It is hard to keep up with the avalanche of talks, posts, reports and so on about AI and education, sparked by Open AI's release of Chat GPT and then the many tools which have followed. Talking with teachers in different countries in Europe, I am impressed how many seem to have just quietly got on with it, accepting that AI is there and it is important that their students know how to use it properly and sensibly. Having said that, in Italy Chat GPT remains banned, as it is viewed by the government as being in conflict with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
The big problem area for institutions is assessment. Joe Wilson's opening speech at the City Of Glasgow College's teaching and learning conference yesterday. Joe Wilson is Head of Digital Skills and his presentation was entitled the 'March of Artificial Intelligence from Tinder to Training in 30 minutes.' The key take aways from his presentation were to:
1. Make you aware of rise of artificial intelligence and implications for education and assessment.
2. Make you aware of a range of tools you can use in your own practice
3. Consider how you should introduce AI to your learners to allow them to use it ethically
4. Reflect on what it means for policy makers.
Talking about assessment (which he approached as part of professional practice) he said
1 .Ideally make assessment a demonstration of competence.
2. Require personal reflection and insights.
3. Require that notes and drafts are submitted with the final work. - know your learner’s writing style
He suggested promoting Portfolios and blogs and eliciting reports on specific activities (How I did/achieved this) as well as creating assessments that require Video or oral assessments and seting tasks that require analysis of charts, images, or videos.
All of which would seem a good idea to me, regardless of Generative AI.
In the work we have been doing over the past three years around the use of Artificial Intelligence in Vocational Education and Training, one of the most frequent requests from teachers and trainers has been for examples of how people are doing this. We are picking up on this under the new Erasmus + Large scale project - AI Pioneers. And my colleague Ludger Deitmer, from the ITB at the University of Bremen, is doing a great job funding examples of teaching with and about AI in the German vocational schools and seeking videos and other materials about what schools are doing. By no means every vocational school is using AI, but there seems to be a growing number developing projects and experiments, especially reflecting on how AI is going to change the nature of work in different occupations.
The video above (in English) is from the Berufsbildende Schulen 2 in Wolfsburg who have developed a project on AI and energy. They say:
Energy saving and green energy is the most important topic for all of us to survive on our wonderful planet earth.
We see many opportunities to reach this goal all together.
We would like to show that energy saving does not cost money – it will payback after a few years.We want to combine artificial with human intelligence to solve this challenge.
I seem to be increasingly subscribing to (and reading) newsletters. For AI, by far the best I have found is The Algorithmic Bridge by Alberto Romero. In the latest edition where he discusses ChatGPT's seeming avoidance of any degree of implausibility, especially in peoples' CVs, he explains his own implausible background as an aerospace engineer who went on to work for an AI startup and then study cognitive neuroscience to end up writing on the internet.
Earlier in the newsletter he quotes the work of Shannon Vallor, a philosopher at the University of Edinburgh whose research is focused on “the philosophy and ethics of emerging science and technologies,” particularly AI.
"I vividly recall reading Vallor’s insights", he says. "They influenced my later perspectives on AI and language models. Here’s, in my opinion, the most illuminating excerpt from her essay “GPT-3 and the Missing Labor of Understanding”:
“Understanding is beyond GPT-3’s reach because understanding cannot occur in an isolated behavior, no matter how clever. Understanding is not an act but a labor. Labor is entirely irrelevant to a computational model that has no history or trajectory; a tool that endlessly simulates meaning anew from a pool of data untethered to its previous efforts. In contrast, understanding is a lifelong social labor. It’s a sustained project that we carry out daily, as we build, repair and strengthen the ever-shifting bonds of sense that anchor us to the others, things, times and places, that constitute a world.”
Alberto continues:
Love this framing. The way it emphasizes the social and cultural dimensions of human understanding. It departs from the typical “AI models can’t understand because they don’t have a world model” or “because they can’t access the meaning behind the form of the words.” Those are true, too, but this one—understanding as labor we do actively and daily—was refreshing.
OK where to start? First what is Generative AI? It is the posh term for things like ChatGPT from OpenAI or Bard from Google. And these Generative AIs based on Large Language Models are fast being integrated into all kinds of applications starting out with the chatbot integrated into Microsoft Bing browser and Dalll-E just one of applications generating images from text or chat descriptions.
Predicting what will happen with jobs is a tricky business. Jobs have been threatened by successive waves of technology. In general the overall effect on employment appears to have been less than was predicted. Of course there was a vast shift in employment with the advent of mechanization in agriculture but that took place around the end of the 19th century at least in some countries. And its pretty easy to find jobs that have disappeared in recent times - for instance employment in video shops. But in general it appears that disruption has been less than predicted in various surveys and reports. Technology has been used to increase productivity - for example in shops using self checkouts and automated stock management - or has been used to complement working processes and tasks rather than substitute for workers and the generation of new jobs to work with the technology
But what is going to happen this time round with all sorts of predictions and speculation - not helped by no-one quite knowing what Generative AI is capable of and even harder what it will be able to do in the very near future. Bill Gates (the founder of Microsoft) has said the development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone. There is too much press and media speculation to even sum up the general reaction to the release of these new AI models and applications although Stephen Downes is making a valiant attempt in his OLDaily newsletter. Personally I enjoyed UK restaurant critic, Jay Raynor's account in the Guardian newspaper of when he asked ChatGPT to write a restaurant review in his own inimitable style. Of course, along with concerns over the impact on employment and jobs, there is much concern over the ethical implications of the new AI models although it is worth noting Ilkka Tuomi writing on LinkedIn (his posts are well worth following) has noted that the EU has been an early mover in policy and regulation. Ilkka also, while noting that education (and teaching) is more than just knowledge transformation, says "dialogue and learning by teaching are very powerful pedagogical approaches and generative AI can be used in many different ways in learning and education:. He concludes by saying: "This really could have a transformative impact."
Anyway back to the more general impact on jobs which is an issue for the new EU AI Pioneers project which focuses on the impact on Vocational Education and Training and Adult Education. Last weekend saw the release of a report by Goldman Sachs predicating that as many as 300 million jobs could be affected by generative AI and the labor market could face significant disruption. However they suggest that :most jobs and industries are only partially exposed to automation and are thus more likely to be complemented rather than substituted by AI". In the US they estimate 7% of jobs could be replaced by AI, with 63% being complemented by AI and 30% being unaffected by it. Perhaps one of the reasons for so much concern is that this wave of automation seems to be most likely to impact on skilled work with, say Goldman Sachs, office and administrative support positions at the greatest risk of task replacement (46%(, followed by legal positions (44%) and architecture and engineering jobs (37%).
What I found most interesting from the full report (rather than the press summaries) is the methodology. The report includes a quite detailed description. It says:
Generative AI’s ability to 1) generate new content that is indistinguishable from human-created output and 2) break down communication barriers between humans and machines reflects a major advancement with potentially large macroeconomic effects.
The report is based on "data from the O*NET database on the task content of over 900 occupations in the US (and later extend to over 2000 occupations in the European ESCO database) to estimate the share of total work exposed to labor-saving automation by AI by occupation and industry." They assume that AI is capable of completing tasks up to a difficulty of 4 on the 7-point O*NET “level” scale and "then take an importance- and complexity-weighted average of essential work tasks for each occupation and estimate the share of each occupation’s total workload that AI has the potential to replace." They "further assume that occupations for which a significant share of workers’ time is spent outdoors or performing physical labor cannot be automated by AI."
What are the implications for Vocational Education and Training and Adult Education? It seems clear that very significant number of workers are going to need some form of training or Professional Development - at a general level for working with AI and at a more specific level for undertaking new work tasks with AI. There is little to suggest present education and training systems in Europe can meet these needs, even if we expect a ramping up of online provision. The EU's position seems to be to push the development of Microcredentials which according the the EU Cedefop agency "are seen to be fit for purposes such as addressing the needs of the labour market, lifelong learning, upskilling and reskilling, recognising prior learning, and widening access to a greater variety of learners. Yet in their recent report, they say that
"Microcredentials tend to be a flexible, demand-driven response to the need for skills in the labour market, but they can lack the same trust and recognition enjoyed by full qualifications. In terms of whether and how they might be accommodated within qualification systems, they can pose important questions about how to guarantee their value and currency without undermining both their own flexibility and the stability and dependability of established qualifications."
The need for new skills for AI pose a question for how curricula can be adapted and updated faster than has been done traditionally. And they pose major questions for institutions to adapting course provsion to to new skill needs at a local and regional level as well as national. Of course there are major challenges for the skills and competences of teachers and trainers, who, the AI and VET project found, were generally receptive to embracing AI for teaching and learning as well as new curricula content, but felt the need for more support and professional training to update their own skills and knowledge (and this was before the launch of Generative AI models.
There is really only one story in town when it comes to education technology. After years of forecasting the rise of AI and not a lot happening the release of ChatGPT and Generative AI programmes has generally panicked institutions worldwide. Indeed, it may seem strange in the future that so much of what was considered learning rested on the essay. Interestingly though, Vocational Education and Training does not suffer from the same obsession, although in some countries VET programmes include school based learning. The issue for VET is how to measure practical competence and AI shows little sign of being able to do that. But at the same time Generative AI will have immense impact on Vocational Education and Training, in that the curricula for almost every occupational subject will need renewal to reflect in introduction of AI in work processes.
Meanwhile the International Baccalaureate has bucked the trend from exam bodies and is embracing the new world of AI. In a statement it said:
The IB believes that artificial intelligence (AI) technology will become part of our everyday lives—like spell checkers, translation software and calculators. We, therefore, need to adapt and transform our educational programmes and assessment practices so that students can use these new AI tools ethically and effectively……
Students should be aware that the IB does not regard any work produced—even only in part—by such tools, to be their own. Therefore, as with any quote or material from another source, it must be clear that AI-generated text, image or graph included in a piece of work, has been copied from such software. The software must be credited in the body of the text and appropriately referenced in the bibliography. As with current practice, an essay which is predominantly quotes will not get many, if any, marks with an IB mark scheme. As with any quote or material adapted from another source, it must be credited in the body of the text and appropriately referenced in the bibliography……
Essay writing is, however, being profoundly challenged by the rise of new technology and there’s no doubt that it will have much less prominence in the future…..we need our pupils to master different skills, such as understanding if the essay is any good or if it has missed context, has used biased data or if it is lacking in creativity. These will be far more important skills than writing an essay, so the assessment tasks we set will need to reflect this.”
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