I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced shockwaves sent through education the size AI has brought. By the time I was in school Google was already a thing. Calculators were not only allowed, but it was on the list of supplies needed before the year started. As far as I can remember everything in my elementary school, high school, and university experience was pretty status quo. This is the first major innovation affecting the classroom that I think I’ve been a part of. Though from what I’ve heard about the past it sounds like all of these things tend to follow the same trend.

At first, they’re hated by those in the world of education. They’re seen as harmful to learning and detrimental to the way curriculum is delivered. Second, they’re reluctantly accepted. The realization sets in that they’re not going anywhere. That despite the best efforts of those who despise innovation, new technology cannot be stopped. Third, educators start to understand them better. They come up with ideas and concepts for how to use these new technologies in the classroom. As such, certain ideals in education are shifted to better equate to the new world we’re living in. And finally they become normalized. Normalized to the point where we can hardly remember how things were before these innovations came to be. Both groups in the debate had great arguments, but I just can’t see AI going down a different path.

I will admit that AI does feel like it’s opening a much bigger can of worms than innovations of the past. Kelsey & Mariah opened my eyes to some concerns I hadn’t considered. The more information given to AI the better it can perform, but when the information is student data how much is too much? Daniel Buck’s article AI is a serious threat to student privacy is the first I heard about privacy concerns for students with the incorporation of AI. He doesn’t shy away from how useful it’s capable of being, but he raises some legitimate concerns over the storing and deletion of this data, as well as the effects of always having students under AI’s surveillance

Then you have the concern of AI’s bias problem. I was aware that AI images have a tendency to make any human in the photo white unless otherwise specified, or that it tends to add in racist or sexist stereotypes to images. Something during the debate I hadn’t heard of though was that AI detectors are more likely to falsely accuse non-native English speakers of using AI generated text. I believe this stemmed from Aniya Greene-Santos’s article Does AI Have a Bias Problem?. These failures of AI can’t just be swept to the side. If we’re going to accept AI into the classroom we first must realize that it’s not perfect. It has its issues and it most definitely has its biases.

If it’s able to learn from its areas of failure and improve then we can reap all of its successes. The benefit of AI that intrigues me the most is its personalized learning experiences and predictive analytics for student success. AI Uncovered’s 6 Ways AI Will Revolutionize Education by 2025 splits these into two separate benefits, but to me they’re almost intertwined. AI would be able to gather information on a learner, figure out their likes and dislikes in the classroom, and tailor the education experience to better fit their way of learning. This is essentially the starting point for the next benefit because it’s done in an attempt to increase student success. The AI can then track the progress the student is making in this new way of learning, and can pick up on early signs of them possibly not being engaged with the content. The pros of AI are truly incredible and will do amazing things for future generations of learners, but as mentioned before we have to be careful of it’s pitfalls.

Compared to the integration of things like calculators or computers I think AI has a much longer and challenging road ahead to reach that normalization that I discussed at the start of this post. In the privacy article Daniel Buck wrote “But these are not issues to face in some distant future of some science fiction novel. Many are here now”. That statement is a big wake up call. For some reason it’s still hard for me to grasp that the AI era is truly here. There was no build up, no slow burn. It was as if one day out of nowhere there was suddenly a vast sea of AI resources.

That quote makes me realizes that there is no waiting around to see how things play out. AI will continue to evolve and grow, so we either figure out how we’re going to utilize it in the classroom, or else we just roll over and wait to be replaced.