UNESCO have launched an online course in response to a survey of digital content creators, 73 per cent of whom requested training. According to UNESCO the course aims to empower content creators to address disinformation and hate speech and provide them with a solid grounding in global human rights standards on both Freedom of Expression and Information. The content was produced by media and information literacy experts in close collaboration with leading influencers around the world to directly address the reality of situations experienced by digital content creators.
The course has just started and runs for 4 weeks; over 9 000 people from 160 countries enrolled and are currently taking it. They will learn how to:
source information using a diverse range of sources,
assess and verify the quality of information,
be transparent about the sources which inspire their content,
identify, debunk and report misinformation, disinformation and hate speech,
collaborate with journalists and traditional media to amplify fact-based information.
The UNESCO “Behind the screens” survey found that fact-checking is not the norm, and that content creators have difficulty with determining the best criteria for assessing the credibility of information they find online. 42% of respondents said they used “the number of ‘likes’ and ‘shares’ a post had received” on social media as the main indicator. 21% were happy to share content with their audiences if it had been shared with them “by friends they trusted”, and 19% said they relied “on the reputation” of the original author or publisher of content.
UNESCO says that although journalists could be a valuable aid for digital content creators to verify the reliability of their information, links and cooperation are still rare between these two communities. Mainstream news media is only the third most common source (36.9%) for content creators, after their own experience and their own research and interviews.
The survey also revealed that a majority of digital content creators (59%) were either unfamiliar with or had only heard of regulatory frameworks and international standards relating to digital communications. Only slightly more than half of the respondents (56.4%) are aware of training programmes addressed to them. And only 13.9% of those who are aware of these programmes participated in any of them.
Is Artificial Intelligence challenging us to rethink the purpose of Vocational Education and Training? Perhaps that is going too far, but there are signs of questions being asked. For the last twenty five years or so there has been a tendency in most European countries for a narrowing of the aims of VET, driven by an agenda of employability. Workers have become responsible for their own employability under the slogan of Lifelong Learning. Learning to learn has become a core skill for students and apprentices, not to broaden their education but rather to be prepared to update their skills and knowledge to safeguard their employability.
It wasn’t always so. The American philosopher, psychologist, and educational reformer John Dewey believed “the purpose of education should not revolve around the acquisition of a pre-determined set of skills, but rather the realization of one's full potential and the ability to use those skills for the greater good.” The overriding theme of Dewey's work was his profound belief in democracy, be it in politics, education, or communication and journalism and he considered participation, not representation, the essence of democracy.
Faced with the challenge of generative AI, not only to the agency and motivation of learners, but to how knowledge is developed and shared within society, there is a growing understanding that a broader approach to curriculum and learning in Vocational Education and Training is necessary. This includes a more advanced definition of digital literacy to develop a critique of the outputs from Large Language Models. AI literacy is defined as the knowledge and skills necessary to understand, critically evaluate, and effectively use AI technologies (Long & Magerko, 2020) including understanding the capabilities and limitations of AI systems, recognising potential biases and ethical implications of AI-generated content and developing critical thinking skills to evaluate AI-produced information .
UNESCO says their citizenship education, including the competence frameworks for teachers and for students, builds on peace and human rights principles, cultivating essential skills and values for responsible global citizens. It fosters criticality, creativity, and innovation, promoting a shared sense of humanity and commitment to peace, human rights, and sustainable development. Fenchung Miao from UNESCO has said the AI competency framework for students proposed the term of "AI society citizenship" and provided interpretation in multiple sections. Section 1.3 of the Framework, AI Society Citizenship says:
Students are expected to be able to build critical views on the impact of AI on human societies and expand their human centred values to promoting the design and use of AI for inclusive and sustainable development. They should be able to solidify their civic values and the sense of social responsibility as a citizen in an AI society. Students are also expected to be able to reinforce their open minded attitude and lifelong curiosity about learning and using AI to support self actualisation in the AI era.
The Council of Europe says Vocational Education and Training is an integral part of the entire educational system and shares its broader aim of preparing learners not only for employment, but also for life as active citizens in democratic societies. Social dialogue and corporate social responsibility are seen as tools for democratising AI in work.
Renewing the democratic and civic mission of education underlines the importance of integrating Competences for Democratic Culture (CDC) in VET to promote quality citizenship education. This initiative aims to support VET systems in preparing learners not only for employment but also for active participation as citizens in culturally diverse democratic societies. By embedding CDC in learning processes in VET, the Council of Europe aims to ensure that VET learners acquire the necessary knowledge, skills, values and attitudes to participate fully in democratic life.
The Council of Europe Reference Framework for Democratic Culture and the Unesco AI Competence Framework can provide a focus for a wider understanding of AI competences in VET and provide a challenge for how they can be implemented in practice.
Such an understanding can shape an educational landscape that leverages AI while safeguarding human agency, motivation, and ethics. As generative AI advances, continuous dialogue and investigation among all educational stakeholders are essential to ensure these technologies enhance learning outcomes and equip students for an AI-driven future.
Long, D., & Magerko, B. (2020). What is AI Literacy? Competencies and Design Considerations. Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
UNESCO (2024) AI Competency Framework for Students, https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000391105
Rick Payne and team / Better Images of AI / Ai is… Banner / CC-BY 4.0
As the debate rolls on about the use of AI in education,we seem stuck on previous paradigms abut how technology can be used to support the existing education system rather than thing about AI and learning. Bill Gates said last week "The dream that you could have a tutor who’s always available to you, and understands how to motivate you, what your level of knowledge is, this software should give us that. When you’re outside the classroom, that personal tutor is helping you out, encouraging you, and then your teacher, you know, talks to the personal tutor." This can be seen in the release of Apps designed to make the system run more efficiently and support teachers in producing lesson plans, reduce administration etc. And for learners a swath of tutor apps and agents to help navigate the way through to support skills and knowledge development.
But writing about the popular educational exercise of future forecasting in the European Journal of Education in 2022, Neil Selwyn outlined five broad areas of contention that merit closer attention in future discussion and decision-making. These include, he said:
(1) "taking care to focus on issues relating to 'actually existing' AI rather than the overselling of speculative AI technologies;
(2) clearly foregrounding the limitations of AI in terms of modelling social contexts, and simulating human intelligence, reckoning, autonomy and emotions;
(3) foregrounding the social harms associated with AI use;
(4) acknowledging the value-driven nature of claims around AI; and
(5) paying closer attention to the environmental and ecological sustainability of continued AI development and implementation."
In a recent presentation, Rethinking Education, rather than predicting the future of technology in education, Ilkka Tuomi reconsiders the purpose of AI in education which he says "changes knowledge production and use. This has implications for education, research, innovation, politics, and culture. Current educational institutions are answers to industrial-age historical needs."
EdTech he says, has conflated education and learning but they are not the same thing. He quotes Biesta(2015 who said "education is not designed so that children and young people might learn –people can learn anywhere and do not really need education for it –but so that they might learn particular things, for particular reasons, supported by particular (educational) relationships.” (Biesta, 2015)
He goes on to quote Arendt (2061) who said “Normally the child is first introduced to the world in school. Now school is by no means the world and must not pretend to be; it is rather the institution that we interpose between the private domain of home and the world in order to make the transition from the family to the world possible at all. Attendance there is required not by the family but by the state, that is by the public world, and so, in relation to the child, school in a sense represents the world, although it is not yet actually the world.”
Education 4.0 he says is supposedly about “Preparing children for the demands of the future. "Education becomes a skill-production machine." Yet "Skills are typically reflections of existing technology that is used in productive practice and "Skills change when technology changes." Tumomi notes "There are now 13 393 skills listed in the European Skills, Competences, and Occupations taxonomy."
Digital skills are special, he says "because the computer is a multi-purpose tool" and "AI skills are even more special, because they interact with human cognition."
Social and emotional “skills” rank-order people“. "'21st century skills' are strongly linked to human personality, which, by definition, is stable across the life-span and People can be sorted based on, e.g., “openness to experience,” “conscientiousness,” “agreeableness,” “verbal ability,” “complex problem-solving skills,” etc."
Their position is these list doesn’t change in education and "Instead, training and technology potentially increase existing differences.|"
Tuomi draws attention to the the three social functions of education:
"Enculturation: Becoming a member of the adult world, community of practice, or thought community
Development of human agency: Becoming a competent participant in social and material worlds with the capability to transform them
Reproduction of social structures: Maintaining social continuity; social stratification through qualification and social filtering'
AI in education supports Enculturation through:
"AI for knowledge transfer and mastery
Development of human agency
AI for augmentation of agency
Reproduction of social structures
AI for prediction and classification (drop-out / at-risk, high-stakes assessment)Incentives and motives in HE."
But while "Students used to be proud to be on their way into becoming respected experts and professionals in the society which For many families, this required sacrifice they are now facing LLMs that know everything." Why, he asks "should you waste your time in becoming an expert in a world, where the answers and explanations become near zero-cost commodities?" What happens to HE, he ask, "when AI erodes the epistemic function of education? The traditional focus of AI&ED in accelerating learning and achieving mastery of specific knowledge topics is not sustainable"
His proposal is that "The only sustainable advantage for primary and secondary education, will be a focus on the development of human agency. Agency is augmented by technology. Agency is culturally embedded and relies on social collaboration and coordination. Affect and emotion are important and the epistemic function will be increasingly seen from the point of view of cognitive development (not knowledge acquisition). Qualification has already lost importance as the network makes history visible. It still is important for social stratification (in many countries)."
He concludes by reiterating that "Education is a social institution. It should not be conflated with 'learning'. AI vendors typically reinterpret education as learning. Education becomes “personalized” and “individualized,” and the objective changes to fast acquisition of economically useful skills and knowledge. The vendors are looking for education under the lamp-post, but this lamp-post is something they themselves have set up. Very little to do with education."
This is the second of our interviews with experts on AI in education for the AI Pioneers project. Thr interview is with Ilkka Tuomi. Ilkka Tuomi is the Founder and Chief Scientist at Meaning Processing Ltd, an independent public research organization located in Helsinki, Finland. He previously worked at the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC), Institute for Prospective Technological Studies, Seville, Spain. In 2020 he produced a background report for the European Parliament on the 'The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in education' and has recently produced a study 'On the Futures of technology in Education: Emerging Trends and Policy Implications' published as a JRC Science for Policy Report. He is writing and commenting regularly on AI on LinkedIn.
[Q1]Can you tell us about the motivation behind your recent publication for the EC Joint Research Centre and the future of technologies in learning?
[A1] My recent publication for the JRC was motivated by my curiosity about the future of learning and the rapidly changing technology landscape. I began by asking which technologies would be essential for policy considerations over the next decade. From this, I compiled a list of technologies that seemed promising for initial discussions. In the process, it became clear that a fundamentally new infrastructure for knowing and learning is emerging. We call this “the Next Internet” in the report. My goal was to both initiate a conversation and delve into the connections between these emerging technologies and new educational models. More broadly, I was interested in how these advancements might transform the education system itself. An essential part of my research also revolved around the evolving dynamics of knowledge production and the importance of innovation in knowledge society, and the implications this has for education. For instance, about the emerging sixth-generation networks offer intriguing sociological and cognitive perspectives, and even on the impact of AI on learning.
[Q2]How do new cognitive tools influence our understanding of learning?
[A2] These cognitive tools aren't just emerging as solutions to automate current practices. They delve much deeper, challenging our very understanding of what learning means and how it occurs. My perspective on this is shaped by my background in both AI and learning theory. I approach this topic from both a sociological viewpoint and in terms of how digital transformations impact society as a whole.
[Q3]Could you share some of your background and experiences in the field of AI?
[A3] When I was younger, I was deeply involved in neural networks research and even co-authored a book on the philosophy of AI back in 1989. Around this time, I joined the Nokia Research Center. Initially, I worked with knowledge-based systems and expert systems, in other words the good-old-fashioned AI. Over time, I transitioned towards human-computer mediated interaction and knowledge management. The latter is, of course, very much about learning and knowledge creation. While the buzz around AI is louder than ever today, I find a dearth of profound discussions on the topic. There's a pressing need for a deeper, more thoughtful debate.
[Q4]What impact do you foresee AI having on vocational education?
[A4] AI's impact on vocational education is twofold. Firstly, we're still uncertain about how AI will reshape vocations and the job market. However, it's evident that the essence of vocational training is undergoing change. Technologies, especially generative AI and other machine learning methodologies, will dramatically influence occupational structures and content. This will inevitably change what people learn. Much of what's taught in vocational schools today might become obsolete or require significant modifications. Many educators are concerned that the skills and knowledge they impart today may become irrelevant in just five years. On the other hand, AI will also change how we learn.
[Q5]How can these technologies be integrated into the educational process?
[A5] These technologies offer immense potential for educational applications. Already, there are tools that enable a generative AI system to process, for instance, technical handbooks and repair manuals. With this knowledge, the AI can then answer domain-specific queries, providing up-to-date information about tools and technologies on demand. Consider a trainee in the construction industry; they could access building schematics through AI without having to study them exhaustively. Multimodal AI interfaces could allow them to photograph an unfamiliar object and get guidance on its use. Such an application can be used in fields like automotive repair, where a mechanic can photograph a fault and receive advice on necessary parts and repair procedures. These tools not only aid in teaching but can also be directly implemented in professional settings. Such applications particularly resonate with vocational education, transforming the very core of professional knowledge and identity.
In today's rapidly evolving digital age, vocational education stands at a unique crossroads. At its core, vocational education is profoundly hands-on and concrete, focusing not on abstract knowledge but on tangible skills and real-world applications. It's about doing, making, and creating. And this is where multimodal Generative AI now comes into play.
Generative AI has the potential to integrate the concrete world with the abstract realm of digital information. Real-world objects and practical training exercises can be complemented by augmented and virtual reality environments powered by AI. We're on the brink of a transformative shift where AI will not just assist but redefine vocational training.
Furthermore, the economic implications of AI in this sphere are revolutionary. In the past, creating detailed digital representations of complex machinery, like airplanes, was a costly and time-consuming endeavor. Now, with Generative AI, these models can be produced with increased efficiency and reduced costs. Whether it's for pilot training or for a mechanic understanding an engine's intricate details, AI radically simplifies and economizes the process.
[Q6]Do we need to redefine what we mean by competence?
[A6] Traditionally, competence has been perceived as an individual's capability to perform tasks and achieve goals. It's often broken down into knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Education has historically focused on what I have called the epistemic competence components. The move towards “21st century skills and competences” is fundamentally about a shift towards behavioral competence components that include aptitudes, motives, and personality traits ranging from creativity to social capabilities.
However, an essential nuance often overlooked in our understanding of competence is the external environment. For instance, a highly skilled brain surgeon is only as competent as the tools and infrastructure available to him. It's not just about what resides in the individual's mind but also about the societal structures, technological tools, and the overarching environment in which they operate.
Reflecting on education and technology, the narrative becomes even more intricate. An educator's competence cannot be solely gauged by their ability to use digital tools. The broader context—whether a school has the required digital infrastructure or the societal norms and regulations around technology use—plays a pivotal role. Emphasizing technology for technology's sake can sometimes be counterproductive. The question arises: is AI just another tool, or does it redefine the essence of competence itself?
[Q7]What are the major challenges of AI?
[A7] Looking back, one can find parallels in the challenges faced by earlier technological innovations. My experience in the 1990s at Nokia serves as a poignant example. While AI was once viewed as a magic bullet solution, it soon became evident that the challenges in organizations were as much social as they were technological.
Communication is the heart of learning and innovation. It's not merely about making the right decisions or processing vast amounts of data. Instead, it's about the rich tapestry of human interactions that shape ideas, beliefs, and knowledge. The introduction of new technologies often disrupts existing knowledge structures and requires substantial social adaptation. The process, thus, becomes more about managing change and facilitating communication.
[IT1][IT2][Q8]What are the implications of AI for Agency
[A8] Humans have always externalized specific cognitive tasks to tools and technologies around them. In this light, AI doesn't stand as a looming threat but a natural progression, a tool that could enhance human cognition beyond our current boundaries. But AI is also different. Its increasing human-like interactivity and capabilities challenge our traditional, anthropocentric views on agency. In fact, one key message in our JRC report was that we need to understand better how agency is distributed in learning processes when AI is used.
Innovations like AI don't just supplement our existing reality—they redefine it. Grasping this intricate dance between societal evolution and our shifting reality is essential to fathom AI's transformative potential.
[Q39 How will AI shape the future of Education?
[A9] AI's purpose in education should be to enhance human capabilities. This enhancement isn't limited to just individual's cognitive functions; it spans the social and behavioral realms too. In contrast to the post-industrial era, when computers were increasingly used to automate manual and knowledge work, AI and the emerging next Internet are now fusing the material world and its digital representations into an actionable reality. This is something we have not seen before. The material basis of social and cultural production is changing. As a result, the nature of knowing is changing as well. My claim has been that, in such a world, education must reconceptualize its social objectives and functions. The development of human agency might well be the fundamental objective of education in this emerging world. We need to learn, not only how to do things, but also what to do and why. This may, of course, also require rethinking the futures of vocational education and training.
UNESCO are very active in the debates over AI in education, in part driven by their responsibility for the UN Sustainability goals on education, which in a recent report were behind on target. AI is seen as potentially developing the capacity of education provision, especially in regions like Sub Saharan Africa, which have severe shortages of teachers.
They say: "The AI CFT offers a simplified, yet flexible structure that can be tailored by teachers in their local classroom contexts and institutional and system decision-makers in framing their teacher professional learning systems." "The following structure "organises 18 competencies along three broadly defined levels of progression and six cross-cutting thematic aspects."
The Framework is now open for consultation either by adding comments in the online version or by filling in a consultation form. The Call for Comments and Consultation form says: "Your valuable feedback is essential to ensure that these frameworks are inclusive of diverse educational contexts across the world and that they serve as relevant guides in preparing education systems to harness the potential of AI while being responsive to AI risks and upholding ethical and rights-based values in promoting student success."
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