Lift the subject of AI in education for discussion these days and you can feel the collective moan in the room.
Sometimes I even hear it. We are tired, I understand. Many students are too. But if we do not continue to work in a creative way to deal with the disturbances of education posed by the AI – if we wait and see how it goes – it will be too late.
AI fatigue is a lot
There are a few factors at stake, of an AI literacy fracture, simply to talk about each other.
AI literacy is almost unmanageable. The complexity of the AI in education, exacerbated by the rhythm of technological change, makes “literacy” of AI very difficult to define, and even less to reach. Educators represent a wide range of levels of experience and conceptual frameworks, as well as different opinions on power, quality, opportunity and risk of generative.
A person will see AI as a radical first step of a revolution in intelligence; The next one will reject it as “mainly garbage” and will minimize the value by discussing. And, as far as I can, there is no main definition of the literacy of AI to date. Some people don't even like the term literacy.
Our different conceptual frameworks compete with each other. Many conceptual disciplines and orientations try to speak together, each with its own hypotheses and incentives. In a given space, we have the collision of experts with a novice, entrepreneur with criticism, skeptical with optimistic, reductionist with Holist … and the list continues.
We tend to silo and specialize. Because it is difficult to become literate in a global way in the generative AI (and its related problems), many adopt a close concentration and stick to that: evaluation design, academic integrity, paternity, cognitive unloading, energy consumption, bias, ethics of work and others. The meetings take on the character of the debates. At the very least, discussions on AI take time, because each orientation seems to need to be disseminated every day.
We feel sorrow for what we can lose: human fatherhood, the agency, status and a whole range of normative relational behaviors. A colleague recently told me how sad she feels to mark the work of the students. Paternity, for example, loses consistency as a category or shared value, which can be surreal and discouraging for writers and readers. AI disturbance brings a deeply difficult emotional experience that is rarely discussed.
We are underworld. The institutions were slow to deploy policies, to train working groups, to provide training or to finance time to search, prepare, plan and design responses. It is an intimidating task to follow, and even less to get ahead, the Silicon Valley. Unfortunately, the burden is widely supported by individuals.
The elephant in the room
A large part of the sector suffers from pious wishes that AI is “mainly garbage”, unlikely to change things a lot, or simply embarrassment. Many educators have not thought about how AI technologies can lead our societies and our education systems to change radically and quickly, and that these changes can have an impact on learning and teaching psychology, not to mention the entire education infrastructure. We are talking about each other.
Silicon Valley openly pursues the general artificial intelligence (AG), or something like that. Imagine a Chatppt that can do your job, my work and a big element of recent graduate knowledge jobs can hope to enter. Some initiates think it could happen by 2027.
A few weeks ago, Dario Amodai, CEO of the company Ai Anthropic, wrote its prediction that 50% of entry -level office jobs could disappear over the next two years, and that overall unemployment could reach 20%. This could mainly be overhaul of media or confirmation bias among the technological elite. But IBM, Klarna and Duolingo have already cited the efficiency linked to AI in recent layoffs.
Whether these changes take two years, or five, even ten, is on the radar. So let's take a break and imagine it. What happens to a generation of young people who perceive the growing shortage of employment, options and social objectives?
Book, for the moment, what it means for cities, mental health or social fabric. What does this mean for higher education – especially if a university degree no longer holds the value it has promised? How should he answer?
Reply
I suggest that we answer with compassion, humanity … and something like a plan. What is it like? Let me suggest some possibilities.
The sector works together. Imagine this: a consortium of institutions brings together a base of resources and a space for discussion (not social media) for AI in education. It respects the diversity of conceptual positions and frameworks, but also aims for a coherent and pragmatic work ethics which helps institutions and individuals to make decisions. He writes a change management plan for the sector, embracing adaptive management to create executives to support institutions to respond quickly, intelligently, in a flexible and human manner. It will not solve all the disorder in a coherent solution, but it could provide a more stable framework for change. And lift the burden of thousands of us who feel that we reinvent the wheel every day.
Institutions act. The leading institutions adopt major discussions on the future of society, labor and education. They show a solid will to deal with the risks and opportunities to come, they devote resources to the project, and they take measures that support both staff and students to sail in a thoughtful way.
Individuals and small groups are allowed to answer in a creative way. Supported by the sector and their HEIs, they collaborate to keep motivated, verify themselves on media threshing and find new creative avenues for teaching and learning. We solve problems for today while organizing a space for disorderly discussions, speculating on future developments and experimenting with education in a changing world.
Thus, the chiefs of the sector, help us to find a certain degree of convergence or consistency; institutions, please take measures for resources and support your staff and students; And individuals, let's work together to do something good.
With leadership, action and creative collaboration, we can simply find time and energy to build a new language and a new vision for the strange landscape that we have entered, to experiment in complete safety with new models of knowledge creation and paternity, and to discover new capacities for self -knowledge and human value.
So moans, yes – I groaned with you. And breathe – I'm going to go with that. And then, let's see what we can build.