully than time allowed, why I do not share this view but instead think that AI is a technology in which we all participate.

AI is a technology in which we all participate.

In my initial response I mentioned how AI is shaping society and how we interact with it and each other, how the tendency to anthropomorphize means we often, for example, thank it for help, where we would not do that with a hammer and I am aware that this comment did get a few laughs and also nods of agreement. I think I mentioned briefly Heidegger. But there was of course not time to really get into fully explaining any of this in detail.

The hammer

So, to start with the hammer, and anthropomorphism. AI is designed to encourage a relationship with the humans who use it, in some cases it is named, and the entire design of our interaction invites us to see it as a person. This is the basis of the Turing test after all; can we reliably tell whether we are talking to a human or a machine? Current AI design is to make it harder for us to be able to tell. This is a commercial choice to shape how we think and engage with it. Traditional tools are not designed in this way. Further, the talk from AI firms of consciousness and needing to protect them from possibly harmful interactions with humans reinforces that position.

To dig deeper into my use of hammer and mention of Heidegger, he was trying to show that technologies were not just a means to an end but in fact reveal what things are and what they are for. They enframe things and his concern was that this enframing was showing the world to be a ‘standing reserve’ – in other words, things to be used. Calling AI just a tool is thus just the sort of enframing that Heidegger was warning us about.

Tools and technologies

I want to add that I think that there is a difference between tools and technologies. Here I am drawing on ideas and work by Brian Arthur and Jon Dron. A tool is something we use, technology is an orchestration of phenomena to achieve some purpose. We humans often are a part of that orchestration. So, I use my hammer as part of the orchestrations of phenomena to assemble an Ikea wardrobe, the hammer is part of a technology that includes me. Dron calls the human part of this orchestration, where we flexibly improvise and judge as we go, soft technique. Hard technique, by contrast, is the mechanical, routine, the scripted. Machines have been able to do hard technique for a long time, but AI is arguably the first widely available technology that can do soft technique and that is important. It writes, it evaluates and it converses, a screwdriver, a hammer and a calculator never did that.

Not neutral

I mentioned that AI does things to us. The panel did not disagree with that point, but argued that it does these things as a tool. I disagree because using the word tool frames AI as neutral, and it is certainly not. Here I am drawing on work by Neil Selwyn among others. Tools do things, technologies do things and do things to us. These technologies are being embedded into other technologies so that they do not only shape us but start to shape our other technologies. If we frame AI as merely a tool then we are hiding this and framing some sort of neutrality that is not real because it carries, embedded in its very design, the beliefs and values of the industry and people who built it. Those cannot be removed.

Tools do things, technologies do things and do things to us.

Those assumptions about the use of data, about efficiency, about infrastructure, about what counts as knowledge, or what counts as valuable, are all there in the technology. This makes it political and social in ways that are often obscured when we describe AI merely as a tool.

My aim here has really not been to try to win the panel or to make a point, rather the act of writing this is my own thinking in action as I try to reach for what it was I felt important to say but had neither the time nor the skill on the day. This is why this is entirely my own writing, AI has not been used. Errors in facts, in grammar and spelling and in thinking are all my own.

References

Arthur, W. B. (2009). The nature of technology: What it is and how it evolves. Free Press.

Dron, J. (2023). How education works: Teaching, technology, and technique. AU Press.

Heidegger, M. (1977). The question concerning technology, and other essays (W. Lovitt, Trans.). Harper & Row. (Original work published 1954)

Selwyn, N. (2016). Is technology good for education? Polity Press.

Turing, A. M. (1950). Computing machinery and intelligence. Mind, 59(236), 433–460.

A Link Blog Post

^{Photo by}^{Clarisse Croset}^on^Unsplash

Writing Something at Last

This is more of a “link blog” than anything reflective and in fact it is really just a lightly edited version of a page that was used in a course that I was teaching in Emerging Trends in Education. However, perhaps it does serve as a way to reopen this blog and my writing. Perhaps there are some links here that might be useful.

Quote of the week.

“The real danger is not that computers will begin to think like men but that men will begin to think like computers” (Sydney Harris – Journalist)

Jon Dron quickly mentioned the quote during his recent webinar and so brought it to my attention.

How Good are you at Identifying Fake GAI Images?

Try this to find out. Might be a useful resource to use with students as well.

No Need to Worry – Everything is Going to be Wonderful

So says Sam Altman, Head of Open AI in his recent blog post. Why? Because “Deep Learning Worked”

AI in Early Years and School Settings

Much of the literature shared on AI in education has a higher education focus. Happy to see this from the Teacher Learning Network (TLN) in Australia which provides “high quality professional development for staff in early childhood, primary and secondary school settings.”

Link Here to home page and PDF of the Issue here.

UNESCO AI Competencies for Teachers

A new report. It does include a short summary for the TL/DR.

Funding for AI in Education

Google.org announces new AI funding for students and educators. I had personal experience of this sort of thing with Microsoft. A Faustian deal or a useful source of money and PD, both of those or neither? You decide.

Call for Papers

Metaphors of AI in Higher Education – Discourses, Histories and Practices: Call for Papers. If you have ideas and want to talk them through, happy to do that.

Contrarian Views?

There have been an increasing number of calls for the development and enactment of “AI Literacy” and this almost always includes a focus on the ethics of AI. Punya Mishra questions that assumption.

Bloom’s Two Sigma from the 1980’s is pretty well embedded as a given and often cited to support arguments in education. Just how valid and reliable is the research and has it been repeatable? This article takes a look.

Both of these are shared in the spirit of being “critical” and questioning assumptions.

Where Good Ideas Come From?

This is not so new, but rather it is only recently that I made a connection. One of the Substacks that I read is by Steven Johnson. He is also one of the main people working at Google and behind their NotebookLM project.

What I had not connected is that this is the same Steven Johnson who wrote “How We Got to Now” and also “Where Good Ideas Come From“. Both of these I had read some years ago but I just had not made the connection that it was the same guy.

This led me to revisit “Where Good Ideas Come From” because I think there are some interesting insights in that book, some of which have also been built upon by others. For example, he writes a whole chapter on the The Adjacent Possible and another on Liquid Networks. Some of you will no doubt recall that Jon Dron also writes and speaks about the Adjacent Possible and the role of Path Dependencies, in his papers, books and presentations. I also think that my own thinking about a Liquid Curriculum and also Networked Knowledge is influenced by Johnson’s writing in this book, although I was not seeing the source of my own ideas.

If you do not have time for the book or just prefer video then here are some resources:

This 4 minute video focusses on The Slow Hunch and the importance of Connectivity.

This is 17 minute Ted Talk Video, provides greater detail.

Although these are more than a decade old, I think they might be useful. To bring this right up to date, this Sept 2024 article from Verge picks up the story with NotebookLM and how he envisions a Chatbot as a teacher! Now no matter what you or I think of that and your natural objections, we have to engage with these narratives.

Punya Mishra (of TPACK fame and many articles and books) – does not agree and explains Why ChatGPT Isn’t Your Next Teacher.

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.”

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

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.

Futures, Trends and Innovations in Education -First Thoughts

I started writing this post several weeks ago, but the pressure of work meant that it did not get completed and published until now.

I recently started co-teaching an MBA course called Emerging Trends and Innovation in Education which has led to me reflecting on education and its relationship with time. It strikes me that the future is part of the raison d’être of education, for without a future of some kind there would seem to me to be little point to education. I think this holds true whether you define education and its purpose more broadly or you use a more narrowly defined characterisation that focuses on formal schooling. One aspect of the pandemic has been that it has made visible the many important functions and roles that teachers and formal schooling play in society. In my view is that this is a good thing for parents, employers and politicians to appreciate that the role of teachers and schools is not limited to the delivery of a curriculum.

Although there are those who lobby for tradition and the “maintenance of standards”, often harping back to some imagined golden age when things were better, it is still their desire to transmit this golden past into the future. So although backward looking, the overall aim is recreate this ‘glorious past’ in the future.

As I am often stating, the question then arises of whether we see the role of education as that of maintaining the status quo, of continuing the world as it now exists or, if the objective is to change the world in some way. If it is the latter, then a wider debate emerges of what that change looks like. It is for this reason that I often become frustrated with those who simply call to improve education and make it better. Better for whom and it what ways? Improve how and for what ends? Without clarity these are just empty platitudes. This is also one of the reasons why I believe that education is always political, not in a party political way, but in terms of whether the objective is stability or change and if change, then what type of change.

Postcard by French commercial artist Jean-Marc Côté in 1899 to commemorate the 1900 world’s fair, “Exposition Universelle,” in Paris. This is his vision of education in the year 2000. The postcards were later published in a book with Isaac Asimov in 1986.

Education has a long history of trying to predict the future and I have no doubt this will continue. As I write this post there are countless projects trying to predict what “post pandemic” education, schools and universities will look like, all with various interest groups vying to push their own agendas. Therefore educational leaders and teachers need to be aware and mindful of of those who are trying to create these futures and frame the narrative. This does not mean we should resist all change or be cynical, but it does mean engaging critically in the debate.