I talk a lot on AI in learning but these days you can’t move
for robot teacher articles and
presentations, usually some diminutive piece of white plastic, sometimes,
oddly, with a tablet stuck on its chest, that invariably responds with silence,
something banal or falls over. This is seriously flawed thinking. I call it the
‘Robot Fallacy’, the idea that AI in learning is largely about physical robots.
Fuelled by a century of cinema, where killer, and sometimes friendlier, robots dominate,
due to the fact that it is a visual medium and needs ‘characters’ in drama,
robots signify lazy thinking about AI. In practice, 99% of AI has nothing to do
with robots. We are all enmeshed in AI, as AI is the new UI. Google, Facebook,
Twitter, Netflix and most other online services are all mediated by AI, with
not a robot in sight. Sure, Amazon uses them in its warehouses but this is a
tiny portion of the process.
Robot teachers are, largely, as stupid an idea as robot drivers
in self-driving cars, robot cleaners pushing a robot vacuum cleaner around the
floor or a robot pilot sitting in the cockpit running autopilot on a plane.
Auto pilot is a sophisticated piece of invisible software with secondary
systems. The whole point of these self-driven systems is to ‘eliminate’ humans.
Sure there’s a role for companion robots for people with severe learning
difficulties or the very young, but on the whole the idea of a robot teacher is
ridiculous. The point of this technology is to augment or disintermediate the physical
teacher. Your automated banking is not a robot teller, it is online. Not a
robot in sight.
The most ridiculous examples I know of AI in learning, are
robot projects. They get tons of attention and grants. Doomed to succeed, they are
usually a simple chatbot inside a big bit of plastic with barely moveable
parts. Take Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro from Japan, whose robot self gives
lectures, while he swans around conferences. To be fair his robot self looks
more human than himself. This is bizarre and says more about the useless
pedagogy of the lecture than any useful lessons in learning. My sense is that
it’s a form of device fetish – education has disastrously focused on spending
money on devices and not solutions to pedagogic problems. Tablets have been
showered on schools in acts of folly. The robot thing is simply a another
alluring device.
Robots in factories, that find, select and porter goods around factories
make sense. Robots in manufacturing with their precision, speed and strength
makes sense. Self-driving cars, make sense. Robot vehicles on Mars make sense.
Robot teachers make no sense.
It is not just that AI has no significant cognition. AI is an ‘idiot
savant’, incredibly good at specific, narrowly defined tasks but magnificently
bad at generalist tasks – namely being a teacher. There is a huge amount of
unwarranted hype around AI, not helped by the robotic presentation of robots as
teachers, whereas in practice, AI can only be applied online to many specific
parts of the learning journey. So far it is a story of augmentation not
automation.
Find
things out
That is not to say that AI has no role to play in learning. In fact, it
will shape what we learn, why we learn ad how we learn. AI, in my opinion, will
be the single most important technology to shape the learning landscape in the
future. In many ways it already has. Google changed things for the better, a
useful tool that heralded an irreversible pedagogic shift. Amazon
revolutionized access to books, online and offline, as well as self-publishing.
AI also shapes social media, as algorithms select personalized information on
your timelines. It is a shame that the only form of AI you’re likely to see
formally adopted by education is plagiarism checkers – but there you go –
education can be a slow learner.
Online
learning
That first wave of Google-led search and social media had had a profound
influence on the learning landscape but the second wave is more significant,
with AI-driven online content creation, curation, consolidation, adaption,
personalization, retrieval and assessment. Tools now exist to do all of these
using AI, and the efficacy is clear. Take one example, content creation.
WildFire creates content in minutes not months, at a fraction of the cost of
traditional online learning. Guided curation using AI is also possible. Spaced
practice tools are now readily available and online assessment has benefited
from online identification, face recognition, keyboard pattern checks and so
on.
Learner
interfaces
Another feature of this second generation AI is the shift in interfaces for learning. With NLP (Natural Language Processing) we also have text to
speech (automated podcasts) and speech to text (speech recognition). This has
opened up a switch from poor retention multiple-choice to open input, as well
as spoken interaction. With WildFire, we have open input and interactive speech
recognition for both navigation and interactive retrieval.
Chatbots
One recent advance has been in chatbots, which uses our natural
propensity for dialogue to teach and learn. This return to a more Socratic
approach to learning as been enabled by smart AI. These chatbots are used to
find things, student support, deliver learning and mentor. Otto is a chatbot
that sits above your content and find answers and learning opportunities for
you as performance support, when you need it. We’ve developed an assessment
chatbot that delivers questions on what you’ve learnt. Other chatbots provide
help and support on courses. (10 uses of chatbots in learning)
Conclusion
So AI is present right across the learning journey. It can already
deliver answers to questions, find things, create content, curate, allow
natural language input and output, deliver personalized, adaptive learning as
well as enable online assessment. Major learning services, such as Duolingo,
are now delivering language learning to hundreds of millions of learners. With
the introduction of software that learns (machine learning) we have software
that get better the more you use it. Teachers have brains that are superb at
general teaching but, bit by bit, aspects of teaching and learning practice
will be automated. That has already happened. Every learner uses AI to search
and find. Almost every learner uses AI-mediated social media. Teachers use it
for CPD. AI at present augments teaching but a teacher is not replicable or
scalable. If we want to solve the problem of increasing demand for learning we
need to scale the process of teaching and learning. That has little or nothing
to do with silly, teacher robots but everything to do with AI.
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