Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIEd) – where is it going?

My feelings about the use of AI in education and training

One of the things that has fascinated me across the decades of my learning journey is that technology changes rapidly. And, especially if you are teaching technology-based skills, you MUST learn the bleeding-edge technology EARLY that you deem to be most relevant to the technology topics that you teach.

That’s right, as a learning technology technology teacher you must always be an early adopter learning the technology so you can teach it. (Go ahead, read that back 10x fast. I’ll wait. 😉)

If you are not an early adopter, then your students who are coming to you for enlightenment and edification will see you as outdated and a waste of time. This is especially true in industry training and college technology programs, but it is not limited to those programs.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is one of these key technologies that you really don’t have the option to learn or not. You must learn it whether you want to or not. Why? Because it is everywhere. Literally. AI powers your suggested items in your online shopping, in your TV and streaming viewing, your social media feeds, logging in to your mobile phone, your car’s cruise control, etc.

Is it the future of education?

According to Will Rogers, “Even if you’re on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there.”

AI is in your classroom. AI is the train bearing down on you sitting on the track. Even if you have a room full of six-year-old first graders, there is AI in your classroom. The first graders may not be using it, but you are. It helps to filter your email; it powers your web searches while you seek content or supplies for the next class; it helps you plot on the GPS the best route to take across the county on the next field trip.

You may not need to learn how or why AI works (unless of course, you teach AI as a subject), but you must know how to interface with AI and let it help you help yourself and your students.

Your classroom tech vendors, like Pearson, are using AI in their course support tools (Chaudhry & Kazim, 2022) and those tools used by students will inevitably end up with them coming to you for “tech support” to get the tools to work. Expecting that that is going to happen, you must learn the technology.

Having said all of this to this point in the post, I do not think that AI is “THE” future of education, but I sincerely believe that AI is a core, central, and essential driving force in the future of educational technologies. However, AI isn’t a stand-alone technology, AI makes other technologies better.

Where I expect AI to be used in the future

I’ve mentioned some use cases for AI above regarding where AI is used today. I see those uses continuing and in some cases expanding in scope within those applications. However, AI will expand into other areas where it may not commonly be used as of the writing of this post.

I expect AI will become a better personal digital assistant (PDA) than those hardware PDAs of the late 1980s and early 90s ever were. I believe the reason those hardware PDAs disappeared was because everything they could do, the cloud could do better with the multi-tool browsers and the generic mobile computing platform that mobile phones have turned into. But the rise/fall of hardware PDAs is a story for another day.

My central prediction is that AI will become the embedded, secret ingredient that makes the cloud capable of realizing its full capability.

Back in 1984 (no, this timeline’s 1984, not Orwell’s 1984) John Gage of Sun Microsystems coined the slogan “The Network is the Computer” well before notions of ubiquitous cloud computing systems became the norm of the late 2010s so much so that Cloudflare would take ownership of the slogan in 2019 (Hughes, 2019).

So much software is no longer purchased and installed, but rather licensed and accessed in the cloud over the internet via a browser. While this makes the software applications (or apps) a bit more universal (they are no longer concerned with what operating system you are running), it also juxtaposes these applications on data center hardware alongside AI’s power base. By moving and hosting the application in the cloud, where the AI lives, the capacity for a direct infusion of AI “smarts” into every cloud-hosted app by way of a simple local network call is paradigm shifting.

With “AI on call” content generation software, assignment grading software, study guides, research tools, communication channels, remediation tools, advanced placement, adaptive assessment, intelligent tutoring applications, and more that we have yet to conceive suddenly come into focus much quicker.

My hopes and concerns about the use of AI for teaching and learning

I have to agree with Clark, AI is the new UI (Clark, 2020). Currently, it is still a bit rough around the edges in this role but it is getting better all the time.

My hope is that AI will get smarter. I know that sounds counterintuitive right now, but that’s what’s ironic about AI. It really isn’t intelligent at all. It’s a fantastic inference engine that can make assumptions and see patterns when it’s prompted properly, but it isn’t “smart” by itself. For example, ask Bing’s Copilot to generate an image (like the one at the top of this post) and it may return a person with eight fingers, three feet attached to two legs, and knees that should belong to the back legs of a horse and it will see nothing wrong with that output. Today, AI is like that kid in the Batman cape, fearless, but often wrong.

My concern is that as AI gets smarter, people will too. As of this writing, and citing the shortcomings of AI above, people using AI must be smarter than the AI in order to provide the guardrails for the output of the AI so that it works within reason. As AI improves, my hope is that people improve as well, and don’t become lazy and settle for “letting the computer do it.” I’m sure there will be some small minority that succumb to that mindset, but people as a whole should stay ahead of the curve and continue to adapt, learn, and improve themselves.

References

Chaudhry, M. A., & Kazim, E. (2022). Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIEd): a high-level academic and industry note 2021. AI and Ethics, 2, 157-165. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43681-021-00074-z

Clark, D. (2020). Artificial Intelligence for Learning. Kogan Page.

Hughes, M. (2019, July 11). Cloudflare acquired an old Sun Microsystems slogan and I’m feeling nostalgic. Retrieved from The Next Web: https://thenextweb.com/news/cloudflare-acquired-an-old-sun-microsystems-slogan-and-im-feeling-nostalgic

QuoteResearch. (2013, October 20). It’s Difficult to Make Predictions, Especially About the Future. Retrieved from Quote Investigator: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/10/20/no-predict/