Will Artificial Intelligence (AI) empower higher education or implode it? How can educators best model AI in cyber-classrooms? Panelists from the humanities, education, deaf studies, and ed tech will engage the audience in an exploration of AI’s potential and analysis of AI’s ramifications in the online and hybrid learning environments.
Nothing says emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI). It continues to expand exponentially at undreamed of growth rates on what appears to be a daily basis. Take ChatGPT for example. It emerged last November and debuted its greatly enhanced version 4 less than four months later. Similar to the calculator, the Internet, and Learning Management Systems, AI is re-sculpting higher education. Are we prepared? Doubtful. Will AI empower higher education or implode it? What should ethical responsibility concerning AI look like in the cyber-classroom, and how can we best model it? In this session panelists from the humanities, education, deaf studies, and ed tech will weigh in on the AI tidal wave flooding the online and blended learning environments.
In a recent Inside Higher Ed article Edward J. Maloney proposed a framework for thinking about AI that was akin to the seven stages of grief. We, however, will employ Marshall McLuhan’s Laws of Media as our lens through which to analyze some potential ramifications of AI on higher education. McLuhan envisioned these implications through four stages. The first involves the ways new technologies can enhance our capabilities. Consider how assistive technologies such as live captioning, text-to-speech, and voice assistants such as Siri or Alexa as functions of Universal Design help us regardless of ability. Second is obsolescence in that new technologies make our current way of doing things obsolete. Think GPS on your smartphone. It makes maps and knowing how to read maps very old school. Third is retrieval. Contemplate ways in which older technologies are reclaimed within the new technologies. For example, look how search engines such as Google have made the overwhelmingly massive amount of information on the Internet more accessible and manageable. Fourth is reversal in which new technologies produce unintended results that are not in keeping with their original purpose. Social media comes readily to mind. It originally gave people across the planet a platform for coming together, connecting, and communicating. Now, cyberbullying, shaming, and misinformation have driven people apart, polarized societies, and deeply damaged trust. As an engagement piece attendees will be invited to join panelists in breakout groups by academic disciplines to contemplate McLuhan’s phases of AI impacts on diverse disciplines.
Following this, as part of our panel discussion we will invite the attendees to participate in a dialog on AI’s role in college level composition. What is the writing instructor’s responsibility in digital literacy in an educational environment where AI writing tools are allowed or even encouraged? What might be some of the implications of AI use in terms of plagiarism and as a feedback tool? Modeling active learning, the panel will ask participants to engage in a brief AI composition activity, reflect on the rhetorical choices of the computer and how their own rhetorical choices might differ, and consider how AI could be a starting point for research rather than as a composition tool. This synchronous activity is designed to not only teach students ethical research and writing methods, but also opens the opportunity for discussion with students in the ethical considerations related to AI use.
From there, attendees and panelists will debate some of the controversy surrounding how AI can or should be utilized in K-12 classrooms in the context of equipping pre-service teachers with the strategies they will need to merge "traditional" approaches to literacy instruction with AI technologies. Specifically, we will emphasize how teachers can support children through the writing process and scaffold the creation of authentic literary texts such as children's books, biographies, autobiographies, and documentaries.
Additionally, the panel and attendees will explore AI’s potential for making communication more accessible for the deaf community and breaking down barriers that have restricted dialogs between hearing and d/Deaf people. AI already provides live and auto closed captions. Can AI grow into recognizing sign languages, ever though there is no universal sign language and the fact that there are more than 300 sign language systems around the world? We will delve into issues regarding ethics and ponder, in light of thousands of d/Deaf people who relay on AI technologies, whether or not d/Deaf people’s dependence on AI has helped or hurt the deaf community.
Session Goals
Session goals include participants using McLuhan's “Laws of Media” as a framework for exploring the impacts of AI technologies in participants’ diverse disciplines, examining transdisciplinary approaches to AI as pedagogical tools in higher education, being able to discuss challenges and possibilities for AI integration in the virtual classroom environment, and determining how various AI technologies may be applied to participants’ own higher education contexts.
Takeaways
As AI is here to stay, one of the takeaways is to help equip faculty to better navigate AI technologies, whether as users or mediators when engaging with students. Another takeaway will be to provide participants with an enhanced understanding of the potential impacts of AI in higher education and ways in which to argue the pros and cons of AI use in cyber-classrooms.