Where artificial intelligence fits in education?

 

Artificial Intelligence is coming for education.

But don’t panic

By Sergey Karayev -March 5, 2020

https://bdtechtalks.com/2020/03/05/artificial-intelligence-education-benefits/

It’s not going to replace college faculty or teaching as we know it. It’s not a slippery slope. Instead, AI is going to give faculty superpowers, extending their reach and expanding their time.

A good teacher is a role model, a sage, able to become what the student needs. Teaching is too personal, too human, to be turned over to AI.

That’s not just my opinion. Three years ago, McKinsey, the global consulting firm, issued a report on how and where AI and automation was most likely to replace jobs and job functions. They listed “Educational Services” as the sector least likely to undergo that type of technology-dependent displacement saying, “… the essence of teaching is deep expertise and complex interactions with other people.”

Consider also Dr. David Weiss, a psychology professor at the University of Minnesota. Weiss was probably the first person in the world to use computers to give and grade assessments, work he was doing as early as 1969. “As far back as the 1970s people said we could have computers deliver instruction, we won’t need teachers anymore. And I’m hearing that again now because so much is on computer,” he said recently. “But that’s never been realistic. There are things computers can do well and things they can’t,” he said.

That’s all true and unlikely to change. Teachers teach. They are good at it. No one wants to change that.

So, the dawn of AI in teaching does not mean we’re on a path to robot instructors. Computers and algorithms are highly unlikely to come between faculty and students anytime in our foreseeable future.

Where AI can help today is outside the classroom, making many non-instructional responsibilities of teaching easier and faster.

As an example, the area I’m working on is AI-assisted grading. When fully tested and deployed, it will be able to do things such as group student answers by their content, and batch feedback to all essentially similar responses in the blink of an eye.  So instead of a teacher writing “forgot to mention the Krebs cycle” 50 times, they can identify the error once and write their feedback once and the AI in the tool will propagate it to other responses with the same error.

AI assessment tools can also help faculty spot sticky subject areas for subsets of students and even make student-by-student recommendations for areas of extra attention. It can spot when an unusually high percentage of students struggled with a particular question, flagging that either the specific question or the whole topic needs teacher review.

Make no mistake. This won’t replace grading—teachers will still decide what’s correct and what isn’t. Teachers will still approve the results. They just won’t need to spend as long doing it, and they will be more accurate to boot.

Used correctly, it could turn the rote process of grading into a faster, less repetitive exercise in much the same way the Scantron or optical mark recognition made scoring multiple-choice assessments faster. Neither innovation replaced teaching, they made being a teacher easier.

Think of it as the difference between using Microsoft Word or a typewriter. Computer-based typing tools such as spellcheckers and cut-and-paste did not replace writing or displace writers, they made writers better, faster, more powerful.

My point is not that automated grading tools and other AI advancements will be mundane improvements. I am confident they will be tremendously important advancements in education.  What I’m saying is that the AI that is coming to education will be in the support systems, freeing faculty to do more of what they love, the things computers can’t do: mentor students, make intellectual connections, and inspire curious minds. Giving teachers significantly more time and energy to do those things has the potential to be a game-changer for learning.

AI can do that, and not just in grading but in

other areas too, streamlining the tasks and chores of faculty that exist largely outside and apart from person-to-person, teacher-to-student engagement. The point of AI is to make those moments more frequent and more powerful—to be a teaching superpower.

Sergey Karayev has a PhD in Computer Science from the University of California at Berkeley, is co-founder of Gradescope, and head of AI for STEM at Turnitin. He is also a co-organizer of Full Stack Deep Learning Bootcamp, which delves into best practices of all components of deep learning.

The problem with online learning? It doesn’t teach people to think

 The following article shows important facts about critical thinking and online learning. The author gives several examples of John Dewey concerning the topic, already established by our venezuelan philosopher Don Simón Rodríguez. 

https://theconversation.com/the-problem-with-online-learning-it-doesnt-teach-people-to-think-161795

Author

1. Robert Danisch

   Professor, Department of Communication Arts, University of Waterloo

The modern research university was designed to produce new knowledge and to pass that knowledge on to students. North American universities over the last 100 years have been exceptionally good at that task.

But this is not all that universities can do or should do. The COVID-19 pandemic has made it even easier to reduce teaching to knowledge dissemination and to obscure other, equally important, forms of education that help students be better citizens, thinkers, writers and collaborators.

These other forms of education are the cornerstone of human flourishing and democratic participation.

This is a problem.

Practical wisdom

The Ancient Greeks relied on a distinction between “knowing-that” (episteme) and “knowing-how” (techne). This was the difference between an abstract body of theoretical knowledge about an area of interest and the practical wisdom necessary to carry out a specific task.

In music, for instance, we might call this the difference between knowing what pitch means, what notes are or the other aspects of music theory that help explain how to play — and knowing how to play an instrument like the piano really well.

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For American philosopher John Dewey, this amounts to the difference between an education that focuses on information and an education that focuses on habits of thinking and deliberation.

In How We Think and Democracy and Education, Dewey prioritized teaching how to solve problems over bodies of knowledge because he knew that improved thinking skills would produce better outcomes for students and for public life.

Dewey believed that acquiring knowing-how habits, like critical thinking, problem-solving and close reading, required interaction and imitation. The practices of reading, speaking and thinking were all intertwined for Dewey, and all required practice and reflection. Practising these related skills would improve our decision-making, as individuals and as communities.

The kind of imitation he had in mind — people imitating each other — is impossible in a remote setting.

Dewey also thought curiosity, along with a recognition of, and confrontation with, real problems set people in the direction of improved thinking. These were modelled by teachers through engagement and interaction with students.

How We Think also argues that teaching students habits of using language for the purposes of persuasion is a central part of education. This drew Dewey’s work quite close to classical conceptions of rhetoric, or the teaching of how to speak and write effectively (including the emphasis on imitation as central to mastering the techne of communication).

These commitments were necessarily embodied in live practice in the classroom.

Know-how compromised online

The modern research university, since the late 19th century, has tended to prioritize “knowing-that” over “knowing-how” in a wide range of different disciplines (despite Dewey’s attempt to articulate an alternative).

Urban studies and planning professor Donald Schon’s work at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on reflective practice was an attempt to correct this over-emphasis and apply Dewey’s approach to contemporary curricula. But the emphasis on “knowing-that” persists.

Remote learning is well suited to the kinds of education that focus on abstract theoretical knowledge and not “know-how.” And this is exactly the problem with those forms of learning — and why we ought to resist being seduced by them.

Some researchers argue that the adequacy of online learning is demonstrated by the fact that a cohort of students might achieve the same grades in an online setting as in an in-person setting. This justifies the assumption that there is no significant difference in academic performance between the two settings.

But my analysis of how people learn, grounded in rhetorical studies and Dewey’s emphasis on embodied and practical forms of democratic education, and also in my own experience administering a first-year seminar program in a faculty of arts, points to the fact that it is much harder to teach (and to assess) the “knowing-how” skills that will matter more to students’ future success.

These include learning outcomes like knowing how to analyze data, collaboration with peers, self-reflection and reading and writing.

Drowning in specialized knowledge

Specialized bodies of knowledge are everywhere now, not just in lecture halls or within the ivy-covered walls of elite institutions. If you want knowledge about advanced python programming or mycology, you can find it online through a range of different media for free. This is why silicon valley gurus can question the value of a degree from an expensive university.

The threat to the university is this: boundless “knowing-that” is readily and easily available to any student because of the very same media that have made the transition to remote teaching easy. But the same is not true for the lived experience required for developing “knowing-how” habits and practices.

As we drown in ever-increasing amounts of available knowledge, our “knowing-how” forms of wisdom continue to suffer. This is true for elementary school students that need school to learn how to navigate social relationships and for university students trying to learn how to use the scientific method or perform a critical, close reading of a poem.

Careful and close readings

To teach a student how to carefully read a text, for example, is a responsibility of the university. But this feels unlikely in remote learning environments. Dewey’s focus on the importance of the interaction between student and teacher, the modelling and imitation of habits of thinking and the necessity of creative and collaborative problem solving in the classroom are all made more difficult in a remote setting.

An isolated 18-year-old, staring at a computer, can learn what a text is supposed to mean but will have a much harder time learning how to perform a careful interpretation.It is also one of the many “knowing-how” skills that seem so broadly absent in our public culture. Close reading is akin to close listening, which is a requirement of collaboration and a precursor to self-reflection. Journalist Kate Murphy’s You’re Not Listening shows just how complex the embodied task of reading someone else can be and how important listening and reading are for success in all fields.

What we ought to ask

Instead of asking how universities might benefit from shifting courses and curricula online permanently, we ought to be asking how students might suffer from fewer opportunities to focus on “knowing-how” and ever-greater commitments to “knowing-that.”

The pandemic has shown that we need finer, more well-honed and well-practised “knowing-how” skills. Skills like: asking thoughtful questions, finding new evidence, testing hypotheses, collaborating with diverse others, critically evaluating data or evidence, performing analysis of source material and designing new methods of evaluation.

These forms of wrestling and questioning are largely lost online. They get easily replaced with rote information processing. We should worry about the outcomes associated with that shift.

El futuro de las plataformas de aprendizaje: LMS y video

 

                                             JUNE 4, 2021/0 COMMENTS/BY PHIL HILL

Con el permiso del autor, me permito traducir este interesante artículo muy pertinente por las vivencias actuales, para mis apreciados lectores. Para el artículo original, el video del seminario web, el podcast y las diapositivas pueden dirigirse a:   https://philonedtech.com/the-future-of-learning-platforms-lms-and-video-to-share-top-billing/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=the-future-of-learning-platforms-lms-and-video-to-share-top-billing

La semana pasada dirigí un seminario web para Contact North, una corporación sin fines de lucro, financiada por el gobierno de Ontario, que pretendía ser una actualización de la sesión del año pasado sobre el LMS. Para esta actualización, eché un vistazo más amplio a las plataformas de aprendizaje en general, y cómo el LMS podría tener que compartir el centro del escenario en el futuro, ya que los cambios impulsados ​​por el cierre pandémico han cambiado los patrones de adopción de manera significativa. Ya sea que lo ame o lo odie (o esté en algún punto intermedio), es probable que las plataformas de video estén aquí para quedarse y no solo un espectáculo secundario. Para comprender mejor los cambios, el argumento central del seminario web es que debe observar la adopción de los usuarios, los problemas humanos y sociales involucrados, incluso más que las hojas de ruta tecnológicas de las plataformas. Este es un tema que mencioné en varios páneles de discusión y notas para nuestros suscriptores de EdTech Market Analysis, pero desarrollé el argumento de manera más completa en este seminario web.

Hay varias formas de ver el seminario web grabado:

• El video de YouTube, generosamente compartido por Contact North, se incluye a continuación.

• La grabación de Zoom con auto-transcripción de desplazamiento se puede encontrar aquí.

• Puede encontrar un video con la transcripción de desplazamiento editada aquí.

• Las diapositivas se pueden descargar de SlideShare y puede acceder a muchos de los gráficos desde la pestaña Recursos gratuitos en MindWires.com.

Curso inicial de actualización para Profesores de Inglés

 Este curso en línea dirigido especialmente a Facilitadores de Inglés, puede ser visualizado también por docentes de otras disciplinas de enseñanza de cualquier nivel del sistema educativo. Sin embargo, siendo las aplicaciones presentadas bastante generales, deben ser adaptadas al área y nivel de enseñanza.

El enlace siguiente conduce al curso en línea:

Curso HTI en línea: Facilitación de Inglés con Herramientas Tecnológicas Interactivas. (2014)

http://teresa.tachon.wix.com/curso-hti

El curso fue diseñado en 2014, como propuesta de mi tesis de Maestría, pero continúa vigente. Se está trabajando en un segundo curso más avanzado y adaptado a la realidad actual enfrentada por todos los docentes a nivel mundial sobre la educación virtual, por lo de la cuarentena.

PhD Thesis and dissertation

I've been away from my blog for some time, due to the conclusion of the thesis and pandemic lock up. 

ENTORNOS PERSONALES DE APRENDIZAJE PARA LA PRODUCCIÓN HEUTAGÓGICA DEL INGLÉS POR ESTUDIANTES DEL NÚCLEO PALO VERDE DE LA UNIVERSIDAD NACIONAL EXPERIMENTAL SIMÓN RODRÍGUEZ

Link to the dissertation:  http://focusky.com/foqb/njcu

Ple_TT

Personal Learning Environments (Ple) have become personalized spaces for learning online or using web apps since the beginning of the XXI century, especially because it is created by every person in particular, without even knowing. Everything depends on each person's learning needs; that is the reason why our Ple is like our finger print. 

Some people have their Ple in their mind (they just use the website, link or app they usually go to) while others organize them in maps, lists, drawings, presentations an d others. 

I gathered my apps in a Focusky presentation in the follwing capture:

or visit this link to see the whole presentation:

http://focusky.com/foqb/yrzm

Website recommended by Stephen Downes:

Finding Open Content Tutorial

OER Africa, Feb 01, 2019

As the website says, "The tutorial is designed to offer a simple, quick way to acquire skills necessary to search for open content, decipher Creative Commons rights and permissions and evaluate the usefulness of open content." It provides search strategies for finding open materials on Google, YouTube and Creative Commons, as well as a section on evaluating open resources.

For more informtion visit this link https://www.oerafrica.org/book/welcome