Why should you care what I think about AI in education? Maybe you shouldn’t. How do you even know a human wrote this? Would it matter?
In the second half of the 80s I was finishing a philosophy degree at FSU when I attended a seminar that was cosponsored by the philosophy and computer science departments. The topic was artificial intelligence and I was enthralled, amazed, inspired. I’d already done a double major, could I add a third? No, I was sick of being a broke college student, I wanted to explore the real world. But that sense of wonder never left.
I was there when the world wide web was born, helped to create the Detroit Freenet, I remember Compuserve, Netscape, the whine of a modem and the exorbitant phone bills.
The real world I’d left to find included technology and it became my career and passion. Until it got boring.
I went to grad school, got an MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts where technology was one of the disciplines I incorporated. In my Artist’s Statement in 2009 I described myself as a Generative Artist. Yes, I had to explain it a lot, but it was the best description I could find for the work I was doing.
In 2016 I transformed again and started teaching high school. I’d always wanted to be a teacher, as my mother and grandmother had been, but the low pay had held me back. I still loved technology (except when I didn’t) and I could see us making the same mistakes humans had in the past. Mysogyny, racism, xenophobia, classism, we had brought these with us into a world I’d helped to create and goddamnit that isn’t what we’d dreamed about.
So I became a high school teacher. I teach classes like Adobe Visual Design, Unity Programming, I’m the coach for our E-sports team. Teaching was already a shitshow, dependent on unpaid labor of mostly women, and then the pandemic hit. Teachers are leaving, fast. I’m still teaching, but sometimes it feels like I’m hanging on with bloody fingernails. I’m trying to stay, but who knows, everyone has a breaking point.
The rapid growth spurts AI has seen lately is exciting. The impacts will be felt in lots of areas, including education. Change doesn’t have an intrinsic value, it isn’t good or bad, it just is. Change does often present us with choices, this path or that one, acceptance or resistance and I’m very curious to see what choices we will make.