Chapter 4 Part 1 - The Near-term Future of AI and Education

Chapter 4, Part 1 — Applying AI to Education

“Everything that civilization has to offer is a product of human intelligence; we cannot predict what we might achieve when this intelligence is magnified by the tools that AI may provide, but the eradication of war, disease, and poverty would be high on anyone’s list. Success in creating AI would be the biggest event in human history. Unfortunately, it might also be the last.”

—Stephen Hawking.

Chapter 4 aims to articulate different short- and long-term scenarios that could result from technological advancements in AI and how these could redefine future educational practices both positively and negatively. I examine existing borders of education and explore how they could be redrawn due to AI. The first section will look at the short term and examine how AI AI-driven independent learning could dramatically alter the way schools function today, focusing on a case study. The second section will focus on the longer-term future and more concerning implications of AI on education, and society in general, if left unregulated.

One way or the other, AI will have an effect on the “education triad” of instruction, learning, and assessment. It will trigger noticeable changes, even in the short term (U.S. Department of Education, 2023).

Section I: The Near-term Future of AI and Education: Reimagining Learning, Teaching, and Assessment

AI is here and it’s the new “kid on the block.” The key will be to manage how it is integrated into education, with the positive effects in mind in the short term, so we reduce the potential for negative effects in the long term. While some people tout imminent changes in the way we will be able to teach, learn, and assess what is learned, in the next two years, there is a higher likelihood that nothing earth-shattering will change institutionally in education in the US (Hamilton et al., 2023). This is mostly because it takes time to reimagine an institution if it even happens at all.

In the short term, AI could shake some things up at least a little. The factory model of schooling and education has been a pretty entrenched system since the 1850s and for the most part, my research shows that we have mostly just been adding AI into existing institutions (Maes et al., 2023). The education system is so entrenched that, according to experts, AI is unlikely to change anything significantly in the near term (Breazeal et al., 2023). Education went through the same thing with computers 50 years ago and the internet 20 years ago. Instead, our education system has only “evolved” and incrementally adapted to incorporate these new inventions into the existing institution of education, while barely altering the established norms of the institution itself (Breazeal et al., 2023).

To better understand how educational changes could be made and how we have gotten to where education is today, an expanded view of Thomas F. Gieryn’s ideas of “boundary work” is relevant (Gieryn, 1983). This idea was originally used to explore the demarcation of what was considered a science and what was considered a non-science, however, it also shows the importance of identifying where and how boundaries are created in an existing institution in order to reorganize the old boundaries into new ones that benefit our society. In this case, the factory model of education was implemented because it was inexpensive, could scale, and had known outcomes of what kids had to know (Maes et al., 2023). Also, it prepared kids to enter a workforce that, at the time, largely included working in factories.

Our current education model has been around for many years and the boundaries that currently define our education have not really changed. The main challenge to redefining these boundaries is that districts are built to run schools, not to redesign them; universities are organized around scholarship and teacher development; and curriculum companies are largely focused on tools that fit within the current paradigm of schooling, which is where the demand is (Rose, 2023).

Before computers, it was important to remember lots of information because the information was less accessible; before calculators, students needed to learn and then endlessly practice computing similar complex math problems (Maes et al., 2023). Now, with the internet and the introduction of artificial intelligence in learning systems, the idea of schools as primarily an information delivery system has become even more antiquated, very likely almost forcing educational institutions of every kind to adapt to the way future generations will find, learn and use knowledge, or become irrelevant. Simply, AI represents the next technological revolution in information presentation, accessibility, and management.

When talking about how AI will change the future of education, Ken Kradinger, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, stresses that change does not have to happen overnight to be effective: small positive iterative change is ok: “Step change is what 25 years of incremental change looks like from a distance” (Breazeal et al., 2023). While this idea should be adopted by teachers who have the power to harness AI in their classrooms to improve their classroom environment, many believe we are overdue for taking a fresh look at the “factory model”.

While small, iterative changes have been made throughout the 20th and early 21st centuries as different technologies were introduced into classrooms, the boundaries drawn around education have remained largely the same (Maes et al., 2023). Kids still sit in classrooms and listen to teachers' instructions, but instead of writing on the blackboard, teachers use whiteboards. As technology advances a little more, whiteboards are slowly being replaced with digital smartboards. But little fundamentally changed in the model. Similarly, students originally wrote essays by hand until the typewriter was invented in 1869 and schools finally integrated typing into their curriculum in 1915 (Shuller, 1992). As technology progressed, students slowly were allowed to type essays on computers after they became more widely used in schools around the late 1990s. So, while there have been small iterative changes, the whole institution itself has stayed largely the same.

However, with AI, a dramatic change in the educational system is likely coming whether we like it or not. Some scientists believe that AI technologies such as ASI and AGI could be achieved in as little as two years, which would completely change the world, and remove the possibility of looking back in twenty years to see the step change described in Ken Kradinger's comments (Hamilton et al., 2023). Granted, two years is at the extreme end of the AI prediction but most researchers believe such technology will be here before 2040 (Hamilton et al., 2023).

Some private interest groups frustrated with the pace of change in approaches to education have identified the need to completely redefine the boundaries of what education means and have taken it upon themselves to create a private school in order to execute their vision. One of the more well-known examples is the Khan Lab School, founded in Mountain View, California, by Sal Khan, the founder of Khan Academy. The lab schools attempt to put the student at the center of learning, allowing them to make the decisions about what, when, and how they learn to cultivate the curiosity, creativity, and collaboration that they’ll need for future success (Maes et al., 2023).

References

Breazeal, C., Capozzola, C., Resnick, M., & Reich, J. (2023, December 11). GenAI + Education Welcome and Fireside Chat [YouTube video]. MIT Open Learning. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDoIOZAYR6s&t=1815s

Gieryn, T. F. (1983). Boundary-work and the demarcation of science from non-science: Strains and interests in professional ideologies of scientists. American Sociological Review, 48(6), 781–795. https://doi.org/10.2307/2095325

Hamilton, A., Wiliam, D., & Hattie, J. (2023, August 8). The future of AI in education: 13 things we can do to minimize the damage. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373108877_The_Future_of_AI_in_Education_13_Things_We_Can_Do_to_Minimize_the_Damage

Maes, P., Abelson, H., & Muniz, M. (2023, December 11). GenAI + Education Moonshot [YouTube video]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_fzDFlslfw

Rose, J. (2023, October 2). AI will not transform K–12 education without changes to ‘the grammar of school.’ The 74 Million. https://www.the74million.org/article/opinion-ai-will-not-transform-k-12-education-without-changes-to-the-grammar-of-school/

Shuller, M. (1992). Keyboarding in elementary schools: Curricular issues. The Computing Teacher, 19(8), 27–29.

U.S. Department of Education. (2023). Artificial intelligence and the future of teaching and learning: Insights and recommendations. Office of Educational Technology. https://tech.ed.gov/ai