Learning in the Age of AI
??????????????????: AI has elevated interactivity with collective human knowledge. Allowing us to consume more at a faster rate. The key is to not focus on the speed but on the comprehension through metacognition. Curiosity remains the driving force behind our engagement. But cognitive science will allow us to learn well whilst learning fast.
57% of readers surveyed at the end of last year wanted to have more content focused on AI in education. Et Voila!
The major difference AI has brought about is the ability to have an interactive wiki. When Wikipedia came along it was a major issue for authenticity in education. But fantastic for those who could search the site with a critical eye and use it to go deeper into their research.
AI tutors have gotten a lot of flak. Or more accurately the proponents of AI tutors have. With their outlandish claims for this AI replacing humans in teaching students. This isn’t likely to? happen because ultimately we are motivated by emotions, by examples of humans before us achieving what we set out to achieve, by the innate connection of one person with another who cares about them for who they are, not what they do.
Empathic AI currently exists. Hume.ai for example can listen to you speak and through analysis of intonation intuit what you are feeling and question you about it. Offering a form of therapy service for you to unpack those emotions. And as the years fly by these platforms will get better. But our primitive mammal brains won’t. And these brains took Millenia to evolve into what they are today. They are optimised to desire and require community.
Equally it’s hard to learn from an entity that hasn’t gone through what you are going through. The shared experience of learning with the wonderment and limitations of a human brain will be vital for our learners. They will need this to know that what they are experiencing is indeed typical. Those examples exist of what organic learning is capable of.
Does this make AI obsolete?
AI is no more hallucinatory than us in reality. It far exceeds our subject knowledge and will get more accurate. We have ‘facts’ we propagate that actually don’t hold up even as teachers given how prone our memories are to distortion.?
A well known example is how many people, including educators, have long propagated the "fact" that Christopher Columbus discovered America in 1492. However, this is not entirely accurate. From an inclusion perspective Indigenous peoples had been living in the Americas for thousands of years, dismissing them is egregious. And even still, from an exploration perspective, Norse explorers, such as Leif Erikson, reached North America around 500 years before Columbus.
The key is to be explicit in teaching thinking processes and learning processes. Subject knowledge acquisition is evidence of this taking place, but we should use it as one metric not as the goal itself.
And the metrics themselves can be collected by AI far more efficiently than we can collect them. We’ll be able to build a much more accurate depiction of our learners. Thus allowing us to make more informed decisions about their learning. Potentially removing the need for large summative assessments at the end of a course of study. The data collected of a students learning journey could be cross compared by AI in order to evaluate a learners capability.
We’ll still be measuring our students. We can’t get away from this for as long as employers and further education have the choice to accept or deny candidates. But we can iterate the measurements to get closer to reality. Just as we moved away from the imperial system of measurement to the metric in order to improve our accuracy, so too we can do the same for measuring the capacity of a learner's ability to learn. I’ve no doubt we have all taught a student who we found remarkable and would hire within an instant, that just couldn’t perform in examinations.
So now that the AI can collect data better than we can, and know our subject better than we can. We can focus on other aspects of our job. Up-skilling in cognitive and neuroscience will allow us to be the expert learner. I hear you cry, ‘but AI will know more about this than we will’ and you’re not wrong. But we won’t be free of subject knowledge. When teaching learners you need subject knowledge in order to formulate the right questions and guide them towards their own understanding.
By acquiring more knowledge in the realm of cognitive and neuroscience we will be able to present both the biological reasoning behind our learning processes, as well as the practical applications. We can keep the students up to date on the latest theory in learning and run action research with them to verify it in our context. And being a human we can provide that community and care that the human needs in order to learn.
Equally, as of 2024 AI doesn’t have agency. So at least for now the learner will need to direct the AI. Without the knowledge to begin with this can be difficult for a learner to do. Thus by knowing the science of learning we can expose the students to the right concepts at the right time. Some curation is still needed.
I do warn against using raw LLM’s (Large Language Models) in the class setting for now however, at least without serious consideration. Cognitive Theory and Attention Span is important to manage and LLM’s make this mighty difficult.
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In fact, attention management is something we haven’t covered in this newsletter. But with the rate of technological development incorporating cognitive science, it is absolutely vital for students to understand how platforms are designed to hack our primitive brain. Unless we are aware of these designs we’ll fall prey to them.
In conclusion, the key to utilising AI better, is by understanding our organic intelligence better. This can be done through cognitive science and neuroscience. If we can up-skill on this as teachers and shift our focus more heavily onto the Science of learning, rather than content coverage, we could transform our education industry for the better.
References/further reading:
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The AI English Teacher - Teacher of Media Studies @ Ponteland High School. Former Head of Languages and Cultures Faculty @ PRINCE OF WALES ISLAND INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL | MEd, AST.
1 个月The point about the shift from coverage of content to understanding learning is absolutely bang on. We need this or rather have needed it for a long time an AI might be the catalyst that pushes us towards it.