Week 2

Super-brief reading reflection: the two readings for this week were both well-written and interesting—I enjoyed them!

For the rest of this post I’ll be exploring a few technological innovations and their present and prospective impacts on education.

Google, Wikipedia, and knowledge acquisition

Wikipedia, in combination with powerful and popular search engines (most notably Google), has changed the learning landscape drastically. Not actually everything, but so many things, can so readily be learned with a simple search, and by searchers of any age with reading ability and access to the internet. As a consequence, teachers’ value as knowledge repositories and knowledge authorities has sunk drastically. In today’s learning environments, teachers are more easily seen for what has always been their primary role—group babysitters. As such, teachers still serve to keep students occupied and direct their learning (often away from more interesting topics and toward less interesting ones—but then almost everything becomes less interesting as soon as it is made obligatory), and many thrive in more of an overseer than an explainer role anyway. School tasks involving greater self-direction have also become more common, wherein teachers often serve as (besides babysitters) arbiters of information sources. In this capacity the first thing they do is rule out Wikipedia and un-cited Google search results.

YouTube and skills acquisition

Of course one could argue that school is more about learning skills than facts anyway, but here another set of technological developments has swooped in to supplement, and in many cases supplant, the role of a teacher as overseer of skills development: YouTube, and the proliferation of video processing, uploading, and viewing capability. For just about anything one doesn’t know how to do, some YouTuber can not only tell you but show you how to do it, explaining exactly what they’re doing while doing it. Also, for any class teacher a student ends up with, a clearer, funnier, and more efficient teacher is probably available for free on YouTube—and their lessons and explanations can be paused, slowed down, sped up, or replayed as needed. For anyone interested in learning how to, this is where it’s at. At institutions of higher learning, where students typically have unlimited internet access, professors’ explanations of anything other than their own Brightspace organization, class requirements, and grading rubrics are routinely superfluous. Taking a math class? Let Sal Khan teach you the entire course content for free and at your leisure.

Ubiquitous video capabilities also make possible new ways for students to demonstrate learning. Many classes are still writing-heavy, but more and more allow for video submissions where in the past an essay would have been required. For my personal preference this is still too rare: I’m a rather slow, plodding reader and writer, but a comparatively good listener and comfortable speaker, and any opportunity to both take in and show my learning in video form results in massive time savings.

AI and teacher obsolescence

The pervasive adoption of AI tools such as ChatGPT has recently introduced confounding problems to the educational enterprise. Chat can read and write, and so fulfill most academic tasks, giving original results every time. And it, too, is free. This virtually ensures its continual use by many, and disrupts professors’ ability to accurately evaluate and compare all students’ learning and efforts. Other applications of AI, such as those outlined in this TED talk will soon replace the need for teachers as learning assistants or aids. When AI tools that can train on any user’s preferred learning method, use of language, and current comprehension level are made freely available, they will be the world’s tutors.

At that point, not only will teachers no longer be needed for holding and imparting knowledge, skills, or even helpful advice, but their capacity to assess students’ learning will be increasingly compromised. And this may be just as well: truly student-centred learning may require the elimination of teaching. Consider Neo in the original Matrix movie. He is the student and kung fu is the subject. Does anyone feel sorry for him as he instantly downloads full theoretical and practical knowledge of his domain of choice? Is anyone feeling bad about the absence of a living, human teacher in this scenario? No, and as well they shouldn’t. A teacher would only impede learning.

But what about emotional support? Maybe teachers’ future roles are more like that of counsellors and child psychologists. Maybe, but in that case they should be trained in counselling, child psychology, and relationship building, not education. As for the prospect of AI making serious inroads into these professions, this too may be a matter of time—and years, not decades. For me, the most interesting meditation on this topic is still Spike Jonze’s movie Her. It is imaginative, speculative, mesmerizingly well acted, and in many ways almost certainly prescient.

One strong piece of evidence for the progressive, and very possibly positive, side-lining of teachers is the increasing popularity of online courses, which provide (to varying degrees) increased freedom and efficiency for those who want to learn. Online courses are also less likely to be disrupted by pesky pandemics, and all of these factors probably explain the results of a 2022 survey of American university applicants, in which 32% of respondents rated “the availability of online courses” as the most important or second most important consideration when looking at potential universities. While, for the moment, human professors design courses and prepare and manage their contents, existing and already well-functioning courses should require very little upkeep. If a course is complete and fully functional, any number of students should, in principle, be able to take it with little further effort required of the professor. This is already incentivizing teachers to teach less—or at least to repeat themselves less, which, as any babysitter will tell you, adds up to the same thing.

In summary, the robots are coming and teachers everywhere can safely look forward to having more than just summers off.