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Improving skills and competences of VET teachers and trainers in the age of Artificial Intelligence

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Advancing theory in the age of artificial intelligence

Graham Attwell 478 Views , , , , , ,

The British Journal of Educational Technology (BEJET) has published a special section around Ai in education entitled 'Advancing theory in the age of artificial intelligence'.

In the introduction of the same name (and which is free to access) the authors, Shane Dawson, Srecko Joksimovic, Caitlin Mills, Dragan Gašević, and George Siemens. "To address the need of effective deployment of AI systems in education", they say, "a theoretical lens is required to guide and direct both research and practice. Theory provides the guard rails to ensure that principles, values and trusted constructs shape the use of AI in educational settings, ensuring that values, existing research, concerns of multiple stakeholders and on-going contributions to science remain centre stage."

They go on to explain that "the papers in this special section argue for the criticality of theory in the design, development and deployment of AI in education. In so doing, we question the continued relevance and value of existing theories of learning when AI becomes prominent in classrooms. We call for new frameworks, models and ways of thinking; ones that include the presence of non- human agents that are more like an active partner than a simple technology, resulting in important questions about revising existing team-based and collaborative theories of learning."

There looks like much of value in this special section, although it is a pity that only the introduction is accessible for free. From looking at the index it seems like a lot of attention is being paid. to research from Learning Analytics. And once more the research seems to be based on higher education. I wonder if the new learning theories they are looking for may be based in vocational educational practice particularly at the intersection between knowledge and practice.

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AI in Vocational Education and Training: the experience of a teacher

Graham Attwell 1052 Views , , , ,

As part of the EU Eramus+ AI Pioneers project, a cross-sectoral project aiming at promoting the use and teaching of artificial intelligence (AI) in adult education and vocational training (VET) we are undertaking a series of interviews with vocational teachers and trainers and teachers in Adult Education.

This interview, undertaken in late May 2023 is with a computer science teacher from north Germany. The teacher has completed a full course of study as a computer scientist and is presently completing a doctorate degree. but has to complete a vocational teacher training course (Studienseminar in German). A German teacher presented ChatGPT at the teacher training course and showed how had developed an exercise sheet with it. The interviewee showed us a worksheet that he himself had created with ChatGPT. The difficulty, he explained lies in formulating the correct prompts. He said it was also important to keep the prompts as short as possible and to use as few technical terms as possible. ChatGPT, he said, is only as good as the prompts you enter.

The time needed to generate worksheets is determined by constantly trying out and improving the prompts until the generated worksheet comes close to one's own ideas. The worksheet never reaches 100% of one's own ideas, so the workload consists of manual adjustments of the generated result. The worksheet also often contains technical errors that have to be corrected.

The interviewee rates ChatGPT as an auxiliary tool, which is particularly good at solving the time-consuming task of thinking up numerical relations for arithmetic problems. The interviewee estimates that the time needed for a worksheet can be reduced from more than a day to a few hours.

ChatGPT cannot insert photos, these can be generated by other software, e.g. deepai.org.

Longer tasks can be generated, but the more complex and specialised the construct, the worse the result of ChatGPT. The worse the result, the greater the subsequent revision effort For more accurate results, it is advisable to let ChatGPT create small sections, which are then merged manually.

There is no debate about the ethical use of AI at the school so far. Many teachers are completely unfamiliar with AI-based methods. Younger teachers use AI for lesson preparation, older teachers reject it as a non-self-performing service for both students and teachers and want to ban its use. It is not openly discussed among students or teachers and the use is considered incorrect by many.

The interviewee considers the use of ChatGPT should become a regular method and be taught to both students and teachers in their training. In China, he says, students are taught how to use AI from an early age, whereas in north Germany, Word is taught at an advanced age, which is not computer science in the opinion of a computer scientist.

The interviewee considers a network around AI in education and training like the one planned by the AI Pioneers project to be enormously important and would also formulate his experiences to date as best practice.

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Is Emergence a mirage

Graham Attwell 588 Views , , , , ,

Nobel Prize-winning physicist P.W. Anderson’s “More Is Different” argues that as the complexity of a system increases, new properties may materialize that cannot (easily or at all) be predicted, even from a precise quantitative under-standing of the system’s microscopic details. As Rylan Schaeffer, Brando Miranda, and Sanmi Koyejo from Stanford University explain in a recently published paper "Emergence has recently gained significant attention in machine learning due to observations that large language models, e.g., GPT, PaLM, LaMDA can exhibit so-called “emergent abilities” across diverse tasks." It has been argued that large language models display emergent abilities not present in smaller-scale models, justifying the huge financial and environmental cost of developing these models.

Rylan Schaeffer, Brando Miranda, and Sanmi Koyejo "present an alternative explanation for emergent abilities: that for a particular task and model family, when analyzing fixed model outputs, one can choose a metric which leads to the inference of an emergent ability or another metric which does not. Thus, our alternative suggests that existing claims of emergent abilities are creations of the researcher’s analyses, not fundamental changes in model behavior on specific tasks with scale."

Their paper, Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage?, is quite technical but very well written and important for understanding the debate around AI.

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#AIinEd – Pontydysgu EU 2023-05-08 12:45:32

Graham Attwell 489 Views , , , ,

As the trailer says: "In this video, you will witness a fascinating discussion between Socrates, the Greek philosopher considered one of the greatest thinkers in history, and Bill Gates, the American entrepreneur and founder of Microsoft, one of the most important companies in the world of technology. Despite belonging to different eras, Socrates and Gates have a lot in common. Both are considered pioneers in their respective fields and have had a significant impact on society. It is interesting that the 'conversation; centres on the benefits (or not) of AI for education and learning.