Archive for the ‘Lit Review’ Category

Readings on AI and Education

November 18th, 2019 by Graham Attwell

In an early activity in our new project on Artificial Intelligence in Vocational Education and Training, we are undertaking a literature review. Although there seems to be little about AI and VET, the issue of AI in education is thsi years hot trend. Of course there seems to be more talk than actual practice. Any way, here is a quick summary (just notes really) of things I stumbled on last week.

Perhaps most interesting was an online webinar organised by the European Distance Education Network (EDEN) as part of European Distance Learning Week.  According to the online platform there were 49 of us present and four presentations. Sadly the recording is not yet available but I will link to it once it is online. What was most interesting was that almost everyone who spoke, and I recognised quite a few prominent researchers in the contributions, were pretty much opposed to AI. Too dangerous, no benefit, just hype, developers with no idea about learning etc. Really only one speaker, Alexandra Cristea from Durham University could see potential.

I found teh follwing publiscation by her. Demographic Indicators Influencing Learning Activities in MOOCs: Learning Analytics of Future Learn Courses (PDF) by Alexandra I. Cristea  and Lei Shi from the University of from Liverpool University  looks at pre-course survey data and online learner interaction data collected from two MOOCs, delivered by the University of Warwick,in 2015, 2016,and 2017. The data is used  to explore how learner demographic indicators may influence learner activities.Recommendations for educational information system development and instructional design, especially when a course attracts a diverse group of learners, are provided.

Meanwhile in the UK, NESTA are continuing to promote AI. However, they too emphasis ethical issues with the use of the technology. In ‘Educ-AI-tion rebooted? Exploring the future of artificial intelligence in schools and colleges’ they say

Although challenges for the ethical and responsible use of artificial intelligence and the sharing of data are common to many sectors, schools and colleges present a distinct combination of properties and considerations. The sharing of data needs to be governed in a manner that realises benefit for the public, and AIEd must be used ethically and responsibly.

AIEd’s potential and risks is reflected in the views of parents. 61% of parents anticipate that AI will be fairly or very important to the classroom of the near future. However, many are fairly or very concerned about consequences of determinism (77%), accountability (77%) and privacy and security (73%).

Finally, I had a look at the X5GON project website. X5GON is a large scale European research programme project, bringing togther a number of leading European Universities. It appears to be developing AI driven tools. particarrly focused on Open educational Resources. The project website says:

This new AI-driven platform will deliver OER content from everywhere, for the students’ need at the right time and place. This learning and development solution will use the following solutions to accomplish this goal:

  • Aggregation: It will gather relevant content in one place, from the projects case studies as well as external providers and other preferred resources.
  • Curation: AI and machine learning will be key to curate relevant and contextual content and external students at the right time and point of need.
  • Personalization: It will make increasingly personalized recommendations for learning content to suit students’ needs, based on the analysis of relevant factors.
  • Creation: Large, small and medium-sized universities have tacit knowledge that can be unlocked and re-used. This approach will allow any organization to release and build their own content libraries quickly and conveniently to share with the world and vice versa.

I’ll keep writing up my findings, in the form of notes on this site. And if anyone has any recommendations of what else I should be reading please add in the comments below.

Peer Production

May 2nd, 2018 by Graham Attwell

I don’t normally publish new journal releases – there are simply to many. But I very much like the approach of the  special issue of the Journal of Peer Production on CITY.

According to their email, it showcases a wide variety of case studies in cities from different geographies of the Global North and Global South namely Barcelona, Berlin, Brisbane, Brussels, Ciudad Juárez, Dhaka, Genoa, London, Melbourne, Milan, New York, Paris, Rosario.Some of those case studies focus more on peer production technologies and others more on the social and political processes on the ground, all with different research methodologies and approaches. They invite us to reflect  on various forms of peer production of knowledge and representation of the city as a commons, where technology should be considered as both a tool (infrastructure) and a contested space. They look at challenges of governance focusing on citizen-driven models of peer production in the city where local governments are called to be in dialogue and build synergies with different stakeholder communities. They use participatory and collaborative methods to collect their data following co-creative research approaches. They are transdisciplinary as much as interdisciplinary in both the methodological and theoretical approaches taken by contributors who merge together urban studies, architecture, informatics, political and social sciences, and ethnography to name a few. The authors collaborated directly – as activists or through their research with other activists, communities and/or stakeholders- giving voice to all those involved in the making and sharing of those projects

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Rethinking school: Ivan Illich and Learning Pathways

March 8th, 2010 by Graham Attwell

The first of a new series of articles on rethinking education. This one – on rethinking schools – is a quick review of an excellent article by Ivan Illich, published in The New York Review of Books, Volume 15in 1971, and entitled ‘A Special supplement: Education without School: How it Can Be Done‘. Illich, best known for his groundbreaking book, Deschooling Society, remains as relevant today as he was 40 years ago. And in many ways he anticipated the use of computers for social networking and collaborative learning.Many thanks to Barry Nyhan for sending me the link to the article.

Illich starts the article by contrasting the function of school with how people really learn.

In school registered students submit to certified teachers in order to obtain certificates of their own; both are frustrated and both blame insufficient resources—money, time, or buildings—for their mutual frustration.

Such criticism leads many people to ask whether it is possible to conceive of a different style of learning. The same people, paradoxically, when pressed to specify how they acquired what they know and value, will readily admit that they learned it more often outside than inside school. Their knowledge of facts, their understanding of life and work came to them from friendship or love, while viewing TV, or while reading, from examples of peers or the challenge of a street encounter. Or they may have learned what they know through the apprenticeship ritual for admission to a street gang or the initiation to a hospital, newspaper city room, plumber’s shop, or insurance office. The alternative to dependence on schools is not the use of public resources for some new device which “makes” people learn; rather it is the creation of a new style of educational relationship between man and his environment. To foster this style, attitudes toward growing up, the tools available for learning, and the quality and structure of daily life will have to change concurrently.

illich saw the schooling system as a product of consumer society.

School, ….. is the major component of the system of consumer production which is becoming more complex and specialized and bureaucratized. Schooling is necessary to produce the habits and expectations of the managed consumer society. Inevitably it produces institutional dependence and ranking in spite of any effort by the teacher to teach the contrary. It is an illusion that schools are only a dependent variable, an illusion which, moreover, provides them, the reproductive organs of a consumer society, with their immunity.

In contrast to the consumer driven schooling system Illich proposed developing learning networks.

I believe that no more than four—possibly even three—distinct “channels” or learning exchanges could contain all the resources needed for real learning. The child grows up in a world of things, surrounded by people who serve as models for skills and values. He finds peers who challenge him to argue, to compete, to cooperate, and to understand; and if the child is lucky, he is exposed to confrontation or criticism by an experienced elder who really cares. Things, models, peers, and elders are four resources each of which requires a different type of arrangement to ensure that everybody has ample access to them.

I will use the word “network” to designate specific ways to provide access to each of four sets of resources. …. What are needed are new networks, readily available to the public and designed to spread equal opportunity for learning and teaching.

Illich was particularly concerned over open access to educational resources. her put forward four different approaches for enabling access.

1.) Reference Services to Educational Objects—which facilitate access to things or processes used for formal learning. Some of these things can be reserved for this purpose, stored in libraries, rental agencies, laboratories, and showrooms like museums and theaters; others can be in daily use in factories, airports, or on farms, but made available to students as apprentices or on off-hours.

2.) Skill Exchanges—which permit persons to list their skills, the conditions under which they are willing to serve as models for others who want to learn these skills, and the addresses at which they can be reached.

3.) Peer Matching—a communication network which permits persons to describe the learning activity in which they wish to engage, in the hope of finding a partner for the inquiry.

4.) Reference Services to Educators-at-large—who can be listed in a directory giving the addresses and self-descriptions of professionals, para-professionals, and free-lancers, along with conditions of access to their services. Such educators, as we will see, could be chosen by polling or consulting their former clients.

Illich was concerned that modern industrial design was preventing access to the world of ‘things’ or ‘educational objects’ which are critical for learning.

Industrial design creates a world of things that resist insight into their nature, and schools shut the learner out of the world of things in their meaningful setting……At the same time, educational materials have been monopolized by school. Simple educational objects have been expensively packaged by the knowledge industry. They have become specialized tools for professional educators, and their cost has been inflated by forcing them to stimulate either environments or teachers.

Skill exchanges would be central to networked learning in a deschooled society and despite the uses of new technology face to face communication would remain important.

A “skill model” is a person who possesses a skill and is willing to demonstrate its practice. A demonstration of this kind is frequently a necessary resource for a potential learner. Modern inventions permit us to incorporate demonstration into tape, film, or chart; yet one would hope personal demonstration will remain in wide demand, especially in communication skills.

The schooling system was leading to a skills scarcity.

What makes skills scarce on the present educational market is the institutional requirement that those who can demonstrate them may not do so unless they are given public trust, through a certificate. We insist that those who help others acquire a skill should also know how to diagnose learning difficulties and be able to motivate people to aspire to learn skills. In short, we demand that they be pedagogues. People who can demonstrate skills will be plentiful as soon as we learn to recognize them outside the teaching profession.

Illich put forward the idea of a ‘skills bank’ for exchanging tecahing and learning.

Each citizen would be given a basic credit with which to acquire fundamental skills. Beyond that minimum, further credits would go to those who earn them by teaching, whether they serve as models in organized skill centers or do so privately at home or on the playground. Only those who have taught others for an equivalent amount of time would have a claim on the time of more advanced teachers. An entirely new elite would be promoted, an elite of those who earn their education by sharing it.

As well as access to skills models peer learning would lie at the centre of a new learning society, with computers allowing peer matching.

The operation of a peer-matching network would be simple. The user would identify himself by name and address and describe the activity for which he seeks a peer. A computer would send him back the names and addresses of all those who have inserted the same description. It is amazing that such a simple utility has never been used on a broad scale for publicly valued activity.

In its most rudimentary form, communication between client and computer could be done by return mail. In big cities, typewriter terminals could provide instantaneous responses. The only way to retrieve a name and address from the computer would be to list an activity for which a peer is sought. People using the system would become known only to their potential peers.

A complement to the computer could be a network of bulletin boards and classified newspaper ads, listing the activities for which the computer could not produce a match. No names would have to be given. Interested readers would then introduce their names into the system.

School buildings would become neighbourhood learning centres.

One way to provide for their continued use would be to give over the space to people from the neighborhood. Each could state what he would do in the classroom and when—and a bulletin board would bring the available programs to the attention of the inquirers. Access to “class” would be free—or purchased with educational vouchers. …..The same approach could be taken toward higher education. Students could be furnished with educational vouchers which entitle them for ten hours yearly private consultation with the teacher of their choice—and, for the rest of their learning, depend on the library, the peer-matching network, and apprenticeships.

Whilst traditional teachers would no longer be required there would be need for a new ‘professional educators.’

Parents need guidance in guiding their children on the road that leads to responsible educational independence. Learners need experienced leadership when they encounter rough terrain. These two needs are quite distinct: the first is a need for pedagogy, the second for intellectual leadership in all other fields of knowledge. The first calls for knowledge of human learning and of educational resources, the second for wisdom based on experience in any kind of exploration. Both kinds of experience are indispensable for effective educational endeavor. Schools package these functions into one role—and render the independent exercise of any of them if not disreputable at least suspect.

Finally, students would develop individual learning pathways through networked learning.

If the networks I have described can emerge, the educational path of each student would be his own to follow, and only in retrospect would it take on the features of a recognizable program. The wise student would periodically seek professional advice: assistance to set a new goal, insight into difficulties encountered, choice between possible methods. Even now, most persons would admit that the important services their teachers have rendered them are such advice or counsel, given at a chance meeting or in a tutorial.

Understaning Academic Tribes (trying…)

December 21st, 2009 by Cristina Costa

Academic Tribes and Territories, Intellectual enquiry and the culture of disciplines
by Tony Becher and Paul R. Trowler
[Random thoughts about texts I have been reading. Please notice that I am still trying to make sense of this all and therefore welcome your critical comments. I am sure they will help me look at the topic […]

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