Great keynote by Siän Bayne who is professor of digital education at the University of Edinburgh, UK, on teacherbot, a twitterbot used within an educational mooc. Really interesting from the automation point and social effect on the debate.
Sian provides multiple references, so where possible I mention the author and year of the reference in this liveblog. Hot from the press Times Higher Ed article on Teacherbot here.
1 Debates in teacher
automation
Artificial intelligenc in education
Adaptive learning
Teacher automation
Suppes, 1966; automated teacher visionair
Electric tutors: education is about to undergo a revolution
unequalied since Gutenberg’s movable type. Arthur C. Clark – visionary article
The electronic tutor is going to spread across the planet as
wiftly as the transistor radio … pure technocentriciy (1980)
By 2011 – Underwood and Luckin: AI in education are still
not very well known about, not very well used, because we have not understood
why to use them or how to use them.
So there is a body of research which critiques this
automated tutor.
Feenberg, 2003: the goal is to replace fac-to-face teaching
by professional faculty with an industrial product, infinitly reproducible at
decreasing unit cost – critique.
This has attracted a lot of funding opportunities, again it
is very political.
Who is thinking against this? Neil Selwyn has written many
books describing the neo-liberal, capitalist lines of this automated vision.
How can we respond to this automation function?
Critical pedagogy approach would bring the focus back to the
correlation with students and tutors (Clegg, 2003).
Humans, academics and teachers working together.
Mobilization in defense of the human touch (Feenberg, 2003)
2 the people
t/technology divide
Two choices provided by Hamilton and Friesen, 2013
Instrumentalism: technologies are seen as neutral means
employed for ends determined independitly by their users.
Essentialism: technology has its own trajectory, humans need
to adapt, like a Newtonian god, watche unaffected as the drama unfolds.
This is something we must think about critically to move
forward.
Things and people need to learn to join – (Fenwick, Edwards
and Sawchuck, 2011) focusing on the world and the dynamics in them.
Whatmore, 2004: the human is always evolving and adapting to
tech, we (tech and human) make each other.
Any teacher that can be replaced by a machine should be (Arthur
c clark)
3 twitterbots as a
cultural form
Twitterbots tweet on their own without any human action. 8,5
% tweets are deliverd by twitterbots.
So it is an interesting, contemporative social form. Here
are some examples.
Example: ‘dear assistant’ made by amit agarwal, or LA
quakebot made by bill snitzer, Olivia taters made by rob dubbin, desire bot
made by felix jung,
Bots of conviction: they can be all sorts of functions, with
this bot being political. NRA Tally made by Mark Sample, two headlines made by
darius kazemi.
Rob dubbin wants to demystify what happens in the world
through critical twitterbots.
4 teacherbot in the
EDCMOOC
This bot wants to do some critical work on the boundaries of
teacher and technology.
Teacherbot ran from October/November 2014 in Coursera mooc
(12000 enrollments).
50% of enrollers work in education, so should be perceptive
to this critical teacherbot.
#edcmooc : based on a simple GUI : mostly topics were
process, content, social and pastoral related (see example in picture)
Challenge was to make a teacherbot that was part of the
curriculum. So now the answers of the bot were fed content from the course.
Serious lessons: we never intended to trick the learners
into thinking it was human. Everyone knew.
Teacherbot got into a dark loop at first, with a fatalistic
tweet, but then things settled down.
The bot was actually very dominantly present in the twitter
stream (about 25% of the tweets)
But it got extra discussions and reflections going (ambush
teaching)
5 Rethinking teacher
automation
Deficit => excess: based on teacher numbers. The teacherbot
helped with creating excess.
Supercession => entanglement: if we do automation
right/wrong it will affect teachers. The question was to find what the interest
would be for education as complimentary extra’s.
Embrace/resistance => play
What works => what do we want?
Sian Bayne (2015) teacherbot in journal of higher education to be found here.
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