Raise the topic of AI in education for discussion these days and you can feel the collective groan in the room.
Sometimes I even hear it. We’re tired, I get it. Many students are too. But if we don’t keep working creatively to address the disruption to education posed by AI – if we just wait and see how it plays out – it will be too late.
AI fatigue is many things
There are a few factors at play, from an AI literacy divide, to simply talking past each other.
AI literacy is nearly unmanageable. The complexity of AI in education, exacerbated by the pace of technological change, makes AI “literacy” very difficult to define, let alone attain. Educators represent a wide range of experience levels and conceptual frames, as well as differing opinions on the power, quality, opportunity, and risk of generative AI.
One person will see AI as a radical first step in an intelligence revolution; the next will dismiss it as “mostly rubbish” and minimise the value discussing it at all. And, as far as I have found, there is no leading definition of AI literacy to date. Some people don’t even like the term literacy.
Our different conceptual frames compete with each other. Many disciplines and conceptual orientations are trying to talk together, each with their own assumptions and incentives. In any given space, we have the collision of expert with novice, entrepreneur with critic, sceptic with optimist, reductionist with holist… and the list goes on.
We tend to silo and specialise. Because it is difficult to become comprehensively literate in generative AI (and its related issues), many adopt a narrow focus and stick with that: assessment design, academic integrity, authorship, cognitive offloading, energy consumption, bias, labour ethics, and others. Meetings take on the character of debates. At the very least, discussions of AI are time-consuming, as each focus seems to need airing every day.
We feel grief for what we may be losing: human authorship, agency, status, and a whole range of normative relational behaviours. A colleague recently told me how sad she feels marking student work. Authorship, for example, is losing coherence as a category or shared value, which can be surreal and dispiriting for both writers and readers. AI’s disruption brings a deeply challenging emotional experience that’s rarely discussed.
We are under-resourced. Institutions have been slow to roll out policy, form working groups, provide training, or fund staff time to research, prepare, plan, and design responses. It’s a daunting task to just keep up with, let alone get ahead of, Silicon Valley. Unfortunately, the burden is largely borne by individuals.
The AI elephant in the room
Much of the sector suffers from the wishful thinking that AI is “mostly rubbish”, not likely to change things much, or simply an annoyance. Many educators haven’t thought through how AI technologies may lead our societies and our education systems to change radically and quickly, and that these changes may impact the psychology of learning and teaching, not to mention the entire infrastructure of education. We talk past each other.
Silicon Valley is openly pursuing artificial general intelligence (AGI), or something like that. Imagine a ChatGPT that can do your job, my job, and a big piece of the knowledge-work jobs recent graduates may hope to enter. Some insiders think this could arrive by 2027.
A few weeks ago, Dario Amodai, CEO of AI company Anthropic, wrote his prediction that 50 per cent of entry-level office jobs could vanish within the next couple of years, and that unemployment overall could hit 20 per cent. This could be mostly hype or confirmation bias among the tech elite. But IBM, Klarna, and Duolingo have already cited AI-linked efficiencies in recent layoffs.
Whether these changes take two years, or five, or even ten, it’s on the radar. So, let’s pause and imagine it. What happens to a generation of young people who perceive increasing job scarcity, and options and social purpose?
Set aside, for now, what this means for cities, mental health, or the social fabric. What does it mean for higher education – especially if a university degree no longer holds the value it once promised? How should HE respond?
Responding humanely
I propose we respond with compassion, humanity… and something like a plan. What does this look like? Let me suggest a few possibilities.
The sector works together. Imagine this: a consortium of institutions gathers together a resource base and discussion space (not social media) for AI in education. It respects diversity of positions and conceptual frames but also aims for a coherent and pragmatic working ethos that helps institutions and individuals make decisions. It drafts a change management plan for the sector, embracing adaptive management to create frameworks to support institutions to respond quickly, intelligently, flexibly, and humanely to the instability. It won’t resolve all the mess into a coherent solution, but it could provide a more stable framework for change. And lift the burden on thousands of us who feel we are reinventing the wheel every day.
Institutions take action. Leading institutions embrace big discussions around the future of society, work, and education. They show a staunch willingness to face the risks and opportunities ahead, they devote resources to the project, and they take actions that support both staff and students to navigate change thoughtfully.
Individuals and small groups are empowered to respond creatively. Supported by the sector and their HEIs, they collaborate to keep each other motivated, check each other on the hype, and find creative new avenues for teaching and learning. We solve problems for today while holding space for the messy discussions, speculate on future developments, and experiment with education in a changing world.
So sector leaders, please help us find some degree of convergence or coherence; institutions, please take action to resource and support your staff and students; and individuals, let’s work together to do something good.
With leadership, action, and creative collaboration, we may just find the time and energy to build new language and vision for the strange landscape we have entered, to experiment safely with new models of knowledge creation and authorship, and to discover new capacities for self-knowledge and human value.
So groan, yes – I groan with you. And breathe – I’ll go along with that too. And then, let’s see what we can build.
