AI and education

AI in education. It is, as we say in Icelandic “the topic of all topics” at the moment. Whether we like it or not, AI is here and is impinging on education and drastically changing the way people learn. No matter what is happening in schools regarding AI, we can be sure of one thing: students at all school levels are using AI and they are using it in ways that affects how they are learning and how they will learn in the future. So, like it or not, teachers have to deal with AI and probably the best way to deal with it, is to embrace it (anything else is really nothing more than a temporary fix). However, my sense is that a lot of teachers are delaying familiarising themselves with AI – for whatever reasons. I hear a lot of, “Oh, I know. I have to start looking into it. I’ll get around to it soon.” Soon, is probably too late. The rate of development of generative AI has been astonishing, to say the least. Any delays are likely to mean that the technology will have undergone significant changes between whenever “now” is and whenever “soon” will be. And, with each new iteration, the learning curve grows steeper…

I jumped on the generative AI train pretty much as soon as OpenAI started offering subscriptions to their ChatGPT, or early in 2023. I had been Continue reading

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Hvers konar gervigreind: um þýðingar

Ég held að þetta sé fyrsta grein sem ég birti hér á Education4site á íslensku. Vanalega hef ég birt íslenskar greinar á Upplýsandi tæki, vef mínum á bloggkerfi Mbl.is. Ég hef h.v. engan áhuga á að pósta efni mitt þar enda á enga samleið með bloggsamfélaginu sem hýsir sig þar. Ætlunin er að setja upp íslenskan vef hér á Education4site en ég hef ekki komið því í kring.

Nokkur umræða hefur verið meðal skólafólks um hvernig skuli þýða enska hugtakið generative artificial intelligence (AI). Nokkrar hugmyndir hafa verið settar fram:

  • skapandi gervigreind (nýskapandi gervigreind)
  • mótandi gervigreind
  • myndandi gervigreind
  • spunagreind

Það eru ólík rök sem fylgja hverri tillögu og skiptar skoðanir um bæði ágæti þýðingarinnar og rökstuðning.

Sjálfur hef ég tileinkað mér mótandi gervigreind. Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson birti um daginn pistil á vef sínum um þetta þýðingarverkefni og styður helst skapandi gervigreind (eða jafnvel nýskapandi gervigreind). Ég er ekki sammála Eiríki og ætla að útskýra hér af hverju. Rök mín er þrenn:

  1. Skapandi gervigreind er ekki rétt þýðing á því sem átt er við með generative AI,
  2. Það að vera skapandi er mannlegur eiginleiki sem við erum ekki tilbúin að ljá tækninni,
  3. Við verðum að geta átt von á því (þótt það gerist mögulega aldrei) að gervigreind framtíðarinnar verði meira skapandi en nútíma gervigreind. Hvað köllum við hana ef við erum búin að nota hugtakið skapandi?

Continue reading

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Competence Frameworks for Futures Education and Sustainable Development Education: A Comparison

Futuring - Art by Eva & Adele

Installation piece by artist couple Eva & Adele. Photo by Ferdinand Feys

Edit (Jan. 20, 2023): An expanded peer-reviewed article based on the research described here has been published. See here:
Thayer, T. (2023), “Identifying similarities and differences in sustainability education and foresight and futures education: a comparative analysis of competence frameworks”, On the Horizon, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/OTH-11-2022-0066

I recently attended a kick-off meeting for a new project, Partnership for Sustainable Development and Social Innovation (PASSION), that is meant to explore and address contemporary needs and challenges in higher education. In our kick-off meetings we read about and discussed various things such as competence frameworks and needs assessments. Here, I want to discuss two things in particular that came up in our meetings:

  1. Competence frameworks for sustainable development education (SDE) – not surprisingly these are very similar to frameworks for foresight and futures education (FFE) but with some notable differences that I think could prove helpful to highlight.
  2. Systemic elements of change – the framework introduced (but not much discussed) is similar to a framework that I have used in my teaching and work, but, again, with some notable, and I think helpful, differences.

While what follows here is more or less just me working my way through some of what I picked up at our kick-off meeting, I think it may also be helpful for our project, but also anyone involved with, or thinking about, sustainable development or foresight and futures in education. Continue reading

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Could science fiction be used as a data source for educational research?

Heh heh, get it? It’s science fiction, it’s Data…

A fascinating and inspiring article came up in my Google Scholar search recently, Learning from Foundation: Asimov’s psychohistory and the limits of organization theory. In it, the authors, Nelson Phillips & Stelios Zyglidopoulos, argue for and demonstrate the use of science fiction literature as data in organizational research. I’ve often entertained the notion of using science fiction literature as data (not for organizational research, but rather educational development) but struggled with the question of how? Phillips & Zyglidopoulos describe an interesting approach, in which I see some pros and some cons, that has reignited my thinking on this matter, and given me some hope that I might actually figure out a way to do something similar with relevant data that I have collected.

Sci-fi schools: How are schools depicted in science fiction?

Readers who are familiar with this website of mine may be aware that for the past 15 years, or so, I have collected examples of depictions of schools and schooling in science fiction. I wrote about it once and described some of the examples in a brief article here on Education4site. Somewhat surprisingly to me, that article continues to be one of the most read here on Education4site. Continue reading

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Augmented reality in education: A discussion long overdue

pokemongoThe recent Pokémon Go rage has brought a lot of attention to the possibilities for using augmented reality (AR) in teaching and learning. This is great and very welcome. AR has a lot of obvious potential for enhancing teaching and learning, and not only that, I think AR can have a transformative impact as well. But, for that to happen educators need to really dig into this technology and explore it from various perspectives.

This is a discussion that we could have started long ago. AR has been one of the most obviously predictable technological developments since smartphone technology really got going, first with the iPhone and then Google’s Android phones.

I first started exploring the possibilities of AR in education when I got my first smartphone in the late 00s. I think that my thoughts from then are still very relevant and could be helpful for the discussion that now seems to be emerging. So, here below are links to some of my articles from back then. I would especially like to see more discussion around the AR and “functional realities” theme:

Augmented reality and education
Prezi on AR in education
Learning in augmented reality: Extending functional realities
Shhh… My environment is talking to me

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Addendum on affordances and educational technology

afford_memeThis is an addendum to an article that I previously posted on affordances in April, 2016. As I’ve continued to explore the topic of affordances, there are a couple of things in the original article that I’ve reconsidered and need to address. The first is regarding some incorrect statements that I made about the persistence of affordances. The second is that I don’t think that Norman’s version of the concept of affordances needs to be “fixed” and brought in line with Gibson’s thinking. Rather, I choose to see it as a distinct concept that, confusingly, bears the same name as Gibson’s.

The persistence of affordances.

In the section “Norman’s affordances” in my original article, I suggest that when an observer does not perceive an affordance, then there is no affordance for that individual. According to my current understanding of Gibson’s theory of affordances, this is incorrect. Affordances are “invariant”, i.e. they always exist whether an individual perceives them or not. What differs between individuals is the meaning that the observed object takes on for a specific observer. The meaning is derived from the affordances that an individual’s attention is directed toward.

In the original article I overlooked the role of meaning in Gibson’s account of the perception process. Yet, it is perhaps the most important for making sense of the differences between Gibson’s and Norman’s accounts of affordances. The purpose of the theory of affordances is to account for how objects perceived in an environment become meaningful to an observer. For example, how does a shoe come to mean “object-for-protecting-one’s-feet” or (and perhaps at the same time), “object-for-squashing-bugs”? For Gibson, meaning emerges when an observer’s attention is directed toward an affordance that corresponds with an action that she wishes to perform. I’ve illustrated this in the figure below:

Gibson_affords

For Norman, the process is different. For Norman, meaning precedes the affordance. This is a necessary consequence of Norman’s dualistic position (or indirect perception). Meaning is a mental phenomenon (he refers specifically to “mental models”) that is brought to bear on the physical environment to reveal affordances. Norman’s process then looks something like this:

Norman_affords

So, I am incorrect when I say in the original article:

“Otherwise, the object simply does not afford the action that I want to perform, i.e. there is no affordance.”

In this sentence, I am, in fact, not talking about affordances, but rather meaning. If the object ever can afford a given action, it always affords that action. But, although an object affords an action, the object will not necessarily come to mean something that corresponds with that action in every environment.

So, basically, the gist of this is that, for Gibson, meaning comes and goes while affordances are forever.

I came to this realisation while reading Shaleph O’Neill’s excellent chapter on the theory of affordances in his Interactive Media: The Semiotics of Embodied Interaction (see his comments on McGrenere & Ho on pg. 55). O’Neill and I would seem to be in agreement on a number of things, but we both made the same mistake regarding the persistence of affordances.

Confusing terminology

The other thing that I want to comment on is that I no longer regard Norman’s conceptualisation of affordances as a mistake in need of fixing (as O’Neill does). Although Norman’s version of affordances probably originates out of some misunderstanding of Gibson’s theory, it has taken on a life of its own and has proven useful for many things. The problem is that Norman’s affordances are not Gibson’s affordances, yet the two confusingly go by the same name. It is that we have two distinct concepts, both of which would seem to have a right to their existence as long as they are applied appropriately, that are both referred to as affordances that is confusing. What needs to happen (and I would pass this project along to others) is to clarify what Norman’s affordances are if they are not affordances in the Gibsonian sense, and perhaps advocate for a renaming.

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