I teach math, I work on my master's degree, practice Muay Thai and burn suppers with reckless abandon. I have been teaching for quite a few years, but I certainly do not know it all.
I have to admit that when I started researching the ethical considerations of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) my first instinct was to stick with education databases. After all, I am an educator; teaching, learning, and curriculum are in my wheel house. However the more that I thought about the ethical issues surrounding the development and use of AI the more apparent that it became that I needed to expand my search. So I started searching law libraries (and their associated online collections) and was hit with a figurative landslide of material addressing a myriad of issues. Lawyers across the world have been grappling with the ramifications of these new technologies and have sent me down a rabbit hole exploring bias, government policy, and intellectual property.
The Journey of a Thousand Miles Begins With a 3 Week Late Blog Post
September is busy time in the life of the teacher. Classes need prepping, coffee needs consuming, and major projects on Artificial Intelligence (AI) need researching. Two of these things began in earnest over a month ago, and the other didn’t get a serious start until this long weekend.
Welcome to the blog where I intend to regale you with tales of my progress toward the completion of my EC&I 832 major project: Exploring Generative AI and Ethical Digital Citizenship. So what have I been up to so far? Mostly stumbling through academic readings while I try to wrap my head around the topic. However some insights have been gained and interesting articles found.
Failure provides opportunities for growth and reflection (in my case, many, many opportunities)
As an educator do you ever get the feeling that your not as effectual, prepared, or responsible as your colleagues? When you engage in professional or academic conversations do you sometimes reflect on your past actions and wince?
This week’s discourse around digital literacy provided ample time for me to relive a greatest hits playlist of botched attempts at both instructing and practicing Mike Ribble’s nine elements of digital citizenship. How important is digital literacy? According to the Government of Saskatchewan teaching digital literacy is not only essential for preparing our students to live in technology rich world, but it must be done so explicitly and purposefully within schools. The importance of the latter point is foremost in my mind because up to this point I have made some embarrassing blunders that I intend to share with you. Why do this? We all have lapses and make mistakes. I hope by examining the missteps that I have made (and bore witness to in my teaching career) we can all gain a better understanding of how Ribble’s work impacts the social and learning environment of a school.
As a teenager I loved the magazine Popular Mechanics. First and foremost, the ratio of text to fighter jet photographs was, in my opinion, extraordinary. Secondly, I would scan through the review sections pretending that I could afford the technological treasures within (I remember practically drooling over a 600 MHz Pentium 3 processor in the late 90s). Lastly, they always made predictions of what the future would look like. The pages bristled with headlines like “Cities of the future” and “Meet the car of tomorrow.” It was enthralling stuff. In hindsight they did drop the ball quite a bit. For example in the 1950s they famously predicted that we would all be driving our personal helicopters to work. However, you can hardly hold it against them. People are terrible at predicting the future, and my favourite childhood magazine was a reflection of this.
That last point seems salient to this week’s discussion of generational, cultural, and societal changes in education. While scanning through this week’s blog prompts several asked me not only to envision the educational landscape of the future, but to make suggestions for how best to prepare students for it. The more I thought about it, the more convinced I became that I would end up suggesting some nonsense that would end up aging like spoiled milk. But why is this task so difficult? Why can’t teachers and administrators predict the future of education easily?
In his discussion of Marshall McLuhan’s work, Mark Federman pointed out that people often misinterpret the quote, “The Medium is the Message.” As Federman noted McLuhan was not insisting that method of delivery is more relevant than its content, but instead that we miss structural, subtle changes in favour of the glaring obvious. This is where I find my understanding of Artificial Intelligence (A.I.), and its associated role in education, at present. With news stories of rampant academic abuses circulating in the media I have largely thought of A.I. as another way to game the system; something to be detected, stamped out, and avoided. However I feel that I have been staring into the headlights while missing the larger picture. What is less obvious? What new opportunities does A.I. hold for my classroom? If A.I. is dangerous to education, is it in a way that I am completely missing? Is my current perspective a reflection of a lack of digital/media literacy?
During this week’s presentation Kim, Brian, and I gave a presentation on the use of virtual, augmented, and mixed reality in the classroom. Now that it is done, I feel that I can speak candidly about some of the shortcomings of these technologies and why I don’t feel that they will have a place in my own classroom (in the near term).
My father once told me, “Never buy something based on promises; focus on what it can do right now, not what the salesperson tells you it might be able to do in the future.” Immersive technologies have an incredible sales pitch: travel across the world, go into space, explore the bottom of the ocean, make the impossible possible! It is incredibly convincing, and initially I was taken in by it. For an example of this see the video below.
I wanted this blog post to be a little bit different. My high school has jumped headlong into creating a makerspace, going so far as to rip out our old auto shop and buy ten 3D printers, soldering stations, and drones. My school division has essentially pulled out most of the stops (more on that later) to create a program around this idea. As such I took an hour after school to talk with the head of our program (let’s call him “Tim”) and asked him to speak to some of the challenges of running a course based on these principles.
Hello again! This week’s presentation on Assistive Technology (AT) got me thinking about one of the more challenging experiences of my teaching career. I had been teaching mathematics at the same high school for about 8 years and was feeling pretty confident in my abilities. In late August, a few days before my students arrived, I received a visit from my vice principal. The exchange went something like this:
Vice Principal: Matt, you’re getting a student who is blind in your senior math class. He is also wheelchair bound.
Me: Oh, okay, what should I know about teaching him?
Vice Principal: He has an assistant assigned to him.
